Want to know how little respect HR gets? So little that a Sunday New York Times story about job-title inflation takes a prominent and pointed shot at HR and its “chief people officers” the first chance it gets.

The premise of the story is that everyone these days gets some sort of overinflated title to call themselves, and here’s the first quote: “Now you find instead of the head of human resources, it’s chief people officer,” Steven E. Gross, the global rewards consulting leader at Mercer, told the newspaper. “The role hasn’t changed. There is this upward pressure for everybody to have bigger titles.”

And this is the funny thing: The New York Times story isn’t about HR, or chief people officers, at all. No, the business story is actually titled “Maybe everyone will be a CEO,” yet the first real example and the first quote in the Times story takes a prominent and dead-on shot at those who lead HR departments. And why is that?

Here’s a wild guess: Maybe it’s because the title chief people officer is not only incredibly pretentious but also vague and terribly overdone. Plus, it’s laugh-out-loud nutty—like something from the “Department of Silly Titles” in a Monty Python skit.

HR always seems to be a punching bag in the business world, and surveys and research done year after year always seem to highlight the shortcomings of the human resources profession. Frankly, I would be getting awfully tired of it if I were working in HR, and I would be really sick of it if I saw myself as a high-powered human resources executive who was deeply focused on business strategy and driving the organization’s bottom line.

This is where the Society for Human Resource Management should step in. Rather than wasting big chunks of money on vague image advertising (with no discernible ROI) during the presidential debates, SHRM should work on improving the image of HR professionals by focusing on their skills and expertise as strategic businesspeople. For example, maybe the “I Am SHRM” print ad campaign could be changed to something like “I Am a Strategic Business Partner.”

Yes, that may sound a little stupid, but certainly no more so than “chief people officer.” And if SHRM were to do it right and spend anywhere near the many millions that have been pumped into the SHRM ads broadcast during the debates, it might find that HR people get a little more respect. Plus, it may make newspapers like The New York Times think twice before taking gratuitous shots in print that do nothing more than make HR executives the bad example in yet another business story.

One more suggestion while I’m here giving advice: Get rid of “chief people officer” as a title. No one wants to be the punch line to a Monty Python sketch.

With each passing day that the stock market gyrates wildly on some new bit of negative economic news, it becomes increasingly clear that we’re going to be dealing with an extremely tough business environment for some time to come.

This isn’t a media-created crisis as some shallow thinkers would have you believe, but the product of a lot of suspect decisions made for a number of years that are now showing their true impact on the global economy. And for everyone who manages talent and worries about the impact on people, it means we are in for a long, bumpy ride.

“This is an equal-opportunity recession,” says Cathy Paige, a vice president at temporary staffing firm Manpower, which has seen softening demand from clients. “Everyone is feeling it.” Paige was quoted in a recent BusinessWeek story headlined “The Coming Pink Slip Epidemic.” 

It’s a sobering read.

“As nervous lenders cower and credit contracts,” the story says, “virtually every industry is likely to be scathed in the widely predicted downturn starting this autumn. Nearly every business relies on credit to operate—just as they need customers to have spending power.” And, it continues with this prediction: “With lending trimmed, and companies and consumers tightening their belts, jobs will be cut across broad swaths of the economy, from the tech sector to investment banking, and from manufacturing to soft drinks.”

I’ve been managing people for a long time and have seen a number of economic ups and downs, but I can’t even recall as gloomy and difficult a period as we are now in. Managing talent and helping to keep your organization going through all of this will take skill and patience, but some experience and perspective would help too.

Here’s one way to get some of that needed perspective: from a breakfast seminar next week in New York titled “Managing Talent in a Turbulent Economy.” 

Workforce Management and Crain’s New York Business (one of our sister publications) will be hosting the breakfast event from 8-10:30 a.m. at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan.

We have a great keynote speaker—Kevin Ryan, the founder and former CEO of global Internet advertising company DoubleClick will talk about how you manage talent through the ups and downs of various economic cycles. In addition, I will be moderating a panel discussion with three executives who have also had to deal with managing people through difficult times:

• Renee Russell, the executive director for global talent management at Avon Products. She had to work through a period when Avon completely changed its business model and turned the company upside down.

• Ron Thomas, the former vice president of organization development at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Ron had a challenge that very few managers have had to face: how to manage a workforce that is rattled when the company’s founder and guiding presence gets sent off to jail.

• Janet Hanson, founder of 85 Broads, a global network community of 18,000 women  who want to leverage one another’s connections, relationships and intellectual capital to increase the ROI on their education and their careers. As a former managing director at Lehman Brothers, Janet has firsthand experience with Wall Street and can speak to the turmoil that is going on there today.

Believe it or not, this is an event that was planned long before the current impact of the economic downturn became clear. If you are in New York and want to hear from some seasoned executives who have dealt firsthand with managing through tough times and lived to tell about it, sign up now for this October 29 event. I know they will have some very insightful observations and strategies for helping to get through the downturn ahead.

TO: Laurence G. (Lon) O’Neil, New SHRM CEO and Grand Poobah
FROM: John Hollon, Workforce Management editor and pain-in-the-ass SHRM critic
SUBJECT: Welcome, but we need to talk about that big-bucks ad campaign

Dear Lon,

Forgive me for not doing this sooner, but welcome from a fellow member of SHRM. I haven’t written much about the society since you were named to replace Sue Meisinger a couple of months ago, but I wanted to make sure you had a chance to get on board and settled in before I started dishing advice.

I never heard much from your predecessor about my counsel, and frankly, I don’t expect to hear much from you either. That’s just the way it goes with SHRM leaders, because a lot of your time is clearly focused on the money —how to grow it, where to put it and what to do with all of it, given that it keeps flowing in at such a breathtaking rate.

And that gets me to my first piece of advice: Whatever you do in these first few weeks of your term at SHRM, take a good look at how the organization is spending money. Once you do, I think you’ll see that this huge and pricey campaign to have SHRM “sponsor” election coverage and the presidential (and vice presidential) debates with advertising on CNN, Fox News, Fox Business Network and National Public Radio is a complete waste of time.

Mark Schoeff Jr., Workforce’s Washington reporter, estimated the cost of this campaign at several million dollars. Whatever it is, it makes me wonder: Is this the best way to help HR people do their jobs better, and get them that long-sought-after seat at the table? When it comes to the ads, even former SHRM chief Mike Losey told Schoeff, “I’m not an advocate for spending all that money.” And I’m in complete agreement.

Sponsoring debates and election coverage is exactly the last thing SHRM should be spending money on. What’s the ROI for SHRM on that expenditure? My guess is that a strong business type like yourself will be asking those tough questions, as you should be, because I don’t know that they have been asked all that much since Losey departed as CEO.

This will be a challenge, I know, but it’s extremely important that you dive into your new job quickly and take a strong position on how SHRM is spending its money. Vanity campaigns like this one do nothing to build better HR leaders, and in my view, they show just how off-base SHRM is when it comes to using its war chest to drive positive change in the human resources profession.

So that’s my first piece of advice: Follow the money and get a good fix on what SHRM is spending, and why. My guess is that if you do, you’ll have some interesting questions to pose to the SHRM bureaucrats. Plus, you’ll send them a clear message that as CEO, you’ll be one in the mold of Mike Losey—a force to be reckoned with.

Yours for a better SHRM,

John Hollon (a member in good standing)

I’ll be the first to admit that I have been pretty critical of the leadership of SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management, and there’s a good reason for that.

Put simply, I expect SHRM to set an example for HR people everywhere by using the resources, size and clout of the world’s largest human resources organization to work for the betterment of the profession, and not be just another painfully bureaucratic trade association overly preoccupied with building an ever-larger bank account for no discernable purpose.

So, let me be one of the first to say that the choice of Laurence (Lon) G. O’Neil, formerly senior vice president and chief human resources officer at Kaiser Permanente, to be SHRM’s new president and CEO looks to be a huge step in the right direction.

Let me count the ways:

• He seems to have the business chops that SHRM needs from its top leader. O’Neil was the senior HR executive at Kaiser Permanente, a $40 billion not-for-profit health care organization, for more than five years. With 158,000 employees, managing the people function at Kaiser was surely a challenge that prepared him well for SHRM. Plus, O’Neil’s previous work in HR with Bank of America gives him solid Fortune 500 experience as well.
 
• O’Neil isn’t a government bureaucrat or association professional. Everyone should be thankful that the SHRM board didn’t go with yet another Department of Labor type or government bureaucrat for this spot. Nothing wrong with government bureaucrats, I suppose, but is that who we really want leading SHRM again? And senior association professionals are essentially bureaucrats without government portfolios. Thank goodness the board resisted going down that road.

• His foreign experience should help as SHRM slowly works to become a global organization. O’Neil spent three years overseas directing Bank of America’s HR functions in Asia. And earlier in his career, he was director of social services for the Tehran American School in Iran.

• O’Neil knows there’s life west of the Mississippi. With a master’s degree from the University of New Mexico and five years in Oakland, California, at Kaiser, I think it’s safe to say that O’Neil probably isn’t another one of those people who is infatuated by life east of the Hudson (or the Potomac). To all of us who live west of the Hudson, this is a good thing.

• Of course, the proof of all this is in the pudding. O’Neil looks good on paper, but the real test will be how well he does navigating the SHRM bureaucracy, keeping his own counsel and pushing the organization ahead. I doubt that he’ll spend much time listening to my counsel, but in my view, SHRM needs a good kick in the tail. It needs to be less arrogant and bureaucratic, more transparent, and it needs to stop trying to be all things to all people.

One more thing: I’ve chided the SHRM board of directors for taking so much time to make this choice, with the caveat that it would be well worth the wait if the delay was because the board was nailing down the perfect candidate to lead SHRM into the future.  

Well, so far so good. The SHRM board seems to have made a solid choice for a new leader. O’Neil offers a lot of promise and hope for the organization. But only time will tell if he is the guy who can focus the world’s largest HR organization on what human resource people must do to be strategic business partners in the 21st century—and if he can get SHRM to help HR get there.

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.