The HR Bank not only facilitates the identification of trainers, consultants, coaches and mentors, it also points out areas in which education and training are most needed. Why offer human resource development programs in areas where the organization already has many resources? Instead of providing training or education, why not set up coaching and mentoring projects to assist those who don’t have these skills or knowledge? Why not create teams in which the SKAs of team members are complementary? In this way, team members can learn informally from one another while ensuring that requisite SKAs are present on the team. The answer to each of these questions is dependent upon the availability of information about the human resources in the organization. This, in turn, requires a Human Resource Bank.
We offer a cautionary note regarding this final use of the HR Bank. Though the bank enables an organization to become clear about what is absent in the organization, its distinctive contributions lie in the domain of appreciation rather than the identification of deficits. Without appreciation, the Human Resource Bank becomes just another ineffective data gathering initiative or, worse yet, another unwarranted invasion of employee privacy. So how do we keep the appreciative perspective alive when constructing a human resource bank? The challenge, we would suggest, resides in the commitment to identification and release of human capital.
