I'M A HR SIMPLETON, DOWH.

I don’t do fancy HR. You know the sort. The ones using big words and lots of rhetoric and not much real application to the real world of real HR.

The ones where you have to pay through your nose to go for their training courses only to end up sitting in a freezing conference room listening to the trainer grandstanding for three whole days and not really making much sense let alone giving you the practical answers you seek to your everyday situations at work.

Some of these fancy HR people will frown and say, ah but then, your HR methods are passé. Some, may even angkat their bakul even higher, let out a mocking snort and tell you that they are way past that “everyday HR manager” level and solving your inconsequential problems are just a waste of their time. Others may just tell you blatantly that your approach is wrong. The rest are just plain conmen.

I tell you what works. Being a traditional people manager works. Anything swankier than that is pointless. Majority of Malaysians still have not departed from the traditional ideology about work i.e. work = pay. I’m sure the colleague sitting beside you does not equate work with enhancing his ability to draw colourful trees with felt pens to plot his sequence of thoughts. So to manage him, you need to apply methods that he understands so he can do what you want him to do. If you start going all Freudian on him, it’ll just petrify him and you won’t get anywhere with your job. Not to mention the Management will soon find you a nonconformist and nonconformists are non-team players. And you do know what happens to those.

I like my humble no-frills existence in the corporate world. And I can see through you conmen, too.