Trust and independent consulting

I've been thinking quite a bit about trust this week.  Firstly it's been coming up at a couple of conferences I've been attending virtually eg at the HR Directors Business Summit helping the Red Arrows to work as a team, but more substantially at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris as the main basis of the collaborative relationships we are trying to create.

Plus of course I've been blogging on trust following my presentation at the HRPA conference a few weeks ago including the recent Edelman Trust Barometer results.  I mentioned that trust in Canada has plummeted this year but it's fallen all around the world.  Again.

And I've been thinking about trust in the context of my own business.  Next year will be my tenth year as an independent consultant and portfolio worker.  So I was interested in the RSA's conference on self employment this week.  Speakers and tweeters at this event expressed some concern about the proportion of people working on their own for low pay levels because they've been squeezed out of the main economy, and because in general these people don't seem to invest much in their own development.

For me, I'm doing pretty well these days and am certainly investing more in my own development than any of my previous employers ever did.  My main issues tend to be things like lack of IT support when things go wrong.  Oh, and doing my own accounting, though that's my own (dumb) choice I suppose.

And the fact that my whole business relies on trust.  I try to contract with my clients carefully - in terms of really understanding what we need to achieve together and how they want to work with me.  This helps me ensure I deliver what my clients need.  I tend not to use legal contracts unless my clients need them as I don't think they actually deal with what is normally important.  And depending upon where my client is around the world, I think taking action if things go wrong can be more trouble than it's worth.  Plus I prefer to focus on making things go right than worry about what will happen if they don't.

However that can be a problem on the small number of occasions that you deal with someone who wants to take advantage.  So the real point of this post is just to flag up two training providers you don't want to put your trust in:

Mark Maritz and and Adele Olivier  

Previously trading as Vital Training / Ripple Training 

South Africa

Szilvia Kadar, Albert Harris,  Matthew Johnson, Sean Martin, Alexander (Sanyi) Daxo and Rudolph Halasz

United Market Events / UMI Events 

Based in Hungary and Slovakia but still delivering conferences and training in the UK and Spain

Neither of these providers do what they say they are going to do i.e. pay in full for services which have been provided.  It could be worse of course - at least they don't threaten 80 year old women.  That's the case with this plumber who also did shoddy work for us which we've had to take down, stole parts he had bought for us and disappeared with some money we'd prepaid him:

Jake O'Keefe

JKI Services (plumbing) 

Reading

Not too bad for nearly ten years experience I suppose and I'd still rather trust people and take the hit when I find that trust isn't deserved, that not to trust people to begin with.  But I can see what people increasingly find it difficult to trust as well.

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HRPA2015 and HR professionalism

Looking through the slides of the sessions that I missed at HRPA 2015 one of the most interesting that I missed was one on HR professionalism.  It suggests that:

'Interestingly,‘professionalism’comesupfairly frequently in HR but there is actually very little that has been written about what ‘professionalism’ means for HR professionals. 

We can take‘professionalism’to mean the set of values, attitudes, and behaviours that are expected of professionals.'

I think this is a really interesting idea, and a potentially important one.  I’d also prefer to see standards focused on our professional behaviour than on the technical aspects of doing HR.  The opportunity but also the challenge in doing this is professional behaviours gets to the heart of what it means to be in HR - eg are we about the business of HR being business, or making the business of business into HR.  Dave Ulrich’s outside in perspective suggests the former but I think it’s wrong.  So do you, apparently.

This is based on one of the other articles in People Management which I found interesting recently which was this one on making friends with the Finance Director (they did let me comment on this.)  

And particularly these survey findings:

'In the 2013 State of Talent Managers Report, conducted by the US organisation New Talent Management Network, 77 per cent of respondents said a primary reason they got into HR was to “help people grow and develop”, but only 58 per cent said they joined the profession to “help my company maximise its profitability”.'

I doubt Mark Efron will not have been impressed by these findings but I am.  Helping people grow and development is the art of HR, the heart of our profession and this is this is what we need to develop and spread.

It's why I still think Peter Cheese at the CIPD has it wrong when he notes:

' “Part of the problem is we don’t have a business language of HR,” said Cheese, pointing out that even regularly used terms, such as headcount, have no common definition. 

“The business language is principally a language of numbers so this is a really important space to be working in,” he added.'

We need to develop a new language of business focused on people, not to try to fit people into the way things are done now.  It's this I hope the reporter was referring to when they note:

'I agree that it’s vitally important for HR to make friends with finance, as the alternative seems to be letting finance take over the boardroom. As any good HR professional knows, one of a business’s most important assets is its people. And people can’t be simplified down to finance’s language of facts and figures.'

It's interesting to see tonight's #Tchat returning to Ram Charan's intervention last year as well (see my comments here.)  To me, if all we do is see ourselves as in the business of business, and use the language of current business i.e. Finance, then we can't complain when we do get taken over by Finance as what's the point in us.  We need to create a new language of people and ensure the business is in the business of HR.  Then we've got something special to contribute and our businesses will be in a much better state as well.

It's this that needs to be the basis for increasing moves towards confirming our professionalism.

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The business of new HR is love and social capital

If the business of business is HR then I suppose we can say that the business of HR is business, but then we get into a loop which suggests that the business of HR is HR which isn’t very useful.  To clarify this, I suggest the business of HR, or at least future-oriented ‘new HR’ is developing the right connections, relationships and conversations, or generating social capital.  This was the focus of the other session I presented at the HRPA’s annual conference in Toronto.

As before, I updated the session at the last minute based upon a couple of tweets I’d seen that morning - one was on TalentCulture discussing the role of love which I was able to work in quite easily as I think love is one of the highest forms of social capital.

The other addition was on the importance of hugs as it was apparently National Hugs Day although I wasn’t sure which nation this referred to - the UK, US or Canada, or perhaps North Korea using social media to start a new global breakout of ebola.  But I think hugs are part of the new HR as well.

I can’t quite bring myself to refer to love and hugs as the business of HR in the title of this post but I do think an organisation where HR, and the rest of the business, invested in love and hugs would result a rather special as well as healthy and productive workplace.

Canada is quite a huggy place I found out later - eg see this post on the conference site by Bonni Titgemeyer.  That would seem to be supported by lower individualism and  masculinity scores than the UK or US in Hofstede’s analysis of national cultures.

I wonder whether this one was reason why the conference felt so special - but what was behind the huge fall in trust in business (62 to 47%) in the Edelman’s Trust Barometer there this year?

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More paradox - the business of business is HR

I also talked about this idea about HR not being a support function, or at least not just a support function, at the HRPA conference a few weeks ago.

Like any conference, any individual's experience will depend upon the sessions they have attended, but my impression based upon the keynotes, and the syndicates I selected, was that this was a particularly 'human' (HCM / Creating Value / Artful HR etc) HR conference - not on the scale of Art of HR of course, but still at the opposite end of the spectrum to HR Technology in Las Vegas.

I thought this focus was a bit spoilt, however, by the HRPA's President referring to the conference theme, 'the business of HR' by suggesting the business of HR is optimising the business itself.  To me, that's only part, and not the most important part, of the story.

So when I was offered the opportunity to step in to present an additional session to the one that I had planned, replacing Kris Dunn, who had ben delayed, I quickly took the opportunity.  Kris had been going to talk about the 9 faces of HR and I wasn't sure what these were about, but building on the value triangle I came up with these 3 faces:

• Personnel Manager - focusing on doing stuff

• HR Manager - focusing on the business of HR being the business (which to me is about being a support function)

• People Strategist - focusing on changing the business of the business to be HR, or at least people (i.e. putting people first.)

There were a couple of people in the audience who could provide examples of my third face so I think the breakdown resonated for people.

Most of the session focused on the paradox of the last two faces - supporting the business and the business’ customers and shareholders (the business of HR is business) and leading the business too, at the same time (ensuring the business of business is HR)

As I quite often do I tried to inject some other topical content into the session which included Joe Gertstandt's thoughts on the importance of psychology, sociology and anthropology (something I've mentioned before as well.)  It's not that we don't need skills in finance, analytics but we need to be able to do the more artful stuff as well.

It's just one more HR paradox to add to the longer list which Dave Ulrich has been suggesting today.

You can see my slides and should hopefully be able to follow my argument here!

And it was interesting to note that this was actually the basis of a short debate with Kris on his HR Capitalist blog a few years back and I talked about this in the session too (since I think quite a few people were there to see Kris).

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The Ulrich model and why HR's not a Support Function

Dave Ulrich seems to be going down well at the HR Director's Business Summit in Birmingham today, as he did at Artof HR in Croatia.  But his ideas are still being knocked in many places.

One of the most recent is this article in People Management: 'Are HR business partners a dying breed?'

As normal, most of the criticisms are unfair and largely irrelevant, for example focusing on things which have nothing to do with the structure of the Ulrich model eg:

"HR remains reactive, procedurally focused and transaction-oriented."  Yes well structure (alone) isn't going to change that and may be if people acted on rather than just listened to Ulrich's advice we'd all be in a better place by now.

"When HR can’t explain its own transformation to the rest of the business, the idea of an HR business partner is dead in the water."  As it, and hopefully the HR function concerned, should be!

"The business partner role is best suited and most effective in larger organisations."  Yes of course, it was always designed for complex, multiple business unit organisations.

In any case:

“A lot of people say HR structure is a three-legged stool, but that’s not at all what the model says,” Ulrich tells People Management. “The model says your HR structure needs to match your business structure. If your business is centralised and functional, your HR function should be centralised and functional.”

Other comments are more relevant eg the suggestion than business partners come from the line, as with Ram Charan’s suggestion.  Though I still think the suggestion is wrong headed.  After all, another key principle of effective business partnering is that the HR structure need to match your HR vision.  Much of our problems come from an inappropriate vision, not an inappropriate structure.

Eg the article suggests that

“If you are an HR business partner, it’s probably best to ask yourself a few key questions: whether you understand business strategy and how HR supports it.”

If that’s how you see your job then that’s going to indicate a particular type of HR structure and I can understand why taking HR from the line is probably going to be a part of it.

But I also suggest that this is an inappropriate vision for HR...

There's nothing wrong with understanding the business strategy of course (other than the question still needs to be asked) but the key word in the above paragraph is 'supports': "whether you understand business strategy and how HR supports it.”  Did you spot it?

This is still the big problem in HR - we define ourselves as being a support function.  We're not, or at least shouldn't be, but then if we believe we are, we'll act as if we are, and we shouldn't be surprised when we remain reactive, procedurally focused and transaction-oriented!"

Of course the word support could just be a slip of the pen, but I think it tells a deeper story.

PS I tried to make some of these points in a comment on the People Management article but PM has chosen not to publish this.  I don't know why not - I was critical, but only of some of the ideas, not the article.  And I did link to a previous blog post but only because it was relevant to the discussion about Ram Charan.  Perhaps it was because that blog post refers to the HR Business Partner training I run with Symposium which competes with the CIPD (though ours is much better.)  But then PM use their article to advertise the CIPD training so why is it OK in their article but not in my comment???  (Just a side comment about the impact of poor moderation on people's propensity to comment - which I probably won't be bothering to try and do again.)

Picture credit: Ed Schipul

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Blogging from Smart Workspace Design Summit

I've already given you an update on some of the conferences I'll be speaking and blogging at between now and June and I've now got a few extra sessions to slot in between these.

One I'm particularly looking forward to is Fleming Europe's Smart Workspace Design Summit in Amsterdam from 19-20 March.  I'll be chairing a panel and blogging as well.

I really enjoyed Fleming's Gamification in HR Summit last Summer and this one looks as if it will be excellent as well.

Maybe see you there?

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HR Training Courses

As well as MOOCing, I still do quite a bit of traditional training, though I tend to be the trainer rather than the learner in these (even if I still always end up doing some learning).  I don't deliver any MOOCs but I'm sure there'll be one some day!

Most of my training courses, in the UK at least, are delivered with the wonderful team at Symposium where I'm now a fairly core member of their faculty - i.e. I deliver more of their trainings than any of their other trainers and possibly more than any of these other trainers put together.  In fact I reckon I probably train more HR people than anyone else in the UK.

The courses I deliver are all focused at a strategic level, responding to the changes in the world of work and aimed at creating high impact changes in businesses.

The sessions have also largely bedded down into the following three groupings which are shown on the three axes of the cube below:

• HR functional areas (shown on the side of the cube which faces you)
• Planing, measurement and implementation (on the right hand side)
• Opportunities for transformation (on the top)

The course all cover fairly similar content (there are only so many things you can say about HR) but each come at this from a different perspective,   Eg in the recruitment, and the performance management courses, we talk about planning, measurement, analytics and HR's roles, and the innovation and technologies related to these functional areas.  And in the technology course we talk about apps and systems, and other products and services, supporting planning, analytics and HR partnering which can be applied to recruitment and performance management and other functional areas too.

There are also close links between the courses which are shows grouped together and identified around the outside of the cube (and there a few more courses like this too - eg I'd really like the gamification and process design courses to be linked up too but couldn't get this to work in the visual.)  Eg the reward and performance management courses run (or will run) alongside each other quite nicely.

In fact with Symposium we actually run the organisation design and development courses and the planning and measurement, and analytics and reporting courses, as two day events - Transforming the Organisation and People Planning, Measurement and Analysis (although people can and so just attend one day of these and that is OK as well.)

Makes sense?

Right then, which one(s) do you want to do?  Oh, and don't worry - I don't include any visuals quite so complex as the one here in any of these training sessions!

Here are the upcoming sessions with Symposium:

And here is the full list:

HR functional areas

• Moving from Recruitment to Strategic Talent Acquisition
• Reward and Recognition which Works (in development)
• Re-engineering Performance Management
• Enhancing organisational capability through learning and development
• Transforming the organisation (2 days - organisation design and organisation development)

Planning, measurement and implementation

• People planning, measurement and analysis ( 2 days - planning and measurement, and analytics and reporting)
• Business and HR process design
• Job design for good work (in development)
• Getting to grips with HR business partnering

Opportunities for transformation

• Social media skills for HR professionals
• Using new HR technologies (in development)
• HR and innovation
• Gamification (in development)
• Making strategic decisions about people

In house delivery of these or similar sessions is also available - get in touch:

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#GamificationMOOC

One of the biggest changes in my life over the last couple of years has been the incorporate of MOOC learning.  Coursera is getting close to being the most commonly used app on my phone and I'm probably always doing about 30 different MOOCs at any one time.  That's not necessarily a good thing as I don't always get to finish and therefore get all the learning I might like.  But I do get lots of learning!

I remember of the things Dave Ulrich noted at Artof.HR was that MOOCs don't work because most people only audit them (vs getting a certificate) and auditing doesn't give accountability.  So adoption trails away.  Well, I think that depends upon the MOOC, and of course and individual's level of attention and interest.  And as I wrote earlier, does it matter anyway, as long as they're still learning.  (I accept it may matter to a MOOC provider but it's a great boost to the world's total amount and rate of learning.)

One of the MOOCs I started last year was Kevin Werbach's Gamification course on Coursera.  You may be able to see from the screen shot that I only managed to get into lesson 1.1.  That's no criticism of Kevin - I was just very busy at the time.  But it did look as if it it was going to be a great MOOC and I liked the way Kevin described it at the Gamification World Congress in Barcelona later in the year.

Basically the MOOC is full of projects, challenges and interactive sessions which targets participants' interests and skillsets.  For example he presented a slide with a picture like to one above, next to another from later in the course to see if participants picked up what had changed (presumably not, since I've learnt from Dan Ariely's Coursera course that we don't tend to notice these sorts of things.)  Even when it's a lot more significant than a Boggle game disappearing off a shelf.  (The Human Zoo have got some great tests on this sort of thing too.)

I.e. Kevin's MOOC has been gamified and that enables him to democratise involvement and people stay on board.  More people, anyhow.

Kevin's suggestions were directed at Education but businesses are applying MOOC so they do apply directly to HR too.  But my main learning from all of this is about creating the right environment and culture and then measuring this - and not worrying too much about completion rates for particular programmes.

Oh, and the thing that reminded me about this post I'd drafted last May was that Kevin's doing another session of the gamification MOOC on Coursera - starting now.  So here's your chance to learn about MOOCs and gamification in one go.  What's not to like?

• My gamification posts
• Kevin's MOOC

See you there!

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Stephen Dubner - HR Freakonomics at #HRPA2015

This morning at the HRPA conference we're hearing from Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics telling some stories about using data for decision making.  Stephen suggests there are some great parallels between these stories and what we have to do in HR - eg how much we can know about people etc.

We're really good at using data which confirms what we want to be true rather than what is really true.  We need to ignore declared and focus on revealed preferences.  Eg declared and actual hand hygiene rates after visiting the washroom are different - 30% of men don't wash (Stephen knows because he lingers in washrooms!). But if the non washers were in this room sitting with their friends and colleagues they wouldn't raise their hands to admit it.

HR tends to survey people about their preferences but there is a problem in doing this - a gap even within ourselves about what we do and what we think we're going to do.  Predicting future even our own own future is really hard.  Eg if price of gasoline rises 10c/gallon people say they would drive less but when price increases people don't drive less.

It's important to admit what we don't know and then find a way to get some data.  Then find some way to change behaviour.

Eg when researchers ask nurses to spy on doctors hand hygiene rate falls from 70 to 20%.  One hospital wanted to increase rate to 100%.  Sending out a memo didn't help.  Posses hiding in rooms jumping out, clapping and giving out a $10 Starbucks card when they heard doctors using the sink sounded stupid but we shouldn't underestimate the power of free (conference swag anyone?).  No doctors ever turned award down and started gamifying the system eg turning on the taps when they heard the posse was on their floor.  But it didn't work - needle didn't move.  If you offer incentives in same cases it can deincentivise people to do this on other times.  Then the bosses thought about themselves and realised their hands weren't clean.  They started putting up pictures of their hands and for some reason this incentive worked!  The conclusion - human behaviour change is hard.

Don't moralise, preach etc but find a way for people to do something differently without even thinking about it.  Eg new design and technology has changed hand hygiene in hospitals.  Rather then relying on doctors changing they've solved the problem in another way.  In Britain we have banned doctors from wearing ties because these act as giant germ swabs.

We need people to be able to think and act differently.  Eg Takeru Kobayashi's hot dog eating success.     Key lessons from this were:

• Redefine problem you are asked to solve - often the symptom not the real problem.  If you asked a different question you come up with a whole different heap of solutions.
• Ignore ie don't give any mental allegiance to previous approaches.  Vs we do things this way because we've always done them this way.  Ignore artificial limits.
• Always soak our buns in warm water!

Or take Keith Chen at Yale who wanted to investigate people's way of managing money - people often treat money differently to how they say they are going to use it.  So he set up an experimental monkey economy.  This involved a communal chamber in which the monkeys lived which then came into a separate cage for the experiment and were given a coin which they could switch for food.

These monkeys think about food and sex and he wanted to add money to this list.  So could the monkeys declare their preferences by what they spend money on?  It turned out they could.  But he then injected a price shock into the economy.  If the cost of a monkey's food doubled over night would they buy less of it?

This just causes a bank heist and the monkey won't give the money bank.  Chen tried to buy it back with lods of food which just taught the monkeys that the best ways to get food is to steal the money.  Then the monkeys start to trade the money between themselves leading to the first ever case of monkey prostitution!

Some great examples here and although we did not get on to Freaky HR it does not take too much effort to start thinking about some examples of where Dubner's freakiness might apply.  Performance management anyone?

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Empathy at #HRPA2015

I'm in Toronto at the HRPA's Annual Conference - no arctic storms this year.

And we're starting at a jet lag tolerant 7.00am, though since it's dark outside it still feels a lot earlier than the 2.00pm it shoul feel like.

Anyway, here's Roman Krznaric on the six habits of highly empathetic people. 

Empathy is the ability to step into shoes of someone else and see things through their eyes.  A topical issue with eg Obama talking about an empathy deficit in the US.

We all have it, we can learn it, and it's the basis of social relationships.  It creates the emotional bonds which makes life worth living - without it we are emotionally tone death.  It's also the basis for leadership, collaboration and helps erode conflict to create a more democratic culture.

There is:

• Affective empathy - shared emotional response - mirroring (not sympathising with) others emotional response

• Cognitive empathy - taking the perspective of others and trying to work out what it is like to be them so we can respond appropriately to others (as George Bernard Shaw says don't do to others what you'd like them to do to you - the 'golden rule' - they may have different tastes)

But one research study shows empathy in US falling 40% over last few years.

So we need to focus on developing the habits of highly empathetic people:

1. Switch on your empathetic brain - we are competitive etc but we are also human and supportive eg mirror neutrons.  But although this is hard wired we can also change and improve.
2. Make the imaginative leap - think about how other people would respond - this gets harder for more senior people in businesses.
3. Practice the craft of conversation and empathetic listening - the basis of nonviolent communication) - listen out for someone's feelings as well as their needs and be present for these (Marshall Rosenberg - the length of negotiation is cut in half simply by asking each negotiator to accurately repeat what the previous speaker has said.)
4. Seek experiential adventures that can change your life or at least organisation -
5. Travel in your armchair - even this retires our brain paths
6. Inspire a revolution - keep the bigger picture in mind.  Empathy opens the door and then rules and procedures wedge it open.

We also need to build outrespection as well as introspection (and empathy is the ultimate art form in building outrospection!)

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