Today we must ask the question again of a job that has scuttled away from its personnel carapace and taken up home in the harder, larger shell of human resources management. But we must ask the question for different reasons.
Its worth reminding ourselves of Druckers remarks because they reflected a frustration with a job that had not lived up to its promise. Some of his points outlined in The Practice of Management seem prescient. The constant worry of all personnel administrators, he wrote, is their inability to prove that they are making a contribution to the enterprise their persistent complaint is that they lack status. Twisting the knife, he wrote that one definition of personnel management described it as all those things that do not deal with the work of people and that are not management. His biggest grouse was that it did not involve itself in the management of managers.
If some of his complaints sound familiar, this last one could be challenged fairly today. Personnel managers are instrumental in administering management appraisals and they advise managers on recruitment, interviewing, legal issues and on pay, although many of these functions, and, in some companies, all of them, can be undertaken by external consultants.
They have also succeeded in extending the seniority of their job. The pay of human resource directors has risen sharply. In part this reflects their willingness to take a tough approach to staffing. Nothing has exposed the lie that employees are our greatest asset so graphically as the latest crop of manufacturing and IT redundancies. What everyone knows is that employees today are usually a companys costliest asset. If that is what we mean by greatest we can all be agreed.
Getting rid of people or doing more things with fewer people is a big talking point among senior personnel managers when they get together. I have heard them discussing such subjects in the bars and side rooms at conferences. But in the conference halls, they prefer to live in a management fantasy land, listening to touchy-feely speakers discussing such issues as work/life balance, mentoring and post-merger cultural integration. Who is kidding whom?
This is why I re-introduced Druckers question. Personnel has swallowed hook line and sinker the jargonistic lexicon of the management fad. At one recent conference I found myself sifting out phrases such as these: key competencies, paradigm shift, people issues, core consequences, empowered virtual teams, strategic alliances, key drivers, knowledge culture, realising synergies, corporate vision, change agents, and sustainable competitive advantage.When the baton was passed to a US expert, the phrases became a steady stream of core strategic alliances, key knowledge drivers and synergistic culture.
And its not just presentations. I was having a one-to-one lunch with an HR consultant recently, having a perfectly normal conversation about families, films and holidays when, quite unexpectedly, the conversation turned to the workplace and it was as if my lunch date had swallowed a management-speak pill. Suddenly everything was cutting edge, people became human capital, business became global and everywhere, under every desk, lurking behind every filing cabinet were these little favourites called strategic drivers for change.
Do any of these observations help us answer Druckers original question? We can be sure about one thing: personnel management is not bankrupt. It went into voluntary liquidation several years ago, metamorphosing as human resources management, the self-appointed gatekeeper of a tawdry, cabalistic, introspective language.
Today it is making real progress in people management although it continues to struggle for status and a role in corporate planning. There remains room for improvement but one thing is sure digesting a management dictionary does not a manager make.
Email address:
richard.donkin@haynet.com
Richard Donkin is editor of FTCareerPoint.com