"Breaking Bad": HR's Opportunity - Part I

How is "Breaking Bad & HR's Future Related?

The series, "Breaking Bad", has become very popular in the last few years. The show centers around a character - Walter White - who transforms himself from a sheepish, unassuming high school chemistry teacher to a ruthless, rogue methamphetamine manufacturer or "cook". In the past few months - as I've obsessively plowed through five seasons of the series, "Breaking Bad" on Netflex - I wondered about the origins of the series title. What exactly does the phrase, "Breaking Bad" mean?

To adapt a new lifestyle which is in stark contrast to the one you previously had.

According to Urban Dictionary, "breaking bad" is "...generally used when someone who previously followed rules and regulations begins to deviate from them to achieve new goals/desires. The term is most often used when someone who is generally accepted as "good" adopts behaviors which are seen as "bad"."

So it's reasonable - at this point - to ask the question: "What in the world does a series about meth dealers have to do with HR?" Short answer: Everything. Long answer: As Walter Woods was transformed - in part, by the life crisis he experienced after receiving a terminal diagnosis of lung cancer - from a meek, unassertive shell of a person to a strong, domineering (albeit, clearly sociopathic) leader, HR has the opportunity - as increasingly there are calls to fundamentally change the role, reporting relationships, and responsibilities of HR professionals - to be transformed as well. However, as was the case of Walt Wood (who started out with the best of intentions - the welfare of his family subsequent to his impending death), the challenge for HR is determine how best to realize transformative change without - figuratively - losing its soul in the course of this change.

As previously noted in my article, "Evidence-Based HR: HR's Opportunity for Respect & Business Relevance", far too many HR organizations continue to trapped in a functional "death spiral" (see below):

HR meets the business' low expectations for HR by hiring & performing at a level consistent with the business' expectations. Over time, the cycle is established - as the business expects little, HR performs at a level consistent with expectations. Many HR organizations have worked to break this pattern, but still far too many languish in this world, trapped by "low" expectations of the business and HR's efforts to simply accommodate the business' "threshold" of performance.

Workforce or Talent Analytics is a Good Start, But...

Fortunately, much has been written in the last several years about the need for HR to become more fact-based, to embrace "big data", to leverage predictive analytics, and to build workforce analytics "centers of expertise". This focus has led many organizations - seeking to join the bandwagon - to embark on the process of building capabilities within their respective organization.

Often, this work begins by recruiting people - it might be someone within the organization who has knowledge/experience/passion for HR data. It might be someone from another area of the business - finance, marketing, sales, or supply chain - with experience in data analysis. It might be someone from outside of the business - a statistician, a mathematician, an industrial/organizational psychologist, or an experienced HR leader who has quantitative/statistical experience.

As someone who has led a Fortune 200 company's efforts in this area, I've undertaken this work myself. I've developed the strategy, built the business case, sold the proposal to senior leadership, laid the foundation of the practice, hire people to built out the team, overseen the process of prioritizing, planning, and executing projects - ranging from deployment of self-service analytics to leveraging this data to build workforce planning capabilities and processes to establishing a predictive analytics practice, hiring the organization's first industrial/organizational psychologist.

The focus - as with many organizations - was building a sustainable, strategically significant analytics team - a "center of expertise" (or "CoE" for short) in human resources capability of delivering fact-based insights regarding employees that would be compelling to business leaders and actionable by HR. In theory, building a workforce or talent analytics "CoE" is a good start, but..

From "Centers of Excellence" to "Networks of Excellence"

What many companies neglect is the need to concurrently build the "network of expertise" - a capability to leverage data & strong fact-based decision capabilities more broadly within the respective HR organization. In building the "CoE", many companies are missing the need to improve acumen & adoption of other members of the HR organization - to "datify" and "democratize" what the CoEs do to change the cultural DNA of the organization and the benefits to the businesses supported.

In building the "CoE", many companies are missing the need to improve acumen & adoption of other members of the HR organization - to "datify" and "democratize" what the CoEs do to change the cultural DNA of the organization and the benefits to the businesses supported.

Those organizations that focus on building both an analytics CoE and analytical NoE will realize even greater benefits from their analytics investments, as their the CoE's primary customers & stakeholders will become more sophisticated in the ability to access information, glean actionable insights, and realize improved business impact. As non-CoE HR team members become more sophisticated as "consumers" of analytics, they are able to better represent (and support) the work of the talent analytics CoE and drive improved outcomes from the work of the CoE. It is at this point that organizations truly "break bad" - deviating from "conventional" HR to a different way of operating, realizing improved results and relevance.

Vitalizing the Network of Excellence with Evidence-Based HR

So how does HR - as a function - "break bad" and really transform from a primarily program-driven, intuition-based entity to a fact-fueled, data-driven, evidence-based entity? In this - and a subsequent article - I'll be describing in greater detail what "evidence-based" HR is and how organizations can begin to "break bad", moving HR from intuition- to evidence-based decision making and from strategic insignificance to business relevance. In the subsequent article, I'll be focusing - specifically - on the capabilities required to drive evidence-based HR programs, including (but not limited to):

• Foundational business strategy & its application
• Broader functional (sales, marketing, supply chain, operations, etc.) acumen
• Strong "technical" HR knowledge & skills
• Process improvement theory & application
• Critical thinking skills
• Fact-based (analytical) decision making

To really become "evidence-based", HR practitioners must be able be able to apply these competencies to address strategically significant business issues. It requires HR to actively participate in business strategy development & execution, possess a strong working knowledge of how other functions - sales, marketing, R&D, etc. - contribute to the success of the business, maintain depth in the theory & application of HR's functional "body of knowledge", understand & apply process improvement (lean, six sigma, etc.) methodologies to contemporary business issues, have the ability to think critically and apply these thinking skills to business challenges or issues, demonstrate the ability to use data & analytics to support robust fact-based decision processes.

HR's Opportunity to "Break Bad" (and That's Good)

HR's opportunity - "breaking bad", if you will - is not about simply infusing the function with statisticians, mathematicians, I/O psychologists, and others who may be brilliant at specific subsets of the evidence-based HR competency model (but lack HR technical competencies & business/functional knowledge). That's a start - a necessary, but not sufficient start. HR's opportunity is to embrace a broader competency model that places business strategy and the same (or greater) level than building recognition programs, that elevates the application of critical thinking to the same (or greater) level than affirmative action planning, that upholds the relevance of process optimization expertise at the same (or greater level) than payroll processing & benefits administration. In doing this, we will leverage & extend the benefits of our investments in workforce analytics & other empirically-based HR programs to the broader HR organization and the businesses they support.

In season 3, episode 12 of "Breaking Bad", a former cop turned bad guy, Mike, explains to main character, Walt, why he needs to address an associate's plan to kill two drug dealers against the wishes of a crime overlord. He recounts being a cop who attempted to scare an abusive man straight, only to have the man murder his victim two weeks later. "The moral of the story is: I chose a half-measure when I should have gone all the way. I'll never make that mistake again. No more half-measures, Walter."

For HR, "no more half measures". We need to go all the way - not stopping at establishing analytics CoEs, but instead using this foundation to build a better HR organization as a whole - one poised to be part of the strategic planning process, capable of translating business strategies into strategically impactful HR initiatives, leveraging process optimization capabilities, critical thinking skills, and fact-based decision making to "break bad". We don't need to be afraid of taking risks, apprehensive about tackling issues in different ways, or anxious about developing and demonstrating capabilities we've never before embraced or utilized. Remember, our opportunity is...

To adapt a new lifestyle which is in stark contrast to the one you previously had.

Although I'd advise against the part about kicking colleagues in the teeth, we - HR - have an opportunity to change the course of our function. We don't look for others to do this - it's up to each of us, every day, in everything we do.