Shakey’s USA

I have always told my teams that HR does not end careers, managers do. It is the functional manager who evaluates, decides and carries out a termination. Even when an employee trips a zero-tolerance policy, HR’s role is to advise in the background, not to wield the axe. That is my belief and I have always built my departments around it.

At Shakey’s USA, a regional chain of popular pizza parlors in Southern California where I run a combined Human Resources and Organizational Development function development is our charter. We own it. Assessment, training and the guidance we give on how our leaders are grown. As in most companies I’ve known, that responsibility sits with us. And yet I know exactly how HR is seen by the very people we need to develop: as the office that ends careers. That perception quietly defeats the development we are charged with delivering. A manager will not expose his weaknesses to the department he believes keeps the file that could one day be used against him.

Let me be clear, the enforcement work compliance, documentation, investigations, corrective action is essential. It protects employees and the company alike and a serious HR and OD function should do it well and without apology. Still this necessary work casts a shadow. People do not confide in the function they have learned to be careful around.

But “development” is a broad word and most of what it covers is not the problem. The workshops, the competency models, the stretch assignments, we run all of that without friction, because none of it asks a person to admit a weakness out loud. The tension lives in the narrower, harder work which includes the coaching that helps a manager face what he is not good at and work through it. That kind of development runs entirely on candor and candor runs on trust.

“The tension between developing a person and judging that person is inherent to leadership itself. You do not escape it by relocating it. You manage it.”

Even capable managers hedge their honesty: they will name what they are struggling with to a peer or a mentor they trust, but not to us the office they associate with the file.

The development we could offer never reaches the problems they admit elsewhere. And the wrong people learn to game it. I once watched a general manager handle our impression of him as skillfully as he managed his store, telling HR and his superiors precisely what he knew we wanted to hear, while the reality was otherwise. He was performing, but by the time his performance cracked we had spent a long while confident in a leader who did not exist.

The temptation, then, is to move development out of HR and hand it to the managers. But that only relocates the problem and hands it to the very people who hold more direct power over a career than HR does. A manager both coaches and evaluates performance; the dilemma does not vanish when we push it to the line. It simply changes hands. So I have come to believe something less convenient, there is no conflict-free home for development. The tension between developing a person and judging that person is inherent to leadership itself. You do not escape it by relocating it. You manage it.

And managing it is exactly where a manager has the advantage HR does not. A good manager holds the dual role inside an ongoing relationship, with a real stake in the person’s success and in that context the candor that dies in front of HR can survive, even deepen. HR carries the enforcer’s shadow without the offsetting relationship; it gets the cost and almost none of the benefit. That, not org-chart tidiness, is the real reason the work of development cannot live inside HR. It is also why a lean shop like mine where the same person may handle an investigation in the morning and a coaching conversation in the afternoon cannot solve the problem by separating the roles.

What decides whether the dual role builds trust or destroys it is not where it sits but how skilled the person holding it is. That is why leadership development has to be strongest at the top: the executives and senior managers must be capable of this coaching themselves, because they build or break every leader beneath them. Developing a promising manager in the middle while his upline leader is weak is a setup for failure from whatever we build, a weaker boss can overrule or undermine. Yet we get the sequence backwards, pouring development into the middle while assuming the top has it handled.

Real development starts at the top and cascades. Get the senior leaders right to make them coaches, not merely managers and the trust will follow, because the people doing the developing will be the ones the organization already chooses to follow. That is work HR can design and enable. It is not work HR can do alone and certainly not work HR can do from behind the file.