The great name debate

Quite often when I’m working with a new client, I start off with a simple set of questions. They come from one of our packs of HR with Guts Cards, and they go like this:

• What are the main products of the business you support?
• What is the most profitable product?
• What are the key customers for the business you support?
• How do the structures of your main competitors differ from that of your own?

Could you answer all of them confidently? If the answer’s no, then you’re not alone.

They're not questions designed to separate the 'good' from the 'bad' HR person. They're simply intended to highlight one of the hot questions in HR at the moment - are we too inwardly focussed?

Certainly if you leaf through the trade press, the answer would seem to be ‘yes’. HR magazines are awash with articles telling us to stop navel gazing, and to concentrate on working more closely with the businesses we support.

One topic that raises the function’s collective blood pressure more than most is the attention we pay to our own name. Personnel? HR? Human Capital Management? The People Team? Talentship? The list goes on. I was recently reading an article in Personnel Today where a public sector HR director was quoted as saying, ‘Never has so much time and energy been wasted on such utter b******s’. It’s perhaps a bit harsh – if an HR department changes its name because that name no longer reflects what the department does, then fine.

In my experience, however, that’s rarely the case. More often it’s the first thing that’s done. And since changing names in order to precipitate a change in a department’s behaviour is rarely successful, the considerable time, hard work and expense of changing a department’s name is normally wasted. People within the department simply won’t change their behaviour as a response to a new name. And people outside the function most certainly won’t look on the function any differently.

So when it comes to the great name debate, I’m with the HR director. But is our obsession with what we call ourselves the one and only example of our internal focus? Is all this debate just us beating ourselves up over nothing? Or is it a real problem?

We want to hear what you think

Have you recently changed department names? Has it had a positive effect? Do you have any top tips for how to make your department more business-led and less internal? Do you think we're all barking up the wrong tree?

We want you to tell us by writing on the all new www.hrwithguts.com forum page. We'd love to hear your views on the issue brought up in this article, so please do check it out if you've got five minutes spare. We'll even publish the most interesting comments in the next newsletter for all to see!

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