Love in HR (and at #HRevolution)

 

  I’ve posted previously about my intent to blog on each of the words Gary Hamel suggests distinguish the more people focused language and behaviour we need to encourage in our organisations (see this post on trust – including Hay’s Trust conference).

I had planned to start with some of the easier words such as equality, wisdom and justice, but there were a couple of things come up at HRevolution which made me think about love, so I’ve decided to start here.

So, for one thing, there was the general lovey-doveyness of the thing whole (nothing wrong with that) as in Trish’s tweet here.  But the real driver for this post was Paul Hebert’s session on incentives and recognition, as well as a general frustration in this and other sessions with a**holes.

Paul talked about the common problem in organisations where managers want to hold their best people back and suggested we need something more like love from our managers – a bit more like the way parents feel about our children – wanting the best for them rather than ensuring they don’t get paid more than the manager etc.

Somebody (I lost track of who, sorry) suggested a boss had explained to them that he did his job in the same way that he looked after his kids: ‘I love them and look after them’.  This took us into a not particularly valuable loop about parenting as an analogy for management – and a chance for Laurie Ruettimann to present her proposal for a loveless model where work is just a contract.

 

But I still think the original point was spot on.  I think we do need love in our organisations.  (And there are lots of other ways of loving people than in parenting of course - Trish’s love for her attendees is probably a more apt example.)  I do think we need more love in our organisations to make them into more compelling places to be.

I didn’t always think so – and remember challenging someone else about this on some site somewhere once.  But the more I’ve thought about it, and worked with organisations to bring about deep change, the more convinced I’ve become that we can’t ignore those things we think are important, even if they makes people cringe at first.

 

So how do we bring more love into our organisations?  Well, I don’t think moving towards more love needs to be that hard.  Paul’s group came up with the ides of a crappy manager policy, which whilst not stimulating real love would remove a lot of the present distaste.

But policies (even those emphasising what you do want rather than what you don’t) act a little like employee recognition as per Paul’s presentation (he suggested that recognition can generate slight changes in behaviour, like altering the course of a ball rolling downhill by a couple of degrees, but you need incentives to get bigger change / start the ball rolling in a different direction).  I think you need something bigger to get real love.

 

To an extent, I think the something bigger needs to be a culture which emphasises the importance of personal relationships for their own sake, rather than as things which need to be manipulated to do a job.  And I think creating this culture is partly about freeing people up to have more time for these relationships, as well as educating people about social intelligence (building on the points Kevin Grossman made about emotional intelligence) to help them appreciate the importance of these relationships – to them as well as the other people, and the organisation they’re working within.

 

Yet there’s got to be more to it than this as well.  The key enabler I think must be more of a sense of pitching in together.  Would Trish have felt the same sense of love for her attendees if she’d been organising a standard SHRM conference?  Actually, Trish probably would!, but I think the general sense of love-in would have been much reduced.

So the traditional family may have been the wrong metaphor for organisations, but perhaps the model of a commune could work (for at least some aspects of organisational life)?

 

So there you go.  I’m not sure I’ve got to the answer on this, and I knew it wouldn’t be an easy post to write.  But I do agree with Gary Hamel that love is something we should be thinking about – and working towards.

What about you?  Do you want to see more love in your organisation, and how would you go about creating it?

 

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Trust and Business Success (and Hay Group International Conference)

 

   See below for information on www.thehaygroupconference,com.

 

I’ve been posting recently on the importance of a differentiated HR Point of View; of influencing business from this POV; and of talking in a more people focused language to support this. And I’ve also posted previously about the irony of promoting the use of more people focused language when I tend to be use rather dry language myself (at least I’ve resisted the temptation to acronym-ise the language I’m promoting as ‘PFL’ – at least until now that is!).

So I’ve decided that I’m going to do a series of posts on the more human language we need to start to use more of, including the words suggested by Gary Hamel that I posted on before: joy, truth, honour, fidelity, equality, wisdom, beauty, justice and love – and on their relevance for business, and HR.

Now this isn’t going to be easy for me, and it may take a few weeks for me to start (I should also point out that I’m generally very poor at delivering on the commitments I make on this blog - I do try, but so many new things tend to come along that end up taking priority and getting in the way. So I should perhaps just say that I do currently feel totally committed to delivering on this – and we’ll just have to see if I can retain my current motivation).

I thought it might help by starting out on this journey by biting off a slightly easier challenge, and writing here about trust. I say easier, not because trust is any less important, or any less human than joy, truth and honour etc, but it does seem to have become rather more acceptable to talk about it in business recently. (I’ll have to think further about the impact on trust between you and me if I don’t fulfil the commitments above that I’ve just made you!).

I guess the main context for this growing level of acceptance is the falling level of trust around the world that we’ve experienced over the last decade and especially over the last few years during the recession. Much of this fall relates in particular to those traditional, authority based sources of trust such as business leaders, politicians and newspapers, and yes, even to consultants and bloggers.

But it’s also about the changing nature of employment, and the increase in service, knowledge and team based work. All of these factors make business more people shaped - and people, and the relationships between them, more obviously critical to success. And trust is the key to developing these relationships.

This reduction of something this important is what I think has made organisations realise that they need to spend time thinking and talking about how trust can once more be raised.

My input into these conversations would be to think about who are the people that create trust in organisations. And from my perspective, despite its somewhat smaller role in Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer this year, I remain convinced that this is the group called People Like Me (or ‘PLM’s I suppose).

This group is often linked to social media but I’d suggest friending on Facebook is about a very different thing. For me, making someone a PLM is about finding a mutual basis for connection, a shared interest or preferably a passion which provides a basis to develop a relationship (Alexander Fliaster referred to the ‘like me’ principle as the dark side of social networking, but there’s a bright side to this effect as well).

If you’re a Person Like Me, you’ve got an immediate connection with me, the basis for some rapport, and then anything you then talk about or present, even those wonderful financial metrics coming out of HR, are likely to be more trusted, because you’re more trusted too.

In a sense, this is only restating the main insight behind most negotiation skills training – that two parties have more room for agreement when they have a common goal, objective or even just a shared interest – something that makes each other a PLM.

And it’s why sharing those snippets of information on Twitter (‘just about to have a cup of coffee’) IS useful communication – doing this helps to provide a basis for a shared personal connection, and once you’ve got this, the more ‘important’ factual tweets are likely to have more resonance and impact as well.

So perhaps trust isn’t just another important area of focus alongside joy, truth and honour etc – perhaps it’s an output of these things. Maybe if we did talk about joy and these other areas a bit more, and importantly worked to create more joy as well, then perhaps trust between people would increase a bit more too?

 

One more thing you can do if you want to increase trust within your organisation, and between your organisation and its stakeholders, is attend this conference organised by Hay Group which is generously sponsoring this blog:

 

Hay Group International Conference 2011

Success Built on Trust

18-20 May, Vienna Austria

Conference highlights:

• Latest insights from top business and economic experts
• Lively, engaging debate on the big issues
• Finger on the pulse, industry knowledge from Hay Group consultants
• Superb networking opportunities with other senior leaders
• Social events including a gala dinner at one of Vienna's cultural highlights.

 

Speakers:

• Robin Bew, Editorial director and chief economist, Economist Intelligence Unit
• Professor Noreena Hertz, Socio-economist
• Richard Reed, Co-founder, Innocent Drinks
• Robert Bond, Managing director, Chief distribution officer, UK Retail Distribution, Barclays Bank
• Dr Nicolas von Rosty, Corporate vice president, Siemens
• Rob Goffee, Professor of Editorial organisational behaviour director at London
• Tharuma Rajah, Managing director, Hay Group ASEAN and South Asia
• Wayne Chen, Managing director, Hay Group North East Asia
• Peter Cappelli, George W. Taylor, professor of management, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
• Sylvia DeVoge, International client advisor, Hay Group.

 

For more information about the conference please visit www.thehaygroupconference.com or contact anna.patterson@haygroup.com on +44 (0) 20 7856 7238.

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This post is sponsored by Hay Group.

Hay Group is a global management consulting firm that works with leaders to transform strategy into reality. The firm develops talent, organises people to be more effective and motivates them to perform at their best. Its focus is on making change happen and helping people and organisations realise their potential.

Hay Group has over 2,600 employees working in 85 offices in 49 countries. Its clients come from the private, public and not-for-profit sectors, across every major industry and represent diverse business challenges.

See more on Hay Group's blog and follow the firm on Twitter.

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Technorati Tags: Hay Group,conference,business,success,trust,Vienna,May,2011,people,HR,talent,language

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Best fit with emotional intelligence

The other point I make on EI, is that it’s not enough for organisations to be generically emotionally intelligent. You have to have the right kind of EI.

This may be based upon the products or services that you are selling, and the emotions you’re looking to create in your customers to drive their purchase decisions. These emotions are likely to be based more on the emotional signature of your particular organisation than they are on your product’s or service’s features. So, for example, if you’re in financial services, selling ‘peace of mind’, then your employees need to come across as open, honest and trustworthy.

One of the case studies on the useful EI Consortium site is American Express. This demonstrates, firstly, the sorts of gains that can be produced from a focus on EI:

“Financial advisors at American Express whose managers completed the Emotional Competence training program were compared to an equal number whose managers had not. During the year following training, the advisors of trained managers grew their businesses by 18.1% compared to 16.2% for those whose managers were untrained.”

Secondly, this case shows the need for best fit in EI development:

“It grew out of an effort to discover why more clients who needed life insurance were not buying it. Research suggested that a major barrier was the financial advisors’ emotional reactions to the process. Consequently, the company developed and tested a training program designed to help the advisors cope more effectively with the emotional conflicts that they sometimes encountered in working with clients around life insurance matters.”

This shouldn’t really be a surprise – EI is really just a useful way of collecting together and presenting a set of intra and inter-personal skills. We know that the competencies that are most useful vary by organisation so it’s fairly clear that the precise form of EI that is required will vary too.

The need for emotional intelligence

Even if they’re not valued by CEOs people skills are the basis of the new world of management.

But despite increasing focus in this area, many line managers aren’t using any more skilled interventions with their people that they were a decade or more ago.

I think one insight into this comes from Emotional Intelligence.

The slide is from a workshop on EI that I delivered last week and comes from one of
Daniel Goleman's articles.

It suggests that the basis for emotional intelligence is self awareness. This deals with how people perceive, appraise and express their own emotions. And how they use emotions to facilitate and prioritise thinking, employing the emotions to aid in judgement (using the information that emotions provide). In the workshop, we looked at labelling and allocating their emotions to different parts of their bodies, for example someone said they got ‘butterflies in their stomach’ before they did a presentation.

Other common emotions which have become associated with parts of the body include a heaviness in the chest, a lump in the throat and a weight on the shoulders. Being able to distinguish between these many different emotions and feelings is a prerequisite for the other areas of EI.

The second requirement is self management which is about how people control their emotions rather than being at their whim – using feelings as a ‘resource’. And we did a short exercise using NLP’s resource anchoring to show how participants could use an emotional state they had experience in one context and apply it in another where it would be more useful than the state they normally experienced here. I think I managed to convince them that this is a ‘tool’ not a ‘trick’, and like any other tools isn’t intrinsically good or bad but can be useful.

The third is social awareness – being tuned into others’ emotions, and the organisational climate. They key here is about being able to read other people and getting some external validation of this ability to be able to fine tune it. We used a couple of great tests which are freely available in the internet: Simon Baron Cohen’s Reading the Mind in the Eyes quiz, and Paul Ekman’s Subtle Expression Training Tool and Micro Expression Training Tool.

Fourth comes social skills, things like 'visionary leadership, influence, developing others, communication, change catalysis, conflict management, building bonds, teamwork and collaboration.

But actually unless people have good self awareness, self management and social awareness, these social skills are unlikely to have much impact. Perhaps the reason CEOs discount social skills is that they don’t see them improving – and perhaps the reason for this is that organisations have put too much focus on social skills themselves, and not enough on the other underpinning abilities.

Using the language of people

In my last post, I advised moving from HR’s current focus on using the language of business to the language of people. This is a language based on emotions and stories that resonates with employees.

There is a good article which relates to this in today’s FT, comparing the oratory of Barack Obama to the US’ other Presidential candidates. Have a look here.

Business language is good for driving efficiency and effectiveness, but it does little to gain people’s engagement. HR's going down to the wrong road if its just tries to become more and more business-like. As I’ve said before, what it really needs to do is to encourage and develop the rest of the business to speak the language of HR, or really the language of people and relationships.

(I do, by the way, see the irony in this recommendation when I’m more guilty than most in often using very technical and not particularly inspiring language. What can I do? – I’m trying, but I'm still an engineer at heart.)

HCM: The future of (HR) management

Travelling up to Sheffield to give a presentation on HCM to clients of the Chamber of Commerce on behalf of Learning Light, I listened to one of Lucy Kellaway’s recent FT podcasts on the joy of fresh stationery.

Asking her colleagues how they could create the same level of happiness experienced by the children in the Sound of Music, Lucy’s colleagues suggested ‘going home’ and ‘being left alone to get on with work’! Persevering, Lucy describes the ‘small pleasures’ she experiences at work, and of which she sings (to the sound of ‘my favourite things’): “stationery cupboards and lattes with lids on, small ego boosters and…”.

But surely work can offer people more than these small things? From a purely humanistic perspective, people spend so much of their time at work, that there must be a need to ensure work in itself is a fulfilling and engaging activity. And from a business perspective, if people aren’t fulfilled and engaged, are they really going to act as an organisation’s ‘most important assets’?

I talked about this at my presentation in Sheffield, contrasting the traditional perspective of people management as Human Resource Management (HRM), and what I believe is now emerging as Human Capital Management (HCM).

HRM has proved itself as a significant step forward from the more basic perspective of Personnel, which focuses mainly on the administration of people management. HRM’s main focus is on the business, and on what the business strategy means for people and people management, ensuring that all employees are aligned behind business objectives. This process of alignment has delivered huge benefits for organisations, but its downside is that, as the name suggests, HRM tends to treat people as resources. It provides a great way to gain compliance from employees, but not necessarily their commitment. Just look at most organisations’ engagement surveys of evidence of this.

HCM focuses, again as the name suggests, on human capital. This isn’t meant to suggest that we should think about people as capital: that wouldn’t be any more empowering than treating them as resources. It’s about how organisations can accumulate human capital which is an intangible capability provided by their people (managing FOR human capital rather than OF human capital). It’s about building jobs around people rather than fitting people into standard job descriptions. It’s about personalising people management activities to each employee’s individual needs. It’s about understanding each person’s own engagement drivers and ensuring that these needs are being met.

I explained that given the fact that we are all emotional beings, HCM strategy development is likely to depend at least as much on creative and emotional (right brain) thinking as it is on analytical, logical and left brained analysis. I pointed to the increasing use of Emotional Intelligence in organisations as evidence that there is increasing appetite for this sort of approach.

The message seemed to resonate with some of the audience, although I was challenged at the end that it all seemed a little bit intangible, a bit ‘emperor’s new clothes’.

When I got back home, I found that I had been posted Gary Hamel’s new book, the Future of Management, which I have just read on another train trip up to Birmingham. This isn’t supposed to mean that it’s a light read, just (despite its dreary cover) an engrossing one, or at least I found it as such.

One of Hamel’s points is that we need to use the right paradigm for a particular problem. He quotes Thomas Kuhn's explanation that we will typically only be able to solve problems which fit within our paradigm:

“To a great extent these are the only problems that the community will… encourage its members to undertake. Other problems… are rejected as metaphysical… or sometimes as just too problematic to be worth the time. A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the [familiar] puzzle form because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools which the paradigm provides.”

Hamel comments:

“We are all prisoners of our paradigms. And as managers, we are captives of a paradigm that places the pursuit of efficiency ahead of every other goal. This is hardly surprising, since modern management was invented to solve the problem of inefficiency [eg HRM]… And while progressive managers may work hard to ameliorate its stultifying effects, there are few who can imagine a root-and-branch alternative.”

However, the need for this new paradigm is increasing:

“What s true in other fields of human endeavour is also true for management: you can’t solve new or chronic problems with fossilised principles… To untangle the story of life, Darwin had to abandon traditional views and conjure up a new theory based on the principle of natural selection. Similarly, physicists eager to understand the anomalies of the subatomic world had to look beyond Newton’s clockwork laws to discover the principles of quantum mechanics. I believe we are now at a similar juncture in the history of management. Put bluntly, there is no way to build tomorrow’s essential organisational capabilities atop the scaffolding of 20th-century management precepts.”

Without the right paradigm, HCM will smack of the emperor’s new clothes, and it reinforces the need, that I’ve referred to previously, for HR to ensure that it’s using the right paradigm to consider the opportunities for people management in its organisation, and for maximising its own role.

More on the future of management to follow shortly…

The shortage of talent

Another interesting article I didn't find time to post on last month was on the shortage of talent, 'Cloned Development Contributes to Crisis of Leadership Supply', published in Talent Management.

The article argues that there are plenty of potential leaders available, "and they're actually dying to lead. They just have no desire to lead as they have been led". Organisations just need to be more flexible in developing and retaining them, and engaging them to progress into a managerial career. Part of this is about allowing these people to act as individuals (not as Business Week (The future of work) argues, as some type of generic 'Organisation Man' (or even woman).

I think this reinforces Peter Cappelli's argument that there isn't really any talent shortage(see The Baby Boomers are Retiring! So What? and What Labor Shortage? Debunking a Popular Myth).

Instead, Cappelli believes that there will be an adequate supply of workers. They just won't be the type, age or quality that organisations are looking for.

“Employers could be forgiven for thinking that this situation looked like a labour shortage: Despite flat-out hiring, they could not bring in enough workers to meet their needs."

But treating the problem as if it were a labour shortage leads to a set of bad decisions. The solution involves better planning, better retention of explicit categories of workers and more professional HR execution.

It's a point I also make in an article for Buck's Global View (1st quarter, 2007), 'Retaining Talented Employees':

"The quality of an organisation’s talent is increasingly becoming a critical success factor. The demand for talent is growing as more organisations recognise that they need the right talent to compete. At the same time, many organisations believe that the supply of available talent is actually declining. This is often not necessarily the case, as it may just be that these organisations need to be flexible in where they find their talent, – for example, through the employment of more women and older workers. However, significant cultural change will often be required before organisations can fully access these wider talent pools."

The point in the Talent Management article that builds upon both my own and Cappelli's writing is that the key to engaging these additional employees is to "honour who they want to become, not attempt to mold them into carbon copies of today's leaders".

"Design learning events that let people have real conversations. Have conversations that really allow people to have a voice. We want the next generation to find their voice, but we resent that their voice now is in formation — it's strident, it's abrasive, it's loose, it's not articulate and it's never going to become a polished, powerful voice if we don't let them use it.

They may come across as rebellious and crass, but that's the sign of a leader who will be innovative and courageous in the future. People have to learn how to help them shape that capacity. Incumbent leaders get so impatient. They throw their hands up and go, 'He's useless!' or 'I'm not putting up with this! They're disrespectful — they're talking to me as if I'm one of their friends.'

We misinterpret the behavior. This generation doesn't want a pat on the back or a high-five. They want genuine gratitude. They want to know that it's not just their contribution that matters — it's them as the contributor that also matters, and they want us to understand how what they contributed is a reflection of them as the contributor."

Dealing with people in this way (and I think the points apply largely to employees of any generation) requires a higher degree of authentic leadership and emotional intelligence than exists in many organisations. So how to develop it? One good example of the type of leadership development programme which is required is that being implemented at Sony by a former colleague from Penna, Alexandra Smith at Swan, which is profiled in the latest edition of People Management, Can You Feel It:

"The SLDP, launched in July last year, involves three modules spread over around eight months. The first, entitled “Visionary leadership”, focuses on the individual’s motivation, life values and career path. As well as the “lifeline”, it involves using appreciative inquiry techniques to explore their understanding of “peak” leadership performance so they can understand what great leadership looks and feels like to them.

The second module, “Leading with emotional intelligence”, requires participants to keep a journal for a week to track their emotional processes at work and at home. “It can be very illuminating if they realise they have been angry or frustrated for three-quarters of the week,” Smith points out. Participants explore using the energy of their emotions in ways that are helpful rather than destructive. The third module, “Coaching for potential,” involves coaching each other to learn how to use open questioning techniques.

Each module is preceded by a tele-conference to introduce the themes that will be covered, while between the modules participants work with their own individual coaches to consolidate the learning and integrate it into their daily work. The course ends with a showcase presentation to the president."

Organisations that prefer to follow Dolly the sheep rather than using innovative programmes like this are likely to find they will fall short of talent.

Management's human touch

An interesting article in this week's People Management about Alison Hardingham at Yellow Dog Consulting presenting at the CIPD Professional Standards Conference:

"It's time for HR professionals to become experts and leaders in 'human relations'... Advances in our understanding of the brain and behaviour, and... emotional intelligence, relationship capital and authenticity all pointed to an opportunity for people management professionals to take a lead in promoting the 'people factor'."

Absolutely! Perhaps if HR focused more on understanding these areas better, they wouldn't be the poor relations that Deloitte's study I posted on last week found them to be. Expertise in human relations must surely have more impact than increased capabilities in metrics and analytics.