Would HR be an artist or a scientist?

Are HR professionals required to be more creative or analytical in their roles?

HR Grapevine’s annual HR & Talent Management Conference this year is themed around Left Brain and Right Brain thinking. In celebration of this, we asked our readers whether they thought a professional within the function would best be described as an artist or a scientist.

The responses were varied. Some believe HR would be a Left Brain thinker, like Noel Brown, Global Talent Acquistion Operations Leader at ThermoFisher, who says: “I may be biased but for me it’s got to be a scientist. Whilst people are inherently different, HR data enables us to tap into great research, unlock the DNA of the organisation and move the business forward.”

While others believe HR would be a Right Brain thinker. “Managing people is not an exact science and sometimes you need to be a creative, finely-tuned expert and see situations in shades of light and dark to be successful,” says Helen Judson, UK Group HR Director at CMA CGM Group.

Then there were a number of responses that stated both. One of the best comparisons was made by James Purvis, Head of Recruitment at CERN: “The Royal Collection say Leonardo da Vinci was a scientist. The National Gallery say he was an artist. He was both – just as I would argue HR is indeed both.”

And it seems that Céline Legrand, Professor of Management, Organisation and Law at Audencia Business School, agrees: “Even if the principle of the right-left division of the brain as applied to the world of work has lost a large amount of credibility since its heyday in the '80s and '90s, the theory can still help to identify certain skills and types of behaviour.

“To say that an HR professional must be more left-sided, and thus logical and technical, or rather more right-sided, and therefore more emotional and communicative, would be to oversimplify. As with any occupation, HR managers need to have a balance of the creative and the analytical. Today, more than ever, HR is strategic and plays a key role in accompanying the evolution of an organisation. To achieve this those managing HR need to employ all the brain's functions. After all, these mental capacities have not been placed in the brain by chance.”

To see a collection of the best responses to the question click here.