Five Words to Describe Human Resources
As the head of Human Resources for our company, I have a vision for our employees. It comes down to five words.
As the head of Human Resources for our company, I have a vision for our employees. It comes down to five words. We want to be:
Person-centric
Performance-minded
Strengths-based
Engagement-focused
Self-aware
Here’s what I mean.
In Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Truth About Employee Engagement, he writes about the three causes of job misery.
Job Misery
One of them is anonymity—the sense that at work, you are unknown as a person. What a sad thing! Being unknown at work makes you feel invisible, uncared for, and generic. When you feel unknown, you become miserable and disengaged. That’s not the way to work. Since work affects your home life, that’s not the way to live either.
Your loved ones will be negatively impacted if you’re miserable at work, and so will your own quality of life. What you do at work echoes at home. Be miserable at work, you’ll be miserable at home. You do not want to look back on your life and realize you were a crabby curmudgeon because of your job. What a waste!
Personhood Over Performance
Instead, we want you to be known at work because:
Personhood is more important than performance.
Embracing personhood at work can mean:
recognizing you for who you are and what you contribute
seeking to understand how you “show up” as a person
giving time to being together not just working together
Personhood is more important than performance. What you do springs from who you are. You can’t think of improving your work without thinking of improving yourself. You can’t win at work if you don’t win at being yourself.
Recognition
Often “recognition” is thought in terms of contribution—what you did—but we’d like to include “who you are” when it comes to recognition.
Celebrating progress
Expressing belief
Naming identity
Celebrating progress is recognizing what someone has done. Expressing belief is showing confidence in what someone will do. Naming identity is affirming who the person is in their core being.
A Strengths-Based Company
One of the important things about our company is that we’re a strengths-based company. We do lots of things around strengths to build a strengths-based culture:
provide the full 34 CliftonStrengths reports to every employee
have a strengths advocate team
publicize employee strengths
provide strengths workshops
With all these activities, you’d think strengths is the end goal. But they’re not.
End Goal
The end goal is greater engagement—the sense that you’re giving your best because you’re emotionally connected, feel a sense of purpose, and are dedicated to your work and workplace, and are willing to give your best, discretionary effort.
Importance of Self-Awareness
In our job interviews, we often quote the great management expert Peter Drucker, who believed that workers should know three things about ourselves:
Our strengths and weaknesses
Our values
What we need to perform well
By knowing these things about ourselves, we’ll know two other vital things: where we belong and what we can contribute. (This is from the
More than Strengths
At our company, we do a lot with strengths, but self-awareness is larger than strengths. Understanding your strengths is part of self-awareness, but it’s not the whole, because there’s more to you than your strengths.
What are your weaknesses?
What is your level of emotional intelligence (EQ)?
What are your personal values?
How do you learn?
How do you work with others?
How do you feel meaning and purpose?
What is your communication style?
How do you deal with conflict?
How do you feel recognized?
What about your behavioral traits and personality type?
How do you receive feedback?
Do you view your work as a job, career or calling?
How do your passions relate to work?
You get the point. The realm of self-awareness is broad and vast, just as you are fascinating and deep. Growing self-awareness develops your personhood, which comes back to being known and being engaged at work.
The ROSTER Framework
At our company, we developed an engagement strategy called ROSTER™. It’s a framework to drive engagement and involves company culture, managers, and employees.
Roles
Outcomes & OKR’s
Self-Awareness
Transformation
Engagement
Recognition
We’ve been growing self-awareness of strengths through CliftonStrengths and behavioral traits through RightPath. We’ve also done training on feedback, and I know individually, employees are growing in self-awareness through weekly check-ins and other sources.
Five-Fold Vision for Human Resources
In our company, we’ve got a vision for Human Resources that can be described by five words: person-centric, performance-minded, strengths-based, engagement-focused, and self-aware. The hard part is building the culture and practices to back it up, but we're on our way.