Dunbar's Number, Bad Process and Results

Dunbar’s Number, Surveys and Engagement

Bad processes yield bad results.

I make that statement as I look at the shouts across the blogosphere that performance appraisal has failed, employee engagement is bullshit, and a number of other sweeping generalizations.

When I examine those things I come up with a pretty consistent conclusion; if your process is designed and executed poorly you are likely to yield poor results.

Let’s look at hiring and selection. It is generally a mess. Most organizations still rely heavily on the interview as their primary selection tool, even though results have said that unstructured interviews by themselves are basically a crap shoot.

Then we add technology to it through automated systems to sift applications and determine the most qualified candidates. That way we can dumb the process down and turn recruitment into an entry level role in HR, because the system does the work. That is typically an epic fail.

If your performance management system consists of an annual trip to the woodshed between manager and employee to communicate why you won’t be getting the raise you anticipated, it is an epic fail.

Employees representing every generation have been clear from the start of the Industrial Revolution that they desire clear performance expectations, appropriate and constructive feedback, and equitable compensation. And for the most part we still suck at it. That doesn't mean we should abandon it, it means we need to do it better!

Most compensation delivery and performance management systems are designed by HR people for HR people. We want to streamline and increase efficiency and consistency. Those are code words for routinizing it. Creating alignment (the appropriate goal of engagement) is not routine, it is personal. It takes work and commitment and it lives at the front line where employees live and work.

A recent Gallup study indicates that employees are much less engaged than senior management thinks they are as a rule. No surprise. How often do senior managers interact with line employees?

Dunbar’s number is the concept  that most of us mere mortals can’t maintain meaningful connected relationships with more than 150 people. As organizations get larger those relationships get strained.

We live in a fantasy world today where people have thousands of Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections. Do you really want to go out on a limb and say those are meaningful relationships? I can’t and I will admit to being in four figures for LinkedIn connections.

Stephen MR Covey tells us that the most important level of trust is identity based, which is based on shared values and experiences and the recent literature indicates every generation, especially the Millennials see this as a baseline element of healthy relationships with their employer.

That requires investment and personalization, you know that soft skill stuff.

Today I read a post that says doing surveys is dumb because good companies already know how their people feel about key issues and how aligned they are with their work and the company.

Really? So is the definition of a good company one that is led by one of those prodigies that can maintain those identity based relationships with hundreds of employees rather than those of us who can only maintain 150?

I will concede that if the only way you are creating and maintaining alignment is with an annual or semiannual survey you are likely falling short of your objective. It’s a tool not a solution.

If you are only having performance management and feedback conversations annually you are failing epically.

If your hiring process consists of hitting the panic button and pushing a bunch of people though an interview process without looking at the totality of the role and multiple tough points like congruency and fit you probably have both hiring and retention issues, not to mention shitty engagement.

I saw a great quote the other day that said if a plant isn’t growing properly you change its environment, not the plant. If your processes aren't working then refine them, don’t throw them out.

Get rid of language like human capital and hire whole people.

Don’t promote anyone into a management or leadership position that doesn’t have decent emotional and social intelligence skills and who has demonstrated competencies in things including: setting clear expectations, giving and receiving constructive feedback, taking corrective action, and coaching. I consider these a baseline.

If you have to retrofit your leadership team through training and/or reassignment, then bite the bullet and do it. Hold everyone accountable to walk the talk.

Remember that your leadership culture is defined by the worst behavior you are willing to tolerate from either management or employees!

It is okay to manage performance, communicate your compensation delivery strategy and align it to organizational goals and performance.

It is also okay to occasionally survey your employees and ask them how we are doing as an organization since you might not have an intimate, identity based relationship with all of them. If you do that listen to what they tell you and act on that feedback.

If you need the survey to identify your poorest performers and most disgruntled employees, you have severe weaknesses in your management infrastructure. Identify those and fix them.

The tough news is you have to all of this not just some of it because half assed solutions or incomplete systems don’t yield complete outcomes ever……

Leadership, Loneliness, and Credibility

It’s Lonely, But Especially at the Top

I am a pretty big Simon Sinek fan. For those of you that aren’t familiar with him he has published two books; Start With Why, and Leaders Eat Last. He has also been a featured presenter on TED (if you don’t know what TED talks are drop me an email) and drawn huge audiences.

I see Sinek as a bit like Malcolm Gladwell, who I also enjoy. Neither of the two are scientists in the traditional sense. They are just very smart, curious people who look at patterns and situations and make observations and comments on them.

 Sinek’s latest blog post; http://www.businessinsider.com/simon-sinek-why-every-leader-needs-a-buddy-2016-3 is just such an observation. In it he discussed the importance of having a colleague to partner with in traveling your leadership journey.

I use colleague perhaps differently than most; I don’t intend it to exclusively describe a peer or coworker in your organization, but rather someone you respect and who you can agree to hold each other accountable as you evolve.

I have long believed that leadership is something others bestow on you rather than something you achieve by virtue of a position on an organizational chart or certification from an organization. To that end doing by yourself is both improbable and probably inaccurate.

I differentiate management and leadership. Not in a judgmental way, I think highly effective managers are critical to organizations in achieving their goals. I just personally see leadership as more ethereal and strategic than management.

In his recent blog, my UK based colleague Geoff Searle points out that traditional leadership models are based on four primary skill sets and activities: planning, organizing, controlling and motivating. It is interesting to me that all four of these activities are things you do to people rather than with them. I especially highlighted motivating because in this old school mindset the model was again things you do to by using leverage points like compensation and performance management, usually reactively rather than proactively. He also astutely identifies that the key skill of alignment isn’t included in this approach.

I have also found that the majority of models to teach leadership are flawed because they focus almost exclusively on the I think, or intellectual part of people and don’t discuss behavioral and even more visceral things like trust and congruency, I think in large part because those are “soft skills” and in part because they are much tougher to change.

Another person I admire a great deal Meghan Biro, commented this morning on the trust deficit that exists in many organizations based on corporate behavior when we embraced the human capital model and used strategies like down- sizing, outsourcing, and off shoring to create higher rates of return at the expense of people and jobs.

Both Gen X and the Millennials got a front row seat to that paradigm shift. It is ironically amusing to me to hear corporate leaders lament about the lack of loyalty from these generations given their willingness to employ the models I mention to improve the bottom line.

Equally amusing is the recognition that truly engaged employees, and I describe engaged as aligned not happy, outperform less engaged employees by a significant margin.

You just have to overcome that trust deficit thing and create an environment that reinforces engagement…

We see a certain recognition of the mutual reinforcement model with the proliferation of coaching models and certification programs. My concern is that those can teach you the techniques, but do we really see changed behavior?

I am a big believer in Stephen MR Covey’s Trust model ™ that indicates that real trust is identity based, built from shared values and experiences so the trust that comes just from training or practitioners who are certified as coaches may have achieved Covey’s second level, competency based trust, but just like George Clooney’s character in Oh Brother, Where Art Though, that doesn’t make you bona fide.

Partnership is powerful. Having created a shared experience with a colleague inside or outside your organization and holding yourself accountable is I believe a much stronger model.

A new article from McKinsey demonstrates the reality/perception delta between employees’ perception versus “leaderships” perception of their credibility and ability to motivate staff, the difference is over 10% in all cases rising to a high of 16% on inspiration. They may be “certified”, but it appears they aren’t bona fide.

This is interesting as Gallup and the famous Net Promoter model have both included scores on the question “I have a best friend at work” as a key indicator of employee engagement.

Most executives I have talked to don’t consider that as relevant or appropriate once you start climbing the management ladder. I will admit to being among them.

Perhaps however if we were to rephrase it to “I have a trusted colleague who I share a commitment to hold ourselves and each other to our stated values and behavior” it becomes relevant again at every level?

So I guess I would suggest when you look at developing and reinforcing your culture you keep some things in my mind-

·        How you act is more important than what you say.

·        Assuming that you have credibility and trust at the identity level is probably ill advised.

·        Find a partner in your organization who you can share your experiences and concerns with and agree to hold each other accountable

·        When you are looking at reinforcing leadership skills and models wherever possible use a cohort or partner model to build in reinforcement and shared accountability.

·        Manage and engage with whole people at every level.

Truth be told the Millennials are no more demanding, narcissist, or disloyal than any other generation. Just like as history tells us you get the performance and loyalty you earn and manage for every day….  

Millennials and Leadership Fails

Millennials, Employee Engagement, and Leadership Fails

It is interesting to watch both the behavior of the Millennial generation and all of the energy and dialogue they are creating.

I think the dialogue is good. Millennials make up 50% of the workforce today and that number will increase to 75% over the next ten years. It is amusing however to see our desire to lump them all together with sweeping statements about who they are and are not.

The last couple of weeks there have been two different situations involving Millennials and leadership opportunities that have played out over social media.

The first was the young woman from Yelp who was frustrated with her living situation and lifestyle opportunities given her economic situation living in the Bay area and not making a lot of money. She chose to use social media to address her concerns in an open letter to the CEO. Didn’t work out well, she lost her job for “policy violations”.

There was a lot of discussion about whether or not she was a victim or overly entitled. That has been debated ad naseum so I won’t cover it here.

I will say that her being hired by Yelp was a management failure. I encourage my clients to build congruency into their hiring process.

Congruency includes things like- the job is consistent with my values, I believe in the product or service, I am willing to do the work to be proficient, I see the activity as being something meaningful and engaging.

When I read her list of concerns I don’t think that was covered in her interview.

I don’t want to confuse anyone by stating I believe in lifetime employment, but even in the tour of duty or gig economy I advise employer and employed to have that congruency discussion.

When you look at what happened and how she handled her issues from the beginning I am going to go out on a limb and say that didn’t happen in her hiring process.

The second story is at the opposite end of the spectrum.

A young woman was hired to work in a retail store. She was so excited and committed to the product and the brand that she posted pictures of her wearing the company’s garments on social media as an encouragement to her network to share her enthusiasm and purchase and wear the clothes as well.

She did that until she received a post on Instagram from the CEO that she didn’t fit the image of the models he wanted representing the brand- essentially she was the wrong body type.

WTF- you tell a committed employee it is okay for you to sell our product, but essentially please don’t wear it or god forbid if you wear it don’t promote it and identify it as our product.

Epic leadership fail. The average employee unless they are working in a very small organization has very few personal interactions with the CEO or any senior manager. How awesome that this interaction is telling an employee they aren’t suitable to represent our brand!

No surprise the young woman has terminated her association with the company. Her story has also been shared over social media.

There are these related concepts called employee engagement and employment brand.

Employee engagement is what Ken Matejka in his book, Why This Horse Won’t Drink, calls being physically, psychologically and emotionally impelled. Employees willing give up other choices to align with your organization. That translates into higher levels of productivity, higher profitability, higher retention and a bunch of other things that CFO’s drool over and human resources professionals wring their hands over trying to create.

It is a good thing. Organizations with high engagement outperform their less engaged counterparts on every key performance metric. The tough part is that it isn’t a survey or a program, it is a culture. You never get done reinforcing it.

That is where employment brand comes in. Employment brand how your employees, alums and potential employees see you and describe you to others. It is very important and it isn’t just about your recruiting brochures and Linked In and Facebook profiles.

Every organization has an employment brand. The smart ones manage their employment brand to ensure they are top of mind with the talent they have and want to acquire.

Engagement starts with that brand. Being able to recruit and manage people who are preconditioned to be supportive of your organization and goals – physically, psychologically, and emotionally impelled so to speak, makes it way easier to manage those folks and get high performance from them. Changing people is really hard, especially since we are so poor at it.

The emerging generations talk with and share perspectives much more than previous generations. Just as executives have old boy’s clubs (and hopefully soon old girl’s clubs) that they tap into to attract and retain candidates these people talk to each other.

Not only do they talk to each other, but they trust each other way more than they trust us. (For more on why read my blogs and articles on the Social Contract.)

So here are my thoughts-

·        Manage whole people, not just their knowledge, skills, and abilities.

·        Hire individuals. Don’t get caught up in group think and treat them all the same whether that is based on gender, age, nationality, sexual preference, or any of the other stupid labels we dream up.

·        Lose the expression human capital from your business vocabulary. If you have to call them something call them people or talent.

·        Don’t expect any more loyalty and commitment than you are willing to provide.

·        Never, never pee on employees who are committed and passionate about your brand and your company. They are incredibly valuable.

·        Do the work to create and sustain employee engagement. It is better, period.

Revisiting The Social Contract

The Social Contract Revisited
Over this weekend I found myself reading and thinking about a number of things I saw posted and debated on the blogosphere. 
There are a number of different postings out there about a young woman who directed a letter/post the CEO of her organization deploring her personal working conditions, primarily her compensation vis a vis, 
 the cost of living in the San Francisco Bay area and the affordability gap for basic food and shelter and wages.
The young woman was released from the company (fired) and part of the discussion was whether or not she was terminated for taking her view and her issues public. The CEO has indicated he was not personally involved in that decision.
There are a number of issues that this incident has provoked discussion about including, but not limited to –
•    The ongoing debate about a “living wage” and who is responsible for providing it
•    Whether her taking her issues to the public represents an act of courage or a sense of entitlement that we have branded the Millennial generation with
•    Whether the action taken by the organization was appropriate and within their purview
Another excellent post talked about engagement versus empowerment and how we should measure it and whether or not it is still relevant.
I personally believe that engagement is a culture and a process rather than a program or an event and I think that if we look at the organizational performance of organizations where employees rate themselves a highly engaged as opposed to marginally or unengaged the question of the relevance of engagement becomes pretty obvious.
I have long believed that engagement is about alignment. When I have a clear understanding of the goals of the organization, can see the direct impact and relationship between my efforts and organizational performance, and a direct link between my efforts and performance and the reward structure of the organization, and finally I feel that my personal values are aligned with that of the organization I am inclined to do my best work.
Our existing social contact has its roots in compliance, not engagement. We wanted employees to do what they are told with a minimum of pesky questions and the need to be coached, motivated, or otherwise individually managed.
There are many who believe (and I am among them) that the primary purpose of our educational system was to train a supply of people who had the basic skills to follow direction and understood that performance equated to complying with authority. Do what teacher says and get the A. In return under the old model you were provided with a degree of economic security.
Then the 70s and 80’s happened and off-shoring, down- sizing, and right sizing to optimize financial performance became acceptable.
Another great post talked about that HR bugaboo, turnover. The author points out a number of things that we should take into account when we look at turnover-
•    The fact that few of the Millennial generation embrace the idea of lifetime employment
•    That who is leaving and why they are leaving may be way more important than how many
•    That certain types of employment are transactional and essentially temporary and that is ok.
I have long thought that one of the most appropriate measures of highly effective executives/leaders is their talent legacy. How many of their staff have gone on to significantly greater responsibility either within or outside the organization.
Yet another great post talked about the entitlement mentality. He talks about how every organization in the world is basically created to generate value for the stakeholders. Simply put that means that the end goal isn’t to provide jobs for employees. That is a side benefit.
On the flip side employees don’t exist to serve their employers. They rent their talents, efforts and abilities to the employer as long as it works for both parties. 
Enlightened employers have figured out that when you see your employees as stakeholders rather than human capital and you hire and develop people who share your vision, values, etc. and reward appropriate behavior they are likely to stay longer and contribute more during their tenure with you.
I feel legitimately bad for the young lady who finds herself unemployed in a high cost of living area, but on the flip side I have to ask myself these questions-
•    Was she not aware of the compensation being offered for the position she accepted and the requirement that you stay in a department for a year before transferring to a different (I am assuming higher paying) role?
•    She made a cognitive decision to live in one of the highest cost of living areas in the U.S. Did she look at the total picture before accepting the job? Has she considered relocating?
•    What other actions did she take before she addressed her concerns to the CEO in a very public forum?
I can relate to much of her experience. The community where I currently reside has major issues with the affordability index which is the cost of living relative the average wage rate. We have largely stagnated for close to two decades or more since the severe reduction of the extraction economy the community was built on. I am deeply disappointed with community leadership that after that much time we have made little meaningful progress in addressing that issue.
I find it kind of repugnant that a big part of our allure to some employers was the ability to pay relatively lower wages to a pretty well educated workforce, something that may be changing as the state is embracing a new minimum wage that will be among the highest in the country.
It is also ironic to me that we have an issue for employers requiring staff with more vocationally oriented than academically oriented skills, positions that do pay a living wage, and we have made minimal progress addressing that.
We have issues in our society with the wage gap, access to health care and a number of others.
I don’t happen to be among those who feel that the government is best suited to address those issues. I am more supportive of collaborative models involving all the sectors than increasing codependency.
My perspective may seem harsh. It isn’t intended to be.
We are leaving literally trillions of dollars on the table annually in the U.S. alone from lost productivity from disengaged employees, employee turnover, and the direct and indirect health care related costs of employee health care expenditures relating to stress, depression and other related issues.
We need a new social contract that is based on mutual respect and mutual responsibility. I can’t see anything but upside. Can you?

E

The Criticality of Feedback

The “Gift” of Constructive Criticism

A couple of recent articles reminded me of something that I both learned painfully and continue to struggle with after several decades in the workplace- “Constructive criticism aka feedback is a gift and should be recognized as such”.

No one really likes to get feedback that is not positive, at least initially, but a couple of articles recently talked about the connection between emotional intelligence and the ability to mine that feedback for value by keeping a few things in mind.

Diane Gottsman in her article How to Accept and Give Criticism with Grace, provides some great ground rules that while not earth shattering or rocket science can be very helpful.

·        Be aware of your body language

·        Be prepared mentally and emotionally

·        Remain calm and don’t respond with angry excuses

·        Rethink the word/concept of criticism. I personally try to avoid that language and use constructive feedback in its place.

·        Be appreciative- of the effort if not the content.

From my own experience I have learned a couple of other suggestions I would add:

·        Focus on the feedback not the person. It is easy to reject the right feedback from the wrong person.

·        Recognize that everyone is not equally skilled in their language or their technique. Listen for the message carefully. This is especially true when there is an unequal power relationship like subordinate to boss or provider to customer.

·        Try to adopt the standard of most positive interpretation, this means giving the person the benefit of positive intent even if their delivery is less than perfect.

Most people would rather get a sharp poke in the eye rather than give feedback whether it is to a colleague, a subordinate, and especially a superior, but constructive feedback is both critical to teamwork and improved performance it is a fundamental expectation of the Millennial generation. Their intraprenurial mindset looks at careers and opportunities to increase their skills and value. They expect timely, balanced, and meaningful feedback as a fundamental right.

Even with all the hoo hah about blowing up traditional performance evaluation the root cause there is that the process is typically done so poorly, not that recipients don’t want feedback. The typical annual review system is an epic fail. It isn’t timely, it isn’t balanced, and many find it marginally meaningful.

As a recovering HR executive I find that many performance evaluation systems are designed by HR professionals to impress other HR professionals and to deliver limited pay increases. They aren’t user friendly to the actual manager and recipient.

Gottsman also mentions some guidelines for giving feedback to make it more meaningful and useful.

·        Be private. No one wants a critique in public

·        Focus on issues or behaviors not on people. People own their behavior they aren’t their behavior.

·        Be specific, especially about the impact on the work, work group, etc.

·        Provide suggestions.

·        Be available and follow up. It is a process not an event.

In my perspective if you can’t tie your feedback to the work and work performance and provide a suggestion as to how to improve it isn’t feedback. It is just petty criticism.

Justin Bariso in his article How Emotionally Intelligent People Handle Criticism, adds some additional great suggestions, ask yourself these two questions:

·        Putting my personal feelings aside, what can I learn from this alternate perspective?

·        Instead of focusing on the delivery, how can I use this feedback to help me or my team improve?

He uses the illustration of a scathing review a top chef received from a New York Times food critic as a great example of how to own the issue and use it as a vehicle to improve future performance.

I firmly believe that the ability to constructively provide and receive feedback is essential to building trust and trust is the foundation for high functioning relationships both personal and professional.

You will never make the transition from manager to leader if you don’t master this skill.

Covey’s third and highest level of trust, identity based trust, simply can’t be achieved without honest dialogue and mutual investment.

Employee engagement worldwide still remains at what I believe to be unacceptably low levels and it is things like trust, congruency, and alignment that are going to address the causes of low engagement and get us the performance we want, not technology, six sigma or other process interventions and feedback is an essential building block….

Wrong Solution

Sigh, I Don’t Think He Got This One Right
I just read where the President has signed a bill proposing that all companies with more than 100 employees will be required as part of their equal employment opportunity filing to report compensation by gender, ethnicity, and other factors.
My concern is that while this may lead to “transparency” it will not necessarily lead to pay equity.
I am old enough to remember when affirmative action planning actually had teeth to it. The idea was to identify inequities in employment and address them. Not surprisingly white men tended to have much higher representation in the higher level ranks than women or people of color. I will take heat for saying this, but some of it was deliberate some of it was a function of unintended consequences of less than optimal practices.
Promotion to higher level positions in part is a function of experience and training and hiring and selection. Most of us have heard of the “halo effect”, this is our tendency to hire and promote people we are comfortable with, i.e. people like us. Although we have been aware of it for over fifty years I still see it happen frequently. Most organizations quite bluntly do a generally poor job of hiring across the board.
What we found with EEO reporting that in many cases women and minorities weren’t “qualified” for senior roles because they didn’t have the experience necessary to move up. That is where the Affirmative Action part comes in. Every level has “feeder” groups from which the next generation candidates come from. The idea is by changing the composition of the feeder group you can change the candidate pool. Although this playing the long game several organizations I worked with embraced it recognizing that the demographics of the workforce was changing and it was not just a legal requirement it is good business. These days we refer to it as encouraging diversity. While we are certainly in no position to declare victory I think that organizations who sincerely embrace this process see much better representation of the workforce.
I also call it good business. Succession planning at every level is a fundamental component of good business planning. Scrambling to find talent when someone dies, retires or quits is a sucker bet. High performing organizations don’t operate that way.
So now let’s talk about how this applies to pay.
Properly executed good compensation planning takes into account the qualifications, experience, and performance of employees including the context of market conditions. Compensation planning is art as much as science.
Looking at job titles and compensation by themselves without consideration for factors like experience, qualifications, training and performance leaves out some critical data.
While I recognize that some people might be surprised by this I consider myself almost a feminist and a huge advocate of equal opportunity. When experience, qualifications, and performance are equal there should be no disparity in compensation.
As I said before however, compensation is not an exact science. I have shared the lament of many an executive who paid a premium for an outside superstar based on market conditions and performance somewhere else who feels disappointed with what they got. Just look at the musical chairs being played at the C level in organizations every day.
I a perfect world we pay for performance and I am going to go out on a limb and say that government at every level rarely provides a great example of that concept.
Mandating equity rarely works.
I am probably one of the few people I know who doesn’t think Obamacare is an abject failure. It is flawed as I pointed out in my eBook Plan B- An Alternative to Obamacare, (I will even be smug and point out I published it before it became law.
Access to care is appropriate and necessary for the long term. The problem is that the model is strictly compliance based and doesn’t address some of the underlying issues like the lack of personal responsibility and education to encourage individuals to participate in managing their own health. It also doesn’t provide navigation through a very complex health care delivery system that is byzantine to the average person.
Compensation inequity purely based on gender, national origin, or other factors unrelated to performance and market isn’t just wrong it’s dumb!
Less than 30% of the American workforce consider themselves to be engaged or highly engaged at work. As many as 17% are actively disengaged.
We don’t just have a pay equity issue, our whole approach to managing people is screwed up.
There are ways to fix it. Comprehensive and systemic approaches that look at whole people and integrated solutions, not patches.
So Mr. President while I applaud and support your intent this one isn’t a solution I can get behind…
As always I would be very interested in hearing opposing viewpoints…

HR's Elusive Value Proposition..

So What Is HR Exactly?
I was having lunch recently with a client and a very capable human resources professional that I was introducing to him and he posed that question.
He wasn’t being sarcastic or demeaning. His organization has never hired a professional human resources person in their 50-year history so he was genuinely curious about what he could expect from making this kind of investment.
I have to say as someone who has been in and around the profession for 30+ years that still remains and interesting question for me.
Is hasn’t been that long since a national survey of CEO’s and COO’s couldn’t frame a consistent answer to that question. Even scarier to me was that the majority of senior level human resources practitioners responded that the most important role they play in their organization is compliance.
I find that utterly disheartening. With four generations in the workplace, employee engagement stalled at lower than 30 percent, and organizations indicating that the acquisition and retention of talent is a key issue for the foreseeable future and the “top” minds in HR think that compliance and keeping the lid on are our highest value added activities…
Years ago when I was working in manufacturing the Total Quality Movement was just starting to gain momentum. Someone had the brilliant insight that building quality in was way better than bolting it on. Quality professional began evolving from functionaries to internal consultants, building appropriate processes and deploying them throughout the organization rather than the old school end of the line approach. It makes sense.
I have seen a number of those in the HR movement seeking to piggy back on that approach with lots of cross certifications in Black Belt and Six Sigma.
In my mind the problem with that is that those address intellectual processes. They are about building things.
When we are dealing with people we are dealing (or should be) with emotional processes.
The most important part of any high functioning relationship is trust and there is not a recipe for trust.
Stephen MR Covey brilliantly describes the three levels of trust, deterrence, knowledge based, and identity based. As you might suspect he believes as I do that identity based is by far the most important of the three.
Therein lies the problem with traditional HR. Compliance is all about deterrence. Six Sigma, Black Belt, and HR certifications are all about competency. Oops we left out that identity based thing.
I want to be clear that the first two are important elements to getting to identity based trust. Knowledge based has competency and character as foundational elements and you need those to be an effective manager.
Effective managers are critical to every organization and management is different than leadership. Bluntly you don’t need armies of leaders in an organization.
So to answer the question my client posed I would submit my answer-
•    HR helps the organization answer the Why question posed in Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle.
•    HR helps identify the values and attributes that are fundamental to and congruent with the Why. As I have said before creating alignment for people who already share your values is much easier than trying to “fix” people.
•    HR helps identify and deploy the competencies that reinforce the performance that we desire and ensures that those are practiced consistently across the organization. Those include setting expectations, giving feedback, course correcting, and coaching among others. Those competencies belong to managers, not HR.
I recommend that HR gets way better about helping organizations answer their WHY and reinforcing the values and way less about compliance and certifications.
We need to teach managers and emerging leaders about how to trust and be trusted. Trust is not an entitlement. It doesn’t come with a title, position, certification, or degree.
There are skills, attributes and abilities that are foundational to that process and they can be taught and learned and in my opinion those are part of HR’s charter as well.
So in the final analysis HR doesn’t manage human capital, we don’t master compliance. We teach organizations and people how to create an environment where people join up rather than comply and we share a vision and goals…..

Creating Clarity and Context

Every once in a while you get exposed to something that just either creates or crystallizes a perspective for you.
For me one of the first of those events was when I saw a demonstration by a man named Monty Roberts the model for the character played by Robert Redford in the Horse Whisperer, demonstrating a completely different way to train horses.
 Before Roberts that process had generally been described as breaking them in and as that implies was basically a process of inflicting your will on the horse. He pointed out that a horse is essentially a herd animal and that given the opportunity is naturally inclined to join up with you if offered the invitation.
I saw some pretty clear parallels between that demonstration and my own struggles to communicate a different way of working with people and introducing change as with rather than to people. It framed the creation of my model compliance to Commitment which is my personal spin on what we commonly refer to these days as employee engagement.
Over the last few days a client exposed me to the TED presentations by Simon Sinek and I felt very similarly. His first presentation on How great leaders inspire action from 2009 talks about what he refers to as the golden circle, three concentric circles on how businesses and organizations approach marketing their efforts and do it bass awkwardly. The outer circle is composed of what. What we claim is our product or unique value proposition. The next circle is how, the famous description of features, functions, and benefits. The innermost circle is why. Why do we bring our product or service to market?
His point, reinforced by our capitalistic nature is that the usual reason for why is to provide a return to the stakeholders and is rarely described in any kind of a compelling way.
I find the same thing is missing in much of our employment relationship. We make little or no attempt to create any sense of identity for employees; we see them as human capital. The nasty thing is that many of them are playing by our rules. They see themselves as independent contractors who rent their skills and behaviors to the highest payer.
We have no right to blame them. As evidenced by outsourcing, right sizing, and all kinds of other models to increase profit at the expense of people, we created the model. We had started to make some progress before the 2008 recession, but unfortunately it provided an excuse to return to a lot of nasty habits. Now that the economy is improving I hear a lot of complaining that organizations can’t find or keep the talent they want. Payback is a bitch.
Sinek’s 2014 TED talk, Why good leaders make you feel safe, is equally if not more compelling. He talks about the mutual responsibility and reciprocity of the relationship between team and leader. The most compelling part of that is trust.
As everybody knows I am a huge fan of the trust model outlined by Stephen MR Covey in his book, The Speed of Trust. What I heard Sinek discussing is Covey’s highest level of trust, identity based trust, which doesn’t come from entitlement or even necessarily expertise and credentials, but rather mutual investment and shared experiences.
I also hear Congruency in his model, something that goes beyond the transactional and becomes personal.
This kind of peopley stuff makes a lot of people squirm. It involves emotions and feelings not just facts and figures.
What he is talking about is the cornerstone of true engagement. There have been some criticisms of his perspective when he compares leadership to parenting, but if you listen carefully he isn’t talking adult/child or codependency, but rather developing skills and competency.
Maybe the reason this stuff resonates with me so much is because it parallels my own thinking, but if you haven’t seen it I strongly encourage you to give it a listen.
It may just clarify for you why this engagement thing is so important and why getting there requires different models than we are both teaching and reinforcing……

The ROI of Hiring Right!

As everybody knows I have damn near an obsession with hiring hard and managing easy and other vehicles that contribute to a highly engaged work environment. Just as a refresher some of the things I include in that process are:
•    The five entitlements; clear expectations, meaningful and balanced feedback, equitable compensation, a work place that is physically, psychologically, and emotionally safe, and clarity about each employee’s purpose and goals as they relate to the business.
•    Then I add the pillars of engagement; respect, responsibility, information, fairness, and mutual loyalty.
•    I also find that managers and leaders with key skill sets like; the ability to communicate expectations clearly, strength at giving and receiving feedback constructively, diagnosing performance issues and addressing them appropriately, coaching to improve performance, and leading by example are critical dimensions.
•    Managers and leaders who understand and lead from a place of identity based trust and congruency are also key.
•    Hiring whole people, not just their knowledge, skills and abilities, but also their attributes and potential to become highly aligned with the organization.
Of late we have seen multiple studies and surveys that demonstrate that organizations that enjoy high engagement benefit from almost every critical key performance indicator we care to track and I remain resolute that building engagement into the organization is much more effective than trying to bolt it on at a later point.
To be honest I am not sure many of our hiring processes have gotten a lot better over the last few decades. We have applied technology and dumbed down the skills required to manage the recruitment and selection process, but I don’t think that algorithms have done a substantially better job of predicting success than the old methodologies.
Too many organizations still rely on first impressions and their gut reaction. In too many cases we hire for expediency rather than long term fit.
In the last couple of days I came across two separate blog posts that pointed out some information that every executive should be aware of-
•    The percentage of employees who describe themselves as highly disengaged has risen to 17% while those who are engaged has remained static
•    A recent study of 60,000 employees in 11 companies by Harvard University concluded that the cost of a bad hire that is a “jerk” is $12,489 per year, versus the benefit of a superstar at an annual benefit of $5303. The jerk costs you 2.35 times the benefit of the high achiever!
I believe that there are two ways we get jerks in the workplace. The first is we hire them. We don’t do a thorough job of vetting them and they get in the door with a predisposition to be a jerk.
The other method is more insidious, they become jerks over time typically because we don’t provide them with the elements I mentioned previously like clear expectations, constructive feedback and corrective action and we don’t take action when their performance/behavior becomes “terminal”.
Although this is important at every level, it is especially critical when we let them enter the management ranks. 
Heskett talked about this back in 1997 in his work The Service Profit Chain, back in 1997 (yep almost 20 years ago) and Rhoads and Whitlark revalidated the point in their Engagement study in 2008. To quote Pete Seeger …when will we ever learn…
My point is that this issue is eminently preventable. If we hire the right people at all levels and then we manage them appropriately the ROI is in the billions, but we need to change how we hire and how we train and reinforce appropriate management.
As has been stated previously, “your culture is defined by the worst behavior you will tolerate…and the example of the leader”
We need to do better at hiring. That means being more cautious, more deliberate, and developing and following better processes.
For candidates that means that often when you are not selected for the position it is not a function of your being unqualified or even a poor “fit”, but rather a consensus that another candidate was better.
Over the last three decades plus I have participated in the hiring and selection of literally hundreds of employees including managing the selection process for many at the executive level.
When I am managing that process if you are not an excellent candidate you don’t get presented and interviewed period. So if you are not selected it doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you, we just selected someone we felt was a better match.
I can tell you that communicating with an excellent candidate who isn’t selected is one of the toughest activities I have ever done.
On the bright side those candidates often became excellent hires for other clients or even for the same client in a different role.
It isn’t going to get any easier to recruit and retain top talent. The most successful organizations will continue to manage and excel at the continuum of not only hiring the right talent, but then managing them appropriately.
Is that a competitive advantage you want to give up….?

Employers Be Advised!

I have been seeing a few posts of late that reinforce some things that I have known and talked about for some time:
•    We don’t just acquire talent or human capital; we hire and hopefully retain whole people.
•    Contrary to everything you read Millennials are not slackers, uninterested in making a contribution, and generally the most awful generation ever…
•    All Millennials are not motivated by the same things (imagine that)
•    EVERY employer has an employment brand; some have an intentional one…
As a former human resources professional, c level executive, and management consultant I have watched the evolution of how we approach the attraction, retention, and occasionally engagement of staff for over three decades now.
I chose interesting timing (2008) to publish my first book, Managing Whole People, on my personal approach to managing talent. I say interesting because during the recession the concept of treating people respectfully, building engagement into your culture, and appreciating the return on investment of engaged versus unengaged or marginally engaged employees didn’t get a lot of traction.
I think we lost ground we had been gaining in that area for the ten years proceeding. With the unemployment numbers increasing I watched employer after employer fall back into their old habits.
The nice thing about the intervening years is that employee engagement is hardly conceptual. The studies are out, have been vetted, and clearly demonstrate the value of an engaged workforce.
There are still detractors who believe that engagement is voodoo or another fad, but the people who believe that also believe that Human Resources highest and best value is compliance and administration. Many of those detractors live and work in human resources departments. Changing your paradigm is hard…
We aren’t a whole lot better at managing talent than we were thirty five years ago when I entered the corporate world.
The problem is as employers we are facing an emerging workforce that sees themselves as equal stakeholders in the employment relationship.
They have expectations-
•    They expect meaningful work
•    They expect their employer to partner with them in developing their portfolio of skills
•    They interpret loyalty the same way employers do, talk is cheap action is clear
I have to say I continue to be amused when I hear employers who used the recession as leverage to defer pay increases and hiring, reduce workforces, and off shore and outsource whine about how employees just aren’t loyal. Some of them even manage it with a straight face…
Todays’ employees, especially Millennials seem to have embraced some pretty interesting ideas promoted by several of my favorite pundits-
From Malcolm Gladwell they have embraced legitimacy-
Those whom are governed have a voice in the process; their input is sought and heard.
•    There is a dimension of predictability and consistency in the application of the law or standards.
•    The application of the law or standard has to be administered fairly and objectively, you can’t   have disparate treatment without a clear and compelling reason.
From Stephen MR Covey they operate from an advanced interpretation and expectations around trust-
In his hierarchy the first level of trust is deterrence, trust that comes from authority or position. This was a broadly accepted concept for hundreds of years provided first to rulers or religious leaders and embedded in Calvinism that God only allowed “good” people to create wealth and prosper so they were endowed with that trust.
The next level of trust Covey calls competency based. In many cases there is an assumption that anyone who achieves a management role has that competence, but we all know better. In most cases their competency is limited to technical proficiency; their emotional intelligence capacity and social intelligence are rarely considered.
The highest level of trust in Covey’s hierarchy is identity based trust which incorporates both your competency and you character as demonstrated by your applied values and behavior to create credibility.
I personally believe (and Millennials seem to agree) that to a large extent leadership as opposed to management is founded in legitimacy. Leadership is entirely relational versus hierarchical, it was be earned rather than bestowed with a title or position.
This is a new paradigm for us old timers…
The other issue we must face is that the new workforce doesn’t rely on us to validate our employment brand, our work environment and how we treat our employee stakeholders.
Social media has provided them with a platform to research and validate or invalidate everything we say about ourselves.
Here’s a tip, if you think your website and recruiting brochures are your employment brand you are in deep shit.
 If you think you don’t need to proactively manage your employment brand you are deluding yourself.
The competition for talent, especially experienced talent is increasing not decreasing. The Department of Labor estimates that employee turnover costs the U.S. economy over $200 billion annually.
Having a great employment brand is not going to guarantee that people stay forever, but it will help you attract the right people and have former employees promote you as a great place to work.
So two things to remember-
•    Millennials represent the largest  emerging sector of the workforce
•    They see things differently…

So Which Are You?

The recent post on LI discussing the two primary varieties of manager/leaders, multipliers and diminishers really cut to the chase of much is wrong with our current leadership models.

There were probably at least three or four other articles ranging from perplexed to angry about why we are not seeing more organizations proactively embracing employee engagement given that the data is in and leaves no doubt as to the performance of aligned versus unaligned contributors.

Just today Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford took his part time colleague Joel Peterson to the woodshed for describing a leadership culture that Pfeffer says there is clear evidence doesn’t exist in the business environment today.

Since I subscribe to the theory of Most Positive Interpretation in gauging the actions of others I see Peterson as describing what could or should be, not a Pollyanna description of what is in fact happening.

We have made very little meaningful progress in climbing the engagement curve over the last ten years. Part of it was I believe the recession which allowed a lot of organizations to slip back into bad habits as unemployment increased and they could be more selective.

Part of it is we still are fully deploying the implementation of new leadership models on our training and graduate schools. We still have a pronounced bias towards managing human capital rather than people.

I get it. Managing people is hard. You have to do the work. Just yesterday in an advanced leadership program I am teaching one of the participants announced “I am starting to get that this coaching thing is really important, but Christ it is hard work!”

Coaching is about being a multiplier, the idea that employees singularly and in groups have tremendous additional potential and that you can tap into by asking questions rather than giving directions and providing autonomy rather than being overly structured.

My colleague Ryan Estis published a great post that reinforces this idea with four simple steps to create a high performing culture and personal accountability:

·         Set Clear Expectations

·         Check In Frequently and Give Feedback

·         Lead by Example (this is what Pfeffer was talking about)

·         Be Consistent which means fair

There a zillion different leadership models out there for the newbie to become perplexed by so I really like the idea of breaking it down to two- do you multiply or diminish?

What do you think….?

How Far Have We Slipped....?

I just spent a little bit better than a week on a road trip/vacation to the Southwest. I used a lot of my time there to think about the last few years and what has transpired since I published my first book in 2008.
My book was kind of a journal about my experiences as a human resources practitioner, executive, and consultant and why I thought there were way better models for the employer/employee relationship that we now refer to almost ubiquitously as employee engagement.
When I look back now somewhat wryly I think my timing could have been a little better.
When I started my career in the late seventies in a field then called Personnel one of the things that was very prevalent was the desire for employers who did not have union representation to remain unorganized.
We weren’t so gauche as to call it union avoidance; we referred to it as Positive Employee Relations.
It was taken pretty seriously, in fact at my employer there was an expectation that in the event your location was subjected to a representation election you were expected to submit your resignation, the outcome of the election determined whether or not that resignation would be accepted or not.
As things progressed we expanded the framework of our thinking to include creating an environment where our employees didn’t perceive a need to seek intervention from any third party. Our list of third parties was pretty extensive; it included plaintiff’s attorneys, government agencies, and special interest groups. Way beyond just unions.
The idea wasn’t punitive; it was to create alignment between ourselves and our employees.
That concept has stayed with me over three decades. When faced with the age old argument of who does HR represent my position has always been that we are there to create a bridge, a win-win environment.
The eighties and nineties saw the proliferation of things like the total quality movement, the beginnings or lean and other models that had some form of collaboration in the mix.
Unfortunately we also saw outsourcing, right sizing, and a fundamental change in the relationship between employers and their employees. This was the age where the concept of human capital took hold. Employees were assets to be deployed.
Competition and other factors caused some forward progress as employers had to compete for talent in the first decade of the new millennium, but the recession changed a lot of that. We slipped back to a lot of bad habits.
I think it is important that the human capital era coincides to an extent to when Gen X and the Millennials were growing up. They saw a model of a relationship between employers and employed that wasn’t terribly positive and they filed it away.
They understand the true concept of employment at will; that the intent is that relationship is balanced. They also snicker at the idea of lifetime employment and the traditional view of loyalty that employers still want to complain about.
Collective bargaining, the right of employees to join together to negotiate areas like wages, hours, and working conditions, has taken a pretty good beating over the past few decades.
I vastly prefer an environment where I am free to discuss these issues directly with my employees rather than through an intermediary, but I also aspire to the model where they perceive that third party intervention as unnecessary.
My colleague, Brad Federman published a post this morning about recent actions on the part of the National Labor Relations Board that give employers less time to react in the event they become aware that their employees are potentially seeking to join a union and bargain collectively. He points out as I do that your best defense should be an engaged workforce rather than a clever pre-election campaign.
We have some things in our favor. Millennials tend to be pretty independent. I am not sure they are going to be any more inclined to surrender their autonomy to a third party to negotiate on their behalf than they are to trust their employer blindly.
That being said there are sectors where unionization is making some inroads.
Unless you have been living in a cage the merits of an engaged and aligned workforce are pretty clear and pretty well documented. Creating an engagement culture is a process not an event and to my mind it is simple, but not easy.
Employees who are aligned with your values, your culture, and who feel valued are unlikely to feel the need to go to someone else to get that for them.
The majority of human resource practitioners would tell you that compliance with the myriad of regulations and laws that govern the employment relationship is their main priority- as you might suspect I disagree.
If you are doing the right things proactively you are playing win-win, not win–lose…..

The Third C

As many of you know a few years back as part of my efforts to promote employee engagement  a few years back I created a management model that I called moving from little c to Big C or from compliance to Commitment.
I have always maintained that commitment or engagement is much more about alignment than more esoteric things like happiness or morale.
There has also been a debate for generations about the importance of compensation as a motivating factor in the employment relationship. Many HR practitioners, myself included believe that compensation is really a break even proposition. If you do it well you break even and people don’t leave your company for that reason, if you do it poorly you give them either a reason to look or a socially acceptable reason to pursue other employment.
This causes me to identify the third C in the engagement journey- communicating about compensation.
It has been my position for quite some time that having a compensation model that is understood and seen as fair and equitable in its treatment of employees is much more important than technically elegant compensation models. Employees also seem to be increasingly inclined to desire input about their performance and pay related decisions from a broader base of input than the traditional direct supervisor model.
To support that perspective I go back first pre- Recession to a study done by international compensation consulting firm Sibson and Company surveying several thousand employees in multiple sectors that reached some interesting conclusions-
•    While a significant majority of employees surveyed 65% indicated they were satisfied with their pay level (their salary range compared to other positions) and 71% indicated they were satisfied with their current pay, 57% of the employees surveyed indicated that they were dissatisfied with the way their employer awarded pay. For the purpose of this study process means the determination of individual pay increases, promotion decisions, and progress through the pay structure.
•    16% of the employees also indicated that they were highly likely to leave their current employer, with compensation being part of the reason they were looking.
•    The study showed little to know difference between the perceptions of generations.
So let’s fast forward to 2015 and a study conducted by PayScale of 71,000 employees looking for a link between compensation and employee engagement which yielded some interesting perspectives-
•    The study concluded that one of the top predictors of employee’s potential to be engaged was the organization’s ability to communicate clearly about compensation. It was in fact identified as more important than career advancement, and employer appreciation.
•    Many employees perception of pay doesn’t reflect reality, in fact two thirds of those surveyed who were being paid market rate perceived themselves to be underpaid.
•    The perception of under paid translates into potential action, 60% of employees who believed themselves to be underpaid also indicated an intent to seek other employment.
•    The communication loop is critical. The study indicated that when employers who pay lower than market communicate clearly about the reasons that 82% of the affected employees still felt satisfied with their work and employer.
•    The issue becomes more pronounced with more highly compensated employees and women are more likely to perceive themselves as being underpaid relative to men even when they are compensated at or above market.
For me these findings validate two beliefs I have held for a long time-
•    The idea of “equity” in terms of perceived fairness and the rationality with which pay is delivered is equal to or higher in importance to the rate itself once you advance above “living wage” thresholds.
•    Having a compensation model that is understood and seen as fair and equitable in its treatment of employees is much more important than technically elegant compensation models.
Let’s be candid most compensation delivery systems are designed by human resources professionals (or worse yet consultants) for other human resources professionals. It is an arcane language that we whisper about in our own secret language. Information is usually only shared with line managers on a “need to know” basis. And bluntly managers often hide behind this in having conversations with employees, especially when there is a difference between employee expectations and pay delivery.
I want to be clear about what I am not recommending here.
I am not recommending that paying below market, but having a great “story” is a good long term approach.
I am saying that being prepared to discuss how you make decisions around pay is a critical process. Included in that discussion needs to be how you define your markets and target your delivery against those markets and just as importantly how we make decisions about individual pay. Everyone doesn’t perform at the same level, but we need to communicate what represents above, at, and below our expectations and how that correlates to compensation.
This is where alignment comes in. If we are truthful we pay people because we have to, not because of our benevolent streak. If we aren’t creating that line of sight we are leaving significant leverage on the table.
Communicating about compensation is a management activity not a human resources activity! Human resources should provide the technical expertise to track markets and recommend strategy, but delivery belongs with the manager.
The amount of information, some of it less than accurate that employees have access to shapes their perceptions, especially in the absence of a clear message from the employer.
So at the end of the day here are the things I want you to take away-
•    Engagement and commitment are superior to compliance
•    Engagement only happens with clear line of sight and that is the key purpose of management and leadership
•    Pay is important. Communicating about pay is critical……

Where Have All The Flowers Gone....

I am probably dating myself a bit by borrowing that line from the classic Peter Seeger tune, but I find myself asking that question over and over again, and what I read almost daily from top executives about their search for talent the metaphor seems appropriate.

The they I am referring to are the leaders and managers who still don’t seem to get it. As most anyone who has read any of my stuff knows I have committed my career to building and reinforcing new models of how organizations and people work together.

You can call it an employment relationship, a social contract, or whatever you choose; but what I am referring to is the relationship between employers and employed.
Employee engagement, the level of alignment between individual employee efforts and goals and organizational goals and objectives remains without question one of the most powerful and significant opportunities to improve organizational performance across every key performance indicator.
I am not speaking speculatively; the correlation between those things has been well established by the Society for Human Resources Management, the Gallup organization, and numerous other academic research organizations and professional consulting firms. We still do it as a society fairly poorly, with the number of employees describing themselves as highly engaged ranging around thirty percent in the U.S.
Organizations in large part took a hiatus from focusing on improving employee engagement during the recentrecession because with relatively high unemployment they didn’t feel they needed to attend to it to attract or keep the talent they sought. Now that the economy is starting to pick up you hear employers whining again about the difficulty of finding and keeping the talent they seek.

Here is a tip – highly engaged organizations don’t have that issue. That is one of the myriad of reasons they outperform their competition.
I had a chance to re-read Joel Peterson’s blog posts with two installments on building a high trust culture and it still really resonated with me. Step two for Joel is investing in respect.
Joel is the Board Chair of JetBlue Airlines, a graduate of Harvard B school and a guest instructor at the Stanford B School so he has some street cred…
As he describes it - Respect is, in some sense, the currency of trust – the way it’s exchanged and circulated among people.

That idea particularly resonates with me.
A number of years ago I created my own model of creating and sustaining employee engagement; I call it moving from compliance to Commitment, or little c to Big C.

My model has five elements: Respect, Responsibility, Information, Rewards, and Loyalty
 
Somewhat self servingly you can see why Joel’s pillars speak to me. Respect is the most foundational of the elements to me. Without respect all of the others fail.

Every person that we interact with has an absolute entitlement for our respect for their personhood. It doesn’t mean we have to accept at face value their talents, abilities, or authority; but we owe them respect for their personhood.
I often tell both employees and new managers that you need to respect each person and in hierarchical organizations you need to at least initially respect the position or office.
In this way this is similar to the first level of trust, deterrence, the trust that comes with formal authority.

The second level of trust or respect is knowledge based, this is the trust we receive (or more importantly earn) based on things like education, qualifications, perceived competency.
The third and in my opinion highest level of trust is identity based. This trust comes from intimacy, credibility, and mutual investment. This trust and respect is highly personal and can only be earned and given. It doesn’t come from credentials or position.
We don’t talk much about trust and respect in this kind of language. I have met many managers and leaders who inappropriately assume an entitlement to the highest level of trust based on the first two.

I differentiate leaders because again in my opinion an organization can appoint you a manager, but leadership comes from others who voluntarily accept your guidance and agree to follow your direction.
I also believe passionately in the concept of personal competence as it relates to respect. Personal competence means that we each own the responsibility to engage, to provide our best efforts, and to contribute fully to the best of our ability.
In return our employers and colleagues have a responsibility to set clear expectations, give constructive feedback, and a clear line of sight between our own objectives and goals and that of the organization.

With respect comes personal accountability and responsibility. If you are given the right tools, the right direction, and the right feedback it is incumbent upon you to do the work.
If someone can’t or won’t do the work and meet expectations I find it disrespectful to continue to leave them in a role they are not performing.
The reason I ask whether we will ever learn is that the majority of human resource professionals and their internal clients would tell you that the most important role they perform is compliance.

That sounds a lot like deterrence to me. It is about the rules. It is about systems and procedures and policies, not about relationships and character and credibility and trust.
As a former human resources executive I remain a proponent of the concept of employment at will, which at its most simplistic form is the legal standard that says that either party to the employment relationship can choose to end it without jumping through a number of hoops.
I temper that with a sense of fairness, that says it is important to me that we balance that transactional concept with the relational guidelines of respect, fairness, clear expectations, constructive feedback, and corrective action.

If you read almost anything about leadership or organizational relationships you are very likely to encounter discussion about loyalty. Employers especially like to talk about their expectation of loyalty from their employees. To me loyalty is relational and mutual, not transactional.
Rigidly embracing the concept of employment at will is not a relational employment model, it is purely transactional. Not a basis for engagement.

I am a much bigger fan of an employment relationship based on Congruency which looks for alignment between employees and organizations on these levels:
•    View of the activity
•    View of my ability to do the activity
•    The relationship between values and the activity
•    Commitment to do the “work”
•    Belief in the product or service
When you build things into your model you have a relationship, not a series of transactions.
I write this at this particular time because two very fine young people I know and care about both ended their relationship with their employers.

Those beginnings and endings happen, but both were handled so poorly that it was a reminder of how far we have to go.

So I leave you with this:
•    Listen to Joel- respect really is the currency of trust.
•    Goal for identity based trust. Yes it is more work, but 30+ years of experience assures me you will never have true engagement without it.
•    Commitment is always better than compliance, period.
•    Add congruency to your must haves when you hire, it is much easier to build it in than bolt it on.
•    Never ever forget that respect for a person’s identity is an absolute entitlement. You may have to terminate the performance; you don’t have to take their dignity.

Hope you enjoy the clip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LZ2R2zW2Yc

When Technology Becomes A Barrier!

We love our technology. I will freely admit that my dependence on things like my smartphone, email, etc. only increase on a daily basis. They make capturing and disseminating information so much faster and more efficient. They inform, entertain and frankly sometimes just annoy me.

When does technology go wrong, when it gets in the way of having a meaningful interaction with people!

I am an HR dinosaur. Who am I bullshitting I am beyond that, when I started in the profession they called it Personnel. For those of you that don’t remember that meant we treated people even more impersonally than now when we call them human capital.

Then we evolved to employee relations, which was HR speak for union avoidance. In the eighties we began hearing about human resources, but I am not sure the attitude significantly changed; Frederick W Taylor’s theories about scientific management were alive and well.

 In fact the accountants got in the act in the eighties when it was discovered that activities like outsourcing and right sizing were discovered to be good for the corporate bottom line once you got past walking back all the promises about employment security and the concept of human capital was born.

In the nineties a few companies caught on that really good talent isn’t human capital and that identifying, attracting, and retaining top performers was really good for business. We just struggled and continue to struggle with how to identify these people and get them in the door and so applicant tracking systems came into being.

Applicant tracking systems are not without value, especially as there has evolved more and more regulation about how we hire, reward, and promote. There have been some downsides however:

·         The art and science of recruiting has been dumbed down. I happen to believe that highly effective recruiters whether they are on your staff or hired specialists have enormous value in helping you identify the attributes and skills of top performers in both current employees and applicants. The new systems in many cases believe, I have an app for that! We just load a formula into the computer and it does that pesky work of screening. Therefore the role of recruiting can be delegated to more junior people who manage the process.

·         Recruitment and selection has become much more impersonal. I have a client who is seriously considering walking away from an organization she feels could be a great fit and who has demonstrated an interest in her because a glitch in their system continues to demand she complete a supplemental questionnaire she has already completed…twice. You can’t pick up a publication without reading about an applicant’s experience with a hiring organization where they applied, were interviewed or both and never heard from the organization again. Current applicants are often potential future hires, customers, or know a great hire, but we turn them off.

Social media has added some interesting complexities to the employment relationship as well. Not the least of which is who is accountable for and controls your employment brand? I won’t go on one of my usual lengthy explanations about what your employment brand is and how you manage it, but I will make some key points:

·         Every organization has an employment brand. It is how employee/customers perceive you as a place to work and form a relationship with you.

·         Really smart employers are deliberate about their employment brand and manage it proactively. It is why some employers have lines out the door at job fairs or get swamped by applicants and your recruiters are treated like they have an infectious disease and your ads don’t yield qualified applicants. They have a great employment brand and yours sucks!

·         You can Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and blog your ass off and if you have a lousy employment brand it doesn’t matter, applicants will find out and avoid you. If you have never heard of Glassdoor or similar sites replace your HR department, now.

·         Your employment brand doesn’t live in HR or Marketing it is owned and distributed by your employees and customers. Can you manage it yes, but you have to do the work. Great share from David Zinger today on Linked In https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/employee-engagement-david-zinger?trk=hp-feed-article-title-share.  His point is you have to do the work not pretend to do the work.

Technology has also aided and supported the hopelessly outdated idea that our leadership are ok, they aren’t they still suck.

I read posts everyday about how to manage Millennials, how women are genetically better leaders than men and lately how men have conquered the market on incompetent leaders who have been promoted. I personally think they are mostly bullshit.

Our current leadership models are largely based on entitlement emerging from either deterrence (I have power and authority) or competency (knowledge based, I am certified, bona -fied, or whatever). Every profession is running about garnering certifications of what type or another.

Real leadership requires we evolve to identity based trust (shared experiences and shared ideas) and there is no certification or technology which creates that. You have to do the work

In HR what has become increasingly alarming is that the profession seems increasingly invested in compliance rather than engagement and scrambling to increase their credibility through certification programs that validate competency rather than identity.

I want to go all the way back to my original point and that is technology is not a bad thing. What is a bad thing is in our culture technology has usually been used or perceived to be used against people rather than with them. I don’t think I have ever been involved with a major technology initiative where the CFO didn’t lean over and ask “what efficiencies will we garner” which is code for how many positions can we reduce.

Technology offers us great opportunities to gather, analyze, and disseminate information to support our broader intentions and goals.  Let’s just take a page from Rosabeth Moss Kantor’s observation about change,   “Change is an opportunity when done with me, and a threat when done to me”, and look at how technology can facilitate trust….