Boss, you don’t need rooster for egg! HR message from poultry farm

Many corporate do argue that they don’t need roosters in their chicken (poultry) farm, if they want to produce eggs hen. In other words they claim that they don’t need specialists and talented people to accomplish the task and they can run the show just with skilled people. The question is do we need rooster to produce egg from hen? The answer is simple, rooster is not required.

If the poultry farm were maintained only for producing and selling eggs exclusively for consumption, the role of a rooster is negligible or insignificant as the hens do lay eggs without the rooster and such eggs are otherwise called as ‘unfertilized eggs’. Role of the rooster is only to enable the hens to lay eggs that are fertilized.

As far as the food value of the eggs is concerned, whether the eggs are fertilized or unfertilized doesn’t make any great difference. Only limitation of the unfertilized eggs is that they cannot be used to rear chicks by incubating them. In brief, such eggs worth only for consumption. Some charlatans do call such eggs as vegetarian eggs just to justify they eating such eggs.

The business leaders, corporate and the HR function must remember one fundamental management lesson.

Having a boss to any particular function or department in the corporate should be seen as an option only when they add a significant value/difference. The corporate also must learn that except such ‘bosses’ no one in the corporate should be in a position to add value to such work.

Many corporate used to have ‘people managers’ in the system just to manage the people and not the task. Many corporate do promote people to higher levels only based on ‘the people managerial skills’. In most of the instances, these people managers contribute nothing valuable, meritorious or significant. This culture is seen more often in single man corporate than in the MNC’s. The single man corporate always loves to have ‘roosters’ even when they do the business of selling eggs for consumption. Contrary to that, in corporate, the owners themselves act like they are the scientist, finance head, product head, quality head, HR head etc., because they do not believe in having specialists.

Having a rooster always comes with cost. Every cost must be well justified in the corporate as it is worth and what significant difference it makes to the result.

People managers should not be allowed to do the role of a ‘roosters’ in a chicken farm where the eggs are sold for consumption and not for rearing next generation chicks. Similarly when the intent is to produce eggs for rearing new chicks, they cannot do away without rooster as well.
The people managers must have significant role and such role also must make a difference to the result. Further, without these ‘people managers’, such differences should not be possible.

Unless the corporate leaders and the HR function understand this, they will be unnecessarily wasting the resources of the corporate such as money, time, effort and expectations.

Understand your business well and understand the nature & competency of people you requires for the business and accordingly recruit them. Even a small farmer in the village who wants to run a chicken farm either for selling eggs or to produce chicks knows this management approach. Importance of having different people, their role and the difference they could make to the business has to be understood first.

The HR function has to educate the entrepreneur about the roosters and its role in the chicken farm where the eggs are sold for direct consumption. A farmer can teach the corporate provided they are willing to learn.

Dr S Ranganathan