HR Bullies

Do NOT quote policy at ME.

Those are the words that came out of the mouth of an HR Manager I was trying to have a conversation with at one point in my career. The weeks leading up to this confrontation were full of micromanagement (even though I did not report to her), disrespectful comments and several instances where she took credit for my ideas.

After the first few weeks of dealing with her constant belittlement I started to dread going to work. I loved the organization but felt hopelessly cornered by this teammate regardless of how hard I worked. I was too afraid to go to leadership about her at that time because it was painfully obvious that this HR Manager was the “favorite” and I was terrified to lose my job.

Finally I hit a breaking point and knew I needed to say something. Now this was well before I became a Crucial Conversations and Difficult Conversations facilitator, before I had worked in Employee Relations and before I knew how to approach issues like this. As a baby in the HR world I did the one thing I knew to do - check the Employee Handbook.

The handbook encouraged employees to handle conflict one on one before escalating to management, so that’s what I did.

I requested a meeting and started the meeting off with, “It feels like you don’t like me. The handbook says that we should go to each other first -”

That’s when she cut me off and told me not to quote policy at her. I didn’t speak for the rest of the meeting. She destroyed my confidence and did a great job of trying to sabotage my career throughout my tenure at that organization.

I’ll never forget my exit interview with the HR Director when I left that organization. I was more confident, had survived the bullying and was launching myself into my career. I told her I felt bullied by this person, and other team members did as well. This was not new information - I had gone to the Director multiple times about this HR bully.

During the exit interview the Director said she never witnessed any of the bullying. She turned a blind eye entirely. That terror of an HR Manager was never removed from the company.

Human Resources bullies are everywhere; we just don’t talk about them.

Perhaps it’s because HR tends to fall into the “Cobblers Kids Wear No Shoes” type of mentality, or it’s because we allow someone’s HR knowledge to supersede their human abilities, or simply because we’ve stopped holding ourselves accountable to our own teams, but we’ve got to usher in a new era of healthy HR departments.

After years in Employee Relations and years spent with HR departments ranging from incredible to just me (that department of one can get real dysfunctional) I now have four strategies for myself and my teams to keep us as healthy as possible:

HR recruitments take as much time as Executive recruitments

The amount of work HR departments juggle, from L&D to recruiting to straight Business Partner work is bone crushing. The demands of HR professionals is only increasing and we allow those demands to create a false sense of urgency during recruitment for our own team members. I take HR recruitments as seriously as executive recruitments and purposely settle into a longer, but reasonable process. There’s no need to create an unnecessarily long HR recruitment, however I want myself and other stakeholders to spend enough time with someone to let them into this HR house. Whether it’s offsite lunch interviews, meet and mingles or anonymous score cards it’s crucial to the health of an HR department that knee-jerk recruiting stops. In this house we spend time on people.

Annual 360 reviews based ONLY on the human stuff

That’s right, HR teams need 360 reviews completed by each other, not just the business. We have billions of metrics to measure whether HR professionals are successful in the hard-skill parts of their job but we neglect the soft skill assessments. I have personally hired HR team members with zero HR experience over those with years of experience because of the soft stuff, the stuff that makes HR not just great but revolutionary. How the HR team feels about each other dictates our success and if we’re not providing anonymous opportunities to give feedback on things like how approachable you are to your team, how empathetic you are to your team, and how you take constructive feedback then we are heading down a road of institutionalized HR bullies.

We spend money on ourselves

Not every HR professional is hungry to be better. Not every HR professional listens to podcasts, goes to conferences on their own and joins HR chapters to make themselves better. If each member of our team isn’t growing in some capacity then they’re dying - that’s just the rule of the universe. To keep the team growing in camaraderie, soft skill sharpening and vulnerability we MUST spend money on the HR department’s professional growth. As leaders it is our job to prioritize our budget to pay for frequent trainings on bedside manner, psychological safety and even facilitated spaces where the HR team can be vulnerable. Human Resources bites their tongues on a minute to minute basis with the business and that type of requirement enhances the chance of lashing out at each other if there isn’t set aside time to learn how to better process what we do and how we do it. If there isn’t any budget for HR (and I mean nothing, not even $100), then you as a leader carry the entire weight of training, providing podcast or webinar content, and facilitating vulnerable spaces. Your teams cannot thrive if you do not give them spaces to stop sucking it in.

Vulnerability is our most important metric

Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change. - Brené Brown

Brené Brown, a shame researcher with a one hour Netflix special that will flip your life over, a TED talk that is one of the most watched ever, and books that every person with a pulse should read has spent decades studying the impact of vulnerability on humans, including humans in the workplace. The statistics prove this: teams that feel comfortable being vulnerable with each other are healthy, productive, long-term teams. Vulnerability doesn’t mean gossip, it means feeling safe to share our stories without shame. Sometimes those stories center around a frustrating stakeholder that belittles HR. Sometimes those stories are sharing that we’re quietly suffering a divorce and still trying to show up at work. With the massive amounts of statistical data on the benefits of vulnerability in teams - vulnerability is the most important metric in Human Resources teams. Our time to close metrics, open enrollment metrics, compensation studies, and number of PIPs per department pale in comparison to “How vulnerable is my team with each other.” If we want to eradicate HR bullies and sustain teams that are changing history with with innovation we as leaders must make vulnerability our priority.

As we approach 2020 it’s my personal resolution to use these four strategies to keep HR bullies out of the workplace and health HR departments thrive in this new decade and I hope it’s yours too. Let’s be better in this new decade friends.