Getting Shit Done

As my friend Jerry Garcia would say “What a long strange trip it’s been.”

Many moons ago I was an HR generalist in the fastest growing manufacturing start-up in history. Things moved fast… really fast. Until you experience growing from $100 in revenue to $1.3 billion in revenue in 3 years, you really don’t know the meaning of the phrase “just get it done.” I was responsible for workforce planning, which (and this is not a joke) was adjusted every 6 hours based on what orders were coming in from Compaq computer. Our long-range plan covered two weeks.

Then I took a break from the helter-skelter world of start-up HR and started my own companies. When you are the CEO of a start-up you don’t have much time to think: everything is a panicked reaction to some angry customer or some new sales opportunity. You put your head down and you pray that you make it through the week.

After a couple of CEO rounds, I needed a break. So I started my own consulting firm. I worked with customers who were trying to develop and ship new products, or package themselves for a fire sale. Sometimes I would fly into a city in the morning and have a new product design late that evening. I once lead a team of 6 people that created, shipped and sold an entirely new product set in just 3 months. I always seemed to be on the hook for some fantastic, impossible new deliverable.

In short, I was always getting shit done.

And then I went back to HR. I have to be honest… part of the reason I did it was that I needed a break. Hyper-fast start-ups, CEO gigs where you sweat making payroll twice a month and harried customers demanding the impossible was starting to get to me. Not understanding what “take a break” really meant, I went to a fast moving video game company going through a major technology overhaul.

Then a couple of years ago I made a new friend. She had worked for some of the toughest CEO’s in Silicon Valley. She forgets more about HR every day than I could learn in a lifetime. But that didn't stop me from giving her my opinion. Thinking I was pretty smart, I would tell her my latest theory about HR (many of which I have blathered on about in this blog). And she would just smile at me and say “That’s nice Jeff, but you just don't understand. HR is about getting shit done.”

Getting shit done? At first I was insulted. “Hey!” I would think to myself “I fly all over the world and talk to people about HR and tell them its strategic and important and they listen and tell me I’m great! What the hell is this ‘Getting shit done’ stuff?”

Then, after a couple of months, as I started to read more David Ulrich and other leading-edge HR thinkers, I thought to myself “Getting shit done is just the way that HR justifies its existence – CEO’s don’t know what they really want so they send the CHRO on all these fool’s errands to make the board think that they get the whole ‘talent is important’ crap that everyone espouses and nobody believes.”

I stuck with that thought a long time. It made me feel better as I moved through various HR jobs (first Talent Acquisition, then HR Services and now Talent Management and L&D), smug and superior. “I am better than this shit" I would think to myself.

But today I had an epiphany. I think I get what my friend has been saying all along.

Strategies and missions and visions and grand pronouncements are all well and good. Sometimes they work; most of the time they mean shit. But it really doesn’t matter. Because business is people: customers, employees, vendors, shareholders. And people change every day. Some days they need more money to pay the bills; some days they need an emotional pick-me-up; other days they need to know where to get a question answered so they can get their job done; most of the time they just want to know how to deal with constant, never-ending change that seems to turn their life upside-down every day. It doesn’t matter: when the shit counts, they turn to HR.

Some people think that the daily tactical “shit” that happens when people change is frivolous and without value. I was one of those people. But getting that shit done is where the rubber hits the road. It is where employees feel better and decide to come back to work the next day. It is where managers learn to chill-out and think of their employees before they go on another pointless tirade. It is where someone goes home and looks their kids in the eyes and thinks “I got paid today.” It is where the board of directors says “This place is going to be all right, because we have the right people and they can make this happen.” It is where HR works.

Getting shit done is not only what HR is about. Getting shit done is what HR SHOULD be about. My friend is right.

Now I still fancy myself a big thinker, and I still like my big ideas and my lofty ambitions. Everyone needs their illusions of importance. But hopefully my friend has taught me the humility to realize that in these troubled times, when people need our support and our craft more than ever, sometimes my big ideas don’t mean shit.

Comments

[Lance Knobel]

Welcome back to the blogosphere. How fortunate that I never deleted your RSS feed.

Will it be two years before the next post?

[Steve Hunt]

Jeff, great commentary. I grow weary of people who bash HR as though the HR world is extremely non-productive and that HR people "never do shit" - to keep with your scatalogical theme. If you boil HR down to its essence, at least the talent management side of it, what we are trying to do is create systems that constructively influence people's behavior to meet the goals of the business. Anyone who has ever tried to lose weight knows changing behavior isn't easy, even when you know exactly how you need to change and your reasons for changing are rooted in your own personal health and self-esteem.

The shit HR has to "get done" requires such things as getting people to break long-standing habits, build strong relationships with people they have never met and may not trust, and forego short term personal interests to support long-term organizational goals they may not fully understand. HR people are regularly asked to guide decisions that influence whether people do or do not qualify for trivial things like healthcare benefits for themselves and their family. Anyone who thinks HR is easy has no clue about what its actually about. That doesn't mean the HR community is particularly effective all the time (far from it), but what HR is expected to do sometimes borders on the miraculous. I recall a consulting enagement where a CEO wanted HR to get employees to forget significant past mistreatments at the hands of others and basically "just get along". The expectaion was this could be done in less than 6 months. My thought was, "gee if the HR group can do this then put them on a plane and send them to the mid-east and they can use this mysterious peacemaking magic over there too".

HR is about getting shit done, but its also about dealing with the messy shit that arises when you have to do things like get people to realize their own limitations, consructively listen to feedback from others, collaborate with people they would never talk to where it not a requirement of their work, and accept that they can't always get what they want no matter how hard they try. Anyone who thinks this shit is easy shit or unimportant shit clearly doesn't know shit.

[Nancy Gray-Starkebaum]

Jeff, so glad you're back in cyberspace! I've missed reading your commentary. Would love to catch up with you sometimez1

Nancy

[Tom]

There's always shit to be done.

[Michael Bozeman]

The biggest message I pieced together from this commentary is: "Through all the big ideas and lofty ambitions, getting shit done is where the rubber hits the road."

A helpful notion for me.