HR Professionals: It’s Time To Fess Up!

“I apologize. I made a stupid mistake. I didn’t check out the facts personally as I normally do. Here is the correct information….” This is how I began my explanation of a big HR mistake I made during labor negotiations to our management team.My laziness in not throughly investigating the facts caused our labor negotiating team to temporarily lose credibility during a critical part of the negotiations. And this set back our progress by a couple of days as our team worked hard behind the scenes to get things back on track with the union.  I wasn’t fired. But I could have been.

But I wasn’t.

But let’s face it…**** happens in Human Resources.  Sometimes because we do stupid HR ****.  We rarely get in trouble for the stupid **** we do.However, we do get into trouble when we don’t come clean before the **** hits the fan.Here’s the message in all this: If you screw up, fess up, fast, and tell the whole truth.

Tell the truth to anyone you can fess up to: bosses, your people, your clients, the receptionist, the guy at the bar, your cat.

THEN GET ON WITH YOUR LIFE.

If you haven’t finished that turnover report your boss asked for – fess up, fast.

If you made a mistake calculating the salary for a key executive – fess up, fast.

If you have already told 47,000 people — by mistake — about a great new HR program they’re going to get – fess up, fast.

No excuses.

No cover ups.

I’m not arguing that “telling the truth” is a easy and painless thing to do. (I’m still embarassed by this labor negotiating situation to this day!)

However, I am arguing that telling the truth ASAP is the most career enhancing thing you can do after a screw up…because the “ethics police” will catch you if you don’t.

People have massive amounts of forgiveness in their hearts for sins — including stupid sins.

But they hate like hell folks who won’t come clean with the truth (see Barry Bonds, Pete Rose, O.J. Simpson, Bill Clinton….and now, Roger Clemens).If you don’t want to be the HR person that joins that group – then fess up, fast, with total truth and candor.It’s one of the best career investments you’ll ever make.