I am an HRIS manager at a midsize company (500 employees) in the US. The HR department runs pretty lean in general and our technology has historically been individually managed rather than having an overall strategy. I‘ve been tasked with bringing this all under my department and partnering with IT on best practices. Cut to our HR Director bringing me in on a “tech project” but the ask is to create and implement our overall L&D and TM strategy. I was very confused by the ask as it’s completely out of scope for an HRIS department and they were not understanding the push back. After chatting with my boss, it was clear that the HR director was told last week that it is not in scope for my department but we can support on helping with the tech side anyways.
During a discovery call today with their subordinates, the HR team told me that our HR director doesn’t understand anything technical or “big words” so they “usually try to explain things as if I’m talking to a 5 year old because they don’t understand otherwise and will argue about it later”. Examples their team gave includes not knowing the difference between the following:
implementation vs an integration
project management vs a program manager
Talent management vs performance cycles
One of the HR director‘s employees told me they create everything with the director’s comprehension level in mind (very basic and using elementary language) because they’ve noticed our director doesn’t understand anything if the words are too big and they will not look something up if they don’t understand it. Once the team started explaining their ways of working, so many instances started to click in my mind from past projects where the director had such a hard time with basic tasks in prior projects or questions in our HCM. It appears they genuinely did not understand but didn’t say anything either.
I am truly taken aback by the fact that our entire HRBP staff and their teams genuinely dumb down everything for a director. I feel bad because the director is a very nice person and it’s clear their team understands this so they work to accommodate. However, we have a large project upcoming for our HCM and I’m genuinely scared that the main focus involves a director that is functioning at an adolescent comprehension level. I should add that the HRBP team was not being mean about it and was genuinely trying to give me advice on how to approach our tech stack with our HR director as they want this project to be successful.
I am not someone who engages in office politics and generally prefer to keep my head down, do my job, and go home. This is the first time I’ve encountered something like this in my career. So my question is: do I mention this to my boss (they both report to our CPO) or let it go/keep these ways of working in mind for upcoming projects?