By Ben Slight, Co-Founder, Leaders Unbound
Last week I spent a couple of days meeting lots senior HR professionals. They were, without exception, highly experienced, talented, “can do” people. Several of them were also, by their own account, running on fumes – frankly, closer to burnout than I’ve seen in a while.
It reminded me of Through the Looking-Glass, when the Red Queen tells Alice that in her country it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. Many of the people I met would recognise the condition.
It is worth pausing on what that running involves, because from the outside it can be easy to miss.
From above, senior leadership wants more: talent strategies, better retention, a stronger culture, measurable returns on every pound spent on development, and all of it delivered with flat or shrinking budgets. From below, a new generation of employees arrives with clear and entirely reasonable expectations about flexibility, transparency, purpose, growth and wellbeing, and they are not shy about voicing them. HR sits in the middle, absorbing the pressure from both directions and translating each side to the other.
Then we come to AI. Recently a curious assumption has taken hold: that because we now have extraordinary tools at our disposal, designing an intervention, refreshing a talent strategy, drafting a new set of leadership behaviours or running a round of 360s must have become rather easy. The tools have certainly made these things quicker to produce. Whether they have made them any more effective is another question entirely, and one that is rarely asked. Instead, it seems like expectations are rising to meet the new speed of generative AI. Instead of the new technology giving people space to think, the way it’s brought in just makes the ground move faster.
All of this lands on organisations whose people are already exhausted by change – the “hangover” we’ve all been hearing about. HR is often the function asked to hold everyone else together through restructures, new systems and shifting priorities, while going through exactly the same upheaval itself. Ironically, the people charged with looking after everyone else's wellbeing rarely have anyone looking after theirs.
What struck me most was not that they were tired. It was that they were tired while doing everything that was asked of them, and doing it well, and still not seeing much of an impact.
An inconvenient Italian
Vilfredo Pareto observed more than a century ago that roughly 80% of outcomes flow from 20% of causes (the 80/20 rule). It is one of those ideas that everyone has heard of and almost nobody acts upon, perhaps because acting upon it could imply stopping the things that have got us promoted or look good on our CVs.
Applied to organisations, the implication is awkward. The greatest point of leverage in a company culture usually sits at the very top. If what happens there goes unexamined, then the frameworks, programmes and surveys beneath it struggle to take hold, however thoughtfully they are designed. Many talented HR people – by continuing to do what they were always meant to do - are spending 80% of their effort on work that delivers 20% of the effect. It’s not their fault, but it is getting worse.
Lunch with Richard Koch
Some years ago I had lunch with Richard Koch, who has done more than anyone to carry Pareto's insight into modern business (he wrote the bestseller The 80/20 Principle). He told me something that came back to me this week. In an age of networks, he said, the ratio is no longer 80/20. It is closer to 99/1. The more recent editions of his book make the same case.
This presents a slightly frightening thought: If 1% of what we do accounts for 99% of the impact, then a great deal of what fills our calendars is, to put it politely, window dressing. That raises uncomfortable questions about culture, about where effort really goes and, more personally, about how indispensable some of our own work actually is.
The good news hiding in the bad
Nevertheless I find it one of the most hopeful ideas in management. Sir John Whitmore, whose work I had the privilege of publishing, argued that people perform at their best when they are aware of what truly matters and take responsibility for it. Organisations are no different, and neither are the people who serve them.
Once we set aside the activity that exists chiefly for compliance or appearances, something valuable opens up: space for the difficult conversation that really needs to happen. What must change? Who must change it? And are the people at the very top prepared to stand behind it, not merely in principle but in practice?
These kinds of conversations are far harder than commissioning another programme for mid managers. It is also where HR can do its most important work, and where many of the people I met last week might step off the Red Queen's track and rediscover why they chose this profession in the first place.
So I will leave you with the question I left them with. If you could keep only 1% of what is currently on your list, which 1% would you choose? And what would you have the courage to let go of?