HRD: The Definite Article

It’s not often you meet someone and have no idea who they are. Especially if you still have no idea after meeting them.

That kind of thing usually happens only if you have spectacularly poor conversational skills or, to be topical, are squished into a chat on a snow-pummelled commuter train. This week, however, three colleagues and I had the pleasure of meeting the HRD. My colleague Natalia, whom we’ve rebranded as @CIPD, arranged the meeting after HRD spat fire over our Think HR campaign.

Must say, very productive meeting. The most effective friends are informed critical friends…

Social media is something organisations struggle with, for obvious reasons. The strength of most organisations is to pull together, to be a team, to have one voice; or, to put it more pejoratively, to act as a corporate body. The strength of the blogosphere is to revel in the free and frank exchange of different perspectives. When worlds collide…?

The key is of course what organisations can learn from the innovations of social media. Not that transparency and frank conversations are values held only by bloggers; to put it in context, at a recent CIPD Leaders’ Network, one HRD (no definite article…) noted that post-Crash, post-MPs’ expenses: “Trust has been virtually destroyed in society. HR, however, has a unique position to see things as they really are.”

So: could we have handled the original situation better? Yep. Would we have preferred a less personal attack on our colleague? Yep. Having aired both points, and agreed on both, we can draw a line under those now. Going forward? Well, in HRD’s blog about our meeting, he concluded: “Words are one thing, actions are another…”

In similar vein, last word to another HRD (still no definite article) earlier in the year: “At the recent BA union negotiations, all the union officials were on twitter, commentating on the discussions. People talk to each other much more easily than before. There’s only one way to deal with it: just accept it. And then find a way to talk.”