My biggest HR pet peeve was when someone would walk into my office and announce, “I have a question.”

Oh yeah? Great. Let me stop what I’m doing and address your very important question that can probably be answered by you if you took the initiative and used some common sense.

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Now I always felt like customer service was important until, one day, my CIO told me that it was a fallacy to believe that IT and HR leaders were in the business of customer service.

He said, “You don’t work in a bank. Your customer isn’t the employee. Learn to close your door. Make people schedule appointments with you.”

He was basically telling me that my client is the business — and I wasn’t doing myself or my career any favors by being so approachable and enabling employees to come to me with every question or issue.

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So I have three questions.

• Is customer service important to HR?
• Who is the client for executive-level HR leaders?
• What’s your biggest pet peeve about the way employees approach you?

Etienne @ The Happy Employee recently asked me to envision the HR rapture. He asked, “What would happen in a world without HR?”

This got me thinking about a conversation with my father-in-law. Years ago, before I was married, my father-in-law asked me, “What is Human Resources? What do you do?”

I wanted to impress my father-in-law with my knowledge & importance, so I shared a very boring and