Human Capital?

I recently heard a consultant talk about the need to recruit and retain talented “human capital.” I have to admit that my jaw dropped. Human capital? Are we still comparing people to digits on a ledger? I agree that it’s more enlightened to think of the people who work for you as assets rather than liabilities. But language counts. Using a term like “human capital” is a dead giveaway that someone doesn’t fully comprehend how the world has changed. It objectifies people. It relegates them to being some abstract component in a business plan. It also leads to poor decision-making. When the solution is positioned as part of the problem – you’ve got a big problem.

I understand what the consultant was trying to do. He’d probably be upset to read this post (too bad). His use of the word “capital” in describing “humans” was probably motivated by the desire to somehow elevate the humans in an organization to the exalted level industrial-age businesses reserved for cold, hard cash. But his correlation implies a relationship between a person and an organization that I believe is a relic of the 20th Century.

Look, I’ve worked for people, worked for myself, and today I have a growing staff. I don’t want to be considered ‘capital’ nor do I consider the people who work for me “capital.” It’s funny, had the consultant merely used the word ‘people’ instead of an abstract term like ‘human capital’, I would have thought nothing of it.

In the industrial age, capital was the critical resource that either limited or spurred growth. It’s why in the past monetary policies always seemed to trump “human policies” in business. Today it’s not capital, but flesh-and-blood people that make companies grow. There’s plenty of capital around. The challenge these days is finding people to carry out a strategy and motivating those people to want to.

The first step may just be to stop thinking of people as capital. They mean so much more than that to your organization.