Carnival of HR – The Organizational Continuum

I am honored today to host the Carnival of HR — a collection of blog posts from around the interwebs full of good advice for you and your team.

When I think about organizations and how they work, it often reminds me of a continuum with recruiting at one end and the company at the other with several points in between. At any given time, the points within the continuum can shift one way or another, but to have a successful organization you must have people coming in one end and a company focus with a purpose for being at the other. Here are some thoughts about a few of the points on the continuum.

HR Store asks, Do you keep interactions active after a job offer is made? HR Store thinks too many organizations drop the ball when it comes to recruiting, a critical starting point on the continuum. To build the company and accomplish organizational goals, your organization can’t just locate good candidates and then drop them when you’ve found a hot one. You need to walk the candidate through a candidate management process to ensure they get good footing.

Once you turn those candidates into employees, April Dowling at Pseudo HR asks, How do you measure your success? She thinks success should be focused on how you provide great customer service. Her key issue is with HR folks, but this applies across the board to every employee of the organization. If HR provides great customer service and creates shining stars throughout the organization, it will succeed.

And then Wally Bock over at Three Star Leadership talks about The Boss’s Work: Leadership, Management and Supervision. Wally says that if you’re the boss, your work is divided into three parts — from leadership to management to supervision. You must be all three if you’re going to be successful and inspire your team to accomplish the company goals.

Dan McCarthy at Great Leadership calls for A Ban on What Makes CEOs Successful Studies. He thinks we should stop interpreting all those studies and statistics about life at the top of the organization and just get on with developing the skills our company leaders need to be successful. Now that’s a great way to populate the points on the continuum!

At the end of the continuum, Chris Young of The Rainmaker Group talks about How the Mighty Fall and Why Some Companies Give In By Jim Collins. He ponders “How do we / I inject systemic humility, personal accountability, and self-review into the business model [of a company] to avert driving a perfectly good “bus” off a cliff?” because no company can stay successful forever and “we don’t know what we don’t know.”

So there you go. Thoughts from one end of the organizational continuum to the other. The next Carnival of HR will be held on June 10, 2009 at Fortify Your Services.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts about this great advice from wise minds around the interwebs by leaving a comment.