???? Human centered or profit-motivated? Yes.

Next month, I take the stage at Epic HR to talk about Comfort Communications, a protocol for providing effective, predictable and equitable emotional support to employees after a traumatic loss event. I’ve been working on this with my wife & partner, Lisa Arroyo Seiden (Cervenka) , for a year; we’ve been thinking about for much longer than that.

Maybe because the topic is so important to us—or maybe because I tend to think about success in terms of employee adoption and impact—I’ve been paying attention when it comes up to what people share about the potential obstacles that could keep a company from implementing it.

Certainly, two key elements are understanding how it works and how to start. But something else comes up a lot, too, and it’s something I’ve been writing about recently: being able to clearly articulate its value to decision-makers.

I’ll cut right to it: I think HR & Talent have a problem in how they think about value. Specifically, it’s too narrow. I’ll explain in a moment, but the punchline is this: if you want to lead (or even facilitate) transformational change at your company to make it more human centered, you have to start thinking beyond your silo, and making more projects cross-functional. Big change requires integration across departments, which is actually the opposite of how things function during steady state.

Good news first: A little curiosity + initiative goes a long way

What does it mean to think beyond your silo? It means you reach out to people in other departments and ask them what they think. What does it mean to make more projects cross-functional? It means inviting those same people if they want to be part of what you’re working on, or if they wouldn’t mind you sharing updates for their feedback on occasion. What does it mean to create integration across departments? It means listening to what those people tell you and acting on their feedback.

It's really not that complicated.?

If the solution isn’t complicated, then why does the problem exist?

Seeking out cross-functional perspectives goes against how businesses tend to operate during normal, non-change times.?

It’s not anyone’s fault. Talent professionals get rewarded for staying within their silo. They increase their odds of being hired by gaining “progressive experience” entirely within their silo. They get promoted faster if they seek out professional certifications within their silo. They become more sought after if they stay up on the latest technology to create efficiency within their silo. Naturally, people will gravitate toward where they’re rewarded! When all the rewards emphasize the silo, breaking out of it can feel pointless—or worse, like a career mistake.

(Certainly, my current experiment on the job market would attest to the disadvantage one faces with a cross-functional résumé!) Moreover, all that inside-the-silo focus generates a number of self-reinforcing feedback loops, where perspectives develop that sound good in the echo chamber but don’t really help build bridges to other areas of the business.

That’s not unique to Talent, of course. Any team that is organized so that practitioners are constantly reminded of their own expertise is likely to respond to problems by saying, “Well, since we’re great at what we do, then since the expected outcome didn’t happen, it must be because someone else goofed.” Now substitute “…goofed” with “…didn’t give HR a seat at the table” or “…put profits over people,” and you start to get a sense for the particular flavor of this disease Talent suffers from.)

?? ?? ?? ?? ?????

Back to value.

In my experience, most people want dollars and people aligned. No one wants a ?????? situation—no one. ?Not Talent, obviously.? What a craptastic place to work that makes! And not Finance or owners, either, because this situation suboptimizes long-term results, makes everything aggravating, and creates risk.

Unfortunately, when everyone holds a narrow view of value that applies only to their area, ?????? is the default. It takes initiative—even if it's a tiny bit of it—to switch away from that.

My suggestion? Get started. Reaching out to people doesn’t require permission, or a quarterly goal, or budget. Talent professionals, you can single-handedly close the gap with Finance (and Ops, and Marketing, and Sales, and Product...) and make ????? decisions possible. All you have to do is reach out to someone in another department and ask for help.

This is what Lis & I did when we started hearing from Talent leaders about communicating the value of Comfort Comms. We talk with people all the time, so we each started bringing up Comfort Comms with colleagues in Marketing, Operations, and Executive Leadership, as well as in Talent sub-areas such as Recruiting, Employer Branding, Leadership Development/L&D, People Analytics, and HR.

The result? Lis & I learned things that helped us articulate the value of Comfort Comms. We also learned things that led us to tweak the delivery model, too!

All we had to do was show a little curiosity, a little initiative, and a little humility:

“Hey, I’m working on something, I’d love to share it and get your thoughts.”

I find that one nice thing about being in Talent is that everyone I talk with is a human, with experience with good mentors, bad managers, and/or career development, and so feels entitled to weigh in on whatever it is I'm working on. And because they're in different departments, I don’t have to ask for a cross-functional perspective, I get that automatically.

It's amazing how much deeper you come to understand things get when you invite cross-functional experts into your tent. Even better: the day you make that first outreach, you begin making your company more human-centered. And more profit-motivated. Both.

That's all I've got. Love you, see you next week!

#thebrilliancewithin #morejoy #talent #comfortcomms