We Can Do Better!

Hiring, Employee Engagement, and Other Epic Failures

Some days you just wonder. I will soon be “celebrating” almost my fourth decade as a human resources practitioner, executive and management consultant and when I watch what is happening I continue to be a bit frustrated and disappointed.

Employers still whine about candidates and employees. The current target seems to be the Millennial generation. They are selfish, lazy, demanding, blah, blah, blah.

Truth is I haven’t found that to be any truer of them than any other generation.

 They are more distrusting based on what they observed and are more willing to be explicit about their expectations, but I find that when their purpose is aligned with your purpose they will work their asses off.

Edward Deming back in the Forties as part of the Total Quality Movement suggested treating employees more like partners and less like human capital (we just called them labor back then) and we are still at a place where around 30% of the workforce rates themselves as highly engaged. It has been 70 years!

I know that there are those who say employee engagement isn’t real, but those are the people who approach it as a program or event rather than as a culture. I remember when quality was treated the same way- we inspected it in at the end of the process rather than building it in.

When I look at a lot of hiring and selection processes I give us a D-. We have lots of automated tracking systems and other technologies that have dumbed down our candidate sourcing process, but we still focus very much on two dimensional hiring. Look at the average job description.

In 1935 Congress passed the Wagner Act, better known as the National Labor Relations Act, legalizing employees right to join a union and collectively bargain with their employer because employees and employers don’t trust each other or perceive they share a common purpose and interests.

A very recent survey concluded that almost 50% of employees across the board generationally don’t trust leadership, their supervisor, or their team mates.

The NLRA and Civil Rights Act of 1964 were the most important things to happen to human resources professionals in the history of employer-employee relations because they imposed laws and sanctions for not doing it right. They also made HR relevant to management for the first time.

If you ask human resources practitioners today what the most important role they play in their organization, a significant majority will tell you it is ensuring compliance with State and Federal laws and regulations.

The others spend their time addressing what Michelle Berg refers to as “shitty leadership”.

No surprise there. Sixty percent of leadership candidates seek those roles to make more money, not better the organization or help develop staff.

Just as disappointing is when I hear that the attributes that make someone a good leader like emotional intelligence, emotional balance, and self- awareness are inherently feminine, that women are genetically programmed to be better leaders.

I find that as offensive as suggesting that African Americans genetically have more rhythm than white people or people of Latin-Hispanic descent are genetically more volatile and emotional.

I have not given up hope, there are just some things we need to do differently.

·         We need to acknowledge that trust is the foundation of every solid relationship.

·         We need to acknowledge that Commitment is far superior to compliance. People want to buy into your purpose.

·         We need better leaders and we need to recognize technical competence is the minimum not the standard and that effective leadership can be taught and must be reinforced.

·         We need to recognize that the best way to create highly engaged organizations is to build it in rather than try to bolt it on. That true engagement is about alignment. It is a culture not a program.

There is a great opportunity for Human Resources professionals to lead this charge. Compliance is a baseline.

I propose a new role for HR-

• HR helps the organization answer the Why question posed in Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle.

• HR helps identify the values and attributes that are fundamental to and congruent with the Why. As I have said before creating alignment for people who already share your values is much easier than trying to “fix” people.

• HR helps identify and deploy the competencies that reinforce the performance that we desire and ensures that those are practiced consistently across the organization. Those include setting expectations, giving feedback, course correcting, and coaching among others. Those competencies belong to managers, not HR.

I would like to see human resources professional demonstrate the following:

• Technical Skills- The proliferation of rules and regulations has indeed made the profession more complex as has the application of technology, phenomenon like social media, outsourcing and global workforces, and related challenges. I needed to be technically proficient, not only in our craft, but to understand the businesses and organizations I served.

 • Project Management Skills- Similar to the Total Quality Management movement I believe human   resource competency in core areas needs to be deployed broadly and deeply rather than be seen as a departmental competency. It is fundamental to the management/leadership role, not just human resources departments!

   • Facilitation Skills-  We need to help our client organizations recognize that by building relationships with individuals as people first and resources second we can create enormous gains in sustainability, productivity, and profitability through alignment of organizational and individual goals.

Based on my experience I would also challenge leaders to take some additional steps:

• Ask your internal and external customers how you can help them and make them more successful. If you don’t think you have any internal customers give me a call. We have work to do.

• Ask your staff what obstacles you can remove to make their job more efficient or easier.

• Ask the people on the front line how your products and services can be enhanced or modified to make them easier to address their needs.

• Ask your peers how they think you and your group are doing. You are an internal service provider.

• Ask your boss how you can help them. This may seem a little obvious, but you will be surprised from how you communicate to taking a task off their list can make a difference.

I would also challenge you to become a champion of commitment over compliance and helping create an environment that encourages true engagement.

How do you do that?

• Hire the right people

• Incorporate the elements of commitment rather than compliance.

• Be flexible about process and ruthless about principle.

• Build on a foundation of trust.

• Remember it is all about relationships.

My experience has taught me that overcoming inertia is one of the most difficult things to overcome in creating meaningful change in an organization is inertia or complacency. If you go back and look at some of the opportunity costs I identified there really is a role to play for human resources to become a catalyst and change agent.

Most HR practitioners want respect and opportunity. This is the path I followed from HR to the C suite and to a role as a successful management consulting career. I am not a rocket scientist. If I could manage it, you can as well.

That Leadership Thing...

Another Wake Up Call

As everybody knows I am really invested in this whole leadership thing. I don’t personally believe that leaders are born rather than taught. Some may have attributes that lend themselves to becoming effective leaders, but I think that real leadership is taught, practiced, and reinforced.

It is interesting for all the money we spend annually how much we still miss the mark.

I read a blog post this week that indicated that a survey of new MBA graduates indicated they felt the most important attribute they had to offer their current or potential employer is their leadership capabilities. My immediate thought was WTF. Luckily it turned out I wasn’t deluded those same current and potential employers said umm no to these shiny new MBA’s. First you must learn to do, then maybe you can learn to lead.

 A classic leadership fail plastered all over the internet this week was the behavior (antics) of the Uber CEO. That was a great demonstration of what happens when you have poor leadership and don’t take time to create and reinforce the culture you desire. He wasn’t alone, looks like Jared’s, Kay Jewelers, and some others have some work to do as well.

I had a chance to read a couple of blog posts as well about one of my other pet rants- the ineffectiveness of HR in most organizations. Both were incredibly well written by women I respect. Maybe the fact that today is International Women’s Day is a cosmic intervention.

The first was why the author, Michelle Berg, “hates” HR. To cut to the chase it is because in her opinion in most organizations HR is the attempt to put a band aid on a hemorrhage, to create handbooks and policies to make up for what she poetically calls shitty leadership.

The other post from Laurie Ruettimann, talks about the messes at Uber, Tesla, Google, and others and asks where HR was in the organization. Especially given that people indicated they went to HR and discussed their concerns and got ignored. I love her quote “But if you work in HR and someone complains to you about a legitimate problem, it’s your job to be the Jordan Horowitz of your organization and fix what’s wrong”.

I agree with both of them. Culture and leadership belong to the C suite, not just HR, but I used to tell aspiring leaders and HR professionals that if they weren’t willing to come to work every day prepared to be fired for doing the right thing they should do something different.

Our leadership models are broken. In many cases our high talent selection processes use the wrong criteria for admission and as I pointed out in a previous blog the results show it with almost 50% of “graduates” of those programs being rated in the bottom 50% of leadership by a 360 review of their capabilities by peers, subordinates, and direct reports.

60% of candidates seeking leadership roles do so to increase earning potential, they don’t give a rat’s ass about developing people of bettering the organization. I think we have a congruence and alignment problem!

Although particularly today it might be an unpopular viewpoint I also grind my teeth when I see articles on some version of the feminine mystique that says that women are genetically better leaders than men. My experience has indicated that is as much bullshit as the genetically programed leader.

I really like this quote from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg-

“In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will be just leaders.”

What a great thought. Maybe we can even expand it to include no special comments about race, national origin, sexual orientation, and a bunch of other factors that aren’t relevant.

Don’t mistake me. I have had the privilege of working with some incredibly capable women leaders and aspiring leaders. I have also had that same opportunity to work with people of color and other cultures who made that same commitment to excel.

So I am going to bore you with my recipe for what I look for in potential leadership candidates-

·         The KSA’s or technical competence to do the work

·         Understanding and committing to mastering all three levels of trust

·         Emotional intelligence

·         Emotional balance

·         Self-Awareness

The trust issue is huge. We have an international trust crisis in leadership in all our major institutions and we need to own it and fix it.

The data is in and it is ugly with representatives of all four generations recording that 50% of them don’t trust leadership. Until we address that the shitty leadership phenomenon that Michelle Berg describes is here to stay and HR isn’t going to fix it.

A recent survey of HR and training professionals indicated the biggest barriers to effective training and development were budget and employees taking the time to participate.

Please. The biggest issues with training are relevance and reinforcement.

Training doesn’t fix trust issues or create alignment and engagement. It is a tactic.

So if you are a current or aspiring leader here is what I recommend you do-

·         Get 360 feedback on where you are in your journey.

·         Pick the most important behaviors to work on and change.

·         Ask your colleagues for feedback and suggestions on how to keep improving.

·         Listen and embrace the changes that provide the most impact.

·         Follow up, measure, and repeat.

Shitty leadership is epidemic, stand out from the crowd…….

What Did We Learn?

I am not a huge fan of New Year’s Resolutions. I find most of them have a shelf life of about thirty days max.

I am however a pretty big fan of reflection.

In honesty I found 2016 to be a disappointment. The year started with some promise, but then kind of petered out.

I think one of my biggest disappointments was that it seems like this leadership thing still seems to elude us. We still use expressions like human capital and continue to want to minimize the human interaction in our hiring and recruitment processes.

This year I became pretty much a raving fan of Simon Sinek. His advice about starting with Why, describing how leaders eat last, and some of the issues faced by Millennials in the workforce really captured my attention.

Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage and Angela Duckworth’s Grit were also among some of the best stuff I read.

I also read things that while they resonated with me caused disappointment like a great blog that shared the dirty little secret that the vast majority of our graduate business programs don’t include anything about foundational concepts like trust and emotional intelligence and still secretly reinforce a lot of Frederick W. Taylor’s scientific management theories.

Which is where I think the idea of people as disposable assets got their roots in modern society. Prior to that we just called them serfs. I guess human capital is nicer.

I read things that said that employee engagement and emotional and social intelligence are all bullshit and hocus pocus because they can’t be properly measured. I disagree. The fact that you do a shitty job of executing on a concept doesn’t invalidate it, it just speaks to your leadership skills.

The ship has sailed on whether or not engagement is real and it can affect the performance of an organization. Organizations where employees consider themselves highly engaged outperform their competitors in every key performance indicator and engagement is a universal rather than a North American phenomenon.

I had the opportunity to work with a recently retired member of an elite military unit about his transition. We explored things like Covey’s trust model and Simon Sinek’s Start With Why and Leaders Eat Last.

His reaction is “duh”. These concepts have been embedded into the culture he spent his adult life to date in. The fact that these are an epiphany in the private sector stunned him a bit.

He shared with me that being a leader in these units is the easiest job in the world. Everyone is highly competent. Everybody is committed to the mission. The leader blocks and tackles.

Our elite military units have mastered something that in the private sector we call an employment brand.

My colleague Brad Federman very elegantly described an effective employment brand in a post a while back-

Don’t chase people. Be an example. Attract them.

Work hard and be yourself.

The people who belong in your life will come and stay.

Just do your thing.

I was pretty struck by the profound elegance of this statement both for individuals and for organizations. I wish I had of heard this before giving life and career advice to my millennial aged children.

I think organizations should have a leadership brand too, how we expect leaders to behave and what we hold them accountable to do.

Kind of like trust and respect your leadership brand should include legitimacy. I like the way Malcolm Gladwell described legitimacy in his book David and Goliath.

·         Those whom are governed have a voice in the process; their input is sought and heard.

·         There is a dimension of predictability and consistency in the application of the law or standards.

·         The application of the law or standard has to be administered fairly and objectively, you can’t   have disparate treatment without a clear and compelling reason.

When I read about what Millennials and the following generation is seeking them seem to want legitimacy from their leaders as well along with the purpose and identity based trust that Covey and Lencioni describe. I think they are right.

I enjoyed some success in 2016. We had a number of folks show up for the leadership training we do and more than a few folks read my ramblings on my blog and other posts so I guess there is some light at the end of the tunnel.

So I guess as we make the turn I will keep talking about managing whole people, relying on identity based trust as your foundational principle, and recognizing that your employment brand dictates your business brand and that your customers will never be more engaged than your employees.

We still have work to do on this leadership thing too…

See you next year.

HR's Elusive Value Proposition..

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

Employers Be Advised!

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