Go Home, HR
2020 ended with a bang in my small world when I was attacked by a terminated employee and her boyfriend in the restaurant parking lot when I was alone one December evening.
When I say attacked what I mean is, the two came with the intention to “fight.",” and that’s all I will repeat from my encounter.
My lucky streak continued that night and I walked away as I have with all other violent employee situations.
Yet, this particular encounter shook me more than any other I’ve experienced. I wasn’t touched or harmed, I was able to verbally de-escalate, get myself back inside the restaurant and call for help. When I look back on my career this was one of the more mild situations and yet one of most difficult to get over.
And then I realized the biggest difference in this situation was simply that I shared it with LinkedIn…and the responses were a war-like attack on me as a person and a professional from my fellow HR pros.
As an Employee Relations professional the majority of my career has been in private. In my most read post in 2020, The 2020 HR, I talk about when HR is done right it is lonely. I have also written posts about HR Bullies and been vulnerable about the struggle HR has linking arms with each other despite being on the same battlefield.
It is interesting to me how easy it is for HR pros to judge each other, and that was perhaps one of the motivations for this safe place. The home page of this website likens Let There Be HR to a padded mall playground where exhausted parents come for a non-judgmental reprieve instead of an elitist club house where you have to pay a fee to hide your true identity just to participate in something that robs you of your own uniqueness in the end.
Still, the comments on my December parking lot experience sat me right back on my ass.
Initially I was irritated with the seemingly well-meaning Karens that chastised a vulnerable HR pro about being alone in her work parking lot at night. It grated on my skin that these well-to-dos thought policy recommendations and a smack on the nose with their rolled up HR manual in the face of trauma was an appropriate response to being attacked in a parking lot, but I summed that up to a lack of emotional intelligence or real ER experience.
Then the post started gaining traction and that hideous side of HR started to seep out from beneath the well-meaning Karens. People started telling me the attack was my fault, that clearly I terminated the person in such a terrible way that I caused this. Others said I shouldn’t be in HR, that I should take this as a lesson, that my title of an “HR Fire Breather” was cause enough to know I warranted a physical attack.
I was asking for it.
For a moment my mind flashed back to the exact moment all those years ago I first told someone I had been sexually assaulted and that person responded it was my fault, too.
And then my decades of therapy kicked in, that Fire Breather mentality of ingesting something poisonous and expelling something remarkable took over, and I decided…HR needs to go home.
If there were ever a time I wish we could sit across from each other at a coffee shop to discuss a difficult topic, it would be right now my friends. But since we can’t, hear me when I say I don’t take the next section lightly.
Somewhere along the way, between the 1920s when we were established to today, Human Resources got drunk at our own party.
We have taken on hard and holy initiatives with backbreaking timelines and immoral budgets and pulled through almost every time. We have suffered in silence, stood at employee funerals, and lifted our chins a little higher when the room goes quiet as we walk in.
And while we’ve been throwing the holiday parties, celebrating at the HR conferences, or drowning our sorrows about another denied proposal, we’ve gotten hammered on our intellect.
We are out here, myself included, stumbling on what we “know” while loudly telling the rest of the world that we can drive when we cannot, in fact, even get in the car.
We’ve become combative, resistant, suspicious, divisive.
As I took in all these hateful, frankly soul-destroying comments all I could think of was, “Go home HR, you’re drunk.”
I want an HR community that allows for Employee Relations professionals to open up about their trauma without fear of a LinkedIn shit storm or career destroying suspicion; an HR community that encourages TA professionals to voice process failures and diversity concerns without a barrage of policy recommendations; an HR community that stimulates conversations instead of drunken spats; an HR community that doesn’t start a LinkedIn message to me with “I’ve never told anyone about an employee that broke my nose when I terminated them because I was scared it was my fault.”
Home is different for everyone. My mom passed away on 2/20/2020 and home has been different for me ever since her last breath, just like millions that have lost loved ones this year.
Home feels different as we’ve worked out of our houses, lost jobs, and weathered this year.
As a mixed kid that grew up Military I learned early on that “home” has never been a place or even a person, but a space in which you can return to your most whole self.
That’s where HR needs to go to sober up before we return to our employees and each other.
To detox from our self-importance but maintain our confidence, to flush out the suspicion but keep the inquisitiveness, to sweat out the combativeness so the compassion remains.
Let’s go home, HR.
2021 depends on it.