Say Goodbye…

So, how did my exit interview at UCLA go, I hear some of you asking? Given my occasion critical comments about my recent employers, and my rather more common (and certainly more vicious) clashes with human resources personnel down through the years, I’m sure most of you were expecting me to take full advantage of this opportunity to “stick it to the Man.” If so, I’m probably about to disappoint you, and you may want to skip ahead to my rant scheduled for the 4th of July, which is a good bit and has fireworks in it. Because my final interview at Extension was an excellent example of how this exercise should be done, and what can come of it…

To begin with, I should note that most line managers have a traditional (and understandable) antipathy for all staff departments, especially human resources. There is an unfortunate tendency in all human activity to consider your own duties and tasks to be the most important of any, and line managers often fall into the (bad) habit of assuming that just because they need (or want) something to happen at once, that it CAN happen at once, and anyone who tells them it can’t is simply lazy, incompetent, or secretly plotting to destroy them. A line manager, upon being told that a critical position may take four to six weeks to fill (when the opening is costing their department money every day someone does not do that job) may well jump to all of these conclusions at once, thus making a difficult working relationship even harder…

Human resources people, in fairness, do often suffer from the same syndrome, believing that following their own written procedures and staying inside their usual routines are more important than actually running the company, or at least, any particular revenue-generating department, and refusing to expedite any request, no matter how much the customary 6-week delay will cost the company, how many jobs will be lost as a consequence, or what the long-term effects on the company’s survival might be. Thus, a lot of line managers come to loathe the Human Resources department, and the feelings are most assuredly mutual. But the fact is a GOOD human resources rep is worth his or her weight in any valuable substance you’d care to name – and some of the best in the business work for UCLA…

The HR rep assigned to my unit, for example, provided me with invaluable insights into some of the long-running management and leadership issues afflicting our department, helped me with a range of discipline, evaluation and benefit questions that came up, and advised me on how to deal with my one significant personality clash within the management team. When the time came for me to leave the organization, we arranged to meet for the last time and went over most of the issues I discussed in my last post. However, we also covered my observations of the department, my unit, the people in each, and my professional opinions on the unit’s organization and how functions and positions could be better arranged to complete our mission.

During the conversation the tradition conflict become clearer than ever; with the frustrations of the HR people trying to help the line unit (which I was leaving) to function better, with fewer internal conflicts and fewer potential legal issues conflicting with the line unit’s desire to accomplish everything faster, cheaper, and with fewer intermediate steps. I don’t know if our HR rep will be able to use my insights into the department’s ongoing problems to resolve these conflicts, or to assist our Director in making our department more functional, more productive, or more efficient, but I know that I was able to get the right information into the right hands where it might do some good. Which is the difference between doing your last, most important duty to your employer, and just wasting a final hour of staff department time and making your exit...