Improving HR | INTO RESISTANCE

THE BIG IDEA

Picture this: mid-90s and a much younger Vince Tuckwood, with very much more hair, is sat somewhere in London in a training course, as part of my retraining to move into HR. As I remember it, the subject in question was motivation (think Maslow, Porter-Lawler, Theory X/Y, etc.)

In the corner of my notebook, I wrote this:

It's all common sense, so why isn't everyone doing it?

And, ever since

(coming up on 3 decades and a lot LESS hair)

this phrase has stuck with me. In fact, my clients will attest to the fact that it's a very active part of my consulting and coaching approach.

What it has come to mean for me is an early alert system for unaddressed resistance - when I find myself, or my client leaning into explaining the common sense again, or in even greater detail, my first thought and question is "... so why isn't everyone doing it?"

Because no amount of explanation is going to change hearts and minds, only changing hearts and minds can do that.

Yet over and over, we fall into the trap of explaining the common sense.

If I were into lessons-learned lists, this might be

Lesson 1: When change isn't happening, stop explaining the obvious reasons it should

And, at the personal, organizational and cultural level, this plays out all the time!

Let's take a simple example:

Stopping smoking is good for your health

Now, while there's an esoteric argument that smoking may help with chronic stress/anxiety, I think most people understand this to be true: stopping smoking is good for your health. It's common sense.

So nobody smokes, right?

(yes, that's rhetorical!)

The trick is to look at behavioral triggers and responses, context, cues, beliefs, and physiology, etc. to help the person quit successfully for the long-term. Repeatedly sharing information about the harmfulness of cigarettes, in greater and greater detail just serves to inform the smoker how broken they are for not being able to quit; and they're more likely to adopt the learned-helplessness and victim mindset.

Lesson 2: Over-explaining the common sense increases resistance to change

(looks like I'm writing a list after all)

Now, let's bring the lens much closer to HR, and how we get in the way of improvement both internally and in our solutions.

Again, we'll use an example that makes things very clear:

When it comes to recruitment, hiring the right person for the right job at the right time is everything

Go on, I dare you to disagree with that statement ??

So, knowing this common sense, we must see that every onboarded candidate is a good fit, so much so that no-one ever fails in their first year of employment.

Once again, we know this to be untrue.

Somewhere, the common sense is breaking down and recruitment is somehow ineffective/inefficient.

Now, let's flip the script and imagine a typical response to ineffective/inefficient recruitment... I'm pretty sure we'd be talking about:

• Process flows
• Job specifications
• Onboarding practices
• Policy and procedure manuals
• etc, etc, etc.

And that list of tactical fixes a) goes on; and b) may reap some benefits.

But I would argue that in going tactical, we are focusing on the common sense - the doing of recruitment, after all, isn't a complex beast.

Before my Talent Acquisition colleagues come at me with pitchforks

(or harshly worded emails)

we have to acknowledge that the ART of successful recruitment is just that: an art!

And, in my experience, a great recruiter works in the "... so why isn't everyone doing it?" part of my phrase.

A great recruiter is influencing Managers who haven't a clue what job they're hiring for.

A great recruiter is wooing candidates with a fair and accurate portrayal of the job reality.

A great recruiter isn't seeking to close the offer just so they can hit time to hire metrics.

Said differently, the common sense - in this case the recruitment process - is a foundation to the game, not the game itself.

Time and again, though, HR falls into the trap of

"If we just explain the common sense enough, people will change"

Yet the road is littered with DOA HR initiatives that died due to that very behavior

(let's not dive into the rinse-and-repeat Change Management Powerpoint Toolkit that's created and re-created for any organizational upheaval - do we really need to explain the transition curve again? I don't think so!)

TRY THIS

So, in the spirit of "... so why isn't everyone doing it?", let's look at three broad categories for why an HR initiative might not be successful:

1. CAPABILITY - are people able to do what we want them to do?
2. CAPACITY - do people have the time/resources to do what we want them to do?
3. FOCUS - are people aware that they need to do what we want them to do?

In our recruitment example above, we might ask some questions, such as:

Do Managers know how to interview for engagement vs. screening for risk? (CAPABILITY)

Are Recruiters able to take the time to woo the right candidate? (CAPACITY)

How fearful are Managers that they will lose the slot if they take the time to recruit the right person for the right role? (FOCUS)

Just some quick examples, but straight away we can see the depths to which we might have to go to improve our recruitment outcomes.

And even in these examples we can see how a tactical, common-sense band-aid (such as competency-profiling roles) is unlikely to drive change, though it may help with the foundation.

I've used the CAPABILITY/CAPACITY/FOCUS diagnostic lens throughout my career and it has yet to fail me in working out why people aren't heeding/following/accepting the common sense solution.

And, it should go without saying that, if the common sense can't be explained or reasoned, then we don't even get to the diagnostic!

USE THIS

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FOOD FOR THOUGHT

"To influence someone you must know what already influences them" ~Tony Robbins