The Road Less Travelled: Oh, HR-man, where you gonna run to?

'Sinnerman' is a traditional African-American spiritual. Nina Simone’s version is the one I love best.  (1) Some of its most telling lyrics include:

Oh, Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?

…Well, I run to the rock….

"I can't hide you," the Rock cried out…

Well, I run to the river, it was boiling

I run to the sea, it was boiling

So I ran to the devil

He was waiting

So I ran to the Lord

I said, "Lord, hide me

Please hide me, please help me"

All on that day

Of course, HR practitioners don’t sin. Nor do they run in a literal sense – unless that curious shuffle at the time of the annual cricket match is considered running. Figuratively, however, according to many employees, HR professionals run far away from assuming responsibility. Few explanations of accountability are as incisive as the one by Dan Davies in 'The Unaccountability Machine'. 

Taking an example from the airline industry, Davies points out that managers who make decisions that seem highly unfair "… have constructed an accountability sink to absorb unwanted negative emotion… The construction of accountability sinks has damaging implications for the flow of information. For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system." (2) 

All of us have come across at least a few HR professionals who are only too ready to blame SNAFUs on unreasonable top management, unchangeable policies and unquestionable forces. These excuses do not bring them employee plaudits. This column examines how these cop-outs occur and whether they can be prevented before they erupt in geysers of employee disaffection. 

Catch 22 (3)

Heller’s classic should be required reading for anyone trying to figure out the puzzlement and frustrations of employees facing a shape-shifting, accountability-avoiding HR department. "Heller … penetrates the surface of the merely funny to expose a world of ruthless self-advancement, gruesome cruelty, and flagrant disregard for human life – a world, in short, very much like our own as seen through a magnifying glass, distorted for more perfect accuracy." (4) 

"Our hero of the book is a brave man who is a coward. He is Everyman, trapped in a world he never made. His name is Captain Yossarian, a bombardier who has decided to live forever even if he has to die in the attempt… His main trouble is his commanding officer, Colonel Cathcart, who raises the number of required missions in multiples of five any time anybody in the squadron gets near enough to rate rotation home." (5)

Throughout the novel we have people passing the buck to their seniors or to an impenetrable array of rules. "At one point, Doc Daneeka tells Yossarian that 'Catch-22 . . . says you’ve always got to do what your commanding officer tells you to.' And when Yossarian protests that Twenty-Seventh Air Force Headquarters states that he can go home after forty missions (he now has forty-eight), Doc Daneeka counters irresistibly: 'But they don’t say you have to go home. And regulations do say you have to obey every order. That’s the catch'. At another point, Yossarian gets Doc Daneeka to concede that if he fills out a medical form testifying to his unfitness he can have him removed from combat status. But once again Catch-22 renders this action worthless since Group must approve the form and, as Doc Daneeka very well knows, 'Group isn’t going to'. Yossarian is effectively stripped of all his rights not so much by the law as by a bureaucratic system that is at base totalitarian." (6)  As Robert Brustein explains: "Catch-22 is the unwritten loophole in every written law which empowers the authorities to revoke your rights whenever it suits their cruel whims." (7)

Promotion and publicity seekers, like Colonel Cathcart, ramped up the demands of fate till they became fatal.

"Colonel Cathcart reasoned…the war was crawling with group commanders who were merely doing their duty, and it required just some sort of dramatic gesture like making his group fly more combat missions than any other bomber group to spotlight his unique qualities of leadership. Certainly none of the generals seemed to object to what he was doing, although as far as he could detect they weren’t particularly impressed either, which made him suspect that perhaps sixty combat missions were not nearly enough and that he ought to increase the number at once to seventy, eighty, a hundred, or even two hundred, three hundred, or six thousand!" (8) Any resemblance to triple-digit-hour workweeks is purely coincidental.

We turn now to the three principal ways HR can run from responsibility.

Run to the rock (of boss orders)

This is the easiest cop-out. It comes in three (increasingly dark) shades of grey: top management, intermediate management (including business partners and HR heads) and concocted management.

Saying an order came from top management is the easiest way to stop further questioning – if it works! "The great majority of executives (not just those in HR) conform to the demands of authority with an alacrity directly proportional to the awe and fear that the Voice of Authority commands. … However, the excuse of following the orders of a superior in doing something wrong, also known as the Nuremberg Defence, clearly doesn’t provide a justification for serious transgressions." (9) Moreover, overuse of this excuse makes it progressively less effective in convincing employees to cease and desist from criticism. 

While lacking the cachet of a top management stamp, the excuse of an order coming from a powerful business partner can carry more proximate question-stopping menace. What makes it far worse for employees and managers is when HR practioners use the heft of the partnership, not just to stop accountability queries, but clearly identify with one warring business partner’s camp in tacit exchange for personal gains. In such situations, the hope of an employee to raise a grievance through the line hierarchy all but disappears.

The most duplicitous means of deflecting accountability upwards is adopted by veterans who have passed the buck for so long, they don’t even need to have a buck to pass. In other words, there is no top management or business partner instruction but the intermediate is counting on the employee lacking the nerve to check it out. A historic and extreme parallel is that of Cardinal Richelieu who, it is claimed, "…wielded royal power in such fashion that he more than Louis XIII was the true ruler of France." (10) Though HR leaders who actually exercise so much influence over promoters and CEOs are rare, there are several pretending to such puissance and very few bold spirits dare check the reality.

In all these instances, the key lies in discouraging would-be Yossarians from appealing further. In nine out of ten cases the key works to lock the path of appeal.  

Run to the sea (of policy)

One way to knock out the vagaries inherent in a top management alibi is to rely on a set of impersonal policies. When a decision is fully determined by policy, "…it cannot be altered by any information that wasn’t anticipated… When an unanticipated situation arises – either because something unusual has happened, or because the accountability sink was badly designed – there will be a mismatch between the input that the system anticipated, and what it actually got. And, because the system has been designed to work as an accountability sink, the outcome could be gruesome or absurd. Consider, for example, the tale of an airline and a few hundred furry mammals." (11) Davies then goes on to describe the horrid case of 440 squirrels shredded by the staff at Schiphol airport because of a malfunctioning accountability sink.

While I haven’t come across too many HR leaders who have been responsible for squirrelcide (emplocide is another matter) their tendency to blame their actions on carved-in-stone policies has become almost an identifying mark of HR and the source of much ridicule by employees in general. In vain do their peers try to counsel them in Gershwin’s words (though, admittedly, not with Ella Fitzgerald’s voice):

It ain't necessarily so

It ain't necessarily so

The things that you're liable

To read in the Bible

It ain't necessarily so (12)

Organisations "… rely heavily on traditional methods, general industry practice, and standard operating procedures for making decisions. These general choice procedures can be summarised in terms of three basic principles:

Avoid uncertainty. Rather than looking for ways of dealing with uncertainty through certainty equivalents, the firm looks for procedures that minimize the need for predicting uncertain future events. One method uses short-run feedback as a trigger to action, another accepts (and enforces) standardised decision rules.

Maintain the rules. Once it has determined a feasible set of decision procedures, the organisation abandons them only under duress. The problems associated with continuously redesigning a system as complex as a modern firm are large enough to make organisations cautious about change.

Use simple rules. The firms rely on individual 'judgment' to provide flexibility around simple rules. One of the most common forms of a decision rule consists in a basic, simple procedure and the specification of a list of 'considerations'." (13)

Perceptive leaders will have perceived the limitation to following the pattern ably captured by Cyert and March. Once addicted to the policy shade, unfortunately, it is an invitation to sunstroke for protected HR infants to re-examine the foundations or enter into a debate on the continuing efficacy of the shortcuts to individual decisions the policy was designed to substitute. 

Run to the devil (justify acceptance of the hell people face)

While our previous two methods tell employees nothing much can be done by HR about their grievance wounds, here HR finds ways of rubbing salt, pepper and chilly powder into it. Not only are people told they can’t be helped but long-winded 'bhashans' are trotted out (either in person or through learned speeches and articles) why what’s happening to them is for the best. 

Take the character of Mustapha Mond, created by Aldous Huxley, who claims people don’t find the monotonous work given to them awful: "On the contrary, they like it. It’s light, it’s childishly simple. No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for? True, …they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn’t… [I]t would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure… Besides, we have our stability to think of. We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability." (14) The sad irony is that Mond too was a pursuer of truth until he fell for the charms of power, stability and the soporific happiness that is at the heart of the 'Brave New World'.

The modern Monds of Manpower management usually choose to defend three other deities, though they describe them in far prettier words than I have used:

• The sanctity of the market and the supremacy of shareholder value.
• The inexorable march of technological progress which must not be chanelled regardless of the devastation it wreaks on human lives.
• The responsibility for happiness lies with the individual employee, no matter the torments and terminations visited by the organisation.

Perhaps I am being unfair to propagators of the people-second principles by insinuating they are doing so to curry favour. What if they genuinely believe shareholder interests should always prevail over those of employees, that the destruction of jobs by technology is essential for civilisational progress and that, in these circumstances, all that HR can do is to equip the turkeys to face Christmas with good cheer and not spoil the festive season for those going home to their stock-filled stockings? If such people are indeed in HR, the best I can suggest is that these foxes should no longer be left guarding the turkey-pen. Perhaps the higher reaches of venture capital would prove more congenial. If practitioners anesthetised to the pain of people remain in HR, their attitudes, justifications and preaching build tremendous animus in the minds of employees which goes a long way to explaining why HR is singled out for special opprobrium when management is being criticised. 

Run to the lord (and become accountable for people happiness)

We have all heard (in Grimms Fairy Tales and elsewhere) of the mirror in the room of Snow White’s evil stepmother which reveals who is the fairest of all. Not many of us, however, might have heard of the Demon-Revealing Mirror (Zhàoyāo Jìng) from China which judges moral fairness by exposing demons or malevolent beings disguising themselves as humans. Here are some first-person questions that can act as the Zhàoyāo Jìng for HR to expose and exorcize the demons hiding in cruel instructions, frustrating policies and unfeeling defences of the existing order.

Orders. When I cannot justify a decision to employees, or to my own conscience, do I have the nerve to question the person who took it till one of us convinces the other? If neither of us is successful, and the matter is sufficiently serious, can I walk away from that role. See the example of such resistance in the opening para of a previous column. (15)

Policies. If I find a policy unpalatable to employees and I can’t see the logic behind it myself, do I try to modify it? Do I try to create a replacement policy with the involvement of the people affected by it? See People-Participating Policy & Process (4P) Teams suggested for this purpose in a previous column. (16) Such questioning requires people with moral convictions. "[W]hen people do have strong moral convictions about what they should do or what outcomes authorities and institutions should deliver, they are more likely to have the moral courage to defy authorities, the rules, or the law. In short, the authority independence hypothesis predicts that when people have a personal moral stake in a given situation, they should be less concerned about complying with authorities or the law and more concerned about doing the right thing, even if it may be costly to do so."  (17)

Justifications. Do I espouse the cause of employees and their happiness? "… [E]ven if we accept, for the sake of argument, that there is a degree of misalignment between the happiness constellation for which HR aims and the financial returns on which shareholders are focused, is that necessarily a bad thing? Isn’t a degree of tension between functional priorities necessary for all-round excellence?" (18)  Should HR not be expected to speak for the people constituency it represents at the top table?

Such a revolution – just because HR-men (and women) stopped running.

Notes:

1 Nina Simone, Sinnerman, (https://youtu.be/QH3Fx41Jpl4?si=hRFxLe6eg52YJJad).

2 Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How The World Lost its Mind, Profile Books, 2025. 

3 Joseph Heller, Catch-22, Corgi 1974.

4 Robert Brustein, The Logic of Survival in a Lunatic World, from James Nagel (Editor), Critical Essays on Joseph Heller (Critical Essays on American Literature), G K Hall & Co, 1985.

5 Milton R Bass, Review of Catch-22, from Frederick T Kiley and Walter McDonald (Editors), A Catch-22 casebook, Thomas Y Crowell Company, Inc, 1973.

6 Leon F Seltzer, Milo’s "Culpable Innocence": Absurdity as Moral Insanity in Catch-22, from James Nagel (Ed), Critical Essays on Joseph Heller (Critical Essays on American Literature), G K Hall & Co, 1985.

7 Robert Brustein, The Logic of Survival in a Lunatic World, from James Nagel (Ed), Critical Essays on Joseph Heller (Critical Essays on American Literature), G K Hall & Co, 1985.

8 Joseph Heller, Catch-22, Corgi 1974.

9 Visty Banaji, A man (of HR) for all seasons, People Matters, 10 May 2024, (https://www.peoplematters.in/article/leadership-development/a-man-of-hr-for-all-seasons-41242).

10 William Farr Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, (Princeton Legacy Library), Princeton University Press, 2015.

11 Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How The World Lost its Mind, Profile Books, 2025. 

12 Ira Gershwin, It Ain’t Necessarily So, from Porgy and Bess, 1935.

13 Richard Michael Cyert and James G March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, Prentice-Hall, 1963.

14 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 

15 Visty Banaji, A man (of HR) for all seasons, People Matters, 10 May 2024, (https://www.peoplematters.in/article/leadership-development/a-man-of-hr-for-all-seasons-41242).

16 Visty Banaji, Reinventing the HR Organization, People Matters, 14 July 2025, (https://www.peoplematters.in/article/strategic-hr/reinventing-the-hr-organization-42077).

17 Linda J Skitka, Moral Convictions and Moral Courage: Common Denominators of Good and Evil, from Mario Mikulincer and Phillip R Shaver, The Social Psychology of Morality: Exploring the Causes of Good and Evil, American Psychological Association, 2011.

18 Visty Banaji, HR’s Business Should Be Happiness Raising, Angry Birds, Angrier Bees – Reflections on the Feats, Failures and Future of HR, Pages 488-496, AuthorsUpfront, 2023.