Dave Ulrich and the Why of Work

 

   I’ve finally got around to reading Ulrich’s new book, the Why of Work.

It’s an interesting read, dealing with a complicated area and there aren’t many books in the mainstream business world that deal with this idea of identify, at least from a how vs what perspective – or what I’ve been calling (and since before Marshall Goldsmith started to) an organisation’s mojo.

I like the idea that a focus on meaning needs to be supported other aspects of organisational management - clarity about identity and purpose; positive relationships and work settings; engagement; learning and civility.  And I like some of the ideas contained within the book chapters on each of these areas as well.

This includes the focus on signature strengths - I agree it makes sense to identify and match individuals’ strengths to the organisation’s capabilities.  And on purpose – I like the breakdown into the different categories of insight, achievement and connection (which you could match to Tony Hseih’s focus on meaning plus progress, control and connectedness).

It’s this chapter on connection (Whom do I travel with?) that I think provides the best part of the book.  Connection is important to engagement and performance (which is why I’m still surprised how many engagement surveys miss the focus out).

A substantial proportion of the chapter deals with the need to make and respond to bids, or requests for attention.  Ulrich uses a tennis metaphor to explain this (with the proviso that the aim is to encourage a volley not to defeat an opponent):

“Think about a bid for attention you have made today.  What did you do?  How did the other person receive your bid?  Did he or she keep the volley going?  What made a bid for your attention today?  Did you return the serve of let the ball bounce off the court while you looked something up on the internet or rushed to meet a deadline?  We have encouraged people to set a goal of having at least one meaningful encounter with a person each day.  While this sounds easy, it often requires consciously making and receiving bids rather than falling back into personal isolation.”

 

One thing I don’t like about the chapter is Ulrich’s analysis of social media – that tweets and blogs are anonymous and therefore remove the personal touch so central to meaningful relationships.  E-communication may reduce face-to-face contact and visual cues for reading each other, but provide lots of other support for relationships building instead.  And it’s simply not true that this emphasises hostility, partisanship backstabbing and cutthroat competition.  I suspect Ulrich’’s just not been using social media enough to understand the benefits – a point I made to Lynda Gratton when she expressed similar sentiments to Ulrich earlier this year.

 

So it’s a good book but I wish it could have had a slightly different focus, or been a bit sharper really.  The problem is that after having read it, I’m still not quite sure what it was about.

So it’s partly about Meaning.  Ulrich suggests that we all work for meaning, which I don’t think is true but shouldn’t detract from its importance.  As Ulrich suggests, meaning can lead to inherent value for employees and market value for their employer (“making sense can also make cents”).

And it’s partly about Abundance.  Ulrich defines an abundant organisation as a work setting in which individual coordinate their aspirations and actions to create meaning for themselves, value for stakeholders, and hope for humanity at large.  It has enough and to spare of the things that matter most: creativity, hope, resilience, determination, resourcefulness, and leadership.  But the book doesn’t really explain how a focus on meaning leads to these things and I would have liked to have read more about how meaning relates to an abundancy vs scarcity mentality or deficit thinking.

And it’s partly about organisational capability: what an organisation is good at doing (“Apple has the capability to innovate, Disney entertains, Marriott has the capability to serve, and Walmart delivers low prices”).  I’m just not clear whether Ulrich sees abundance as the activities which lead to these outcomes, whether it another outcome along with innovation, speed etc, or whether, like meaning itself, it’s something that’s needed for this system to work effectively, ie to enable organisational, management and HR activities to lead to the desired outcomes.  In my view, in different ways, it can be all three, and I think that’s part of the problem with the book.

The result of this confusion is that the book ends up being a list of nice-to-have’s.  For example, although I’m a big believer in the importance of intelligent workplace design, I struggle to see how keeping the office windows clean (p149) supports meaning, abundance or organisational capability!

 

One further observation: Ulrich suggests he’s written the book for business leaders, not for HR, who already tend to understand the need for meaning.  Two things about this:  Firstly, if business leaders don’t understand the need for employee engagement then they’re not going to understand the need for Ulrich’s even bigger and rather amorphous concept of abundancy.  I think it needed to be much clearer and more outcome focussed for them.

And secondly - and this is a general point rather than one about the book but may still worth making here – I think Ulrich’s observation reinforces my own belief that HR can only go so far by becoming more like the rest of the business.  We also need to develop our businesses to become more like (the best bits of) HR.

 

You may also be interested in my review of Meaning Inc.

 

Technorati Tags: Dave,Wendy,Ulrich,Why of Work,meaning,abundance,book,review

 

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(British) Values

 

    The RSA hosted another good event, this time on British values, this week.

The background to this debate is Gordon Brown's desire to be clearer about the rights and responsibilities of British citizenship and what it means to be British (potentially to disguise his own Scottish nationality from English voters, although it could also be seen to be an extension of Tony Blair's cool Britannia).  'The Governance of Britain', published in July last year, proposed to "work with the public to develop a British statement of values".  It is currently intended that these will then form part of a new 'bill of rights'.

I'm not going to dwell on what these values should or might be (I recommend an article in last year's Prospect magazine to readers who may be interested in this).  But I do want to share some thoughts about the appropriateness of this quest and the current consultation process, which I think relate to the development of organisational values too.

The main concern at the RSA seemed to be the difficulty in setting values at a national level, and particularly for Britain, which since WW2 has shied away from the idea of having a self identity and lacks a formal constitution (it was even suggested that it would be 'unBritish' to have a set of British values).

It is also recognised that it will be difficult to define a set of values which are:

• Specific enough to have some meaning but still sufficiently inclusive to include the full, diverse population of the country .
• Based on our aspirations but still grounded in the way people act today (which will also be difficult given that MORI's recent research found that no more than half of British people agreed that we display behaviours aligned with equality, fairness and responsibility - and that only 18% said we exhibited the characteristics of tolerance and politeness)
• And that the values must remain fluid and enable change (to be like porous lime mortar rather than cement which will crack and let in water the first time it rains).

 

These are of course, similar issues to the ones organisations need to face when defining values, but even more difficult to deal with as there is no opportunity to align them with a centrally imposed direction.

But do we / organisations need values anyway?

I will admit that I am not generally a fan of values (I will of course support an organisation to develop them if that's what it believes it needs to do).  And I think this wariness comes from two main experiences.

Firstly, I don't think I've ever changed my own values because of the values of an organisation I've worked for.  I may have altered my behaviour, although even here, probably only very slightly.  But to the extent that I have, this has been based upon my understanding of what I need to do to be effective, or to be perceived as being effective, and hasn't altered my own beliefs about what I think are important.

Secondly, in the most successful change experiences I've been involved in, we deliberately haven't used them.

Still, I'm aware of other experiences where they have been used successfully.  I wrote about one such example in my book - the use of values to articulate what was being seen as important at Skandia in the UK (in this case: 'creativity', 'passion', 'commitment, 'courage' and 'contribution)- and which did seem to have changed people at a deeper level than simply their behaviour.  One reason for this success seemed to be that the values were expressed as pictures rather than through words.

There are also some good examples of values based change in one of my favourite texts, YSC's Meaning Inc, which I reviewed last year.  For example Sainsbury's values ('getting better every day', 'great service drives sales', 'individual responsibility - team delivery', 'keep it simple', 'respect for the individual' and 'treat every £ as your own') which were written up as a story.

YSC suggest that the use of generic sounding values statements are in decline and "businesses instead  are developing values statements that articulate more precisely the behaviour they believe is core to the culture and will make for a successful working environment".  They provide Siemens values statements as examples ('I am a good colleague', 'I am a team player - I feel responsible', 'I keep my promises - I only promise what I can keep').

I don't think YSC, and I certainly don't, mean that attitudinal change is unimportant.  I just don't think written lists of deeply held beliefs and values is the way to get there.  To the extent they are, the value comes from the process of development and communication (hence the successful use of pictures and stories in the examples above), rather than from the list itself.  (So here at least, I think the fact that the UK's government has given control of the 'British values' consultation process to the people, is a very positive sign.)

But most successful examples of values don't use 'attitudinal values' (as in 'I value...').  Instead, they simply clarify what the particular organisation believes is important, and the behaviours it requires from its employees to support this prioritisation.

A good example is Ritz Carlton Hotels which issue all staff with a card on which one side states the corporate motto ('We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen') and on the other lists 20 basic rules, which translate the credo into real behaviour ('Smile - we're on a stage', 'Escort guest rather than pointing our direction', etc).

So what we should be doing, rather than trying to draw out something about the organisation's (and therefore its' employees) identity, is to specify what the organisation holds to be important, and which can support its competitive advantage.

And I think what I'm saying here, is that organisation's need a clear idea of their own mojo, which can then be translated into employee behaviour.

That then leads us onto a discussion about British Mojo, which I think is a slightly different one to that currently undergoing consultation.  Perhaps this is about the 'wit and ingenuity' that London Major Boris Johnson has predicted we will bring to the 2012 Olympics?

And the relevant behaviours are then about innovation, entrepreneurship, flexibility etc - attributes that I think are much more central to the success of our financial services driven economy than hopeful ideas about tolerance, fairness and equality. 

 

Technorati Tags: British Values,The Governance of Britain,Meaning Inc,mojo,Boris Johnson,Olympics

The Search for Greening

In my last post (The Search for Meaning), I wrote about the first approach to developing mojo: the development of a compelling strategy based upon a key purpose that is internally rather than externally generated.

I think the second approach is to develop a complementary theme to the main focus - one that is not directly related to achieving the organisation's mission (like leadership, innovation etc), but can act alongside this to provide meaning and focus.

An obvious opportunity is to develop a focus on CSR and in particular on green business / HR.  But for this to serve as mojo, this complementary focus needs to be really high profile and to perculate through everything that the organisation does.

The term, green HR, is often used to simply to make existing HR services and approaches sound more strategic or innovative, or to very small changes in policy. But I think it can be a lot more too.

The issue is that for a lot of organisations, their main environmental footprint is caused by the action of their employees, rather than in manufacturing, transportation or other activities with a more recognised environmental impact.  And even in manufacturing and other industries, employee behaviours will still have a significant impact.

So the fact that many employees who have high green standards for themselves at home don't apply the same requirements to themselves at work (only 40% of employees think that it's our responsibility to protect the environment during office hours) is a problem.

Green HR to me is about how employees can be encouraged to change their behaviour, supporting and potentially leading the wider environmental management changes within organisational.

I attended a Deloitte dbrief webinar,  'Going Green', recently.  This identified a dual role for HR in promoting sustainability.

First, there is the role HR plays in driving results through its own activities:

• "How do we compete for talent?
• Gen Y? OMG!?!
• What do employees care about?
• How can green engage employees?
• Is green helping deliver on my employer brand promise to employees?"

I think this role relates to often fairly simple changes in policy, most often associated with recruitment and reward, and also often geared to taking advantage of national / European or other legislation.  An example would be B&Q stores offers discounted rates for home energy monitors (as an employee benefit).

And second, HR also supports green business by acting as a strategic partner to the business in this area:

• "What does sustainability mean to the business?
• Are people aware of our sustainability vision / results?
• Are our sustainability efforts enhancing our reputation?
• How do we reward people who 'go green'?"

I think this relates to organisations engaging their people to support broader changes to have less impact on the environment across the business (eg reducing waste, energy etc through manufacturing).  An example would be Ford's energy awareness campaign for employees ‘Energy is everyone’s job!’

This is a useful distinction, but I think there's a third role as well, which is about HR leading the business to develop a focus on green behaviour as something that will help the company's sustainable competitive position by engaging employees, and by acting as a source of meaning and motivation, ie as organisational mojo.

Employees are increasingly searching for meaning, and also increasingly require that this basis for meaning comes from the operations of the organisation rather than its competitive / financial success.  A focus on green issues is one possible way of providing this meaning.  HR can take a lead by raising this opportunity and aligning management and HR processes around these green issues.

My favourite example of this is BSkyB which I posted on last year.  Green-ness has become a core part of what BSkyB is about (rather than just delivering broadcasting), and HR has played a fundamental role in making this happen: raising the issues, supporting employee behaviour change and adding a green tint to all HR processes.

Now that really is green HR.

 

(I'll also be talking about these issues at Personalvetardagarna in Malmo, Sweden on 15th October.  Let me know if you'd like to meet me there, want a copy of my presentation etc...)

 

Technorati Tags: Green HR,Meaning,Organisation capability,Personalvetardagarna

The Search for Meaning

I've previously posted about the increasing importance of organisational capability, and how this needs to be developed around a core theme, purpose, differentiator or mojo which is internally rather than externally generated (as is generally the case in BHAGs for example).

I explained that the first type of mojo is something that is absolutely central to organisational strategy and which is going to make this strategy real and achievable.

Mojo does this by providing meaning for people working in the organisation, in the way that an externally focused goal (eg 'beat the competition') often struggles to do in the longer term.

A good example is GE's leadership brand.  This is absolutely key to the company's success (and my bet is on it recovering) and also provides a focus for its staff (at least its managerial employees).  It provides a major reason why you might apply to join, and helps clarify what's important to the company when you're there.

Mojo provides a basis for developing best fit rather than simply best practice processes (as in Zappos' WOW! customer service, Toyota's collaborative nerve system, Yahoo!'s life engine, Reckitt Benckiser's innovation, AXA's financial planning and BP's peer assists.  Some of these examples look a bit tarnished now, but I think that's fine.  All mojo can do is to stack the odds in your favour, but there are still a whole load of other factors which are going to influence the success of your business too.

And mojo provides the basis for your employee value proposition - outlining what's important to you and therefore what you think you can offer or what sort of meaning you can provide, and increasingly attracting employees who will value this offer.

Lucy Kellaway noted recently that lack of meaning is the most popular problem submitted to her agony aunt column in the FT:

"I am used to people telling me that their jobs are meaningless. In fact this, is the most popular problem that readers submit. Lawyers, bankers, fund managers and all sorts of people with grand jobs write in with the same complaint: the money may be good but where is the meaning? How can I make a difference, they wail.

There are two things that give work meaning. First is the satisfaction that comes from the work itself. I am lucky in this way: I (mostly) enjoy putting one word in front of another, and that is meaning enough for me. Yet this sort of simple pleasure in the job is not open to most people: the majority of jobs are either boring or beastly or both. The second strand is the more dangerous one. That meaningful work must be somehow worthwhile; that in doing it we must feel that we are making a difference. This way of thinking can only lead to despair. If you start asking if your job is worthwhile, you have to conclude it isn’t. Viewed this way, all work is pretty meaningless, whether you are journalist, banker, busker or government minister."

She refers to a Work Foundation report and summarises its conclusions as:

"Meaning is a subjective thing: what counts as meaningful work to one person won’t to another. This means that companies, for all their insistence on 'employee engagement programmes', can’t create meaning and should not try."

This can't be the right answer!  Yes, different people seek different types of meaning, but this doesn't mean organisations can't and shouldn't provide an environment where individuals are able to create meaning.

And I think that it is increasingly by focusing on what a company sees as important (on its mojo) that is the way to do this.

Technorati Tags: Meaning,Organisation capability,BHAG

The power of Mojo

A little while ago, I posted on the the need for organisations to have an internal purpose: a clear big idea about the organisation that increasingly needs to be internally rather than externally generated (ie about how the organisation's going to be rather than what it's going to do).

I linked this need to growing interest in self-actualisation and increasing cynicism over corporate messages within employees.

I want to use this post to extend on the idea, and will then further develop it over the next few days.

So firstly, why mojo? The word apparently traces its origins back to Congo, Africa from the word moyo, meaning 'soul' or 'life force'. More recently, it is often applied to that often elusive quality (magic, personal charisma, energy) that sets a person apart from everyone else.

This is what I'm talking about on an organisational level too - the organisation's real central essence that gives it its life and character and distinguishes it from elsewhere.

And I think there are two types of organisational mojo - the first of which is something absolutely central to organisational strategy and which is going to make this strategy real and achievable. The second is a complementary focus to the main business strategy - something that will fit beside and support (if not drive) the strategy, but which will be more motivating for employees.

More shortly...

The need for an Internal Purpose

In previous posts, I've written about the increasing importance of internal capability to business competitiveness.

I've also become increasingly interested, and have been talking with a couple of clients about developing the core theme, purpose or differentiator at the centre of this capability (and other approaches to gaining competitive advantage).

Firstly, just to point out that having a core purpose is recognised as important in most reviews and theories about strategy. For example, the CIPD’s report on the ‘black box’, 'Understanding the People and Performance link states:

“One of the keys to the HR-performance link is the existence of a ‘Big idea’, a clear mission underpinned by values and a culture expressing what the organisation stands for and it trying to achieve. In Jaguar, for example, the Big Idea is quality, in Nationwide it is ‘mutuality’. In our case studies the existence of the Big idea was strongly linked to employee commitment.”

The report suggests that the Big Idea needs to be embedded, connected (internally and externally), enduring, collective, and measured and managed.

Probably better known is the concept of a BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal – pictured) in Collins and Porras’ 1996 book, ‘Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies'. They explain that:

“A true BHAG is clear and compelling, serves as a unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a clear catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organisation can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines.”

However, most Big ideas / BHAGs relate to beating the competition (strategic positioning) or developing new processes / technology (core competencies), not to internal purposes (organisational capability).

I think that this is something organizations need to look at, and is becoming increasingly important given increasing focus on self actualisation (clearly demonstrated by the millenials but increasingly by other generations as well) and growing cynicism with big business, both of which are evidenced through an increasing search for meaning (see next post).

Private equity and people management

Last week's Economist also ran a good article on mergers and acquisitions and private equity, Whither the great wave?.

The last five years have provided a great ride for private equity but this is now entering a more challenging period. Activity has slowed dramatically following the credit crunch and returns are likely to reduce.

However, private-equity firms are still sitting on record amounts of capital and continue to be able to raise large sums and so smaller deals should continue.

I think a more important reason for being bearish about private equity's future is about whether this model provides a sustainable way of running organisations.

Firstly, as more people seek meaning in their work, do private equity firms and the companies they manage provide working experiences and environments that meet people's needs? Particularly as more millenials enter the workforce? I think less and less people are motivated purely by cash. And a heavy financial focus doesn't usually lead to very wonderful behaviour.

Business Week also had a good article on this last year, Perform or Perish, and an even better cover story podcast.

In this, Business Week journalists discussed two types of employee:

• Cheaters, whose traits are aggressiveness, insistence on high standards, the ability to hold people to account, being driven by numbers


• Lambs, whose traits are listening, developing talent, being open to criticism, treating people with respect (it's not that cheaters can't do these things, but it won't be their strengths).

It's rather pejorative language, because you need some of both sets of behaviours to be fully effective. I'm a natural cheeta but have learnt that lanb behaviours are often more successful over the longer term.

However, Business Week quoted research finding that only cheaters survive in a private equity environment.

Secondly, private equity reduces the ownership of the organisation experience by employees, except at the very top. So it acts in an opposite direction to Charles Handy's call to separate company funding and ownership.

And thirdly, private equity firms only make investments for liquidity, none for the future (for example, creating value / human capital management). So given its required focus on the long-term, I can’t see talent management for example, ever succeeding in this environment.

These are the reasons I expect 2008 to be a less successful year for private equity than 2007.

HR - it's the Meaning, not the Numbers

Scott McArthur has some great new posts on his blog. Referring to Meaning Inc, Scott suggests that the key challenge faced by HR (HCM?) is to provide an environment in which meaning is created.

I particularly like his post, HR and the business delusion, not just for the drawings, but because I think the post hits the nail on the head: HR may need to have a good understanding of the business and its numbers to gain credibility across the business, but this isn't what enables it to maximise its impact on the business.

In my terminology, an understanding of the numbers are the basis for HRM, not for HCM. But whatever we call this, the future direction of HR an important issue for the HR community to resolve.

See also my posts:

• HR's role in strategic people management
• Management's human touch
• Talking metrics and people evaluations is not enough
• Talking metrics and people evaluations is not enough 2
• Which direction beyond HR?
• Can / should HR take on more accountability?
• Can / should HR take on more accountability? 2
• Jose Mourinho: HR business partner

The meaning of this blog

One more post on my reivew of Meaning Inc. (here and here).



As well as noting how organisations can provide meaning for employees, Bains et al also list seven criteria to test for yourself whether you are living a meaningful life:

• Do I have an invigorating sense of purpose that ignites my passions?
• Do I have aspirations beyond living a high-quality and pleasurable life?
• If others were asked would they be able to identify my core values?
• Do I have a distinctive set of strengths that make me feel unique?
• Do I feel I connect in a meaningful way with others around me?
• Do the aspirations and goals that I have stretch me?
• If my current dreams were to come true would I feel that I have had a worthwhile life?
  
  

I thought sharing my responses against one of these questions (I think answers to all seven would be rather repetitive and probably quite dull) might provide an interesting contrast to sorts of things people share when participating in the random facts meme.

So, do I have an invigorating sense of purpose that ignites my passions?

Yes, absolutely. I believe the way that organisations manage their people is changing. That organisations are going to have to start offering people truly valuable experiences that support their individual value requirements. And that line managers are going to have to start truly managing and coaching their people. I see my purpose being to help nudge this change along a little bit faster. And my blog is part of this.

Spiky leaders and spiky companies

In Meaning Inc, Gurnek Bains notes that many of the best business leaders are 'spiky': they possess incredible and distinctive strengths, but also some similarly significant limitations. Leadership development should not try to develop clones, but help people be true to themselves, and to leverage their own strengths to the maximum possible.

This conclusion is supported by Gallup's work on strengths and also many of my own projects in executive assessment and development.

However, I would build on this and suggest that the best organisations are often 'spiky' too. For example, they don't try to provide meaning through all of the seven means identified by Bains. So Semco doesn't try to provide meaning through an invigorating purpose, it is enough that it has such a strong spike within rewards and work-life balance.

The consequence of this is that HR 'best practice' has limited application. Instead, organisations need to develop 'best fit' strategies that align to a particular organisation's spike.

Different people are attracted by different organisations offering different types of meaning. For example, see Lynda Gratton's recent article in the Harvard Business Review, What It Means To Work Here, where she six different ways in which work engage different individuals:

• Expressive legacy


• Secure progress


• Individual expertise and team success


• Risk and reward


• Flexible support


• Low obligation and easy income.

Having a clear focus on how an organisation s going to create meaning and engage employees allows it to target the people for whom this type of meaning is important.

Meaning Inc.

Ruth, a colleague at Buck, loaned me a copy of Gurnek Bains’ Meaning Inc., which outlines the learning YSC have gained from their many psychology consulting projects.

The book provides more valuable insights about how organisations can create an environment that will enable their talent to thrive. It contrasts with Ricardo Semler’s perspective, described in a previous post that people expect too much out of work. Bains argues that:

“Work is quite simply too important to be put in the get through it cynically’ bin. People care about their work. They want the issues that concern them to be tackled. They want to feel good about a part of their life that takes up over 50 per cent of their waking hours. In short, they want their work to be meaningful.”

Bains explains that meaning is experienced when we are able to connect our thoughts or activities with something else in a way that creates a sense of relevance or context. It is unlikely that meaning will be created if that something else is simply financial, or even commercial:

“Employees often feel senior executives are only concerned with the share price, their options and how they might look. Even when people feel that their senior executives are motivated in an authentic sense by company goals, many increasingly ask the question of whether driving brand X at the expense of a competitor’s brand Y is really what their life should be about.”

The main seven ways that meaning can be created are:

• An invigorating purpose


• Belonging


• Rewards and work-life balance


• Self-actualisation


• Connecting with organisational DNA, values, history


• Living a positive brand


• Clarity of impact.
  
  

To provide employees with meaning, companies also have to have:

• Courage to set extremely stretching goals


• An innovative approach to benefits and the treatment of people which makes them feel special


• A culture that allows people to be themselves and to feel they are personally making a difference and utilising their distinct talents.
  

It is also important that companies create meaning in authentic and non-formulaic ways:

“Skin deep and, at times, contradictory and half-hearted efforts to create meaning are, as we will show later, all too common in the corporate world. They risk raising the appetite for something which business may not be able to deliver.”

I think there are some great points in this book that should help organisations find ways to provide their people with more meaning, and which should then lead onto increased engagement, discretionary behaviour and organisational success.