H.R is not your friend

Welcome to Luxury Career Advice, the section of my newsletter where I answer actual questions I get about starting and scaling a career in luxury hospitality. And this week’s newsletter is sure to make some people a little miffed.

Dear Paul,

My director has been cutting me out. Meetings I should be in, decisions about my own department, and a new hire I found out about from the schedule.

A friend told me to document everything and take it to HR. I have a folder now. Three months of it.

I keep not sending the email. Something about it feels like a door I can’t walk back through.

Am I being a coward?

Holding A Folder In Scottsdale

Dear Folder Holder,

You’re not being a coward.

As a matter of fact, your instincts are better than your friend’s.

Why?

Because HR does not work for you.

HR works for the company.

Trust me, I know. I used to have an HR department.

This isn’t a slur on anybody in HR, by the way. And I want to be careful here because I know good people in that job. I’m sure the idea of creating HR departments started with good intentions. And I’m sure that some people who work in HR got into HR because of those good intentions. But when you look at what the HR departments are actually built to do these days, you see right away that their main function is to manage the company’s exposure.

So when something reaches HR, the question being answered is what protects the organization, not what’s fair to you.

Which means, in a way, the moment you file anything with HR, the relationship becomes adversarial. It also means that, whether you intended to or not, you will have converted a management problem into a legal one. And once anything is framed as a legal problem or potential legal problem, it takes on a shape that nobody involved really controls anymore.

But I also want to say something very important.

Sometimes that’s exactly what has to happen. Especially if what’s happening to you is unsafe, discriminatory, or illegal. But I would also suggest that in that case you don’t wait to go to HR. Or soften it. Or let anybody talk you into handling it in-house first. If you find yourself in a dangerous, compromising, or malicious situation, skip HR and go straight to legal counsel. (I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, by the way.

But what you described didn’t sound anything like that.

What you described was a director who is freezing you out, which is either a management failure, a coward with a communication problem, or the first sign that they are preparing to let you go soon. Which, as I already explained, in either case, HR is not going to help you with (well, they may help you get let go).

As I have mentioned many times, all of this is why we don’t have a traditional HR department at Fallon Hospitality.

Yes, because of the issues mentioned above, but mostly because when you think about it, human resources is kind of like the hospitality department for companies. So, as hospitality specialists, we kind of expect everyone at the company to be in human resources.

Here’s how that works at Fallon:

Operations owns hiring and owns the hard conversations. Tougher situations only go to compliance when it’s genuinely gone legal. The reason behind this is that the manager is in it every day. Which means they carry the stress of the operation and know the people under them better than anyone. Which means that, especially if they follow Fallon Guide protocols, they’ll come into a hard conversation from a more human place than someone who only has “human” in their job title.

This, by the way, is not their fault. The HR professional could be the most empathetic person on Earth. But the distance between someone in HR and a person’s day-to-day chips away at that person’s empathy. Even with the most empathetic people. So it has nothing to do with people skills. It’s just proximity.

But enough about me and how I run my company. Let’s get back to you about what you should do.

Once again, none of this should be construed as legal advice. But if I were you, I would have the conversation you’ve been avoiding. Which means having a conversation with your manager.

But leave the folder at home.

Because the minute you walk into a room with three months of documentation, you have declared war. It doesn’t even matter if you use the folder. Once he sees that folder, he will see it as war, no matter how gently you say it.

This is what I would do.

First, ask for permission:

“Hey, can I talk to you about something?”

Then, once you are alone, be direct and be short.

“I found out about the new hire from the schedule. I want to understand how you’d like me involved in decisions about my department, because right now I don’t think I’m reading it right.”

Then stop talking.

When people stop talking after a comment like that, the people being spoken to feel the need to fill the void. And when people fill voids with words, they tend to over-explain.

Watch and listen to his response.

If he gets uncomfortable but also tries to fix it, then you have a manager who lost the thread and can find it again.

If he immediately explains why you don’t need to be in those rooms, you have your answer, and while it may be a different answer than you were looking for, it’s the more useful one.

If he just gets uncomfortable, then I would do some inner work and start dusting off the resume and looking for a better opportunity.

Either way, you’ll know within ten minutes what bringing a folder was never going to tell you.

Keep the folder, by the way.

Because if this does go somewhere ugly, you’ll want it and you’ll be happy you have it.

Paul Fallon
Founder, Fallon Hospitality

P.S. This column runs on your questions. Hit reply and send me yours. You’ll stay anonymous, same as our Folder Holder