Directors in denial

I once asked the HR director of a huge retail business where she got ideas from. She didn’t look at HR publications – not even (and she named it) this very magazine. HR stuff, she explained, was not really that useful and she preferred to read Harvard Business Review.

This was not simply a dispassionate account of where she found information. Rather, she was trying to tell me what she was about, and more importantly, what she was not about. She was really saying: “Look, I know I’m an HR director but don’t think of me or label me that way. I am bigger than and different from HR.”