I said I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the Society for Human Resource Management’s board of directors to get its act together and have a new CEO hired by its own August 1 deadline. I’m glad I didn’t, because I would long be out of air by now.

The SHRM board has delayed the naming of a new leader yet again. The fact that this seems to be a long, dragged-out process doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. On the other hand, it’s not really that much of a problem—as long as the SHRM board finds the right leader.

In fact, Workforce Management found during its reporting of the search that “SHRM hopes to attract a candidate with a strong business background as opposed to one who has led a professional association. High-level HR executives at Fortune 500 companies have been interviewed and at least one has withdrawn.” SHRM really needs a strong businessperson with top leadership experience who knows how to drive an organization ahead. Or it needs a creative, experienced, strategic, high-level HR professional. In other words, SHRM needs someone strongly grounded in business and managing people, not a bureaucrat or organization professional.

So I’m encouraged by the kind of person the SHRM board is trying to hire. It’s going after the right kind of person, but unfortunately, it’s doing it for all the wrong reasons.

As Workforce Management has reported, sources close to SHRM say the organization is looking for a high-level executive to become its new CEO because the board believes that it needs “someone with enough stature to get senior executives to join the organization.” That’s where SHRM is off course.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: SHRM’s biggest problem is that it seems to want to be all things to all people all the time. It is just not possible for an organization the size of SHRM (roughly 250,000 members) to serve everyone, from high-level HR executives down to the rank-and-file HR generalists who make up the bulk of the membership.

High-level HR executives are not going to spend much time with SHRM. They are going to be focused more on organizations like the HR Planning Society and other groups that cater to senior executives. It’s silly and counterproductive for SHRM to think that it can compete with highly focused organizations like that and serve the needs of such executives.

Yes, SHRM needs a high-level business leader or HR executive to lead the organization, but it don’t need such a leader to attract other high-level executives. SHRM needs that kind of leader to help the great mass of midlevel human resources professionals develop into indispensable business partners who can help organizations everywhere grow and nurture the single most important resource that they have—their people.

In my mind, SHRM is still at a crossroads, still trying to figure out where to go next. It’s a big organization with a lot of money, but all too often, it seems to operate the way a much smaller organization would—tenuous and insecure.

 So it’s now August and there is still no new SHRM leader. I hope this is just a minor delay and that the board will make an inspired choice of someone who can re-energize and recharge the world’s largest HR organization from top to bottom.

Can the SHRM board do it? Only time will tell.