Last fall I just couldn’t do it any more for these reasons and a few others and left HR after nearly 20 years. I took a 30K year pay cut to change careers, but I have never felt better and am not looking back.

With 25 years in HR – I have worked for companies where sales ran the business, operations ran the business, but not once has HR ran the business. Barney is right — HR can’t threaten to or actually quit each time their advice isn’t taken. However, I have had the opportunity to state, in a number of occasions when my advice wasn’t taken — ‘I told you so!’

You know, I normally delete spam comments, but I kind of love the name.

Also, I’ve seen the Holy Infant of Prague.

There definitely are. And employment law isn’t always clear. Sometimes managers get punished. Sometimes HR does. Sometimes both deserve it. sometimes neither does.

That’s not fair, or accurate. The HR person cannot say ‘do this or I quit’ every time there’s a disagreement with management. Nor would quitting ensure the managers would do the right thing. So then you’ve quit and they still do the crappy thing, which helps no one.

So there are occasionally situations where HR is “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” and you are bound by the whims of bad managers. I wonder how often this happens, and if upper management *ever* is accountable for pushing HR into unethical or illegal actions. My guess is almost never.

Let this be your catalyst to Seventh-Heaven:

‘The more you shall honor Me,
the more I shall bless you’
-the Infant Jesus of Prague
(<- Czech Republic, next to Russia)

Love him or leave him or indifferent…
better lissen to the Don:

If you deny o'er-the-Hillary's evil,
which most whorizontal demokrakkrs do,
you cannot deny Hellfire
which YOU send YOURSELF to.

Yes, earthling, I was an NDE:
the sights were beyond extreme.
Choose Jesus.
You'll be most happy you did.
God bless your indelible soul.
Google+: kold_kadavr _flatliner

Most lawsuits will settle when, in deposition, the HR person has to say, “Yes, I knew that this was happening.”

Bad managers are going to be bad managers to everyone, so yeah, I’d worry about my job. But i’d worry about my job as soon as they rejected my advice on something serious.

As I said in the article, though, not every situation is black and white. Those complex situations are where the real scary things are.

What if, say, an employee won a harassment/discrimination/retaliation lawsuit against a company — would the HR person (that knew about/administered the employee’s firing, etc) likely be fired for not adequately protecting the company? What if they had objected to the firing? I suppose it would be entirely dependent on the circumstances, but do you document guidance to management to protect yourself in the event they make a bad decision against your input?