I Love people of HR, But I Hate Their Job Titles

I am an HR person. I know how hard it is to please hundreds or thousands of employees. Let’s face it, people can get whiny. You can’t walk ten feet down the hall as an HR person without having someone say to you “At my old job they treated us better. They gave us our birthday off with pay.”
You have to bite your lip in half to prevent your tongue and teeth from saying “Why don’t you go back there, then?”
You bite your lip all day long! Still, HR is an awesome field. I love it. I love HR people, too, but I hate the language they use. Where does it come from? Who made up all the awful, weenietastic terms HR people use?



















The field of HR is a wonderful thing, but it’s also awash in the most awful terminology. Some of the most obnoxious HR terms are the titles HR people have foisted on them by folks who don’t understand what their jobs are all about.
HR people have some of the worst titles ever invented. A jack-or-Jill-of-all-trades HR person is called a Generalist. What the heck kind of title is that? It comes from a horrible place. It comes from the school of thought that every job title has to refer to the tasks and duties the person performs, as though we are all working in Henry Ford’s assembly lines, bearing titles like Drill Press Operator and Forklift Driver.
An all-purpose HR person has a critical job. His or her job is to listen to and take care of the employees so that they can focus on their jobs. Human problems crop up in any organization, and someone has to sort them out so the team can keep moving.
There are a million human ways to describe that job. Here are just a few of them:

• HR Consultant
• HR Coach
• HR Advocate
• HR Adviser

What does your embedded HR person do, after all? He or she listens. Sometimes the local HR Consultant has an answer right away, and sometimes s/he has to talk to other people to get the information an employee needs. Sometimes the HR Coach spots issues that need resolution and digs into them, without anyone asking him or her for help. It’s an insult to a talented and people-aware HR Advocate to label him or her based on the weenie subject-dividers that people use to classify HR people who specialize in one thing.

You know the chapter headings I’m talking about: compensation, benefits, payroll, training and so on.

Those things are means to an end. They are ways to get your team the information and support the team members need to do their jobs. Why would you saddle your most employee-facing person, the HR Advisor, with the awful title HR Generalist?
If you’re going to do that, why not go whole hog and call your CEO “Business Generalist?” The CEO has a high-altitude mission: to set a vision for the organization and lead the people there.
Your HR Consultant has a noble mission, too. S/he has to remove all impediments that might keep your team from racing down the field. Who came up with the stupid Generalist label? It’s the worst!
Another godawful HR title is Strategic Business Partner. Whenever I hear that one I picture adorable little Shirley Temple stamping her adorable foot and pouting with her bottom lip out, saying “But I AM strategic, I AM!” The first rule of strategy if that if you are doing strategic things, you don’t have the word “Strategic” in your title.
Your CFO has a strategic job. Does s/he have “Strategic” in his or her title? Nope!
HR Strategic Business Partners are like HR Generalists, although I hope that if you have either of those titles, you insist on a new title immediately. The first rule of partnership is that you don’t become a partner by putting the word “Partner” on your business card.

If people want to partner with you, they know how to find you. Here’s what partnership is: partnership is Morry and Solly, who met on the boat from Eastern Europe to Manhattan in 1905 and when they landed, started a deli together. Their great-grandchildren are still running the deli today. They are true partners. They found one another and they started something cool.

HR people have an important job to do, and that job is not running around looking for people willing to partner with them. How come your IT and Finance people don’t have “partner” in their titles? They don’t need to. They perform a vital service to the organization, and everyone knows what it is.

They don’t need to pander by putting words like “Strategic” and “Partner” in their titles. And let’s not forget the word “Business!”
Why would HR people want the word “Business” in their titles? More pandering! That’s to let people know that they are businesspeople, in case anyone might be confused that HR people are zookeepers or hairstylists who wandered into the wrong building.
In the Human Workplace, the role of HR is obvious and fundamental. They are Ministers of Culture. Their job is to keep the energy moving in the organization, to spread the critically important cultural pixie dust that makes an organization hum.
If you don’t see pixie dust, you might have trouble seeing the vital work that HR people do. That is your energetic impairment. If you can’t see anything that isn’t on a spreadsheet or a bar chart, I feel sorry for you. You will not become a great leader until you learn to read between the lines, the way your valiant HR champions do every day.