Week 1 Learning Log - Exploration and References

Exploration

Exploring the six paradoxes of HR is an interesting journey through the challenges that the modern business world presents its managers and leaders. While these paradoxes are certainly something that HR professionals run into, they are not exclusive to professionals in the HR field. Anyone who manages people or is responsible for an organizational function can relate to the trade-offs necessary to navigate through them. The paradoxes are representative of the competing demands facing HR professionals as they attempt to balance they're guidance and focus among them.

• Paradox number one is the "Outside and Inside" conundrum: The industry for a given business is constantly evolving, and HR individuals must keep up with the evolution in order to provide relevant advice and perspective. At the same time these same HR individuals must meet the existing needs of their business, which in some cases are in conflict with industry trends. Maintaining a balance of where the business needs to head and where it needs to operate contemporarily can be a difficult challenge.

• The second paradox is "Business and People": Demands on today's HR professionals are that they become more business proficient in order to provide salient guidance to their managerial partners. As this happens, HR can lose touch with the labor or people side of their responsibilities. This is a constant back and forth that must be recognized so that appropriate steps can be enacted to achieve balance.

• "Organization and Individual" is the third HR paradox: Having strong individual talent is essential to the success of any organization. Cultivating an environment that promotes strong individual performance can be a real boon for a company. Only focusing on promoting this environment centered around individual achievement can be problematic, as an organization team and group achievement must also be a focus. This is the challenge for HR in this arena to achieve this balance.

• Paradox number four for HR professionals is "Process and Event": A successful HR approach includes a foundation of training, development and objective evaluation standards. By following this roadmap, HR can influence an organization in enormous ways because these processes can bring consistency and resources across the company. The field is also prone to engaging a variety of individuals or groups that make it their life's work to find the newest "solution" to the ails of a company personnel management. By incorporating these fads or new ideas, HR can get away from the foundational processes that can bring success and structure in a very consistent way.

• Managing through the "Future and Past" paradox for HR: Like any industry or area of life, experience guides how people react to stimuli. This is no different in the HR space. HR professionals in the field for a period of time will draw on these experiences to guide their approaches or decisions. As the industry they are aligned to changes, or the workforce evolves in ways that differ from how a workforce reacted historically, HR professionals must not solely rely on their experience to solve the challenges of tomorrow.

• The final paradox is "Strategic and Administrative" for the HR community: Within the non-HR community of professionals, the pervasive view of what HR contributes to an organization is the administration of payroll, benefits and general workforce documentation. HR has very much contributed to this view as those items have dominated the industry's responsibilities for many years. To bring both their organization and the HR industry forward, HR professionals must add to their competencies the ability to influence corporate strategy. HR is constantly evolving like every business and industry, and HR needs to shape how a company moves forward to best incorporate both their changing dynamics.

References

Stroh, P., & Miller, W. W. (1993). HR professionals should thrive on paradox. Personnel Journal,72(5).

• Stroh and Miller share the paradoxes that HR professionals encounter within their role, and the unique position that they find themselves in balancing often competing priorities. With confronting these scenarios, they argue that the whole reason for the existence of HR is to in fact deal directly with these paradoxes head on. They share how a HR professional can review each scenario objectively, document what their ultimate desired outcome is and work towards achieving that solution.

Ulrich, D. (1998). A new mandate for human resources. Harvard Business Review.

• In this article, Ulrich tries to answer the question of whether or not HR can successfully co-exist in a fast-moving and aggressive business world. While exploring the answer to this question, he comes to the conclusion that it cannot co-exist as it is currently constituted. He argues forcefully that the entire HR profession must position themselves less as an arbiter between management and labor, and more as a conscientious member of an organization's management structure. By positioning themselves in this way, HR will keep itself aligned to the organization's goals but do so in a way that provides appropriate balance to the views and plight of labor.