A few weeks back I was part of a team that facilitated a session for the national HR team of one of South Africa's private banks. It was a session that focussed on how the HR team could support and enable an audacious goal set by the company's leaders. Fairly early on in the session someone piped up and said, "We need to become business partners to the business to help the company achieve this goal!" All-and-sundry nodded in reverent appreciation for a true and noble statement. It was of course a truism that is beginning to apply more and more to HR teams globally.

We moved on in the discussion.

A little later on in the day the team leader was discussing the core competencies the HR team will require in becoming the team that will help the company achieve the aforesaid audacious goal. She listed "basic financial literacy" as one of these competencies.

The words were barely out of her mouth before I realised that I had nearly fallen off my chair. Basic financial literacy? This was a bank. Is it not a requirement that anyone coming in have some basic understanding of the core business of the company?

I was not the only one who nearly found them self on the floor. The team looked at their leader with disgust, jaws dropped and eyebrows were raised. The leader held her ground saying, "I want you guys to be able to read basic financial statements." Again, utter silence from the team.

"Why the hell would you want us to do that? We're HR, not accountants!" someone said.  read more »

Michel Foucault, the infamous French epistemologist (know him? Check him out here), put a lot of thought into what constitutes a ‘discipline’ by locating a discursive genealogy of the practice. He used the the discipline of mental asylums as an example that was born out of discursive musings that mad people should be separated from society … hence loony bins!

The same process can apply to human resource management (HRM) as a discipline. So, in a genealogical sense, people need to be controlled, measured and recorded for economic purposes - the discipline of HRM is tied to the economic principle that people should be your means of production. Now here’s the interesting thought, there is intent and practice in HRM. The intent is that your humans assist you in economic gain, however the practice often divorces itself from this means in that the practices of HRM alienate people from the economic principle more than it aligns them. For example, performance reviews in intent aim to align a person’s performance to the company’s performance, but in reality they tend to limit and inhibit the persons ability to contribute to the economic principle.

Back to plain talk – when we consider what a company needs to change in order to become a connection economy company where its people are treated like people, how do we ensure that the practices we propose in talent development actually measure up to the intent we want?