The war on talent
McKinsey consultants started it with a book of the same title. By focusing on what it seemed like a universal problem of scarce talent, and a subsequent call to arms in a battle to acquire it, they skilfully managed to distract the attention from a problem significantly greater: hosting talent. The military analogy (that management loves with narratives such as ‘win-win’, or ‘kill the competition’, for example) implied that talent is ‘outside’ and therefore there is a war to ‘get it’. Undoubtedly true in some occasions, organizations have today a greater problem with retention, engagement, and, as I said, hosting that talent. The war on talent is global, the skills gap is widening and employees are demanding more from their employers.

Organizations need to adopt a strategic approach to talent management. They must create workplaces where employees feel value, challenged and supported. They also need to invest in developing their employee’s skills and knowledge so that they can stay ahead of the curve.

The wrong capital
‘Talent management’ ( a sub-industry in its own rights) focuses too much on Human Capital, with emphasis on skills (and with emphasis on people ‘who have done it before’). However, in today’s world, social and emotional capital are just as important.

• Social Capital refers to the quality and quantity of an individual’s relationships. Employees with strong social capital are better able to collaborate, solve problems, and build consensus.
• Emotional capital refers to an individual’s ability to manage their own emotions and the emotions of others. Employees with high emotional capital are more resilient, adaptable, and effective leaders.

The best talent management programs focus on developing all three types of capital: human, social, and emotional.

Defining Talent
You’ll be surprised how many people can’t seriously articulate what this means to their organization. The narrower the definition, the bigger the problem. Once you have a clear definition of talent, you can develop programs and initiatives to attract, retain, and develop talented employees

It is vital to move beyond conventional boundaries and develop a nuanced understanding of talent management to foster a thriving workplace.

One of my favourite sets of Team Rules. Real life. Not invented. One of my best clients.

1. Always curious
2. No bullshit
3. All thoughts in the open, good or bad (no whinging in the toilets)
4. My time is not elastic. Yours?
5. Team’s success is mine. My success is the team’s success
6. Eyes on destination, the road is bumpy
7. Navel gazing is neither aesthetic nor productive
8. Mistakes are OK. No, really, they are.
9. People with all the answers are overqualified to work here
10. Call it out, name it, stop the nonsense
11. Ask for help, offer help, you are not on your own
12. We laugh a lot, and that’s a promise

Can you match that?

 

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Interventions from The Chalfont Project

Reboot! The Game Plan ^[1]

Do you feel like you and your team are stuck in the day to day doing of things and many aspects of the running of the organization don’t make the agenda?

There may or may not be anything obviously wrong. Or maybe there is. But this is not a good enough state of affairs.

This high intensity, accelerated intervention takes leadership teams of all levels through a process of discovery and identification of both stumbling blocks and enablers will be followed by a clear ‘so-what’ and an action plan. It results in alignment around a well crafted Game Plan that reflects where they see the organization/team/department in the short to medium term and a detailed commitment to action that can be tracked.

Contact us ^[2] to find out more information or discuss how we can support your business.

In the old Greek tragedies, when the plot became an unsolvable mess, a God (or few of them) came down from the sky, often on a mechanical platform (deus ex machina ^[3]) and solved the issue, full stop, end of story. Literally. Deus ex machina were like parachuted consultants coming to the rescue, but cheap and fast, unusual features.

There is a fabulous Deus ex Machina system in organizations. It’s called training. Or retraining. ‘You need training, they need retraining, and then they will get it, will know what to do (they forgot) or will solve the problem’. Invest in training; that will do it.

Yes and no.

Yes, skilling needs training, so does education, sensitisation, and awareness creation.

Culture shaping needs behavioural change mechanisms at scale. Behaviours don’t like PowerPoints. It’s social copying; and in Viral Change we will add, peer-to-peer, bottom up,and in the informal organization.

So yes, to Cesar what is Cesar’s, but lets be clear:

• You would not say about the guys in the BP oil spilling disaster, ‘these people need safety training’. They had the best.
• You would not say about the Volkswagen fiasco, ‘let’s retrain the engineers’. They are trained and best in class. Or , ‘let’s hire better engineers next time’. There aren’t.
• You would not have said about the Enron lot, that the problem was that they did not have the appropriate training in values. They had a pretty good one, praised by all at the time, including gurus such as Tom Peters
• You would not say about the rogue traders in investment banking, or the Libor manipulators, that they needed training in ethics. (Funny enough Barclays is doing just that)

Paraphrasing Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, on the incorporation of a CRM system to serve customers better (of course! what else would you buy a CRM system for?), when he said: ‘”We’ll be getting people to register and CRMing the hell out of them,” we could say we will create a training system for all, and…

Mmm, it does not look like training. ‘It’s culture, stupid’. And cultures are not created by training, I have said a million times. Also, no revolution has ever been done from a classroom.

Training could be fantastic, we all know when it’s good and refreshing. But it’s not the ex machina solution to the ills of the company. If it looks like descending from heaven, just in time (funnily enough), suspect ex machina. Red lights on, please.

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For more insights and thought-provoking discussion WATCH our free on demand webinars led by Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of organization architects.

 

‘A Better Way’ Series ^[4]

This series explores the future of organization life. We will explain how the 3 Pillars of The Chalfont Project’s Organizational Architecture – smart organizational design, large scale behavioural and cultural change and collective leadership – work together to create a “Better Way” for organizations to flourish in the post-COVID world.

 

Feed Forward Webinar Series ^[5]

In this series, Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of Organization Architects debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[6], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change , ^[7]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 regularly invited to speak at global conferences and Corporate events – to invite Dr Herrero to your event you can find out more here: Speaking Bureau ^[8] or contact us directly at: The Chalfont Project. ^[2]

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.

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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 ^[9] 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 ^[10].

 

I am (in) IT, I work for X (company)
I work for X (company), I am in IT

These are not the same. It tells me where the sense of belonging is, where home is, where loyalty may be, or divided. Both are neither good nor bad. They express what they express. They are different.

Change IT for R&D, Commercial, Regulatory etc. if you wish.

But some tribes are particularly good at preserving their belonging. Medical doctors are one. ‘Being a medical doctor’ becomes part of some sort of special form of being that sticks. Lots of pages in social psychology manuals explain why, including one that made me think for many years, when I was briefly teaching Medical Psychosociology in University: the so called ‘access to your body’. The plumber, the engineer, the roof fixer, the driver or your manager do not have (usually) access to your body. They may have access to your time, your money or your emotions but usually not your body. That is an anthropological privilege when looked through those lenses.

In my many years doing time in the pharmaceutical industry, I was always struck by the medics, some reporting to me, who would always put ‘the medic’ bit before the company paying the salary. ‘I am a doctor, I work for X (company) as Medical Director’ was always, always, far more prominent than ‘I work for X (company) as a Medical Director, comma, I am a medical doctor’

Here, the order of factors does change the product.

Similarly, for a company composed of parts or business units or acquired businesses.

I am in Y (part of company Z, or we are just being acquired by Z)
I work for Y, now part of Z
I work for Z, they just bought us, Y

Here, as well, the order of factors does change the product.

Months, even years after an acquisition, some groups or individuals have not made the transition yet. They still belong to the previous entity.

Also, the more de-centralised, devolved, an organization is, the more it is acting as a host, as an umbrella. As such, the overall brand may or may not be stronger than the individual de-centralised branded units. We see this all the time. People are often more loyal to a product-brand or a service-brand, or, indeed a geography-brand, than ‘the firm’.

The issue is not whether the decentralised business units retain high levels of loyalty and belonging for employees (what is wrong with that?) but whether the parent brand makes the whole thing even more attractive. The more decentralised, the greater the need for an overall glue, a neat common home to be. The onus to be a good magnet is on the host/umbrella/mother/father. Not on the children.

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.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[6], 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 ^[11] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[2].

His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management ^[12], is available at all major online bookstores.

 

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 ^[6], 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 ^[11] on topics covered in his Daily Thoughts and his books ^[13], and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[2].

 

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  ^[14] (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.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[6], 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 ^[11] on topics covered in his Daily Thoughts and his books ^[13], and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[2].

 

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.

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Continue the conversation – get your copy of Dr Herrer’s latest book, ‘The Flipping Point‘. ^[12] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[12] 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 ^[15].

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.

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Let’s Join Forces!

 

The team at The Chalfont Project  ^[6] 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! ^[2]

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 ^[2] .

 

 

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 ^[16]

If you want to increase employee engagement and employee satisfaction, increase your company performance (yes, the order is not a typo) ^[17]

The shortest Employee Engagement survey has one question ^[18]

Is employee engagement whatever is measured by employee engagement surveys? ^[19]

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.

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Continue the conversation…..

Thought leader, keynote speaker and author, Dr Leandro Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements. Find out more ^[11].

 

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 ^[20] 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 ^[11].

 

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 ^[20] to discuss your needs and to create the most appropriate virtual session for you.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Extracts taken from my book The Flipping Point. ^[12] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point ^[12] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read recent reviews on LinkedIn ^[21] and Amazon ^[22].

 

360 degree feedback is the great deceiver

Another self-proclaimed ‘vital management practice’. It is a self-centred and inwards looking system that is supposed to provide food for people’s development. But it is also often an HR sacred cow from HR departments with a lack of imagination, sold on the idea of openness and transparency, but serving as a ritual to keep HR busy. It bypasses meaningful, truthful, day-to-day, ongoing dialogues and 24/7 mutual interchanges on behalf of a pseudo-scientific process. An alibi for managers, who don’t have the guts to have honest conversations. I doubt that any job description or contract includes mental nudity and exposure to friendly fire and ‘objective’ input from colleagues. In the best-case scenario, do it if your boss is also included in the parade. And do it quickly, there is a lot of real work to do. In reality, it is a collective Maoist system. I have only seen collateral damage, never a seriously good thing coming out of this process. Obsessive feedback cultures are cults, not healthy organizations.

 

360 feedback is the great deceiver. A ‘culture of feedback’ is always praised as superior. When feedback is institutionalised, the whole thing becomes mechanistic. Robotic processes deprived from real meaning. If ‘feedback’ is part of the daily, prosaic conversation, then you don’t need the 360 Maoist system. Or any benign form with narrow angles (180 degrees etc). Incidentally my preferred angle is 45 degrees, which is the one you need to look at yourself in a mirror.

 

The following qualify for early retirement

The following qualify for early retirement on compassionate grounds due to their poor health, in some cases terminal illness: Agile, neuro-anything (as in neuro-leadership and neuro-marketing), employee engagement surveys, annual performance management systems, 360 feedback, talking about VUCA, Change Management à la Kotter, gender targets (as a sign of how diverse we are), mindset-change programmes (I have worked as a clinical psychiatrist for 15 years of my life and I have never seen a mindset, no idea what they look like; but I’ve seen lots of behaviours, I know what to do with those) and purpose. Purpose is really, really exhausted and has asked for a career break, but I don’t know whether it will ever be back. It has been occupying the old Mission and Vision discredited spaces and has become so overworked that it has grown grey hair. It also has nasty arthritis.

The following qualify for early retirement on compassionate grounds due to their poor health, in some cases terminal illness. Are we still friends despite my list?

 

 

 

Spot the difference at the dinner party or barbeque. So, what do you do Joe? [You must start with ‘so’ if you are in some kind of technology role yourself]

‘I am in IT, I work for Techno’ vs. ‘I work for Techno, I work in IT
‘I am a medical doctor, I work in PharmaTer’ vs. ‘I work for PharmaTer as a medical doctor’.
‘I am a hedge fund manager, I work for InvestSmart’ vs. ‘You know InvestSmart? I work there as a hedge fund manager’
‘I am an accountant, I work for GoodsMart’ vs ‘I am work for GoodsMart, in finance, I am an accountant by training’
‘I am a lawyer, I work for BankGlobal’ vs ‘I work for BankGlobal as a corporate lawyer’.

Imagine many other alternatives on any other function. The differences are not simple anecdotal ways of expressing the same. The expressions are not the same. In one type, the dominance is the professional tribe (IT, medic, hedge fund, accountant, lawyer). In the other type, the company (Techno, PharmaTer, InvestSmart, GoodsMart, BankGlobal) is the dominant source of belonging. Both are compatible, for sure. But, if I were the CEO of any of these companies, I’d rather have my people referring to the professional tribe after, not before referring to the company.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the tribal-professional sense of belonging. But when projected upfront as my real persona, it means that its power, significance, and identity is stronger than those of the employer’s itself. Tribe 1, company brand nil.

I have found two types of clients. Those who don’t get this, (‘don’t see the problem’) and those who care about ‘the order of things’. The latter are the ones who also care about culture. Since senior leaders, and therefore CEOs, are curators of their culture, it’s clear which ones ‘see’ the differences and have a preference for the company brand.

‘Seeing’ is the first step to interpreting and then doing something. Do you know what Joe, from your company, says when asked? I wish the Employee Engagement people included this…

Readers of my books and clients will be aware that I am not very fond of 360 degree feedback used as a tool in performance management in organizations. My antibodies are not related to the principle of obtaining feedback in order to progress individually and professionally, or to become a better leader.

My problem with ‘360 feedback’, where subordinates and colleagues are asked to provide anonymous input about somebody’s performance and qualities, is at least two fold:

(1) 9 out of 10 cases it’s misused. It is used as a form of control, warning for bad behaviours, even punishment, in a badly controlled way. You don’t need to be a psychologist to understand that soliciting feedback about somebody’s behaviours or traits in a anonymous but formal way, is an invitation for venting, highlighting and expressing feelings that the respondent would not like to say directly to the person. It’s often corporate open season for a semi-Maoist finger-pointing, accumulating feedback as ‘the collective truth’ with little room for disagreement. Very often, a 360 feedback system ignores the internal group and organizational dynamics. Any group psychologist would be very careful in orchestrating feedback and open discussion making sure it is a safe and constructive environment. Many ‘360 implementations’ end up as simply obtaining feedback for the sake of ticking boxes, with little care on what to do with the feedback itself.

(2) So, 25 people says that Jim is not very analytical (so this is sort of bad, or a weakness). What 25 people may not say is that Jim is very ‘synthetical’ and may be able to put things together and provide meaning. And this may be precisely what makes Jim valuable. 25 people say Peter is inconsistent; 25 people say John is emotional; 25 people say Mary is too quick to make decisions etc. All that, whether you like it or not, presupposes that being consistent, unemotional and a less quick decision-maker is good. The system presupposes an ideal normality, which is artificial. It inevitably tends to produce a comparison with an ideal type with no room to decide what ideal may mean other than some dubious, general bench marking. ‘Jim is 3 point below the norm for managers of this kind of company size and industry. Really? Everybody gives Mary feedback that her communication is poor, and this is communicated to Mary with some numbers and a talk by her boss. Great.

I know I am in caricature mode but many years of observation (and dare I say practicing) have convinced me that the misuse is greater than the benefits.

I’ve written before that my ideal angle is not 360 but 45 degrees. I believe in 45 degree feedback. 45 degree is about the angle needed to look at oneself in the mirror. A mirror is the best and cheapest Leadership Development tool.

Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, notorious for his disregard for customer service of any kind, was told by his Board that the company needs to show a little bit more respect for ‘the customer’. The man who once said ‘my company is the fastest at customer response; we are the fastest at saying no’, has admitted that the customer is some kind of reality to take into account. As a result of some changes in that direction, the company decided to invest in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. O’Leary went on to say: “We’ll be getting people to register and CRMing the hell out of them.”

Some organizations behave in similar way: they are ‘360-ing’ the hell out of everybody in management. You get the picture… On behalf of anonymous and collective feedback, we are abandoning open, transparent and more difficult face to face conversations. Those questionnaires are easy. Sure, it’s a choice…

If you look at political marketing, and the place to look for a serious PhD in communications and their segmentation is Obama’s campaign 2008 and 2012, for which there are plenty of books and papers, you’ll see that segmentation of the message is not even a question. You don’t go to them asking ‘do you segment?’ That would be the same as asking a restaurateur if he puts food on the table.

In these campaigns, the ‘data points’ per voter went into the hundreds. The entire communication system was tailored to segments of age, race, schooling, and another myriad of elements.

There is a wonderful clip on the web of Walter, a 90-year-old veteran campaigning via phone and a laptop, where a precise script is in front of his eyes, and a precise list of people to call. I have used this with my clients multiple times. We can only hear the voice at the other end of the phone, and it’s not one of a 25 year old. It sounds like one of his age or a bit below. Walter is asking for a vote but is not talking about an Iran threat, climate change, or education. None of it. It’s all healthcare. Nothing else.

When confronted with the clip, the first reaction by people in the room is ‘well, that’s obvious’. But then they have to suspend judgement about what may come after the obvious. I ask, when was the last time that you, in your internal, top down communication system, of the vision, the strategy, the ‘what’s next’ or the ‘what has just been’, segmented the message, a la Walter, versus one, single, monolithic, top down stack of PowerPoints shown at the all-people Town Hall meeting?

Invariably the answer is, don’t know, probably never. I think it is never.

The company, your company, probably, has Millennials mixed with Boomers, single mums and not, age bands with particular preoccupations, tribes (engineers, accountants, marketers etc.) speaking their own language, people in HQ and people outside, those feeling pretty OK and those worrying about the question mark over the site, passionate ones engaged with charities, super skilled and perhaps no skilled or very little, the secretaries tribe, the new in the company and those who have been there for years. Do I need to carry on? Why is it, for goodness’ sake, that everybody, I mean everybody, gets the same message, in the same format, at the same time? On behalf of what? Unity? Alignment? Democracy?

It’s simply crazy. Yes, you need a single, overall compelling narrative. But you need to segment, segment and segment the message. I know, this is not the conventional wisdom in ‘business’. But we, ‘in business’ are miles behind what happens in other parts of life where mobilizing people is the key. Perhaps this is why we have rather pathetic Employee Engagement practices.

Employee empowerment is an output, an outcome. If you start thinking of employee empowerment as an input, something you are supposed to give, you’re looking at it from the wrong angle. As an input, all the airtime will be allocated to how much to give, when, in which circumstances. Sure, you need to think about that but the real question is, what do you want to see happening that you can say ‘people are empowered’, what kind of state of mind and behaviours, and why, what benefits, if any.

The why is obviously important. Why is empowerment good? Because it is? What would happen to an organization with high levels of employee empowerment? Can you visualize it? If it is not clear, stop thinking what to give away to empower.

In this path to uncover the benefits, the argument is going to take you to the territory of ‘autonomy’, whether you call it this or not. Autonomy means a degree of control that has been gained (so yes, you now need to imagine what you will need to give away, to let go). Autonomy means self-determination, self-help, ability to conduct independently.

If you had that, people in the organization will probably also gain a lot of self-esteem and confidence. Trust levels will go up. Autonomy means increased efficiency and efficacy. Usually it also means faster reactions: markets, environment, crisis. The ‘business case’ is strong.

There are five ingredients that need to be cooked to achieve this.

Explicit ‘permission’ from leaders. There is something perhaps in people’s upbringing that makes us very dependent on ‘permissions’. Don’t underestimate the need to stress and repeat this to people. Don’t take for granted that this has been heard.

Trust. Call it how you like, but you need a good dose of this for autonomy and empowerment to be real. Are you prepared?

Resources. If people don’t have them, there is no point trumpeting empowerment. You can’t empower people to do the impossible.

Skills and competences. Equally, you can’t empower people to do something if they don’t know how.

A safety net of some sort. Within the compliance parameters that you may have, people need to be able to fail and not only survive but spread the learning.

A working definition of empowerment from the leaders perspective may sound like this: To give control to people who don’t have it, so that you can free yourself for things only you as leader can do, and, in doing so you are creating an efficient system with high levels of trust and self-esteem. All this provided that people have the skills and resources.

But the trick is to start from visualizing the kind of organization you want to see, not the theoretical view of empowerment or the things you would give away (decision rights for example). Then you need to work backwards to see what needs to happen. If you can’t visualize the benefits in the first instance, or not yet, don’t go that route. Stop talking about it.

One aspect of my work with organizations that I truly enjoy is to help craft the ‘Behavioural DNA’ that shapes the culture of the company. This is a set of actionable behaviours that must be universal, from the CEO to the MRO (Mail Room Officer). They also need to pass the ‘new hire test’: would you put that list in front of a prospect employee and say ‘This is us’?

There was one ‘aspirational’ sentence that I put to the test in one of my client sessions: ‘Working here makes us better human beings’.

It was met with scepticism by the large group in the meeting, initially mainly manifested through body language including the, difficult to describe, cynical smiles. The rationalists in the group jumped in hard to ‘corporatize’ the sentence.  ‘Do you mean better professionals?’ The long discussion had started. Or, perhaps, ‘do you mean…’ – and here the full blown corporate Academy of Language – from anything to do with skills, talent management, empowerment to being better managers, being better leaders, and so on.

‘No, I mean better human beings.  Period!’- I pushed back. Silence.

Next stage was the litany of adjectives coming from the collective mental thesaurus: fluffy, fuzzy, soft, vague…

I felt compelled to reframe the question: ‘OK, so who is against working in a place that makes you inhuman? Everybody. OK, So who is against working in a place that makes you more human? Nobody’. But still the defensive smiling.

It went on for a while until the group, ‘organically’, by the collective hearing of pros and cons, turned 180 degrees until everybody agreed that ‘Working in a place that makes you a better human being’ was actually very neat. But – there was a but – ‘Our leadership team won’t like it. They will say that its fluffy, fuzzy, soft etc… In the words of the group, it was not ‘them’ anymore who had a problem, it was the infamous ‘they’.

I then continued to push back: ‘Lets test it’. There was a joint meeting with the top leadership team scheduled for later. The statement ‘Working here makes us better human beings’ was, amongst others, for discussion. The leadership team loved it, each and all of them.  Permission granted. Now we could say that ‘Working here makes us better human beings.’ Safely.

Its funny how our corporate uniforms make us feel uncomfortable with humanity as if this is beyond the scope of work, outside the job description, in need of top approval. ‘Excuse me, can we say ‘human’ here?’ Yes you can.  Thanks!

Many years ago, I learnt from the UNHCR, the UN refugee Agency based in Denmark, that many global NGOs of that kind, had invented the art of employee engagement at a distance.

We were discussing organizational models and a Director of UNHCR was with us. The conversation evolved towards decentralized operations, the pros and cons of ‘control’, and the challenges of managing a workforce that’s remote and that you don’t see. The director looked at us with an incredulous look and said: “This is what we do all the time.”  So the formula was (paraphrasing), clear directions, lots of trust, get reports when you can, send feed back.

That organization, and similar ones of this sort, did not have the time or opportunity to ponder about levels of control (on the ground): control was near zero in some instances.

It has always fascinated me how, if business was smart enough to look for models outside their mental frameworks, there would be constant learning. I have written here before about ‘the movie model’ ^[23], one of many examples we could benefit from digging into.

Large, field based NGOs are also a good start. Not just for organizational models per se, but also for learnings about leadership, employee engagement, decision making.