ARE YOU ACCREDITED?

When some well meaning HR professional asks me if I am accredited as a coach, it is with some difficulty that I swallow my instinctive answer which goes along the lines of, "do you want a smack in the mouth, idiot?"

Other questions come to mind.

"Are you?"
"Is your CEO?"
"Are any of your Directors?"
"Is your best friend?"
"What of your lover, are they accredited?"
"Your parents?"

Accreditation is a notional affront to individuality, a self referential attempt to commoditize, and the worst of HR's tendency to dehumanize. HR - the term itself robs dignity from the polyglot of unique individuals it describes, and hints at the real power assumption; you, you unique people, are resources which belong to us - HR, behaving in this way, has an equivalence to slave driving. But, in doing so, it is blind to its own thuggery and its own diminishment, its own confirmation as slave itself rather than master. For its positioning is not the plantation owner - few HR professionals get to this status - but the gang master, inventing new forms of degradation, to keep slaves in order, for the ultimate profit of others.

If you are an HR professional who in any way bucks this system, and happens to believe that people really ARE key to an organization's future, here is why you should exercise caution in choosing to work with accredited coaches.

A coach ought to believe in the release of the unique individual as a means of maximising that person's contribution, as well as the recognition and reward they should expect in reciprocation. How, then, could a coach themselves submit to "method"? Surely that would strike at the roots of such a belief? Moreover, if you are buying method in your coaches through an accredited approach, as an organization, aren't you buying the opposite of the innovative urge you actually want and need? Aren't you buying predictability - sameness with your competitors? Aren't you buying the very thing you don't want your people to be? Indeed, aren't you buying something that may look clean and respectable, but is in fact, robotic?

Questions to ponder. Even if slavery was its heritage, can HR survive promoting control in a 21st century creative and knowledge based economy?

What you accredit, you control.

But you kill it too.