BE professionals all have to read Why We Hate HR. Not just read the ideas in the article, but ponder, re-hash, debate, and reject or accept (obviously I vote for the latter).

Why? Three reasons:

First off, most of our clients are training managers or HR departments. The article explains why HR sits at the kid’s table, while marketing, finance, and production call the shots. That our clients are marginalized within their organization should be of concern to everyone involved with BE.

Second, we need to take into account the internal dynamics of our client companies. HR has less clout than other areas. What does that means for us? It means that we must bring the line managers to the table. Since most of the time we design the language program structure, we must include line managers (not just HR) at every step. Needs assessment, course planning, attendance reporting…all must flow through line managers as well. Our students feel accountable to their direct manager, not HR. At English360, when we started pushing for active line manager partication in the programs we designed and delivered, program success improved considerably.

Finally, and most importantly, we need to constantly ask ourselves “how can we best impact our students’ business?”. It’s the lack of perceived direct impact of HR on business results that this article laments. For BE to contribute to business results, we need to design courses and activities around actual performance events such as presentations, meetings, and email, instead of page 42 of Market Leader (nothing against Market Leader by the way).

Of course many BE teachers do this already. But several years ago I observed about 40 different classes and dozens of teachers for a client, in 9 countries, and I was dismayed at how few of the teachers strayed from the book. Some weren’t sure what their students’ jobs were…even in individual classes. In the follow-up interviews, it was clear that these teachers (and their schools) understood that, for most of our students, English isn’t an end in itself, it’s a means to an end. They just weren’t teaching that way.

The purpose of Business English teaching is to improve business performance (through more effective communication). Focusing on that end requires, whenever possible, a dogme approach, an emergent syllabus, and classes primarily based on preparing for learners’ actual on-the-job language performance. I’ll be discussing these ideas on this page, as they summarize the English360 approach.

(Full disclosure: my BE experience is from Latin America, and I’ve spent some time in Eastern Europe. Why We Hate HR is is right on the money in LatAm and the US, but I’m not sure how applicable it is to the rest of Europe and Asia. If you have experience there, please chime in.