An Anti-Valentine from Peter Drucker to HR

An Anti-Valentine from Peter Drucker to HR

Mike West Mike West

Mike West

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发布日期: 2021年2月14日
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Plus ca change. A french exclamation used to express resigned acknowledgment of the fundamental immutability of human nature and institutions.

Drucker was scathing in his criticisms of the personnel role. In the 1950s Personnel Management was something of a schizophrenic profession torn between human relations and employee administration. There had been no great changes in Personnel Administration, he wrote, since its foundations were laid down shortly after the end of First World War. In human relations, there had been little progress since the original insight on human motivation at Western electrics Hawthorne works. (1920's). A telling remark that seems to have as much resonance today as it did half a century earlier. He wrote, “the constant worry of all personal administrators is their inability to prove that they are making a contribution to the enterprise. Their preoccupation is with the search for a gimmick that will impress their management associates. Their persistent complaint is that they lack status.” Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999, p.269.

He didn't stop there. He added a joke that personal management has been described as “an amalgamation of all those things that do not deal with the work of people and that are not management.” 

Then he added to this his own attempt at a job description. “It's probably a file clerk's job, partly social workers job. and partly firefighting, to get out off trouble or to settle it.” Other parts of the job - looking after health and safety pension plans, and employee grievances - were “necessary chores”. But the two most important features, the organization of work, and the organization of people that do work, he said, were generally avoided. 

Drucker's assassination of the HR's character was almost complete, but not quite. His gravest charge was that the personnel role assumed that people did not want to work. Here he was agreeing with a point made by Douglas McGregor, that work was viewed as a kind of punishment. This was contrary to the spirit of human relations which started out with the assumption that people wanted to work. This was the correct assumption, said Drucker. It recognized that “human resources is a specific resource.” Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999, p.272

The attacker achieved some results but not those desired by Drucker. Within a few years American personal managers can begin to describe themselves as Human Resource Managers.

The job had not change significantly. It was still attracted to what some might call gimmicks. Family-friendly policies, 360 degree assessment, employee assistance programs, mentoring, and benchmarking are just few the process in vogue. It is a process-oriented job and the title Human Resource Manager seemed to stress the process side of the job. What's more, it tended to convey more status, back by the prospect that its processes could produce measurable results. 

If anything the new job title dehumanized HR. This had not been Drucker’s intention, but at least it exposed the underlying dishonesty of human relations - the suggestion that its exponents might be in some way concerned about the welfare of employees. Human Resources was about sweating the most valuable assets of the company. It still is. 

Drucker, however, was concerned about employee welfare, or rather the job in hand, recognizing that the relationship with employees was linked to productivity. He had never let go of that concept of the self-managed plant. This he decided would require job integration using some of the processes already developed such as scientific management.

Taylorism could break the workers job into its constituent parts, just the alphabet had broken down language. The alphabet was impractical unless letters resembled into pronounceable words that had their own sounds. The key to management, he reasoned, was to assemble the constitute parts of the job in a way that fitted the talents and desires of the worker. Job placement was the thing - putting the right individual into the right job. Taylorism had separated planning from doing. Drucker was saying that they needed to be handled as a whole. He decided that planning - a vital part of management - did not need to be carried out by some designated manager. It could be achieved by workers themselves if they were given the necessary information. 

As an example, he points the way that workers at the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and involve themselves in remodeling workshops. The railroad managers did not need an HR assistant to explain to them the theory of empowerment. They simply sat down with employees and listened to their ideas. “We have overwhelming evidence that there is actually better planning if the man who does the work first responsibly participates in the planning,” wrote Drucker .” Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999, p.281

His book was hailed by reviews as “a tour de force,” seminal work on management, and yet this particular message was largely ignored in the West. Until Japanese companies with their quality circles and close worker participation and continuous improvement began to set the standard. Drucker could not have spelled his message out any more plainly, even urges readers to look at the work of Joseph Juran. Drucker's writings was illuminating but subversive. Personnel management, he said was “insolvent,” Personnel preferring to ignore “the frozen assets” of scientific management and human relations in favor of “techniques and gadgets”. Perhaps he bruised too many egos, not only those in personnel management, but also those in general management. After all, he had written that “many workers of tomorrow may have to be able to do more planning than a good many people who call themselves managers today are capable of.” Like Frederick Taylor before him, he was undermine the rule, only this time it was the management rule. Here he was writing about the practice of management but carrying the message of manage to the shop floor. It wouldn’t do. Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999, p.280

“Nature has not provided ready-made all the things necessary for the life and happiness of mankind. In order to obtain these things we have to work. The only rational labor is that which is directed to the creation of those things. Any kind of work with does not help us to attain this objective is a ridiculous, idiotic, criminal, imbecile, waste of time.” Robert Tressell, (Robert Noonan). 1870-1911.

The above is an excerpt from "The History of Work" a book by Richard Donkin, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2001.

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