Sabrina Baker  0:10  
The HR Happy Hour Network is proudly supported by Workhuman. Every year, companies spin their wheels searching externally for senior leaders. Meanwhile, their next VP is already on their payroll, recognized by peers but overlooked on the org chart. Future Leaders by Workhuman fixes that using AI and real time recognition data, Future Leaders identifies your highest potential talent four years ahead of schedule, before they burn out, before they check out, or get picked up by someone who saw what you missed. Build smarter, promote confidently, keep your best people. Future Leaders only from Workhuman. Learn more at Workhuman.com Thanks so much for joining us. Welcome back to the HR Connection on the HR Happy Hour Media Network. My name is Sabrina Baker, and if you are new here, here is the thing that I want you to understand about this show before anything else, HR in a 50 person company is not a smaller version of HR in a 5000 person company. It's a different job. It is his own discipline, different rules, different resources, and almost none of the structure that most HR advice assumes you have sitting underneath you. This show exists for the gap between those two realities, the 50 and the 5000 If you're the only HR person in the building, or one of two, maybe a really small team, but you're doing the job of what would be an entire department somewhere else, you're exactly who I'm talking to. And today's topic is one that I don't think we talk about out loud enough, even though every single one of you listening has lived a version of this at least once, probably once this week. It's the work that lands on your desk that was never supposed to be yours in the first place. Did you just say, uh, huh, I know what that is. Yeah, essentially the idea is this: if no one owns it, HR gets it, and I don't think there is a more accurate description of what happens inside of small business HR than that. In fact, when I first started thinking about this episode, I almost called it when HR becomes the catch-all department, because that's absolutely what it can feel like. HR becomes the default for a lot of things and a lot of organizations, not intentionally, not because HR is asking for more work, certainly not, we have enough, but because HR becomes the place where unresolved business problems go to live. I've told you before on this podcast that I don't think small business HR practitioners have a time management problem, and I don't think they have a bandwidth problem. I think, and let me just say, I know you probably think that's crazy. I know you're busy, and you think it's bandwidth. The work is too much for one person. I know that. I know your inbox is full. I know your calendar is overflowing with meetings you probably don't need to be a part of. I know there are days where you feel like you are being pulled in 20 different directions in the same moment. I know there are days where you can't finish anything you started, because every time you get close, three more things land on your desk. I know that I'm not suggesting that there's not a high volume of work inside of a small work. There absolutely is. We live it every single day, but I think what many HR professionals call a bandwidth problem is actually an ownership boundary problem. We haven't decided who really owns stuff, because when I look at small businesses, especially small businesses, what I often see, in addition to a lot of HR work, is too many non-HR problems finding their way to HR, or problems that HR doesn't need to own alone, and that's a different issue entirely than bandwidth. Bandwidth problems are solved by adding more time or people. Boundary ownership issues are solved by creating more clarity around who should own what, and clarity is much harder to figure out because it requires people to take ownership. I really do believe that in small businesses, accountability and ownership is lacking in a huge way, and it's because people don't want to have conversations.

Sabrina Baker  4:59  
Managers don't want to manage leaders, don't want to put structure around the things that they need to do, but in order for organizations to stop treating HR as the solution to every people-related challenge, or even pseudo people, people adjacent, which I'm going to explain in a few minutes, we have to put boundaries around who owns what, and that's really difficult. There's one sentence I really want you to remember from this entire episode, and, and here it is. Every problem HR solves without clarifying ownership becomes HR's problem to solve again later. Let me say that again, every problem HR solves without clarifying ownership becomes HR's problem to solve again later, and once you start looking at your work through that lens, you'll begin to see why some small businesses, maybe yours, constantly pull HR into everything. I don't think most small businesses mean for this to happen. I really don't. I don't think that leaders are sitting around saying, how do we give HR more work, or all of these things? Really, you know, HR needs to do all of them. That's usually really not the issue. I don't think it's an intentional thing. It's usually much more subtle. There is a problem that emerges, nobody knows exactly who should own it. And then what happens? HR, us trying to be helpful, we're trying to be a partner, and we are good problem solvers. We step in to help, and so we step in to help the problem gets solved, because not only are we good problem solvers, but we're also very capable and competent, and so the problem gets solved, everybody moves on, then a similar problem comes back, and HR helps again, and then it comes back, and HR helps again, and before long, eventually, what was going to be temporary help becomes a permanent solution. Leaders stop seeing HR as helping, and they start seeing HR as owning and being responsible for the outcome of whatever that problem is, even if it's something that HR really shouldn't own. They have been owning it these last couple of times, so they're no longer helping. Now it is their responsibility, and it gets completely added to your list of job duties when it doesn't even make sense for you. This happens with things that HR should be involved in, but not own, so things like a manager struggling with employee accountability, HR steps in to help. They work with the manager through this issue. Maybe they have the conversation, and then the next time that same manager struggles, they call HR again and expect HR to be the only person holding their employee accountable, because you can have the conversation. Or a leader has difficulty communicating a change, it goes wrong. HR steps in to help and kind of smooth things over, and so then the next time there's a communication challenge, HR gets pulled in from the minute, like immediately to deliver the news, so that it doesn't go south again. Those are things that HR should be involved in. They kind of make sense on why HR gets pulled in, but I don't think HR has to always own those. We talk about that quite a bit, training your managers to be able to handle those things. They're people related and you should be involved, but they're not yours to own. People think that because we are the people department, then leaders can really start to figure out ways that everything ties back to people, so therefore HR should own it, right? If it's people in some way, shape, or form, HR should own it. Let me tell you a story, and see if you can relate to this. A few years back, we had a client with no formal IT department. They had one employee who was not an IT person, but he was just good at tech stuff, that's very small business life, right? You're good at this, so you do it. And he was responsible for ordering laptops and then getting them back from employees when they terminated. Well, that employee who's responsible for that decided to leave.

Sabrina Baker  9:16  
He gave notice, and we were looking at all of his job duties, and all of the things that he did, and IT, and laptops were a thing on the list that we weren't sure, and there was this back and forth, and really I wasn't even involved in a lot of the back and forth, but somehow that landed on HR's lap, their outsourced HR provider, us, was now charged with ordering laptops and getting them back when someone left the organization, it made total sense to the leaders, because we owned onboarding and offboarding, and so therefore, if laptop ordering and retrieving were things that were part of onboarding and offboarding, then these all made sense, it was all related, and so therefore it should just be something that we owned as part of the onboarding and offboarding process. But it became a nightmare, an absolute nightmare. It became so very time consuming and so hard sometimes to get the laptop on time or find the right laptop, because they, you know, stores would be out or Microsoft would be on a delay, and we needed it next week, and so that's kind of an example of something that can be on your plate that others really should be doing, and one or two of those things, if you have one of them that are not really like HR related, yet somehow you got stuck doing it, like ordering laptops can take up so much of your time. I think it's sometimes it's because everyone else found a way to say no faster, and HR was all that's left. That's certainly what happened with the laptop. This happens particularly often in small businesses, because small businesses are built on people being very flexible and wearing many hats, when you're a 10 person company, everyone jumping in and doing things that may not be completely in their realm is what you do. Everybody does a little bit of everything, but when you start pushing to 25 people and more, the responsibility should not still be evolving. We should have those figured out by that. And when you're a 50 person company, you're trying to create structure that should have been created years ago and simultaneously managing growth. Those two things just are really hard to do at the same time. Things move very fast. People wear multiple hats for far longer than they should, and then processes develop organically, roles evolve over time, and in that environment ownership can become blurry, very blurry. So the question then stops being who should own this and starts becoming who can handle this right now. That may seem like a small shift, but it creates enormous consequence later, because who should own this is a structural question asking about the structure of the organization, who can handle this is a convenience question. And convenience is how ownership drift begins. The most capable person becomes the default owner, even if they shouldn't be. The most responsive person becomes the default owner, even if they shouldn't be. The person willing to step in becomes the default owner, even if they shouldn't be, and in many organizations that person can be HR, not because HR should own the work, but because HR is willing to help. This is where I think many HR professionals get stuck, and I actually think they kind of shoot themselves in the foot a little bit. They assume that because they are involved in something they should own it, and that's really not the case. Involvement and ownership are two very different things. They are not the same thing at all. In fact, I would argue that one of the most strategic things HR can do is understand the difference between involvement and ownership, because when HR owns too much, nobody else develops, no one else develops the capability if you are owning it all. Managers stop managing, leaders stop leading, departments stop taking responsibility for their own outcomes, and if you are holding things like ordering laptops that you shouldn't, then you are also taking away from time that you could be using to actually help the growth of the organization.

Sabrina Baker  10:02  
The irony is that the more this happens, the more overwhelmed HR becomes, not because the organization has more people problems, but because the organization has fewer ownership boundaries, and when ownership boundaries disappear, everything starts flowing towards the function most willing to absorb ambiguity, which brings us to the next question: Is why is HR so vulnerable to this in the first place, and I think the answer is actually one of HR's greatest strengths that can sometimes work against us. So, why does this happen to HR? Why doesn't everything end up in finance? Why doesn't everything end up in marketing or IT? Why doesn't everything end up somewhere else than us? Why are we so often the department that inherits everyone else's problems? I think the answer is actually one truly of our greatest strengths. We are built to operate in ambiguity. If you think about most business functions. Finance like certainty, there is a right way and a wrong way to close the books every single month. There is a right way and a wrong way to process an invoice. There are rules, there are standards, there are definitions. IT is very similar. Something either works or it doesn't. A system is either functioning or it isn't. Those functions generally operate inside of environments where ownership is much more easy to define, but HR is very different. HR operates in the space between systems and people, and people are messy, people are emotional, people are inconsistent. People bring context, and they bring history, and they bring relationships, and they bring personalities into every situation, so HR develops this really unique skill set, and that is that we learn how to gather incomplete information, we learn how to navigate competing perspectives, we learn how to help people through uncertainty, we learn how to make decisions when there isn't a perfect answer. We learn how to operate in gray areas. I don't think anything in HR is black and white. That's a tremendous strength, and in fact, I would argue it's one of the most valuable capabilities an HR professional can develop. The problem is that strengths often create unintended consequences, and one of the unintended consequences of being so good at ambiguity, so good at living in the gray, so good at herding cats is that people start bringing you more cats. Now here's where things get really interesting. The organization often mistakes HR's ability to navigate ambiguity for HR ownership, and those are not the same thing. Just because HR understands a problem does not mean HR owns the problem. Just because HR can help solve a problem does not mean HR should be accountable for the outcome. That's a huge distinction. Just because HR is capable does not mean HR should carry any responsibility around whatever it is that they're asking, that distinction is really one of the most important lessons I think small business HR professionals need to learn, because capability creates gravitational pull. The more capable you become, the more work gets pulled towards you. We talk about this with high performers, right. The better you are, the more you do. Think about this with your own career. Has ever anyone ever said, "Can you just take a look at this? or "Can you help me think through this? or "Can you, you know, talk to this person for me? Those requests rarely feel unreasonable in the moment. In fact, they often feel flattering. Right, let's just be honest. You feel like people trust you, people value your opinion, people need your help. We love to be needed. People see you as someone who can solve their problem, and we love that. We like that. The problem is that when you get enough of these requests, eventually that becomes part of your job description. One of the things that we see all the time in our fractional HR work is organizations where HR has become the unofficial owner of organizational discomfort. I've talked about this on the podcast before, not really because HR was assigned that role, but because HR was willing to step into situations that nobody else wanted to handle.

Sabrina Baker  19:23  
We have an episode I said we talked about before was actually just released on our main HR Connection channel, titled HR Can't Fix What Leadership Won't Own, and it speaks to this very thing we call a lot of things HR problems, their communication problems, or their culture problems, when really they are accountability problems, or they're operational problems, but again, because they touch people and they're a little bit ambiguous in nature, and you know, they, they seem to feel like an HR thing, then we inherit the problem, and we become responsible for that outcome. This really connects directly to something I talked about a few episodes back. Bandwidth is never the real problem. You're solving for influence, influence is the real problem, and bandwidth is just where it shows up first, loud enough that you finally notice it. And here's the big problem with this: well, beyond the hours that you spend doing unnecessary work, the more reliably you absorb that kind of work, the less time and credibility you have left over for the work that actually moves your position inside the business, the strategic work that we all say we always want to do, the pattern level work, the kind of influence building I talked about a few episodes ago, influence where you go to leadership with patterns instead of problems, you cannot build a reputation as a strategic partner in the same hour you're on hold with a cleaning vendor, because somehow now that's your issue to solve. So this was never really a workload management question, a bandwidth question. It is a question of what kind of HR person the business experiences you as every single day in 100 small interactions that no one is consciously tracking except for you. Okay, so enough of all of the diagnosing. I think you get what I'm talking about. Let's actually talk about what are we going to do about it. I think there are three moves, I love threes. I think everything goes in threes. None of them are really complicated, but I'm going to be super honest, that all of them require you to do something slightly uncomfortable, and depending on your tolerance of being direct and in the moment, you may want to skip these. I think it's why most people do skip them, but let's talk through them. So, the first one is to call out the ownership issue when something lands on your desk that clearly doesn't belong to you to own. The instinct could be to just handle it and move on, because in the moment that might feel efficient, it might feel easy, maybe you can handle it, and so why not? It even feels kind. Before you solve it, say out loud to whoever's in the room, or on the email thread, or on the chat thread, that this doesn't have a natural owner. Call that out. It doesn't need to be dramatic. You're not trying to get out of work. It's one sentence, and here's it. Here it is. I'm going to handle this for now, but I want to say that this isn't an HR function, this is a gap in how we've divided this kind of work, and I want us to talk about that. That one sentence changes everything that happens downstream. It takes invisible labor and makes it visible the moment it happens, instead of three months later when somebody finally says, Why are you doing that, almost as an afterthought, right? It puts the actual gap of ownership on record, instead of letting it solidify into your job by default. If I had said that sentence the very first time the laptop situation landed on my desk instead of just solving it myself for months. I think that conversation about who really should own this, which I did eventually have to bring up anyway, would have happened a full year earlier than it actually did. Just one sentence cost me a year by simply avoiding saying it. Move to is for that work that's already on your plate that shouldn't be. This is the stuff you picked up six months ago, or a year ago, or you've been doing since day one, that has since become just a common line item on your to-do list, and it's kind of by default, because nobody technically ever formally gave it to you, and nobody certainly ever took it back from you.

Sabrina Baker  24:01  
This is the harder problem, I think, because by the time you realize you need to offload something, you've likely been doing it for a long time, and so it's going to be a little bit of a shock to everyone's system when you start to start to push back, because honestly they're not even thinking of it. The mistake most people make here is trying to hand it off in one move, sending one email, having one small training session, or one conversation, and then expecting that to be enough, expecting it to be over. It almost never is. Here's the structure that I have found actually work. First, you want to document what you've been doing, not for your own records, for the person who's going to take this over. You need to do, have an SOP, what the task involves, how often it comes up, who the relevant people are. There are links that you can have to outside documents or websites. What does a good outcome of this task look like? You're not writing unnecessarily a manual, sometimes you might need to, but you're just removing the friction that gives people an excuse to hand it back to you, because you know how to do it. Second, you need to figure out who the real owner is and name them explicitly, not in a vague, like, oh, maybe this is more of a finance thing. I think that's sometimes easier for us to say, but you want to be really specific and say this job should really be with the office manager, or with the accountant, or with the operations league. Vague redirects bounce back. Specific ones have somewhere to land. So, the third thing, then, you want to do is give it a date. I'm going to keep handling this through the end of this month, but by next month I expect so and so to take this over. Here's who everyone's going to go to. Here's who's going to own this. The date really matters, because it converts the hand off from a request into a plan. You're not asking for permission, you're telling the business how the transition is going to happen. Now, I know you can't just do it that way. You're going to have to have conversations, and this part is rarely comfortable. There's going to be pushback. Someone is going to tell you it's easier if you just keep doing it, and that may be true, maybe it is true, or easier for them if you just keep doing it, but that's exactly the problem. Your job is not to be easy, your job is to be positioned where you can actually do the work you were hired to do. Move three is about the work that hasn't attached yet, so something lands on your desk today. There's an email, there's a request, there's somebody at your door. A problem dropped on your desk, and it isn't yours to solve. You have about 30 seconds to decide how you're going to respond. So, if you do nothing, is that it becomes yours if you say nothing, you do nothing, it's going to become yours. That's how the pattern works. Makes sense to them to give it to you. Silence reads as acceptance, so if you do nothing in those 30 seconds, it's going to become yours. So this move is entirely about what you do in that first 30 second window before the work formally attaches to you permanently. Here's what this looks like in practice. When something arrives that isn't yours, maybe it's not, it's HR adjacent, it's not something that is yours. You want to respond but redirect rather than accept, so not with silence, not with the refusal, but with a path forward, so something like this one should really sit with operations. Here's who I'd start with, and here's the context they'll need. You want to give them some direction, give them some help, but don't take it. You're not refusing to engage, you're refusing to be the owner, and you want to make that very, very clear. You will help, you will not own. There's a real difference, and the people around you will feel that difference in how you deliver it.

Sabrina Baker  28:09  
The key is that you have to do this the first time every time, because the first time you accept something without calling it out and without calling that it shouldn't be yours, you've set the pattern, and then the second time it arrives, it won't feel like a decision anymore, it'll feel like the natural order of things, it'll feel like that's what they're supposed to do, and then you will feel difficult, you will feel like you are being difficult, or they will think you are being difficult, because you handled it before. The goal here isn't that you never touch anything outside your lane again, because that's just not realistic. You probably still will have to do things that aren't necessarily HR, that is small business life. The goal is that the business starts asking the ownership question before it assigns or defaults to you, instead of asking it way later, or you having to push back way later. I have a huge belief that one of the biggest struggles in small businesses is defining who owns what, and by doing these three moves and asking those questions, you could be the catalyst. Wouldn't that be so nice to start defining that better inside your organization? So, here's a quick way to check yourself when something ownerless lands on you. Ask yourself this, is this a genuine gap where nobody else in this building could reasonably take it on right now, or is this a convenient gap where someone else absolutely could do it, and they're just defaulting to me. Those two questions get very different answers, and they deserve very. Three different responses from you if it's a genuine gap, and it makes sense for you to fill it. Fill it, as a temporary out loud, say that out loud. I'm going to do this for now, because we have no one else. Put a rough date on when you're going to revisit it to see if maybe there's a better owner, and then actually revisit it when that date arrives. If it's a convenience gap, that's exactly what those three earlier moves are for. We talk a lot about invisible HR work on this channel, and there's a ton of invisible work that happens in human resources that leave process that you fixed before it got really sticky, that conflict between two employees that you smoothed over before it landed on a lawyer's desk. Certainly, there's a lot of stuff that we do that no one ever sees, but there's also a lot of work that we do that people see but don't recognize we shouldn't be doing, and sometimes even us, it doesn't even hit us that we shouldn't be doing it. I bet if you went through your task list and you looked at all the things you are doing, you might have something on there that you could question, you could think about, is this really for me or should it be for somebody else. And so, working through those three moves from earlier can be such a game changer in opening up some capacity within yourself. You're never going to be able to add more time, and the volume of true HR work is probably never going to diminish. So, it's about how do you open up more capacity within yourself, and sometimes it's about finding those tasks that you should have never been doing in the first place. If you want more small employer HR talks, so small employers for us is anything between one and 500 You can find our weekly episodes on the HR Connection on the HR Happy Hour Network. Here we post monthly, but on the HR Connection Full Podcast, we have weekly episodes. We'll make sure that that link is in the show notes, as well as you can connect with me on LinkedIn. All of our content is geared towards small business HR. It's where we work, it's where we set every single day, so you can connect with me there.

Sabrina Baker  31:56  
I'd love to hear about, I'd love to hear from those who are managing HR in a small environment, and just hear about their ups and downs, and see how that validates the work that we're doing, and just share experiences. So, please subscribe to the HR Connection, both here and on our main channel, and then also connect with me on LinkedIn. I hope that you found this helpful. Thanks so much for being here. I'll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai