Are you a Tinkerer?
There are so many time when someone brings me an idea or wants to get my thoughts on an idea. Recently it was a video to replace a onboarding slide deck. In this case, I found myself pushing it off because I didn’t think we had the time to do it. Or the general bandwidth. I have a feeling I’m not going to hear new ideas from this person for a while.
I see this happen both in myself and others. You have someone bring a great idea. Then the questions and hole poking starts. What’s the ROI? What does legal think? Isn’t that someone else’s job? Have we done this before? The idea is poked so much that either it falls apart (even if it’s an amazing idea) or the person slowly retracts and is discouraged.
Being in this mode is hard to get out of in HR. Being in HR, you carry a lot of risk and we want to avoid upsetting the delicate balance. Some companies are also highly regulated and mistakes can be expensive. The problem is when we use all of these things as an excuse to guard against anything new, or become so risk adverse that we never make things better when we can clearly see something is broken.
That’s when HR stalls.
Because our work in HR is reactive by default, there is rarely room to build anything else. Even when there is, the culture or group dynamics rarely reward using that time for anything else. And that’s an issue. It makes people stop tinkering. Makes them stop thinking in new ways. Instead, they move to execution. implementation, and maintenance. Processes and activities stay exactly as they have been. No one pushes to make processes better. To have less friction.
That’s why I tend to see new ways of working so up other places first. Not in HR. We are the last place to jump onboard to something. The people who are wired to build or improve things? They leave HR. They don’t want to keep stalling their work and ideas.
Playing it safe is rational.
But it doesn’t make it right. HR gets evaluated on what doesn’t go wrong. What doesn’t hit the fan. We rarely get called out in a positive way for making things better. Updating processes to reduce friction. So playing things safe is what seems natural. But that’s the problem.
Other functions ship things that are rough and improve over time. And sometimes that function calls on HR to help smooth out the rollout because we have the knowledge and know-how. In turn, HR acts like we have to have to have something finished and in a polished form to roll out. That’s not the way to look at it. Doing that only leaves room for ideas that were already guaranteed to work. But that’s not how anything actually gets better.
The best leaders I have learned from were tinkerers. They wanted to know whether something could be better. They tried small changes to confirm the idea. They pushed forward. And when things went wrong, they didn’t run away. They pushed forward and reshaped. They had the grit that a tinkerer needs.
Those leaders also made room for others. They knew ideas can come from anywhere. So they made space, elevated ideas, and innovated in new ways. You don’t have to become an “agile” team to make that work. You just need to make space between in all for people.
Have you seen a tinkerer in action? Are you that person? Is there an idea you had that never landed, but that you know would be amazing? I’d love to hear about it.