If you had a choice to between managing a human or managing a resource which do you think would be the easiest?

Anyone familiar with the task of herding cats will readily appreciate that managing a resource is heaps easier than dealing with human beings, who can be distinctly unplayable, tricky, unpredictable and inconsistent.

In reality, managing humans is akin to herding cats, so why do we pretend otherwise?Credit: iStock

Perhaps therefore the unholy marriage of human and resources is a forlorn attempt by management to think of their humans as resources. Unfortunately, too often that is precisely how people get treated when the HR managers start doing things by the book.

This week I was tasked to review a large organisation’s redundancy practices. I was privy to all the documentation and deliberations that went into “firing people with enthusiasm”. It was all there, the post-hoc attempts to apply metrics to justify arbitrary or biased decisions about whom to keep and whom to boot........

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