The Water Gourd

I grew up in a munic­i­pal Human Resources Depart­ment between the years 1979 and 1990. It was a dif­fer­ent world then and I was pro­found­ly lucky. The HR unit I entered, with no pri­or expe­ri­ence in HR, was in vir­tu­al sham­bles, hat­ed and feared by most of the orga­ni­za­tion, most­ly because the depart­ment had become a polit­i­cal foot­ball and was fun­da­men­tal­ly incom­pe­tent from a tech­ni­cal stand­point. Over time, and with new lead­er­ship, the depart­ment regained its cred­i­bil­i­ty and went on to become a gen­uine cen­ter of orga­ni­za­tion­al excel­lence. By then we had a great team and we had great leaders.

I learned, per­son­al­ly, not just pro­fes­sion­al­ly, what HR is real­ly all about, which is the hard fought wis­dom that comes from being con­stant­ly engaged and with a crit­i­cal role to play in the lives and feel­ings of peo­ple at work. I learned all about the dif­fer­ences in per­spec­tive that those in man­age­ment roles and those in first-line roles bring to their deci­sions and actions. I learned the soci­ol­o­gy of the work­place and how truth and open­ness are often dis­tant dreams for peo­ple, while day to day rela­tion­ships go on being frag­men­tary and peo­ple take home their anger and sense of powerlessness. 

The day I arrived I was help­ful­ly ori­ent­ed to my new job — the one on paper — called “Per­son­nel Ana­lyst.” The real job, how­ev­er, was well hid­den. “Don’t eat in the cafe­te­ria,” a well-mean­ing col­league advised that day. “Peo­ple around here, learn­ing you are new, will just work you over for the answers they want to hear to their ques­tions; then black­mail the rest of us with some alleged promise you’ve made to them.” Anoth­er said, “I won’t be intro­duc­ing you to the Direc­tor of the [such and such] depart­ment for awhile. He’ll eat you alive unless you know how to deal with him.” The help­ful, “real” orientation.

My first assign­ment was to take on the orga­ni­za­tion’s blood dri­ve. It was intend­ed for me to be a way to meet peo­ple. I tried to put my friend­liest foot for­ward, but was often greet­ed by dis­tance and mis­trust, as if the blood I was ask­ing for (metaphor­i­cal­ly) was not going to a char­i­ta­ble cause. 

And then there was the employ­ee sur­vey, some months after I arrived, where employ­ees anony­mous­ly rat­ed the HR func­tion. We found that pret­ty much all eight of us in the depart­ment had had our names called out as liars and cheats and incom­pe­tents. The feed­back was so bad all we could do was laugh and won­der who the heck they were talk­ing about. That was before the bet­ter lead­ers came and we learned we were nei­ther an appendage of man­age­ment nor sim­ply a mouth­piece for employ­ees, but some much more sub­tle bro­ker­age in the wars of self-interest.

I stayed over ten years in that depart­ment for rea­sons that had to do with my desire to learn how to talk to peo­ple, how to advise and sup­port, how to calm peo­ple from their neg­a­tive assump­tions, and help oth­ers learn to trust me as I learned to be trustworthy. 

HR real­ly can be a place that holds the soul of an orga­ni­za­tion, but it takes a ton of work to do it, espe­cial­ly when fear and betray­al and sub­tle or not so sub­tle ani­mos­i­ty have been the norms. Of the many things I received through my expe­ri­ences, per­haps the best was sim­ply the vision of a work­place where peo­ple treat­ed each oth­er with deep respect, com­pas­sion, care, where they told the truth, and where the truth was heard. That vision, that inner and out­er view of peo­ple, of their capa­bil­i­ties and true dimen­sions, that sen­si­tiv­i­ty to trust and mis­trust as core dimen­sions of any work­place, of any rela­tion­ship any time any­where, that vision of mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships that comes into the heart and stays because it must in order to do the work — that was the pri­ma­ry gift. Hard fought wis­dom is the lega­cy of doing HR work well. It can change a per­son and it cer­tain­ly changed me.

One time, in Hawai’i, I took a class in how to make a dried gourd into a use­ful water ves­sel. The process includes putting sand and stones, and a lit­tle water, into the gourd, then shak­ing it hard to loosen the scraps of dried flesh inside the gourd. You need to have some­thing tru­ly abra­sive, like the sand and stones, and you have to dump it out and refill it many times, shak­ing it as hard as you can many times over in order to get all the con­strict­ing old flesh out of the way. But even­tu­al­ly, if you stick with it, you get some­thing quite help­ful and you can use it for quite a long time.

Technorati Tags: Healing. Link to blog posting. Link to Oestreich Associates website.