There's legal CYA and there's CYA ingrained in the everyday operation of the company. I think the CYA OP is talking about is the sort where employees (managers, devs, designers, what have you) deliberately act suboptimally to protect themselves.

Making a suboptimal recommendation knowing it will harm someone else more than it will harm you. Diffusing responsibility. Inflating estimates. etc etc.

> There's legal CYA and there's CYA ingrained in the everyday operation of the company.

Maybe other people have different experiences, but I've never met an HR person who did one and not the other.

HR is CYA by definition, but you can have a HR department without having the whole company behave like said HR department.

True, and you can also have an HR department that goes beyond CYA. Some companies treat Recruiting & HR functions as strategic parts of the business. I'm not talking about lip service, like "Chief People Officer" titles, and things of that nature, which are usually just a whole lot of signaling and little else. Rather, I mean companies wherein recruiting and developing people is part of the hiring manager's job responsibility, and he or she has skin in the game. To the extent that HR is a self-contained silo, completely removed from the hiring manager's organization, it's bound to lose touch and turn into a simple, CYA-esque meat grinder.

Additionally, good HR strategy includes implementing events, training programs, talent development strategies, etc., so that retention and promotion of existing employees is just as important as recruitment of new ones.

A reasonable KPI, in this case, is turnover (both by volume and by average employee timespan). The ability to find world-class talent by the bucketload is all but wasted if existing employees tend to bounce after 6 months to a year.

CYA attitude can show itself outside of the HR department. One of the most insidious ways CYA hurts a company is when departments or people are resistant to trying new ideas because they might fail--even if the potential upside would be a significant improvement.

This is part of the Innovator's Dilemma--people tend to keep doing what is working "well enough" because they can't be blamed for that, and opportunity cost tends to be invisible unless it's looked for. Meanwhile, a competitor with less to lose is more likely to take the risky bet. If they succeed, they eventully beat the former incumbent.

Edit to add: in the case of hiring, CYA can mean hiring someone who's no different from anyone else currently employed in the company--and therefore perhaps missing an opportunity to create positive change.

There was a classic management study which, in essence, consisted of asking VP's of a company if they would initiate a risky project that had a 50% chance of saving company 2 million and a 50% chance of completely wasting 1 million - where each individual VP found arguments to not back the particular project in their area, but the CEO (naturally) would like all of his VP's to take that risk, as the odds favor the company (but failure hurts the individual manager).