Management is not an HR issue

I describe myself as an operations leader - but I’m very interested in management, and a lot of my writing is about relationships. What’s going on there? Why are these topics operations related? Isn’t (line) management an HR issue?

When it comes to HR, I’m going to quote Matt Bradburn again. HR leaders should “think about what will keep your users subscribing to your employee experience”. I think this subscribing concept is is great way of getting to the heart of what a modern approach to HR looks like. It’s about user experience for employees. It’s about attracting and retaining the right subscribers. This is an important goal for organisations. As Jim Collins says in Good to Great: the first thing for leaders to ensure they do is get the right people on the bus, in the right seats, and the wrong people off it.

But:

This is not why we do management.

It’s actually not about people’s experience of the organisation - although when you do it well (AKA properly) it can only impact positively on that.

We have managers because they are essential to building and maintaining a high performance culture.

Organisations sustain high performance in the long term by getting good at teaching people to be better problem solvers (in the context of the particular set of customer problems which we are there to solve). Managers have a vital role to play in this. Framing problems, coaching people to take on progressively bigger problems on their own - and proactively providing the solid relational context that people need in order to feel safe in an environment that continually challenges them.

Having a manager who knows and genuinely cares about you, and is supporting your learning and development not once a quarter but day in day out - sounds like a great employee experience! But the reasons for doing this are operational. These are things that lead directly to an organisation being able to generate value, regularly and repeatably.