Thursday, June 29, 2006

HR Generalist Vrs Specialist

You simply can’t remove the HR generalists - they have a truly strategic opportunity and role in the organization. Rather than being a facilitator of data, they have to be a diagnoser of data and a true strategic business partner of management.

Whether its talent management, recruiting woes, turnover, or declining productivity, HR generalists should be at the forefront of diagnosing human capital issues rather than employee issues .

Same goes for HR specialists. That person who used to coordinate training programs may need to gain new skills now that learning management has been completely automated. The performance manager is in the same boat. Instead, these individuals should be looking at proactively optimizing the workforce in an integrated HR framework. The question is if they’ll be able to find the skills to work in a different way towards a different end state says SytematicHR.
I think sometime the roles of HR generalist and Specialists are highly misinterpreted. As a HR generalist one also perform the role of specialist for most of the areas of HR. To assume that Generalists simply act as frontline implementation agents for Corporate HR strategies is a gross misconception.

To some extent this has also got to do with the organizational matrix and decentralization .Organizations which have delegated HRfunctions at Unit level are also ensuring that generalist perform the role of Specialists.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

excellent point. i agree that generalists also need to perform specialized tasks.

there is a similar problem with the world of academia as well; it is too focused on specializing at the expense of wisdom that is found at the generalist's level.

just had a thought: what do you think about Nokia's slogan "connecting people" in regards to the issue of HR generalists and specialists? who is responsible for the job of "connecting people" (physically and spiritually)?

Anonymous said...

It is useful to try everything in practise anyway and I like that here it's always possible to find something new. :)