1: The ‘annual’ measurement is artificial. It works for budgets and accountants but not for much more. If a project is a 17 month project, why do you need a measure of performance at month 11 or 12? Why not monthly? Weekly? At month 17? [In Safety, if you have a fatality in June and another in August, this does not make it a 2/12 of a problem].

2: Performance appraisal is a constant dialogue. When you do that, the picture is built automatically. If so, performance management is simply management, not an extra ritual.

3: Performance appraisal 2021 version is two ways:  management about employees, employees about management. One way only? 50% of the picture.

4. The best thing you could do, in any case, is to consciously de-couple the process for compensation and bonuses from the one for performance appraisal.  You’ll still have to decide about compensation and reward, but this should be based upon a continuous build up over the year. De-dramatize the annual one off ritual if you insist in keeping one. It should be just another data point.

5. Data by Bersin/Deloitte showed that 89% of managers think that the performance management process ‘is not worth the time put into it’. Yes, you’ve heard, 89%. That is 11% thinking it’s OK. You?

6. Performance appraisal should be focused on (a) understanding success and failure, (b) coaching and (c) action/development. This cannot be done once a year. Not even twice a year. Is your system fit for purpose?

7. Punctuating performance management in particular calendar slots (mid year appraisal in June, end of year is November) paralyses the organization on June and November. Don’t fix times from the top. Managers should dictate their tempo and leaders should keep an eye on it. Again, this should be unbundled, time and process, from pay raises and bonuses.

8. Substitute ‘your Performance Appraisal’ for ‘Our performance Assessment’. We are together in this. A manager is not a father, or a benign god. Managers are human (most of them), they are not absolute holders of the truth.

9. Focus on tracking success and failure, assessing individual and group contributions, recognition and planning forward for success. The current systems are probably unsuitable. There may be digitally reborn but still mechanistic.

10.  Performance assessment/appraisal needs to be reinvented. A 360 degree feedback plugged in, does not solve the problem. It only creates a pseudo-democratic and pseudo-scientific monster.

If you agree with three or four out of the 10, you need to act. Call time out and re-invent. If you agree with more than three, why are you still doing it the old way? Change now! If you don’t  agree with any, maybe your company is called Annual Performance Management Suppliers, a company founded in 1809 (the year Frederick Taylor published “The Principles of Scientific Management.”) Just kidding.

I am not advocating scrapping performance management. I am advocating reinventing it and getting rid of the word performance. Then we will be confronted with the real issue: reinventing management.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

What do YOU want to change in your organization’s culture? More accountability, innovation, respect?

Whatever it is, you need the tools to mobilize people at scale. The Chalfont Project Academy ^[1] can provide those tools. Our new online learning platform, enables us to share with you, our resources and insights based on our work as Organization Architects.

Find out more ^[2].

 

Sorry for the medicalisation, an annoying legacy in my brain from many years of diagnosing and prescribing.

Unlike many other ills, autoimmune diseases are generated by our own bodies. Our immune system, in charge of fighting external invaders, gets it wrong and fights your own defences. You are caught in your own friendly fire. You are attacking yourself. Rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel syndrome, etc. You name it.

In our organizations, we have our own autoimmune diseases. Employees fight colleagues and leaders, the Unions fight management, people fight the systems they have created, HR fight disengagements blaming the disengaged. So many things look and feel as self-inflicted pain. It’s often a war place, not a workplace. With lots of war-shops instead of work-shops.

If there is a long way, we will take it, a leader told me recently. They are fighting their own simplicity.

In my experience, the worst affected by the auto-immune mechanism, are industries that are ‘very regulated’. I work with ‘very regulated industries’ all the time, pharmaceuticals, finance, banking etc. There is nothing in any regulation that says you have to take 30 days and involve 30 people to make a decision when you can do it with 3 people in 30 days. Nothing. Zero. But the ‘we are a regulated industry’ kicks in all the time.

It’s self-inflicted pain as a symptom of their own autoimmune diseases.

They are fighting their own body.

And unfortunately these conditions are chronic.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

We can help your business Reboot!  

 

Renew, transform, re-invent the way you do things. Organizations today need to look at better ways, alternative and innovative ways to change the status quo. It’s not about being radical for the sake of it. Only if you try radical ways will you be in a better position to find your ‘fit for purpose’ goals.

As Michelangelo said: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’. He was a radical in the way we talk about it.

 

Reboot! The Game Plan ^[3]

Timing: 1 – 3 days depending on format

Audience: minimum 20 – maximum 40

Price: POA

For more information, and to discuss how Reboot! The Game Plan can support you and your business, please Contact Us ^[4] or email: [email protected] ^[5]

This is model 4 of the series ^[6].  The concept is simple. Imagine that you, as an employee, are in reality an investor. Not of money, but of another form of capital: your own human (intellectual) capital. The employer pays you for the use of that capital with a promise to grow it. Employers are Intellectual Capital Fund Managers.

Good Fund Managers will deliver good returns. At the end of the year you should expect a return on your (human) capital that has been invested: better skills, personal and professional enhancement, greater ‘market value’ and ‘market-ability’, more knowledge, new experience… You define your expected returns. After all, you are the investor.

Nobody (invests) gives capital to Fund Managers with a poor track record. You should not expect a year-end with no growth (or indeed, loss of capital!). The deal with your employer is that the contract is for the use and growth of your Human Capital. So, the one who is really in charge here is actually you. Novel concept. HR departments become ‘Human Capital Investment Fund Brokers’. The company is a big investment fund.

The idea is old and I have written about this several times before, for example in Disruptive Ideas. ^[7] For various reasons, it has not obtained great visibility.

There is a connection here with ‘The Alliance’, by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh. These authors propose an employee-employer form of ‘contract’, with mutually beneficial rules of the game over a period of agreed time (not a forever relationship) that they baptise as ‘Tours of Duty’, which I think is an unfortunate name. But these ‘Tours of Duty’ are not the same as the relationships in the ‘Investors Metaphor’.

Pros. The Investors metaphor model is a smart way to reposition the power of the employee. Engagement is high! How could it be otherwise if you are the investor? Why would you invest in a mediocre way, or half hearted effort?

Cons. It’s highly disruptive in terms of organizational models. Companies may be shouting at you: ‘Investor in what?’. I have seen reactions to this in the past, from my own client work, of the type: ‘Interesting!’ (which is an English expression that translates into  anything from ‘I don’t believe you’ to ‘nonsense’, but never, ever truly ‘interesting’). Proponents of the ‘Build to last’ old school of thinking are restless about models that don’t shoot for long(er) term stability. The ‘Investors Metaphor’ may seem like one of these but it’s not. You’ll invest for as long as (a) you have something to invest (so if you are poor in Human Capital, or becoming poorer, you have a problem) and (b) the return on your investment is worth it.

So what? The ‘Investors Metaphor’ makes you think. A lot. It’s a legitimate model of employee engagement, although hardly referred to. Use it in combination with other ingredients and the cooking looks (and smells) promising. More to come.

Next: a very novel concept. What if Employee Engagement (as opposed to non-engagement) was morally right on its own merits?  Period.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[8], an international firm of organizational architects, and the pioneer of Viral Change™ ^[9], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable, large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations.

An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project ^[4] or email: [email protected]. ^[10]

For more information visit: The Chalfont Project Speaking Bureau ^[11]

 

Despite being repeated a thousand times, hiring processes are still quite imperfect. Of course, there are many places in which this is done in a sophisticated way and, indeed, there are Search Firms which do a good job. However, it is still amazing to see how in sophisticated places, with sophisticated processes and helped by sophisticated search firms, still we get it wrong. Define wrong? Simple. The person disappears just months after joining and after an initial hyperactive, exciting and apparently successful honeymoon.

Why? Who is to blame? The candidate? The search firm? HR? Management?

Lets say that the candidate is (as is often) selected on the basis of ‘been there, done that’, good credentials, the infamous track record, the background on some well-known brands and other elements of ‘fitness’. Let’s say that he or she has added a pinch of charisma in the interviews, has become likeable at the door, and everybody is looking forward to ‘the addition to the team’. All this does not ensure that the person will navigate well in that particular culture. OK, you thought you did articulate the expectations well and perhaps you did. It does not mean that the candidate heard you.

One of the most painful situations is the one when the candidate goes from a big firm to a small one. The attraction of the offering is perhaps precisely the attraction of the small entrepreneurial flavour, the ability to make a difference, to count, perhaps to be hands on. That you have preached the benefits and the candidate has preached back to you his amazing interest and the discovery of ‘just that place he was looking for’, do not guarantee fitness. Often, when the day to day reality kicks in and the candidate’s mind is looking for a support system that does not exist (but we told him) and is confronted with urgency that is greater than ever lived before (but we told him), amber lights turn red lights and the smell of fire is all over the place.

Also, then, the candidate does not quite understand why the lines of command and control have gone fishing (but we told him). Instead of having to deal with less people and interfaces, as expected, (well, you are small, aren’t you?) it turns out that he has to deal with more people than in the big company because the lines of accountability are not on the map. Nope. You figure it out my friend. (But we told him that networking here is not an evening with cocktails).

It ends in tears.

When we help small(er) enterprises with onboarding of new people, we do a lot of ‘simulations’ where we do test real scenarios that may/will take place in days or weeks, where perhaps, clarity does not exist, exquisite navigation is needed and outcomes come more from relationships than processes. Yes, messy. But early time spent in the simulator, helps avoiding real crashes on the highway.

Even people with good social skills in a big company may be unable to navigate in a smaller one.

There is no magic bullet but we need to obsessively pay attention to culture and imagine the candidate navigating, not doing a job or performing a role, or bringing in a set of skills.

Behavioural recruitment, as we practice it, helps, since the best prediction of behaviours is past behaviours. We are not talking skills or competences, but, again, navigating cultures.

As a writer of Fortune magazine said many years ago, I seem to remember, if a 100,000 dollar piece of equipment disappears from the company, there will be a thorough investigation. If a 100,000 dollar executive leaves, we say ‘that’s life’. If he leaves just after 6 months, we scratch our heads.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[8], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[12] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[4].

His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management ^[13], is available at all major online bookstores.

 

Many years ago companies started to say ‘we are organized into project teams’. Professional projectisation was the thing. Until it became commoditised and meant nothing. No project team was equal to another. One has project leaders with budget accountabilities and great autonomy, another was a bunch of guys who did not want to be there and wrote minutes. Anything in between. Who cares today? ‘We have project teams’ sounds like we have electricity. You don’t get on the front page saying that, in your company, you switch that thing on the wall and light is produced on demand.

My prediction is that something similar is about  to happen with ‘influencers’ . Everybody seems to have ‘them’. The proliferation of methods to find them and name them has contributed to it. Years ago, a not terribly well-respected, branch of Sociology called Sociometrics had some grasp of the real connectivity between individuals.  Today you have many providers of those tools.

At The Chalfont Project, our Viral Change^TM progammes use Social Network Analysis (SNA), because of its strong scientific basis and friendly commercial applications, the latter not compromising the former. It’s as good as it gets.

My non scientific analysis of the current usage of SNA to find influencers is as follows: 4 out of 5 companies who ‘have done it’, have no idea what to do with the findings. Shockingly, they have not done it anonymously or on an opt-in basis, which means that names of people have been known at least to HR/OD/L&D etc. You now have that elite group exposed to all, with no clear plans, but sent to an off sites to ask them to deploy Vision Success or Future 2020 or Alignment & Empowerment 2.0 or whatever the name of those ‘change efforts’ may have.

In a recent HR/OD conference I dared to say that the corporation has no right to unveil all that and ask people to ‘use their influence’ unless they have opted in anonymously; that being, a high influencer was probably not in the job description and not something for what people were paid for. They did not like it. Some people were convinced I represented the workers Unions (not an offense in its own right, but a proxy for obstructionism).

Besides the ones who ‘have done it’ but who don’t know want to do with it (I swear I am not kidding, these companies do exist), others have commoditised the concept and in the process have muddled it. You hear people talking about influencers and mixing up role models, talent management, volunteers, and, of course, champions or ambassadors. Companies now have ambassadors of this and that, like they have those switches on walls.

SNA, with its ability to map the real organization (that is, not the organizational chart) has untapped potential to discover how information flows, how knowledge and expertise is used, or, for sure, who are the highly connected individuals.

Using SNA and ‘finding the influencers’ must not become a HR/OD sport. It drives me crazy to see how we can easily kill one off the very few management innovations of decades. It seems like ‘Le beaujolais nouveau est arrive’, the new beaujolais wine has arrived, as we get every year from wine merchants, but in organizational version.

‘Identifying influencers’ is becoming something that companies do ‘because they can’. Bad management at its best.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Our Feed Forward Webinar Series is now available to watch, on demand.

 

Watch our webinar Can you put your organization through an MRI?  ^[14]

 

Yes you can. You can have a diagnosis. Learn how our online product 3CXcan provides this analysis based on the highest scientific principles of network sciences. In the current environment it’s important to base the recovery and the post Covid-19 organization with full understanding of its formal and informal connections, communication channels and internal collaboration. Suspend judgement about your assumptions and find the truth. This webinar will show real examples of this kind of diagnosis performed in real companies. Understanding the real organization, which may or may not be the one you assume it is, will show a completely new baseline upon which to navigate the future.

 

What attendees said:

‘Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this fantastic webinar. Both the depth of the discussion between Leandro and Carlos and the very intensive exchange in the chat inspired me.’

 

It was a great pleasure to participate in today’s webinar…. If you would have been sitting next to me, you would have seen a lot of ‘head nodding’ and heard a couple of loud ‘yes’es’ from the bottom of my heart. 

 

WATCH NOW ^[14]

 

I shared yesterday three types of employees I want for the modern organization. Different characters on the payroll. If there is a payroll. These are the second trio:

4. Synthesizers

I suggest you stop hiring for analytical skills, salami cutting experts and extreme specialists of little bits. Whether it’s big data, small data or in between data, what we are lacking is people who can make sense, extract meaning, not who can read the parts and pontificate. We are seriously  short of synthesizers (not the keyboard things).  We don’t distinguish signal and noise any more. These people do exist, but are hard to find. Our education systems do not produce them.

5. Designers

Of ideas, departments, products, services, teams, campaigns, social movements, structures, networks, dialogues, conversations, processes, HR policies, strategy. Also buildings. It is a mentality. A way of seeing. Certainly not a commercialised process. At the cost of annoying friends and irritating people (I know that for a fact) I confess my inability to understand the glorified surge of ‘Design Thinking’. Believe me, I have tried.

6. Reinventors of wheels

Oh boy! How annoying may this be! How many times I have heard, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. How many times I have used this expression myself. I have changed my mind. I think the wheel needs to be reinvented as a counter-epidemic of Cut-And-Paste. Cut-And-Paste ideas, presentations, off-the-shelf answers, the-ways-we-have-always-done-it, templates, SOPs, follow the process. I want people who can reinvent a wheel. Who can look at alternatives and reinventions. Who can come back and say, I have tried to reinvent that wheel, and, you know what, our wheel seems pretty good, so we should keep it.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[8], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[12] on topics covered in his Daily Thoughts and his books ^[15], and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[4].

 

My ideal modern organization has different characters on the payroll. If there is a payroll. These are three of them:

1. The craftsman

Perhaps nobody better than Richard Sennett  ^[16] (Sociology, LSE, Humanities New York) has described  it. Himself a good craftsman of ideas, he explains the traits: skills and care to make things well, not necessarily for its immediate utilitarian reasons, with focus on detail, perhaps on beauty, or perfection, whether in a pottery workshop or a lab. What distinguishes them most is their motivation for life time learning. I imagine strategy making as a craft, more pottery than spreadsheets. I have been using the term ‘crafting’ for many moons. I hope that the use of the language makes me become one.

2. The entrepreneur

They create things, not necessarily from zero, but look for alternatives, try, experiment and above all take risks. The term is associated  with taking initiative. A passive entrepreneur checking in from 9 to 5 is an oxymoron. I want entrepreneurs on the payroll. I imagine a company of entrepreneurs and its leadership with the sole goal of creating space for them. I imagine the question ‘how many employees do you have?’ changed into ‘how many entrepreneurs do you have?’

3. The activist

Which includes the word ‘act’. Therefore not ‘Wait-ivists’, ‘Later-ivists’ or ‘once-we-have-aligned-all-stakeholders-ivists’. They understand the imperative of action; the concept of ‘agency’: take control, be in charge of destiny, express themselves. For the activist, permission was never granted, it was always taken.

OK, three more tomorrow.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[8], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[12] on topics covered in his Daily Thoughts and his books ^[15], and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[4].

 

The job description is dead. It is replaced by a Lego box, no instruction manual or a map.

Welcome to the company. Good to have you. Your business card says Director of Business Development but this is only in case you meet another Director of Business Development somewhere so you don’t feel too lonely.

Your role is to get this Lego box of pieces called possibilities and build something. And then another thing. Here is the map. We are going somewhere around here, and if you could help us to figure out how to get there safely, fast and profitable, it would be much appreciated. Mind you, the ‘somewhere around here’ may change a bit so you’ll have to be flexible and prepared to abandon the half made helicopter Lego model, and perhaps use some of the pieces for a submarine.

We hired you because you are, or we think you are, an entrepreneur. We don’t hire employees with backgrounds and skills anymore. We hire entrepreneurs with some background and some skills. Which means, entrepreneur as in ‘undertaking’ something, you know, actually doing something, as opposed to thinking of doing something. Also we love an old version of the term used in France somewhere in the 18^th Century that says entrepreneur is ‘bearer of risk’.

So, just for the record. We don’t mean busy-ness, we mean business. We don’t mean any risk, we don’t mean chaos and we don’t mean permanent state of blue sky thinking. In fact, we are not in the sky much, but with our feet on the ground.

As you will find out in the next hour or so, your business card title bears no consequence internally, where colleagues do many things that the business card never says.

Here is the credit card, the toilets are to the left and then take a right, build your Lego, get moving, help us on the journey and have some fun. By the way, these are the non negotiable behaviours on this journey: (specific list to continue here).

Commentary. No standard, inflexible, pre-defined job description has a place today in the knowledge economy (agrrr, sorry, the term is so old) We are kidding ourselves. I personally would not hire anybody who is determined to follow their job description to the letter. So, whoever things like me, can we please stop writing those jobs descriptions as a shopping list for the supermarket?

The push back I get frequently is: surely you don’t mean any job description? To which, I tend to twist the question and ask them to list the jobs that could not follow the above rule. Usually, the list contains the ones that are most likely to be taken over by the digital revolution.

This position is not anti-skills or experts either! If I have a brain tumour, I want a neurosurgeon, not a paramedic. But, no apologies, I want accountants who can spell passion, passionate business developers who can spell spreadsheet, HR people who can spell R&D and R&D people who can sell something. It’s 2020 if you’ve noticed!

Just get many Lego Boxes of Possibilities, some maps and good leaders, and forget the Quantum-Physics-like Competence System. It looks good on a powerpoint and impresses the CEO, but it’s as useful as a little boat in a tsunami.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation – get your copy of Dr Herrer’s latest book, ‘The Flipping Point‘. ^[13] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[13] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

Available from major online bookstores ^[17].

There are many ways to introduce, trigger and spread behaviours in organizations, but not many of them are effective and sustainable. Triggering behaviours is the easy bit. Everybody can do it. We, human beings, are doing it all the time. Spreading them is a bit more difficult, but still doable. Making it sustainable, this is another matter. Not many approaches do the trick. In Viral Change^TM we succeed all the time due to the bottom up and peer-to-peer methodology that we use.

But sometimes mangers wish there was a way to inject a behaviour, create a habit or, more frequently, deal with difficult behaviours that have a hard time getting embedded in the culture.

One good example is in the difficulties that many managers encounter in giving performance feedback. And most of the time, when people say this, they refer to difficult conversations and difficult or negative feedback. It is very common to hear, ‘perhaps we are too nice’, or ‘we don’t dare’, or ‘it just does not happen’, ‘it is not in our DNA’. IT becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and the issue, an important one.

I suggest that it may be good to try to get there by the back door. This is the back door. Imagine that you create a rule that every single meeting has to end by soliciting feedback from each of the participants. Noting dramatic, even a score of satisfaction 1 to 10.  Most people, most organizations, have an agenda for meetings. Include a few minutes feedback session. As a rule. If you have the discipline of an agenda, you won’t have much difficulty within the discipline of giving feedback at the end. It may start as a simple feedback, it may evolve to a more sophisticated feedback from person-to-person. It does not matter.

After a while, this will become normal. How many meetings per day do you have in the organization? Dozens? Hundreds? Imagine all of them ‘practice feed back’!

Of course, I am not talking about the same feedback as above, the difficult performance management conversations. Instead of focusing, sometimes with high energy, on ‘training everybody to give (performance) feedback’, and getting nowhere, you make feedback ‘normal’ in easier and less ‘threatening’ situations, such as at the end of a meeting.  You will end up making feedback easier in general, period. In the meetings and outside meetings. The taboo may disappear. After all, ‘practising giving feedback’ will be already happening possibly in massive numbers.

That is the back door. Find something that facilitates the behaviour somewhere different from the area of the problem. Multiply, create a critical mass (norm, habit), and that will infect other areas. It’s a praxis, a habit, a practice, something people do, versus, a process, a mountain, a difficult one.

There are about 200 people in the organization.

1. But 10 of them at the top are very powerful
2. In fact, 5 of them are more powerful than others
3. There are about 50 people who really try hard
4. That does not include the powerful 10
5. From these 50, 20 do more work than anybody else
6. And 10 of them end up doing 75% of the work
7. About half of the workforce is disengaged
8. About 15 people are very well connected and highly influent inside the organization
9. More or less half of them are part of that pool of 50 who try hard
10. 10 are clearly sceptical and negative
11. Most of them are highly influent
12. 10 people always ‘get away with murder’ and achieve things by bypassing rules
13. 15 people in sales are untouchable because they deliver high performance
14. None of them are highly connected and influent, but they meet high sales target
15. 25 people are ‘chronic volunteers’: they put their hands up quickly and get involved no matter what
16. From those, about half are full of good intentions but not very efficient
17. 5 people are incredibly toxic
18. About half of the highly connected and influent are quite low in managerial ranks
19. 30% of people are really worried about money and personal finances
20. 15 people are thinking of leaving in the next 3 months

(1) I challenge HR and senior managers to tell me who is who. To put names into groups

(2) I challenge HR and senior managers to tell me what to do differently with each group, once people have been identified (if they have been identified)

We are running organizations with social blindness and rough metrics, not fit for purpose.

The performance-based categorisation (underperforming, contributors, achievers, stars etc) that is often the single categorisation we have in an organization, says nothing about any of the 20 segments above, with perhaps a couple of exceptions.

I sometimes think that we are running the game but we haven’t got a clue what’s going on with the players, and that, if tomorrow half of the workforce is replaced with Martians, nobody would notice.

Ah! Am I exaggerating? OK, so, could you answer the quiz in your own organization? What would you get? 10 out of 20? 5? 20?

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Do you know your REAL organization?

With 3CXcan we can uncover your formal and informal organizational networks.  We can discover:

 

• How people truly communicate and collaborate with each other in your organization?
• How information flows in your organization?
• How useful people find the information they receive?
• How people work together across departments and sites?
• How well particular departments are connected with others?
• How the informal conversations take place in your organization?

 

With 3CXcan ^[18], a simple to use online survey, we have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality. Find out more. ^[18]

Contact us now ^[4] for a free virtual consultation or a short walk through our online demonstration.

 

Louis Gerstner, chairman of IBM from 1993 until 2002, recalls in his autobiography, the company’s use of a competence model for leadership and change. He acknowledged that they had too many of these competences, but that, by and large, they contributed to three things: created a common language, provided a sense of consistency and formed the basis for performance management. As you can see, he did not say that it created good leaders.

And I think there is a profound learning here. Most competence-based frameworks for, say change, leadership or talent management are more useful as a language for the tribe than as tools to facilitate change, shape leaders or ‘manage’ talent.

At that time in IBM, which Gerstner was referring too, the leadership competence system in the company had eleven of these, which eventually they ‘summarised’ into three. Most of the competence systems I know today run into several dozens, a broad supermarket of ‘pieces’ that one has to ‘have’ in order to be categorised into a particular box, which usually is related to a particular salary or compensation.

There is a whole industry of consultancies selling these boxes and categorisations, which usually look conspicuously similar to those of the multinational next door. They all successfully pass the universal test: they are impossible to disagree with. Teamwork, collaboration, ‘drives change’, empowerment, proactivity, ‘provides clear instructions’, results focused, openness and customer-centrism, are ‘fundamental to your leadership structure’. (I have just saved you a few thousand dollars or any other currency for consulting fees).

So there you are. The trick now is the dosage. Lower ranks have less of them; as you go up the ladder, you have more of them. By which mechanism one goes from ‘manages change’ to ‘leads change’ and then ‘anticipates change’, is never clear to anybody. The linguistic injection of steroids seems to be enough to expect the differences between levels. And if you land in a higher rank box by accident or imposed reorganization, you seem to inherit the competencies of the new box. The corporate Father Christmas has just given you abilities you did not even know you had.

One of my tired, recurrent jokes in this area is that these systems seem to have been created by a quantum physicist, but this usually gives Quantum Physics a bad name.

But, the language, oh, the language. That is marvellous. Conversations about people and talent management rituals by HR could not take place without the language and its dialects. And that is a serious asset, as Gerstner acknowledged.

Don’t expect the perfect leader to be the sum of a perfect high dose combination of competences. But expect perfect conversations about career progression and bonuses.

Despite appearances, this is not a rant against competence systems. It is a rant against outdated and past-looking competence systems. I can assure you that if you have one of those systems in place, and are performing well, the chances are your company is fully prepared for the past.

The trick, that many of those ‘human capital consultancies’ do not seem to provide is how to look at strategic, future looking capabilities. That is much harder because one has to project oneself into the unknown and acknowledge that a copy and paste of the competences that seem to have served so far, equally yourself and your neighbours by the way,  are going to be in the best case a pass, a baseline, and at worst, completely unsuitable for you.

However, since language is providing you with a powerful glue, it’s going to be difficult to abandon those quantum physics boxes.

But, frankly, I can’t see any other option. It will take a brave leadership team to look at those boxes and say: seriously?

There are many ways to list our own assets. And that’s something that is very healthy to do. Practice it from time to time, not just when talking to recruiters.

1. What we’ve done. This is the first thing that comes to mind. Many CV/resumes are travel books, with a bit of Tripadvisor. This list will give you the ‘been there, done that’. It may look impressive or may not. But it’s not the most important list, even if you have the heroic assignments in the Amazon (the forest and the online).
2. What we know. Ah! This is the bit that usually deals with qualifications and ‘experience’. Experts, experts! Can you really list what you know and don’t know? OK, but this is not the most important list anyway.
3. What we care about. That’s another list. Try it. Seriously. (Now?!) Hard sometimes. It’s the list of values. But don’t call it values, it’s a bit devalued. Call it ‘The Things I Seriously Care About List’. This is a very, very important list, but not the most important list.
4. What we do, and like, that not everybody knows, probably not in the company anyway. Training kids, singing in a choir, driving old ladies to the doctor, making mojitos. Very important list, but not the most import list.
5. The that’s me list in front of a mirror. What is unique about you, from all the lists above, that defines you, when you look at yourself in the mirror and say, Ah! I know that guy. This is the you as ‘the only world expert of your own experience’ (William Stafford). This is the unique blend of good and bad, and less good, and those unique pieces of the other lists. This is the most important list.

Can you make that list? Just as well, because whilst somebody else can list the things that you have done, the marvellous things you are an expert of, your values and your secret likes, nobody else other than you can write list number 5.

It’s also a choice to define yourself by (1) what you do, (2) what you know, (3) what you like and are good at, (4) what you care about, or (5) what it’s only you and nobody else knows about.

Note that the default position in introducing people is to talk about what we do. Nice to meet you Peter, nice to meet you John, so, what do you do? Well, I run the IT back office for Super Duper. And you?

Now, imagine this: Nice to meet you Peter, nice to meet you John, so, what do you care about? Well, these are the things: kids, fishing, and global warming, no particular order. Awkward? But why? It’s a perfectly legitimate question.

I am digressing. Make that list 5.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Let’s Join Forces!

 

The team at The Chalfont Project  ^[8] are here to support you and your business.  We can deliver webinars, remote keynotes, masterclasses or round tables tailored to your organization – all designed by Dr Leandro Herrero.  Example topics include:

• leadership
• corporate culture
• internal influencers
• leading change
• employee engagement

To find out more or speak to us about your specific requirements, contact us now! ^[4]

Or if you want to be informed about talks, events, masterclasses or courses organized by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero. Contact us now ^[4] .

 

 

The Communications function in organizations has still today one of the best chances to drive strategic change. To do this, it must master a few things.

It must occupy at least these two corporate streets:

(1) Take over the empty space of Curators of the Informal Organization. Nobody really owns this space. Certainly not traditional HR. Most of the good stuff happens in the informal organization (informal, fluid social networks and conversations) but most of the energy goes to domesticating the formal one: teams, structures, committees, task forces. The informal organization needs care: fluidity, possibility of interaction, internal social networking, water-coolers… Internal/Corporate communications could take over that space, if it wanted. Invent that function. Occupy!

(2) Lead the ‘back to the drawing board’ exercise to rethink the spaces for Branding, Marketing, Employee Engagement, Employee branding, PR and any other cousin I may have forgotten. Bring the cousins in, have a party, but recreate these spaces. Because reinvention may be uncomfortable (more than carrying on in their respective shops as if nothing would trouble them), nobody is taking the lead. Occupy that street. The functional borders are gone or going. All those spaces are blurred. It’s all mixed up. These areas have foster parents. Occupy!

If you don’t, somebody else will. Other more vocal cousins? However, if you prefer to keep writing newsletters and preparing Powerpoints for the Board or Investors, up to you, but you are going to enter into terminal illness pretty soon.

It’s a choice. Just saying… These two streets need their own ‘Occupy movement’. You can always say ‘pass!’ But I did warn you.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Most of the good stuff happens in the informal organization (fluid social networks and conversations) but most of the energy goes to domesticating the formal one: teams, structures, committees, task forces.

DO YOU WANT A DIAGNOSIS OF YOUR FORMAL AND INFORMAL ORGANIZATIONAL NETWORKS?

 

With 3CXcan ^[18], a simple to use online survey, we can reveal your formal and informal connections. We have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality. Find out more. ^[18]

Contact us now ^[4] for a free virtual consultation.

 

There are two opposite and wrong reactions to Employee (engagement/satisfaction) surveys. At one end, there is the ‘ignore the findings’. I use the term ‘ignore’ as a host of different meanings: ignore-ignore, pretend that you don’t ignore but ignore, dismiss, justify, or sweep under the carpet. Included here are all the ‘cognitive dissonance’ mechanisms: ‘Of course the results are not good, it was done just when the reorganization was announced’. Or, ‘We have just gone through a hell of a journey with the hostile takeover’. Or, ‘The weather has been really, really bad recently’. Most management teams will not ‘ignore’, but may pretend to ignore a little.

In my consulting experience, this end of the spectrum is not as problematic as the opposite. At the other end, there isn’t ignoring but over-reaction. A need to address point by point, score by score, graph by graph and do something, or, more importantly, being seen to do something, sometimes without a lot of reflection. Work-life balance low? Let’s have focus groups to find the 3 best initiatives we can have to improve it. Trust in management low? Let’s have a cascade down system of workshops by mangers with their staff. Etc.

I often see a temporal organizational paralysis trying to deal with the graphs and numbers. I know of a Big Plc Board that has ‘ordered’ a tsunami of meetings across all geographies to make sure that ‘people are engaged’. I see more benign forms of reaction to items, but not much overall reflection in search of overall meaning.

Incidentally, I have never seen a Reaction-Workshop-Chain focused on high scores to see how we can keep them high. It’s always a Problem Solving of The Negative exercise. No wonder the climate of the Tsunami Reaction is negative/sad/Houston-we-have-a-problem.

My advice for people who don’t have proficiency in handling Employee Surveys is simple: don’t do them, you might get lots of results.

My views on these surveys is known:  In case you missed them, here are four recent Daily Thoughts on the topic:

Build your own Employee Engagement argument for free. You can’t go wrong ^[19]

If you want to increase employee engagement and employee satisfaction, increase your company performance (yes, the order is not a typo) ^[20]

The shortest Employee Engagement survey has one question ^[21]

Is employee engagement whatever is measured by employee engagement surveys? ^[22]

Employee Engagement Surveys are tools for conversation. Results, good or bad, are symptoms. Any symptomatic treatment is, well, symptomatic. It does not touch the causes.  Having low work-life balance scores treated with a package of ‘flexible working’, is giving painkillers to somebody with a fractured arm.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation…..

Thought leader, keynote speaker and author, Dr Leandro Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements. Find out more ^[12].

 

Leandro Herrero is frequently voted ‘Best Speaker’ at conferences worldwide. He also speaks to Boards and Leadership Teams, participates in other internal company conferences as a keynote speaker, and is available to run short seminars and longer workshops.

The topics of Leandro Herrero’s presentations and workshops relate to his work as an organizational architect.

Each organization has specific needs to be addressed.  Contact us ^[23] to discuss your needs and to create the most appropriate virtual session for you.

 

 

Engagement, retention even activism…Traditional models of employee engagement are getting a bit tired. They are starting to look the same, smell the same, and feel the same.

There was a joke amongst Psychology students many years ago when they asked: ‘What’s intelligence?’ and the answer was: ‘Whatever is measured by tests of intelligence’. We are running the same risk: employee engagement is whatever numbers come from Employee Engagement surveys. It’s a growing industry. Executives of all sorts are asking their HR colleagues” Can we have one of these?” Or perhaps, ‘we must have one of these’.

Who could argue against having ‘some numbers’ that tells you how employees feel? Ah! The fascination with numbers! And what do you do with them? Ah!, you try to make sense, which is usually translated into lots of presentations to several layers of management. And then? Ah!, you must do something about it. Which is usually translated into more meetings about what to do. And then? Action plans. And then? Follow-up meetings? And then? Then, it will be time for another Employee Engagement Survey.

Believe me, I am far from cynical. I am describing an organizational ritual. And rituals have a key role in organizations. They tend to do good, glue and align people, make collective sense, provide maps, boost sense of belonging etc. They are not that good at solving problems, though. It’s better to have those numbers than not having a clue about the climate of the company. The serious question is what to do what those numbers other than ‘ try to boost them’.

I wrote an article many years ago: ‘Prisoners of the numbers’. Where I aired my frustration at seeing Boards managing Earnings per Share (EPS) and share prices, not the organization, not the people, not the purpose. Little has changed.

I very much welcome the sub-industry of Employee Engagement providing it’s not about number-management, the discussion of an up and down scale, and the comparison with a neighbour.  Many tools provide excellent, beautiful, sophisticated, expensive answers to the wrong questions. I have yet to know an organization that defines engagement first and then creates its survey. Most I know ‘use that survey’… Because they can. Time to rethink?

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation…..

Thought leader, keynote speaker and author, Dr Leandro Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements. Find out more ^[12].

 

Leandro Herrero is frequently voted ‘Best Speaker’ at conferences worldwide. He also speaks to Boards and Leadership Teams, participates in other internal company conferences as a keynote speaker, and is available to run short seminars and longer workshops.

The topics of Leandro Herrero’s presentations and workshops relate to his work as an organizational architect.

Each organization has specific needs to be addressed.  Contact us ^[23] to discuss your needs and to create the most appropriate virtual session for you.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

And the question is: ‘Why are you still here?’ You learn about the organization by asking questions to employees when they leave you (exit interviews) but you learn far more when you ask them why they are staying (‘stay’ interviews). It’s not a joke. ‘Why are you still here?’ – with the emphasis on the word still – it’s the best Employee Engagement survey you can have. It’s also very cheap and you don’t need an external agency.

It’s the only question that allows the person to respond with something like ‘I need to pay my mortgage’ (I have never seen an Employee Engagement survey with this kind of answer). Also, possibly, ‘It’s the best place I could dream to work in’, and anything in between. We are so afraid of direct questions that we tend to ask people things in complicated ways. I have practiced this with clients many times and I have always got the richest of answers. Believe me, a one-question questionnaire is a dream.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

More thoughts on Employee Engagement

Extract taken from my new book The Flipping Point. ^[13] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point ^[13] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read recent reviews ^[24] here. ^[25]

 

The industry of Employee Engagement (and there is a big one) says that companies with high employee engagement (as measured by some kind of artificial tool) are more successful. And produces ‘studies’ to prove it. Employee engagement is clearly portrayed as the reason for success, so the path is clear: how can we get more of it? My view is that success creates employee engagement, not the other way around. If you want high employee engagement, run a successful organization. I know it’s rather inconvenient to think this way.

 

The industry of Employee Engagement says that companies with high employee engagement are more successful (…) My view is that success creates employee engagement, not the other way around. The book The Halo Effect (2014) by Phil Rosenzweig opened my eyes to this. I would put this book in the list of obligatory reading to anybody in management. The subtitle of the book is explicit: ‘and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers’. Rosenzweig quotes the case of the UK retailer Marks and Spencer, a company which at some point scored at the top in employee engagement rankings. Then a terrible year in business performance came up and employee engagement scores went down significantly. Not a single iota in benefits, programmes, employee care, or anything had changed. Just abysmal market performance.

 

If you have enjoyed The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management, I’d be delighted if you could leave a review on Amazon ^[26]. Many thanks to those of you who have taken the time to do so.

 

If you’re yet to get your hands on a copy, then you can buy here ^[13].

 

Here are three baskets full of concepts:

Basket one: Working conditions, Flexibility at work, Pay and perks, Reward and recognition, Empowerment, Good communication, People development plans, Talent management, Clear vision and purpose, Internal digital connections, Gamification, and Health & wellbeing programme.

Here is basket 2:  Satisfaction, Happiness, Engagement, Fun, Self belief, Realization ,Enhancement. Fulfilment, and Motivation.

And basket 3: Profitability, Higher EPS, Retention, Reputation, Customer satisfaction, Loyalty, Employer of choice, Low absenteeism, Safety, High quality, and Resilience in adversity.

Pick one from basket 1, say that it produces something from basket 2 (pick one concept ), which, in turn, delivers something from basket 3 (pick one or two). You can’t go wrong. And I bet you will always find some data with correlations between the items in each basket. Flexibility at work (basket one) creates high motivation (basket two) which leads to low absenteeism. Come on, give it a try. The combinations are great.

Constructing Employee Engagement arguments is not difficult at all. There are always correlations between items from basket 1 and 3, or 1 and 2, or 2 and 3 etc. Problem is, these are correlations, not causality. Most Employee Engagement arguments that we use in organizations are semi-rich in correlations and very weak in causality. The truth is that it is hard to tell, for example, whether satisfaction delivers profitability, or profitability delivers satisfaction. The fact that we may see both going together does not make the casual argument in one direction true.

Many Employee Engagement systems and questionnaires are based upon the assumption of something from conceptual basket one, delivering something from basket two and/or three.  We have taken the argument at face value. We have converted correlation into causality. But, as the Spurious Correlations website reminds us, there is also a strong correlation between the per capita consumption of mozzarella cheese in the USA and the number of civil engineering doctorates awarded. Or the divorce rate in the state of Maine, correlating highly with the per capita consumption of margarine.

Whilst most sensible people would not infer that feeding your son with mozzarella cheese will make it highly probable that he will get a Civil Engineering doctorate, or that a decrease in divorce requires banning margarine, many managers would be very happy with declaring as true causality chain the correlation between anything in basket one with anything in basket two and/or three. The whole industry of Employee Engagement is based upon this.

When I show these arguments, sometimes to large audience in my Speaking Engagements, I get the whole spectrum of reactions. The data-fundamentalists get very irritated, despite the fact that they can’t really show serious causality data. The ‘Employee Engagement people’, furnished with all their questionnaires, get even more irritated. The Cynical contingency says that what I am inferring is that we should not do anything, not bother at all  about Employee Engagement initiatives, because all data is flawed.

But the latter is far from my position. I think we should do anything we believe that will improve the company, period. It’s called Good Management, and I am all for it.  But managers need to use their critical thinking more. Do as much as needed for good management, and avoid the simplistic causality interpretation of input-output:  if we do more Town Hall meetings with all employees, it will give them more ‘voice’ and air time, it will improve their morale and that will increase performance. The company is not an input-output machine. For goodness say, lets do what we believe we need to do without the constant need to justify the output! Maybe it is morally good, managerially sound and probably beneficial for the mental health of all, to give employees more airtime, more voice, more saying and a more proactive role. Do you need a score in a questionnaire to tell you that you should do that?

By the way, here is another one: the number of films Nicolas Cage appeared, correlated highly with the number of people drowned by falling into a swimming pool. He should really stop his movie career, or else, we will need to have compulsory fences around pools.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Extract from: The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management.  ^[13]  

Making ‘employee engagement’ work has always been called management. The fact that we needed to create an extra programme for it, tells you a lot about the strength of management itself.’

 

 

If you have read The Flipping Point and enjoyed it – we’d greatly appreciate a review from you on Amazon.

We have received many great recommendations and would be delighted if this positive feedback filtered through to the Amazon reviews pages ^[27].

Thank you to those of you who have already taken the time to leave a review.

Performance appraisal or performance management are one thing. Forced ranking into an artificial normal distribution of people in the organization, is another thing. A Bell Curve/normal distribution of performance is still used in many organizations. In this way of thinking (and it is a way of thinking) a majority of people will fall into the category of (average) contributors and, then, there will be minorities on one side (excellent performance, get the big bonus), and on the other side (under performing, on the way out). I am talking in caricature, but anybody working in a medium to large organization will recognise this annual ritual, usually led by HR in order to ‘classify people’s performance’. Historically, it’s gone as far as telling managers, ‘you must have so many in the mean area, so many in one standard deviation, so many in 2 etc’. It was a ‘you must have’, not a ‘what do you have?’.

HR, and I am not directing the shots at the function only, but also to leadership of organizations, (we are all HR) needed tools to classify people and trigger professional development, pay increases, bonuses etc. So it has used for many years an intuitive and ‘logic’ tool, which has become ubiquitous.

However, the Bell Curve distribution in organizations is the wrong distribution for almost anything, even from a simple mathematical or statistical perspective. It is as irrelevant to organizations as it would be to supermarkets in order to explain the stock on its shelves. This is why.

The organization is a social network of connections. Bell Curves and social networks are as suited to each other as oil and water. Most distributions in a network are not ‘normal’ but follow a Power Law/logarithmic one. In a Power Law distribution, a few have a lot of (head), and most have few of (long tail). Translation: a relatively small number of people have high connectivity and influence, for example; a relatively large number of people have low connectivity and influence. It works for connectivity on the web (relatively few sites, compared with the huge total, enjoy high connectivity; most sites enjoy low connectivity, as compared with the total) and in any social network (scale free, is the technical level) The organization IS a social network in which many dynamics, from connectivity to power, follow Power Law principles.

You may think that this can explain connectivity and influence (see my books  ^[28]Viral Change™  and Homo Imitans) but not necessarily performance. But the only reason why we think this way is because nobody has seriously thought about Power Law and performance. It is however logical that the distribution of ‘performance’ (which after all is not a single ‘measure’) follows the same rules as other true social network distributions. So imagine a top of 100 and bottom of 0 and anything in between in a power law/logarithmic distribution/curve. This is a much better representation.

Trouble is, we are so used to Bell. The entire IQ system is based upon 100 being normal, 140 a genius and 60 a handicap. But this was a mathematical construct.

An additional problem is that HR/Bell/Forced ranking is heavily biased towards operational outcomes (read: hitting targets) and usually it says zero about other things such as connectivity, influence (positive or negative), positive deviance, experience, overall ‘market value’ etc.  You are going to tell me that Performance Management includes not only operational outcomes but also values and soft stuff. I see, ‘Performance’ is then a conglomerate. When you give conglomerates a number (and a position in a curve) you risk falling into the phenomenon that I call ‘Sumville’. ‘This is a hypothetical town with a sign at its entrance: ‘Welcome to Sumville; population 2500, 5 hotels, 20 pubs, 3 churches, 200 sheep, total 2728’. For the record, Sumville is my invention but I have seen that sign.

None of my (serious) clients use Bell/Force ranking anymore. It is an artificial distribution. A broader problem however is a similarly artificial competence system, but this is a story for another day.

People’s classifications are here to stay. It is our nature to frame things (reality, concepts, people) and make sense of them. But many of our toolkits are old. The Bell Curve applied to people performance creates more problems (including motivation and a high potential for unfairness) that it tries to solve. It is a convenient management tool, in 2020 only justifiable to provide convenience to management.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

‘The organization IS a social network in which many dynamics, from connectivity to power, follow Power Law principles…Bell Curves and social networks are as suited to each other as oil and water.‘

 

Do you know your REAL organization?

 

 

The organization chart tells you who reports to whom but not much else. But, who is truly connected with whom?

For many years the need to understand formal and informal connections in organizations has been well understood.  Now, we have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality.

We can help you identify those channels.

 

 

 

3CXcan ^[18] provides a diagnosis of your formal and informal connections 

 

3CXcan is an online survey which uses organizational network science software called Cfinder Algorithm, a tool for social network detection, to give you a profound understanding of your internal networks. With this data you can built effective solutions for your organizational challenges. It is a diagnostic tool which:

 

◦ Provides a picture: of the formal and informal organization and how effectively both operate.

◦ Reveals: organizational connections from strong to weak, to ineffective and broken connection.

◦ Gains insight: on the specific solutions and interventions required.

◦ Identifies: the individuals that will leverage change more effectively (ie champions).

 

Note:

• This process is totally anonymous.
• No names are ever revealed (unless there is a specific agreement)
• The data base of findings is erased soon after the debriefing has taken place

 

To find out what the results from this process look like and how it can help your business – find out more. ^[18]

For a free virtual consultation or a short walk through our demo – contact us now.; ^[4]

This is my alternative to the Gallup 12. You can develop a whole Organizational Development philosophy around these questions. These are 10 questions on Corporate Magnetism (AKA Employee (Dis)engagement).

1. (Boss question) Why would anybody want to join us? Serious question about being a magnet or not. Alternative question: How long is the list of people wanting to join my division?
2. (Boss question) Why are you still here? The best and only Employee Engagement question that matters
3. If this were a volunteer’s job, would you be here?
4. If you were ill, at home or on holiday for a little while, would anybody notice? Seriously.
5. Can you name all members of the top executive team? Without looking at the Annual Report or the website, that is.
6. What do you tell your children about what you do? (Have you told them? What do you say?) You’d better write it down so you can see it. Or even better, record it.
7. Would you ask your best friend to join this company? Yes, the very best you have, that you care about. Husbands and wives accepted.
8. Does working here make you a better human being? Alternative question: did you understand the question? No, not a typo, ‘better human being’, not better professional.
9. Do you love this company even /because (if )sometimes ‘they’ make you mad? Driving somebody mad, or nuts, may be a sign of serious emotional connection. Just saying.
10. If you could, would you work somewhere else? OK, list it.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Let’s Join Forces!

 

Let’s join forces. We can deliver a webinar tailored to your organization and delivered to an in-house audience or a remote keynote, masterclass or roundtable on topics including: leadership, corporate culture, internal influencers, leading change and more– all delivered by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero. Contact us now! ^[4]

Or if you want to be informed about talks, events, masterclasses or courses organized by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero. Contact us now ^[4] – we want to hear from you!

 

 

Only when you see Performance Management as rituals, you can understand why we still do them in the same unchanged way. Think Anthropology, stop talking business school dialect.

In recent times people have become more and more disenchanted with performance appraisals, or at least in the form that traditionally is done, such as once a year, perhaps twice. Some companies have announced their death and consulting groups have advocated a semi-scrap of the system.

Why are they still here and robust? Because far from doing what it is obvious that they do, they also do other things. The truth? They are rituals. Rituals are hard to change because they are at the core of keeping the glue of cultures and organizations.

In my view, Performance Appraisals have at least five functions, not one:

(1) The official, declared goal oriented function: give feedback, learn, improve/professional development, manage the troops. Fine.

(2) The (Actionable) Taxonomy functionality: classify people, put them in quadrants and boxes, corporate ‘snakes and ladders’, with the aim to reward, promote, fire. The HR entomology system love this.

(3) An often hidden ‘agency’ function: bringing a sense of belonging, exercising power, asserting authority, being a vehicle for revenge (delayed until the end of the year); these are things Agent-Managers do. Take these away, you get, lame, one-armed managers.

(4) A tribal function: the tribe(s) have here a punctuation of time: same time each year, the before and after, prepare, guidelines, report, It’s that time of year again. Here we go, Christmas is coming.

(5) A structural function: this is uniformity for all, it cannot be changed, one system and glue, good group cohesion, good for maintaining social order. As such ‘we cannot touch it, it’s global, it’s HQ’ (usually expressed as with some sort of divine or supernatural power).

Only (1), the official, is often declared and talked about. But it is the 5 of them that keep the system alive. If it were only number (1), we would be doing a million other things instead.

The only way to seriously think about alternatives is to look at the five ‘functions’ in their totality and see how much each of them is Performance management supporting in your particular culture. The simple elimination or substitution of a ‘type 1’ system for a ‘more refined (1) system’ is naïve.

The clue about Performance Appraisals is in Anthropology, not in Harvard Business School.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Let’s Join Forces!

 

Let’s join forces. We can deliver a webinar tailored to your organization and delivered to an in-house audience or a remote keynote, masterclass or roundtable on topics including: leadership, leading change, internal influencers, corporate culture and more – all delivered by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero. Contact us now! ^[4]

Or if you want to be informed about talks, events, masterclasses or courses organized by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero. Contact us now ^[4] – we want to hear from you!