[shiroiuma]

I think it's not just experience, it's partly about picking the right people, and not picking the wrong people. Some people are just not good managers, and no amount of training is going to make them a likeable person with good people skills needed to lead a team of people. Many places seem to want to pick someone who has the best technical skills, and then assume he'll magically become a great manager somehow.

I think sometimes HR gets blamed for stuff that's really upper management's fault. HR can try to patch over the bad decisions and deal with the interpersonal problems caused, but there's really not that much they can do because they have no real power, and the problems are caused by inept management. It's not HR's fault when upper management decides to promote people to management who clearly don't have the right personality for it, and that's not something HR can fix.

[pi-e-sigma]

Since when HR has no real power? In most places they can block any hiring decision . That's a lot of power and no accountability

[shiroiuma]

You must have worked in some shitty companies. HR is treated differently in different companies. The ones you worked in sound like companies where the HR department has some incestuous relationship with the C-suite (or more likely, the owner). That's not the norm for all companies; in better-run companies, HR only functions at the pleasure of the departments that actually make money. So if a hiring manager wants to hire someone, that person gets hired (assuming the department head supports the decision), and any problems from HR result in the department head (for instance, engineering) going to the CEO and telling them to do something about HR.

I've seen horror stories about companies like yours on places like glassdoor.com. Those are places to be avoided at all costs.