HR worry more about employees than about caring for themselves

If you’re finding your HR role tough, you’re not alone.

Research by Marion Hewitt confirmed that people in HR worry more about other employees than about caring for themselves. Hundreds signed up for our recent webinar on this, so let’s take a deeper dive.

As Dave Ulrich clarifies in his ‘Paradoxes in HR’, there are many tensions, including the need to ‘take care of self’ versus ‘take care of others’. You can’t do one without doing the other.

This is the point of identifying a paradox – we need BOTH AND, not either or. We need a balance.

Dave also talks about ‘Care, compassion versus Challenge, competitive’ and this can demand making tough calls that you don’t feel comfortable with as a human, but need to protect business interests. It also means pushing back, testing, coaching.

As HR, you’re the person who has to sit with the employee and take the flack or the tears – whether you’re the HRBP or the CHRO.

The quality of your stakeholder relationships comes into play in all dimensions of this. Strong allies give us protection as well as courage, and welcome robust discussion.

Marion and I have designed a workshop with these two key themes:

• ‘reach in’ to build your inner resources and look after yourself, and
• ‘reach out’ for strength by building trusting, supportive and also productive stakeholder relationships.

All this helps you to deliver more impact, better results for your organisation.

We’ll open up opportunities for you to be your own authentic and productive self – and that’s good for your organisation too.

Our next workshop will be held in May 2023, in the meantime please contact us if you would to discuss this topic in further detail.