Hard is Easy, Soft is Hard

by Chuck Csizmar - Feb 15, 2010

For those of us who have spent their entire career in the Human Resources / Compensation arena our pathway likely started at the bottom of the ladder, writing job descriptions, completing survey questionnaires and evaluating jobs.

Eventually you worked your way up the food chain into survey analysis, market pricing, structure design, incentives and program development. You mastered the various formulae, charts and graphs, could make Excel dance on a dime and you would happily debate the various and complex techniques that befuddled your HR generalist colleagues. If you stayed at it long enough you eventually became a master technician on the "hard" side of Compensation. You carried a calculator everywhere.

The Hard Side

The "hard" side? This viewpoint represents the traditional view of compensation practitioners from the outside looking in. We are those who manage the technical analysis of impersonal data bites - the black & white world that only deals with neutral and impersonal facts. We are usually placed in a small cubicle, left to our own devices. No one stops by to chat.

We don't receive Christmas cards.

Then it happens; one day you're asked to walk through the beaded curtain into a new world, a new career in something called Compensation Management. This is exciting, because on the other side is increased pay, a loftier title and finally recognition as a "player" within the HR community.

The Soft Side

You are assigned internal clients, managers who suddenly aren't interested in your formulae, charts & graphs or technical babble. They want you to solve problems, provide solutions, to talk with them and explain how Compensation can help them achieve their business objectives. You become an advisor, deeply involved in "what do we do now?" scenarios.

This is the "softer" side of Compensation, where rules become guidelines, policies become politics and the proper answer to most everything is "it depends".

Not everyone successfully makes it through that beaded curtain, though. Why? Because the journey requires a mindset change as well, into a place where your comfortable analtyical tools don't serve as well and you need something called "relationship competencies" to succeed. I've seen many people falter at the curtain; some do not want to pass through - and others have stumbled through, only to eventually burn out like a meteor shooting across the night sky.

Why do some fail to succeed once through the curtain?

Non-Exempt mindset: some are not comfortable being part of management, as they continue to identify themselves with their former colleagues and find it difficult being labeled "management" and required to support a particular view of employee reward.

• Too comfortable with black & white of technical analysis; figures don't lie, they just are. Can't argue with that. There's a comfort in dealing with the neutral, just reporting the facts. Some prefer to stay in this "safety zone."
• Not comfortable with multiple answers for the same question - a common problem where differing circumstances result in differing answers. Like the ground shifting beneath your feet, the certainty of sameness is replaced by "it depends."
• Preference to let existing policies and procedures make the decisions; some folks don't like to stick their neck out, to face being challenged and having to defend their recommendations.
• Preference in the safety of the numbers, vs. dealing with the people who are affected by those numbers. You're in HR, so you should be at least somewhat of a people person - sensitized by how your recommendations impact employees. Some aren't comfortable with this role.
• Back when you were an analyst you were not expected to develop tactical strategies and recommendations; you read the surveys, tabulated the spreadsheets and reported your findings. That was it. Sound harsh? Not at all, as proper analysis remains a critical component for the making of informed business decisions.

To be an effective practitioner in compensation management is to straddle *both* sides of Compensation, to understand the technical aspects of where the numbers come from and what they mean, as well as the brave new world where your role is as an influencer of management decisions. To be successful you need to breathe the crisp air of business realities and shake up those technical rules that you've learned so many years ago; you do not let them rule you.

But you still won't get Christmas cards.

Compensation management is a challenging role, requiring you to balance the numbers, the people, and business realities - all while sticking your neck out to recommend a potentially contentious course of action.

Or you could sit back and let established policies and procedures do the talking, though that's probably not the intent of the increased salary and important title.

What's it going to be?