The other road? What other road? The skinny 2-wheeled road of course. Here is the idea: for a cyclist to be safe when you are cruising down the road at 30 miles per hour, a guy 2 inches to your left, right, back and front, there are a couple basic things to keep in mind.
- Don’t hit the brakes. At 30 miles per hour and a guy 2 inches behind you (true tailgating), hitting the brakes means that you’re going to have a very sore butt and back from impact. When you do hit the brakes, usually it’s accompanied by some rather foul language that reverberates all the way back through the pack.
- Ride in a straight line (a.k.a. follow your line). Don’t swerve, don’t move right or left unexpectedly. I usually even check under my arm to make sure nobody is within striking distance before I “change my line.”
- Ride efficiently. You can always see the guys to avoid riding close to. They are the ones that are pedaling with their legs, arms, torso, and everything else. Perfect efficiency is a relaxed and still upper body while your lower body does all the work.
I tell you all of this for one reason only. HR is a finely orchestrated bicycle dance. We can work together and radically increase our speed by drafting. Or we can bring all of us down together as well (this latter option is often quite painful). We often don’t realize the integration we have with each other – that we are only a small cog in the HR process. If we look at things end to end, it’s quite a bit more complex.
A quick snapshot reveals that how compensation constructs jobs can make life really easy or hard for recruiting. The quality of the recruiters’ work makes life easy/hard for HRSS (shared services) when the person is hired. HRSS makes life easy/hard for payroll and benefits based on the accuracy of the data entry.
The thing is that we understand who is downstream from our piece of the puzzle, but I’m not sure we always care enough. When the recruiter is told to slam someone into the hire process, HRSS is often left to pick up the pieces. We sometimes don’t even know what all the ramifications are for months. The problem is that we (in this example recruiting) did something unexpected, and forced an action on someone else. At the end of the day, we probably caused more problems by deviating from our expected course than we solved by rushing someone into the organization.
I’m not saying it’s always bad to deviate. Sometimes it’s necessary. When I hit the brakes at speed, it usually comes with a simultaneous shout, “SLOWING!” When I change the line I’m riding, I usually check under my arm (think of this as checking your bicycle blind spot) and quickly flick a wrist so everyone knows I’m moving over. The point is, unexpected deviations are bad. Planned and coordinated deviations when really necessary can prevent a log of angst.
