People : Sources or Resources?

'A human being is not a resource - a human being is a possibility.' ~ Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

General

A resource is like a lump of coal; use it and it’s gone. If you stop and think about it, it’s a terrible way to speak about people. A resource is something you take and use. Applied to people, it carries devaluing undertones.

A source is like the sun—virtually inexhaustible and continually generating energy, light, and warmth.

You will agree with me that there is no more powerful source of creative energy in the world than a turned-on, motivated, empowered human being. And I have seen, and continue to see, how conscious business enterprises energize and empower people and engage their best contribution in service of its purposes.

Dealing with Humans

It takes kindness, support and care to help people be their best selves. When that happens, it’s a win-win for both the individual and the organisation, not to mention the team.

Kind comes from 'care' and 'fundamental respect' for the dignity of the individual. We usually refer to a person responsible for others as a “people manager”, but somehow it turns out to be thought of as a task to manage people as if they were inanimate resources.

A manager is actually more like a director in a play or a conductor in an orchestra: making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

But when the very name “Human Resources” is an oxymoron (as explained above), there has to be a more thoughtful way of designing the part of your organisation that is intended to curate your most important asset. As Jim Collins points out in his classic book Good to Great, one of the features of organizations that consistently outperform is Disciplined People.

In fact, leaders of companies that go from good to great start not with “where” but with “who.” They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats. And they stick with that discipline — first the people, then the direction.

The point he makes is that people are not your greatest asset. The right people are your greatest asset. This reinforces the idea that people are NOT resources. If people were interchangeable units, you’d only need the right type of people on the bus.

In reality, it’s the individuals and the relationships between them that matter. An astounding research showed that teams made up of preschoolers outperformed teams made up of business school students. That may sound baffling at first, but it points to just how important healthy team interactions are. The energy of business school students was directed away from the task, towards social order and status in the group. Preschoolers simply didn’t have this baggage so could focus more energy on the task, leading to better performance.

Teams Matter

If you consider humans to be “resources”, you will be convinced that it is possible to build the perfect team just by looking at a bunch of CVs. Pick the “best resources” for the different positions and you are done.

Just bringing together the people with the highest respective qualifications does not mean that you will get a great team. Quite often you will be surprised that your 'high performer' team only performs mediocre or even poor. This emerges time and again in professional football teams - clubs spend millions of dollars and yet teams fail to deliver!

The performance of a team is determined to a high degree by the quality of the collaboration and interaction of the team members. Factors like psychological safety have a lot bigger impact on team performance than individual excellence.

But good collaboration and interaction does not happen magically. It is a result of having the 'right' people in the team, people who harmonize with each other, who trust each other, who treat each other respectfully, and many more things. This has to do with the character and the inter personnel skills – traits you will never find in a CV.

It also has to do with the 'chemistry' between people which is strictly mutual. You can only find out the team 'chemistry' by putting the people together and observe the dynamics that emerge. Sometimes even the team members themselves are surprised by the emerging dynamics.

Overall, forming a good team that performs well is a rather challenging task. It is even more complicated for cross-functional teams where people do not speak the same 'language.' If you accept that humans are individuals and not 'interchangeable resources', you may be successful. If you consider them being 'resources' you can staff from CVs, most likely you will not.

Conclusion

We are unique human beings, with all our differences and variances. Only when leaders keep this in mind, will they be able to unleash the power – which will be beneficial for them and their teams.

So, change the way you speak. Stop talking about 'missing resources' if you do not have enough people on your project. Stop saying 'resource planning' if you plan the work of humans. And if I had it my way, I would stop people calling the personnel department 'human resources.'

But how to call it instead? When you accept that people are not 'resources,' maybe you will come up with something more appropriate!

Your people will perform much better when they know that they are valued!