What's Microsoft UK doing right? (Glassdoor Employees Choice Awards)

One of the things I'd meant to post on before Christmas was Glassdoor's Employee Choice Awards - the only awards which rely on the perceptions and commentaries of employees.

My desire to do this is partly because of my press relationship with Glassdoor as their UK HR Expert, and partly because this is the first year the awards have been made in the UK and this is an important new activity here.  But mainly just because the rankings are really interesting!

No surprise about the top two companies in the UK - Google and John Lewis, sitting on their own short tail with 4.3 and 4.3 points out of 5 respectively.

In 3rd place, just at the start of a rather denser distribution, with 4.1 points, is Microsoft.

Microsoft?  That's Microsoft whose technologies increasingly belong to the last decade, which is cutting 18,000 jobs, whose CEO wants women employees to let karma take care of their careers and whose organisational culture is so competitive that collaboration is almost impossible - see the Bonkers World visual about Microsoft's and other tech firms organisation structures (though Microsoft has restructured since then).

In the US Microsoft didn't even manage to join Chick-fil-A on the awards list.  So what's happening in the UK?

I could of course contact the couple of people I know who work at Microsoft here but probably the better, more accurate, way to assess the company's culture is to consult Glassdoor:

The site summarises positive comments as:

• "Really good work-life balance compared to other tech companies of the same caliber" 
• "You will get the opportunity to work with smart people solving real world problems"
• "Great benefits that are truly 1st class when compared to other companies in the industry"
• "Lots of opportunities to move around in the company to try new things"
• "Generally good benefits (though they've been cutting back in recent years)"

And the negatives:

• "Work life balance is not good in some places but it really depends on your role"
• "Performance review system basically encourage competition inside the team"
• "Stack Ranking poisons team work (you're only as good as your last performance)"
• "Review process focused too much on politics rather than actual accomplishments"
• "Typical big company disadvantages that are uncommon for most tech companies"

These comments give some idea of the culture of the firm - the same great benefits which are common on the tech sector but also the particular issues around competitiveness which I referred to above (though Microsoft has abandoned its stack ranking too now.)

Individual ratings add support to this analysis as well:

• Compensation and benefits 4.0
• Career opportunities 3.6
• Work-life balance 3.5
• Culture & values 3.4
• Senior management 2.9 (though this seems to relate more to the leaders reporting to the CEO than Satya Nadella himself - 82% of approvers approve of him.)

But these comments and ratings are based on the 8,900 all time reviews for the company (which give it a rather lower ranking of 3.7) rather than the 52 reviews that contributed to the 4.1 and the award.

Looking through comments from the UK over the period of the award calculations does give some insight on what may be happening in the UK - people complain about senior management, but also suggest that in the UK employees tend to be further away from them.  This presents some problems in terms of projects being cancelled and timezones slowing down decision making, but in general it's a good thing.  If your senior management is poor it's better to be less impacted by their leadership.

Ie it's not actually something Microsoft in the UK is doing right - it's just that we're further away from what the more generally excellent company in the US is doing wrong.

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Higher Ambition at #MelcrumSummit

  This afternoon is focusing on IC and change and we're starting wih Flemming Norrgren, author of Higher Ambition which had already been trailed by Anne-Lise Kjaer.

In Norrgren's view, the key silent killers for change, similar to those real killers for individuals (hyper-tension and high saturated fat) which are often undiscussed . undiscussable are ineffective leadership, management and communication (top, down, one-way) etc:

 

 

Key ones for the attendees here are leadership and co-ordination:

 

 

Anyway, it's not a single killer on their own that's important, it's when they act in tandem.  And the root causes are often the lack of rust and honest communication which requires a change in how leaders behave.

Norrgren recommends a rapid strategic change process - locking the leaders in a room and giving them a few hours to come up with three or four new strategic goals on one piece of paper that they're all signed up to.

It also needs to involve 8 to 10 of the most talented people in the organisation who them really trust in helping to implement the strategy.  [I can't say this process works for me - I think the top team will have lost the engagement of their people before they start.]

These task force members then each interview 8 to 10 people in different areas in the business and report back to the executive - which they do in a no-powerpoint fish bowl format.  [I like that.]

 

 

The next presentation was provided by two ex-Pfizer communicators about a project there.  Most of this what about damage limitation recovering from a top-down imposed change - exactly why, whilst I think there are some interesting ideas in Norrgren's approach, I still don't think it's fully there yet.

 

We've still got more inputs from Melcrum / Speakeasy and Kingfisher and I may come back and add more here if I get more new insight from these...

And I'm also back here again tomorrow.

 

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Technorati Tags: Flemming Norrgren, great leaders, strategic change, higher ambition, internal communication

So people join organisations, and leave Top Leaders!

 

   So its finally official – people join organisations, and leave… top leaders (you probably read it here first).  It’s great that Gallup’s well known line (‘people join organisations but leave their line managers’) has finally been over-turned.

And it’s obvious really.  I participated in a Twitter exchange following the CIPD’s report – along the lines of who is the biggest problem – rubbish leaders, managers, HRDs or organisations?  But thinking it through, I would go for the leaders – as they have so much influence over the approach their line managers take.

 

I still worry about how easily this piece of garbage has caught on however…  and why it is that HR is so easily influenced by marketing organisations like Gallup, and so little by academic research (or just insightful bloggers).

Are academic thinkers your most influential???  Not for many HR practitioners I don’t think – and I may blog on this tonight on the way home from tonight’s event…

 

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Reviewing 70-20-10 at HCI Learning and Leadership Development conference

 

   One of the things I’ve suggested adding to my client’s learning strategy is the 70-20-10 approach. I use the form of this developed by Morgan McCall, Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo at CLC and popularised by Jay Cross, Charles Jennings and others in which 70% of development is provided through on-the-job experience, 20% through others including informal mentoring and coaching, and just 10% through traditional, formal training.

  

 

This version of the model was included in a slide presented by Robert Vulpis from Morgan Stanley at the HCI Learning and Leadership Development conference - the other recent partly virtual conference I’ve been reviewing:

 

There are also similar models which push the shift even further, for example at the HCI conference, Bob Cancalosi from GE Healthcare suggested these three amendments to the model:

 

 

 

There’s also this one shown by Carie Blum at the CLO Symposium:

 

Here social takes the top 70% (rather than the middle 20%) of learning.

Which ever model is used, I think it’s important that it is only ever seen as an indication or provocation of what a company should do  - and not as a rule! (or as an objective to be achieved).

(Slide presented by Joe Garcia from Home Depot at the HCI conference)

 

I guess David Forman from the HCI was making a similar point in emphasising the need to think about 70-20-10 as a portfolio rather than percentages:

 

Well, I did write that the model has been popularised – and I’m sure that after all of this repetition that attendees at the HCI conference (and now you, I guess) must surely be able to remember it!

 

By the way, if you’re not sure what types of learning go in each separate category, I recommend Dan Pontefract’s schematic:

 

 

 

More tomorrow…

 

Technorati Tags: 70-20-10,Morgan McCall,Robert Eichinger,Michael Lombardo,CLC,Jay Cross,Charles Jennings,Bob Cancalosi,CLO,GE Healthcare,Carie Blum,Xerox

 

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HR Transformation at SAP

 

  My favourite presentation at last week’s SAP HR Transformation summit focused on SAP itself.  Roger Bellis, their European SVP for Talent, Leadership and Organisation Development (and a former client from Barclays) explained that SAP is now a mega company, and its people management challenges are a bit like a teenager moving into adulthood.

For example, the average age of employees in its head office is 41 and turnover is just 1% (so the average age will be about 50 in ten years time if nothing changes).  But of course in China it’s completely different.  Averages tell you nothing – you need to look at the detail.

And with over 50,000 people it’s difficult just to keep some control, particularly as SAP wants to maintain the same freedom and entrepreneurial spirit it had when it was a young company. 

Innovation is key and the networked nature of SAP is an asset.  They want to maintain and develop this connectedness, through technology, and through their culture, and reduce the way this is inhibited through some of their control systems.

To balance these requirements, SAP needs to motivate people, but within a frame.  The paradigm is still to specify what they need to do, but give people responsibility for how they do it.

But some things need to change and Roger is working with SAP’s co-CEOs to help leaders lead differently.  Managers often have 20+ reports, often working at home, so supervising them tightly is impossible.    Instead they need to focus on continuing to win employees hearts and minds.

To do this, SAP have five main change drivers:

 

In organisation design, the challenge is to support people as they move from project to project. SAP has had 300 reorganisations in the last five years! and many people have had 5 managers in the last two years. Again there’s a balance – SAP needs to be mobile / flexible and adaptive in terms of its organisation whilst still being stable.

There’s also a process, Ignite (a small p process) to develop people in a different way, through leadership and engagement.

Not surprisingly, SAP use SAP to support these practices. They’re able to provide feedback to their developers through this too. For example. they're using an updated performance management tool that better reflects the very different way managers need to lead today.

All of this is measured through a series of metrics including bench strength and turnover etc.  Where it makes sense, these metrics are combined into indices.  For example, they use the wisdom of the crowd to provide an ongoing pulse check, and a people management index comprising pride (up) and engagement (down due to the organisational change).  But Roger is most interested in the chats over coffee – chewing the fat and getting feedback.  It’s really the the conversations you have that tell you how you’re doing.

 

Technorati Tags: SAP,Roger Bellis,talent,hr,leadership,transformation,networked,intrapreneurial,organisation,SAPHRSummit

 

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#ECTalent - Recognising Individuals: GE vs. Aviva

 

  OK, this was only a competition in my own mind, but after the previous panel session I was still feeling just a little… well, bored is the wrong word, but you know what even the best conferences (of which this is one) are like.  Let’s just say I was a bit last energised than I had been in the morning, so I thought it’d be fun to imagine these two separate sessions running as one – and seeing which company / approach came out on top.

And I do think that doing this provides an interesting competition between two different perspectives:the inclusive and exclusive approaches to talent management, and particularly between these two companies, as almost polar opposite examples of the two approaches.

 

  John Ainley, Group HRD at Aviva, kicked off first.  For him, developing an Employee Value Proposition depends on recognising the individuality of employees.

Aviva’s Customer Value Proposition is based on the concept of significance. Everyone needs to feel significant as a human being. The CVP is ‘no-one recognises you like Aviva’, differentiating the company from its grey competitors, and they want to do something similar internally as well.

For Aviva, everyone is talent.  It sounds trite but is quite fundamental. If you’re focusing on that top 10% cadre, this means you’re neglecting the bottom bottom 90%, which doesn’t feel right to him.

Reward doesn’t have a particularly important role in significance. Everyone wants to feel fairly paid, that’s all.  So they have a twice a year conversations about their own needs.  These use Real Deal cards to help understand how the company is doing in delivering what the employees value.

The skill of the leader is about recognising the significant needs of the individual.  Aviva isn’t perfect at it.  What’s perfect (John suggests) is their focus on the significance of individual in everything they do.

 

    Second round: Susan Peters, CLO, GE talking about GE’s Session C.

Susan talked mainly about social media and the way it’s changing the way we work. You’ll need to pop over to Social Advantage for that.

Linked to other conversations earlier in the agenda, GE also takes a long-term view of culture, thinking about how they’re going to attract and retain people in their business in another 10 years time: three to four years isn’t enough – you need to be able to leapfrog in order to be effective in the future.

So, Session C.  This, as you probably know, is GE’s annual review of HR – of peoples’ performance , strengths, career aspirations etc.  And they do this review in aggregate too – in the Session C Wrap.  They sit and talk about people and their succession planning as well.

It’s what provides GE’s magic – that ‘we know our people and we talk about them’.  Note it’s not really about the 20 / 70 / 10 thing (which they’re not forcing as much as they used to historically - and even in the past they never really took 10% out, although the higher you went the higher % went eg it was about 7% at senior levels).

Like BSkyB, the model gives as much weight to demonstrating the values as to performance.

 

So, both great submissions, I’m sure you’ll agree.  But which will be the winner of this contest?

Now, I love Aviva’s focus on significance.  But I’ve never really been able to understand their talent thing.  How can calling some talent top talent, and other talent slightly-less-good talent be any better than saying you’re excellent or average?  It feels a little bit like spin and therefore comes over (to me at least) as unnecessarily inauthentic.

But I’ve always had problems with GE’s competitive focus too.  And although I understand why being robust and honest is likely to be in lower performing employees’ benefit longer-term, I’ve always felt this has smacked a bit of process for process sake.  Certainly, the greatest benefits from stack ranking come in the first few years of using it, so GE’s determination to keep forcing it for as long as they did seems overly fixated (even if they never really used it as robustly as they said).

 

But then, these are both minor points.  One of my key beliefs about HCM strategy is that you can make a wide range of approaches work if you’ve got the ambition and determination to make your’s work, and you’re able to align your strategy, your processes, and the people you employ behind it.

The people who are going to work at Aviva are, I’d hope, a very different lot to those who’d work at GE (to the extent that this can ever be the case in such large companies).  I suspect the different processes make the different groups of people feel about equally recognised and significant.

I like the way each of these companies processes are so strongly linked to their way of thinking, and I love the clarity of these thoughts.

So I think I’m going to have to award top marks to both companies (well, say 9.5 out of 10).  Still, if you’ve got other thoughts on marks, let me know, and I’ll think about adjusting!

 

 

Technorati Tags: Economist,Talent Management,#ECTalent,EVP,Employee Value Proposition,Aviva,John Ainley,significance,Susan Peters,GE,Section C,leadership

 

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#ECTalent: Leadership Behaviours for the Future

 

  We didn’t get as much focus on the future as I was hoping for in the session, but mainly a comparison of the how vs the what of leadership (and therefore I didn’t get my question answered).

 

Gareth Williams, HRD at Diageo talked about the development of leadership behaviours supporting the company’s Ambition.

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Geraldine Hayley, Group head, Leadership Effectiveness and Succession at Standard Chartered talked about their Whole Person programme based on these competencies: sensing the future; distributed influence; and sweeping and soaring.

These about about you as whole person –being self aware, authentic, ethical etc. So leaders are expected to talk about their life events, and how these have changed the way they see the world, or the learning they’ve been through. This shows they’ve had the experience and been aware; that they’re humble and willing to share – not perfect but flawed.

Standard Chartered’s performance rating system is based on performance, and how someone is perceived by themselves and others against the company’s five values. Someone’s bonus depend on living these values as much as they do on delivering the results (although we later found out that this mean 15% of the bonus is based on values).

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Deborah Baker, Director for People at BSkyB emphasised that leadership is key to business success. But leaders need passion if they’re to gain high levels of engagement.

BSkyB measure both what and how and both of these have equal weight in someone’s compensation.

 

A good session – though not quite as impactful as the others, and I think by the end that everyone was relieved to do some ball throwing with Stephen Carver from Cranfield.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Economit,Talent Management,Summit,#ECTalent,leadership,behaviour,Deborah Baker,BSkyB,Deraldine Hayle,Standard Chartered,Gareth Williams,Diageo

 

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Benchmark for Business: Michael Watkins

 

  This idea about HR leaders adapting their behaviours seems to have been my key theme over the last couple of weeks, and of course it applies to other business leaders too.

So I’m looking forward to attending this session in a couple of weeks time:

 

Driving Sustainable Change

Michael Watkins is the world's leading expert on accelerating transitions. He is author of the international bestseller The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at all Levels, recognised by The Economist as "the on-boarding bible."

Michael's recent book, Your Next Move: The Leader's Guide to Successfully Navigating Major Career Transitions, was published in 2009 by Harvard Business Press.

During his presentations, Michael will explain how the most successful leaders adapt their leadership style as conditions change in their organisations. Whether you are facing the "hidden transitions" that are part of normal growth and downsizing-or coping with a merger, reorganisation, or new leadership. Michael explains the critical relevance of leadership style, and how you can master the art of adaptive and inspirational leadership for ongoing success.

 

Let me know if you’re going to be there as it would be good to discuss your insights on this too (registration is here).

 

Technorati Tags: Benchmarkforbusiness,Driving Sustainable Change,Michael Watkins,adaptive leadership,organisation change

 

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#HRD11: Stories not Processes

 

   The other main challenge to traditional HR thinking that got my attention during the CIPD HRD conference was this one about the role / importance of softer, more organic approaches as opposed to harder, more mechanistic ones.

I’ve already referred to one example of this distinction in Laura Walker’s comments about changing the stories.

To be sure, there were a lot of calls for ongoing management of the organisational machine, for example Paul Kearn’s suggestion that we should measure the results of leadership development through the pace at which people shuffle paper!, but there were lots of examples and suggestions around more progressive ways of managing too.

I thought this new way came out most strongly in the session with the two undercover bosses (David Clarke from Best Western Hotels and Kevan Collins from the London Borough of Tower Hamlets).  Some of the key points discussed included:

• Relationships are at the heart of success in business – you want people to bring their whole heart and whole life to work.
• This is about genuine, authentic dialogue to help people really understand each other
• Help people move beyond thinking about what they expect of the organisation to what they expect of each other (see my post on social EVPs / branding)
• Life is emotional – walk towards, not away from, emotions
• You need to give people time (you might not be that concerned about what they’ve been doing on their weekends, but stop for them anyway – it’ll only take 30 seconds)
• Blogging and Twitter helps by showing openness and creating networks within organisations

 

I thought both bosses were great, but what a shame it needed a Channel 4 TV programme for them to generate these insights.  It’s a bit like when you make a CFO a CHRO and they get to understand it takes a completely different mindset, not just a new set of capabilities, to do the job well.  We need to get this mindset into more business leaders (and still into more members of HR).  And perhaps we need more new generation HR leaders becoming CEO too?

 

Also see my earlier post on another undercover boss with an equally compelling story (Stephen Martin from Clugston Group).

 

Technorati Tags: David Clarke,Best Western Hotels,Kevan Collins,London Borough of Tower Hamlets,Channel 4,Undercover Boss,CIPD10,HRD,conference

 

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Top Leadership Influencer

 

  Well I was going for 10 posts today which I’m not quite going to be able to manage!, but I thought this would be a good one to finish on.

I was chuffed as usual to be recognised last week as a top global online influencer in leadership (at #16).  One more gong for the cupboard.

Thanks to John and the HRexaminer team.

 

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CHROs and Collaboration

 

  I’m in the US for the Enterprise 2.0 conference next week but unfortunately arrived just too late for this week’s HR Happy Hour – Episode 74 – ‘Creativity, Flexibility, and Speed’ (they didn’t get much time for calls anyway).

Steve Boese and Shauna Moerke were interviewing IBM’s Dan Roddy – the study director for IBM’s Chief Human Resource Officer study based on conversations with more than 700 Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) worldwide.

The study identifies three areas that are the most important for CHROs and are also most poorly done.

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Creative leadership

Dan explained that leaders need more creativity rather than linear thinking.  They have to think differently in order to do something different now that we’re facing higher levels of complexity in business.

I’m pleased IBM have come round to recognising this need which contrasts to the conclusions in some of their previous reports, eg their 2008 human capital study which I also reviewed:

IBM also believe that managing this kind of talent market requires a structured, analytical approach: “A more data-driven, fact-based method to hire, pay and reward top performers”.

“If the workforce is truly to be valued as an asset, much like financial capital or brand equity, the entire C-suite, not just HR, will need more robust and accessible information about current and future talent needs, employee productivity and resource availability.

No matter how much respect the C-suite may have for the CHRO, until the HR organisation has access to workforce data and information with the same level of timliness, consistency and validity as the financial or operational data available to the CFO or the COO, its insights will not hold the same weight.”

This argument doesn’t work for me. Human capital may be just as important as financial or brand capital. But this doesn’t mean that human capital is like financial or brand capital, ie should be treated in just the same way as them. Management of financial management involves cause and effect relationships. Management of human capital requires an understanding of
complexity.

Again, I’m not against measurement and analytics, but I think these need to be conducted very strategically, and often qualitatively. And I simply don’t believe that more or even better measurement is the difference that will make the difference in HR’s strategic impact. The magic is in truly developing an adaptable workforce (or whatever you decided is going to be your organisational capability, perhaps even something that will make you seem a bit strange?), and using measurement as an enabler to this.

.

See this post on imagination (vs evidence) based HR.

And this one from J Keith Dunbar arguing that CHROs aren’t as bad at leadership development as they think.

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Speed and flexibility in workforce planning

One interesting finding here is that organisations using social media for learning and collaboration are more effective in developing skills to support strategic needs.

I agree with this, although I suspect the more important use of social media is to enable the workforce to align more closely with changing business requirements, rather than just supporting a traditional, command and control focused planning process.

I fully connected, social organisation won’t need workforce planning, as the whole organisation will be much better and sensing and capturing opportunities as they arise.

(However, this is clearly some way off for most organisations, so I accept the need for more rather than less workforce planning in the medium term.  See this post on workforce planning – and on the need for more creativity too).

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Collective intelligence

Workforces are becoming more networked and less hierarchical.  This isn’t about replacing hierarchy – you still need control, standardisation, harmonisation etc – but you need to combine this with the ability for people in the field to make decisions.  This means you need to think about replacing the hierarchical information flows that networks have taken the place of.

Organisations need to emphasise collaboration – culturally and technically breaking down silos:

• providing the infrastructure and technical capabilities for collaboration
• culturally not rewarding behaviours that limit sharing etc.

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Unfortunately, this is the are that CHROs report being least effective – with 78% reporting that they didn’t do anything to support collaboration or weren’t effective in doing it.

But is this really the case – or just a another problem from the research (as in J Keith Dunbar’s post)?  I think the problem may be over-stated.  I suspect that like communication, collaboration is something people will always say they could do more of (even if we know organisations can do too much of it).

But I suspect the figure’s probably reasonably accurate all the same.  We may be very poor at leadership development, but at least most of us try to do something about it.  Collaboration is something that most people and organisations (largely just with the exception of those involved in Enterprise 2.0) don’t even try to influence (there’s even a point of view that you shouldn’t try).

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Anyway, the point that I really wanted to make is that the key for IBM is integrating social collaboration into the workflow – connecting it directly into business operations and project management activity.

That’s not the key for me – not in most knowledge management roles and organisations any how.  To me, processes need to support (not get in the way of) collaboration, not the other way around.  But collaboration needs to be a strategic focus which permeates everything an organisation does, and the way people behave – naturally, all of the time – not just when they’re following a process.

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It’s about Relationships

Like most of IBM’s studies, this is a good report.  But I can’t help feeling they’re missed the central point.  Just as IBM’s focus on technology initially led them to miss the importance of creativity, so it’s now constraining their thinking to a focus on information, rather than relationships.

Collective intelligence isn’t about information flows and processes.  It’s about people and their connections.  Speed and flexibility isn’t about formal planning processes - supported by social tools, it’s about giving people autonomy to make quicker and smarter decisions – supported by social relationships.

 

And it’s not Simple!

Steve pointed out that most of Dan’s suggestions were pretty simple (so why aren’t people doing them?).

It’s a point that’s often made about HR too and my response to it is the same for CHRO support for collaboration as it is for HR – it’s not all simple, and even the simple stuff takes skill and insight to do well.

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I hope I’ll get a chance to come back and review a rethought through IBM survey in another couple of years time!

..

And if you’re a CHRO who can’t do collaboration, get in touch and I’ll show you how you can!

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Other links:

• Rawn Shah in Forbes
• Samee Patel on IBM Panel

Technorati Tags: IBM,Dan Roddy,CHRO,social,collaboration,connecting,relationships,HR,Happy Hour

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Interview with the Upside-Down CEO

 

   Part 3 of my report describing my meeting with Vineet Nayar, Chief Executive of HCL Technologies and author of Employees First, Customers Second is now online at Personnel Today: Author Interview.

The article describes some of the changes involved in developing HCLT’s inverted pyramid, inverted HR function!, and also Vineet’s at least partly inverted (and I’d suggest highly commendable) management style.

 

You’ll also find:

• Part 1: Employees First (on this blog)
• Part 2: Collaborative Organisation Structures (on Social Advantage).

 

Photo credit: Susan Cornell

Technorati Tags: Vineet Nayar,HCL Technologies,inverted pyramid,CEO,change

 

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Kenexa Leadership seminar: leading change; changing leadership

 

   Busy day today with a couple of afternoon appointments following a seminar on leadership hosted by Kenexa, ‘The Science of Outcomes’.  Despite the title, the key theme for me was the emerging / additional aspects of leadership.  MC’d by Kenexa’s Director of Consulting, Dave Millner, the presentations focused on:

 

 

Leadership in a Social World

Matt Alder (recruiting futurologist, who I met recently at a Changeboard event, and will be working with again soon at TRU London 2) presented on social media and the connected organisation.

Social media is changing the way people buy things, the way they complain, and the nature of brands (“it’s like word of mouth on steroids”).

It’s changing corporate communication, recruitment and other HR practices.  In fact, it affects every area of your organisation – the opportunities are enormous.

So it’s a strategic issue, not a policy one (although having an appropriate social media policy is important too).  And the threats of not participating significantly outweigh the threats of doing so.

In response to my question, Matt explained that in his view, one new challenge for leadership in this environment is about responding to the connected generation (Gen Y) who are used to using these new social channels.  This requires leaders to understand the opportunities provided by the new techniques which are fuelling these generational differences.

 

For more on social media and the connected [social] business, see my other blog, Social Advantage.

And for comments on leadership in this environment, see my reviews of Emmanuel Gobillot’s two books.

 

 

Developing Leaders in Emerging Markets

Tommy Weir (VP of Kenexa’s Leadership Solutions and author of CEO Shift who I met at his former employer, Nakheel, on one of my trips to Dubai, and is pictured above) presented on what expat (and local) leaders need to understand about leading in emerging markets.

Just as with developed markets, success in leadership is about knowing your employees, and there are some considerable differences in employee perspectives in countries like UAE, China etc:

• A youth bulge vs an aging population
• A group orientation (in which life is designed to be a group) vs an individual orientation
• A family mentality to business (where business has until very recently been conducted in an agrarian setting and in a family context) vs a corporate mentality
• Informal learning (learning in small settings over a cup of tea) vs formal learning
• Leader vs employee-centric (patriarchal societies in which an elder person has more status).

 

 

Changing Requirements

So if employees are different do leaders need to do something different?  Clearly, yes.  Tommy Weir took us through the following changes, which I think apply to the new social world as well:

 

Imagination

Things aren’t necessarily going to be at your finger tips – you need the ability to connect different piece of information (think about the imagination needed to create the man-made islands in Dubai.

 

Magnets

You need to know how to hold onto your talent.  Matt’s connected generation are used to pressing the reset button when playing computer games – and they have similar expectations in organisations too (in both developed and emerging markets).

 

Multilingual in one language

Just because we’re all talking same language doesn’t mean we have the same understanding.

 

Rapid talent developer

Promotions are having to take place at a very early age (either because this is the only way to sustain growth, and / or because this is the expectation of the new workforce).  This increases risk – leaders need to be able to get talent developed faster – by starting earlier / condensing development or mitigating the extra risks.

 

 

The Paradox of Leadership Potential

There are some opposing trends too.  Tommy suggested leaders in emerging markets need to have abilities in navigation – they need to be expert in giving direction in an ambiguous environment.  In the social world, leaders need to avoid giving direction, and enabling the workforce to make decisions for themselves.

So how do you handle leadership in social and emerging businesses?  There are no easy answers to this one, but it’s clearly possible as I think social media’s developing nicely in the UAE at least (see my interview with H2.0).

But I think the tension between the two trends also emphasises the complexity and ambiguity involved in developing leadership skills and in particular, the difficulty predicting how these skills are going to change…

 

John Mahoney-Phillips (Global Head of Human Capital at UBS, who Sandy Campbell introduced me to briefly quite a few years ago) referred to this difficulty in predicting leadership requirements as one reason why traditional ‘9 box’ approaches to performance and potential have significant problems, and also why many organisations aren’t getting huge returns on their investments in talent.

His / Kenexa’s new Leadership Potential Quotient tool focuses instead on the attributes of individuals now which may enable them to reach leadership roles in the future:

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: Kenexa,Leadership,seminar,Science of Outcomes,Tommy Weir,John Mahoney-Phillips,UBS,Matt Alder,social media,emerging markets,potential,LPQ

 

 

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More from the CIPD conference – developing a culture of…

 

   There were quite a few sessions at the conference about developing a culture of something, eg of:

• Coaching (Jane Turner, Newcastle Business School)
• High performance (David Smith, ex-ASDA)
• Homogeneity in a global context (Mark Adams, Abbey / Santander)
• Innovation (Jaideep Prabhu, University of Cambridge)
• Integrity (Roger Steare, Cass Business School)
• Leadership (Anete Jajkowska, Microsoft)
• Resilience (Rebecca McIntosh and Claire Jelley, also at the University of Cambridge, but internal this time).

 

However, there wasn’t any linking between sessions these even thought the actions organisations need to take to develop each one of these cultures are largely the same thing!

Basically, there are two or three key steps:

 

1.    Decide what / how you want to be

Organisations can’t do everything, so the key question is which of the capabilities from the above list are most important for you?  Having a clear BHAG or mojo will make this easier for you.

Describe the required capability in detail – what behaviours and actions will you expect to see when this capability is in place?  This becomes what McIntosh and Jelley referred to as their North Star.

This is, of course, where things between each of the culture types are a bit different, and where some knowledge of the particular type of culture, and what attributes / behaviours support it, is required.

For a culture of innovation for example, Jaideep Prabhu suggests that organisations need three particular attitudes:

• Future market focus
• Willingness to cannibalise
• Tolerance for risk.

 

Once these three things are in place, innovation should follow.

Actually, I think there’s probably a bit more too it than this ( read my post on Hal Gregersen’s presentation, and listen to the last Talking HR show where I discussed developing innovative cultures with MOK from the Innovation Beehive).

 

2.   Decide on the actions which are going to lead to the required attitudes (and them do them)

For innovation, Prabhu suggests the following:

• Product champions
• Asymmetric incentives
• Internal markets.

 

Once again, I think it’s a little more complicated that this!  In fact, it’s the actions Prabhu doesn’t mention, that are common to the development of all these different types of culture that are the most important.

So, what are these?

 

Hard issues

Well, there are a few ‘hard’ issues, such as getting your ducks in a row, ie linking all of your HR and management activities to the required capability, and then monitoring these activities (see Microsoft’s system model, and people scorecard):

 

 

 

 

You might even want to produce a few T-shirts?

 

Soft issues

But the soft areas are the harder ones (if you see what I mean).

David Smith did a good job of describing some of these in connection with ASDA’s journey:

• Hire for attitude
• Communicate, communicate, communicate
• Listening
• Engaging style of management and leadership
• Remove your underperfomers, push your talent
• Recognition
• Fun / buzz and a sense of community.

 

But I think Roger Steare captured what’s at the heart of changing these soft issues even more accurately.  For him, good behaviour and culture is when:

• People stop and think
• People talk about shared values
• People unite around a common purpose
• People act fairly for the common good.

 

Out of these, it’s talking (- particularly about what’s important - see Emmanuel Gobillot’s ‘narratives’) which is at the hear of culture change.  There was a good post on this in Harvard Business / Peter Bregman’s blog How We Work, this Summer.  This put culture change down to the way we tell stories:

"You change a culture with stories. Right now your stories are about how hard you work people. Like the woman you forced to work on her wedding day. You may not be proud of it, but it's the story you tell. That story conveys your culture simply and reliably. And I'm certain you're not the only one who tells it. You can be sure the bride tells it. And all her friends. If you want to change the culture, you have to change the stories.

I told him not to change the performance review system, the rewards packages, the training programs. Don't change anything. Not yet anyway. For now, just change the stories. For a while there will be a disconnect between the new stories and the entrenched systems promoting the old culture. And that disconnect will create tension. Tension that can be harnessed to create mechanisms to support the new stories.”

 

It emphasises, I think, that much of what we mean when we talk about culture change is actually social capital (which I define as the value of the connections, relationships and conversations taking place between people in an organisation).

And which brings us straight back to the importance of Connectivity again!

 

 

Technorati Tags: Culture,coaching,high performance,global,innovation,integrity,leadership,Jane Turner,Newcastle Business School,David Smith,ASDA,Mark Adams,Abbey,Santander,Jaideep Prabhu,Roger Steare,Anete Jajkowska,Microsoft,Rebecca McIntosh,Claire Jelley,Peter Bregman,CIPD,Manchester

 

 

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CIPD09: A New Leadership Paradigm (Part 2)

 

   Live blog from the CIPD 2009 conference final panel keynote:

 

 

 

And it’s a wrap!

 

 

Also see part 1 of this post: http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.com/2009/11/cipd09-new-leadership-paradigm.html

 

Technorati Tags: Christopher Kelly,Steve Easterbrook,Shaa Wasmund,John Humphrys,Leadership,CIPD,Manchester

 

 

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CIPD09: Leading the HR function

 

   I was hoping to see Warner Burke this morning, but he seems to have disappeared off the programme, so instead I’m with Kevin White from the Home Office and Stephen Lehane from Alliance Boots talking about HR leadership.

White has conducted his own mini-survey of 70 current and future leaders in civil service HR.

Some of the quotes from the survey relating to how HR leadership is perceived today include:

• You have to have the balls
• A sense of humour is essential
• Business first, HR second
• Psycho-babble misinterpreted as knowledge
• Saying ‘no’ whilst offering options
• A high IQ is helpful
• Trying to please too much
• Inspirational and passionate
• Ignorance translated into chaos
• All mouth and no trousers.

 

You’ll know from my previous posts that I have concerns over this “business first, HR second” thing.  But I thought White expressed it nicely: We earn the right to set at the table through our expertise, but we need to get better at understanding the wider organisation to understand how to apply HR solutions.

Other thoughts:

• Senior leaders of HR may be better coming from outside of the function, but you need some structure around this
• HR makes great number 2s to their CEOs (people who are determined to be #1 may not be flexible enough (it’s not about you).

 

   Lehane suggests the following attributes:

• Positive dissatisfaction
• Leading for what you care about
• Big relationships
• Understanding the ‘real system’
• Building demand
• Active engagement
• Avoid HR
• Deliver the basics
• Enrol your Personal Support team.

 

Relationships are of course the area I’m suggesting all leaders need to focus on.  Lehane is asking about how do you make your relationships bigger and deeper?  “Think about your worst relationship and work on it.  You’ve got to invest in it to develop your ability to get things done.”

His point on building demand links to this as well.  HR needs to support things bur it needs to stand for things and lead things as well.  It needs to be bold and confident.  It shouldn’t be about selling products.  “If you need to work on getting buy-in, you’re not sufficiently embedded in your organisation, you don’t really understand what’s going on.”

 

 

Technorati Tags: Kevin White,Home Office,Stephen Lehane,Alliance Boots,HR,leadership CIPD,Manchester

 

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CIPD09: A New Leadership Paradigm

 

   I enjoyed day 2 of the CIPD Conference more than day 1 (I met some people who thought the reverse, so of course it’s a personal thing, partly depending upon which sessions you attend, and a whole heap of other things as well).  I particularly enjoyed Nick Baylis on ‘the Rough Guide to Happiness’ and Sarah Redshaw from Unilever on ‘Building Transformation through Engagement’.  I’ve not blogged on these sessions, but you can see plenty of tweets from me and others on Twitter, using the hashtag #CIPD09 (if you don’t know what this means, you really should you know).

The highlight from today should be the end of day keynote, ‘a New Leadership Paradigm’.  The outline certainly looks interesting (and just seeing John Humphrys live should be good):

 

Public respect for leaders has hit an all time low. The exposed inadequacy of those in leadership positions has brought current thinking on leadership and the established models into question.

Today, it seems that there is a substantial lack of ‘real’ and successful leaders equipped with both the resilience and capability to deal with the complexity and pressures of the ever changing global market. So are we now at a cross roads? Is this an ideal opportunity to challenge the current view of what it takes to be a good leader and to establish what behaviours and competences will be needed to lead organisations and societies into our uncertain future?

Join us to debate:

• Why and how have traditional models failed?
• How can we learn from the past and build on its successes?
• How can we re-establish leadership credibility?
• What skills and attributes will successful leaders of the future need?

 

 

I’ll be live blogging from the session, but here are a few thoughts to warm-things up.

Firstly, I think it is a really big and important question.  I do think existing leadership is failing.  Look at Hay’s stats from yesterday, or simply the end results (the recession we’re now in).  And we know that leadership accounts for a significant part of this (Jim Collins’ point that leaders can destroy organisations on their own).

I agree that resilience and capability are part of what needs to be fixed.  But I think attitudes need changing too.  We need to look again at what we mean by leadership and change the way that leaders lead.

And we’ve had a few pointers during the conference, particularly from Jim Collins on Level 5 leadership, and the need for leaders to act through others to create greatness; and Emmanuel Gobillot on the connected leader in his session on Leadershift.

Leaders may have a particular role but they achieve success through their community.

It seems to be a view that’s taking off.

I was talking about this with Jonathan Austin at the Best Companies exhibition stand yesterday too.  He had just attended a session with Edgar Schein where Schein had been talking about leaders as ‘humble engineers’ who need to work through others to make their organisations work.  And I’ve already posted on Social Advantage on Henry Mintzberg’s concept of Communityship.

Emphasising that companies are not collectives of human resources, but communities of human beings, Mintzberg suggests that traditional views of leadership isolate people in leadership positions, thereby undermining a sense of community in organisations.  He believes leadership and communityship go hand-in-hand: "A community leader is personally engaged in order to engage others, so that anyone and everyone can exercise initiative".

And it’s by developing this sense of community that individuals become bound to each other and start to want to focus on developing the productivity of their organisation as a whole, rather than acting purely out of self-interest.

 

That’d be the basis of my answer if I was on the stage today.  And it’s also one of the things I write about at my other blog, Social Advantage, and you might want to check over there.

Join me for the live blog if you can!

 

Technorati Tags: CIPD,Manchester,New Paradigm,Leadership,John Humphrys,Jim Collins,Level 5,Emmanuel Gobillot,Leadershift,Edgar Schein,Humble Engineer,Henry Mintzberg,Communityship,Jonathan Austin,best Companies

 

 

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CIPD09: Emmanuel Gobilott on Leadership

 

   Emmanuel Gobillot started his presentation with ‘Shift Happens’ – the second conference speaker I’ve seen in two weeks to do this.  Personally, I wouldn’t use it (too many people like me who’ve seen it too many times), but the video did set the context for Emmanuel’s speech quite nicely.  And I’d guess most people in this audience won’t have seen it anyway.

Also, Emmanuel has mentioned me three times in his speech, so I’m not going to be too critical am I?  Actually, I wouldn’t be critical anyway – I think Leadershift provides a very apt description of the changes I’m seeing in the world.

The presentation wasn’t a practical one, but focused on a necessary mindset change.  And a shift in the way that we lead.

The shift is based on these four challenges:

• Demographic – what happens when you’re working with people who have nothing in common with you?
• Expertise – business models are adapting (eg through mass customisation, crowdsourcing, mass participation, mass collaboration)
• Attention – where do we focus? – a need to create your own information space (including my blog apparently)
• Democratic – we’re changing the way we feel about our companies as fast as we change our clothes.

 

The impact of these changes is that your experience, expertise, efforts and power are now DEAD.

But you still need to gain the engagement, accountability and commitment of your staff?  How?  Well, unfortunately I’ve run out of time (lunch is calling) – I’ll come back and finish this post later.

 

Do call back – or visit my Social Advantage blog for some reasonably aligned thoughts on leadershift.

 

 

UPDATE WEDNESDAY MORNING: TOO MUCH RED WINE LAST NIGHT!  I’LL HAVE TO FINISH THIS OFF LATER.  MAYBE TONIGHT, MAYBE AT THE WEEKEND.  DEFINITELY BY MONDAY!

 

 

Technorati Tags: Emmanuel Gobillot,Leadershift,Connected Organsiation,CIPD

 

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