Flip Chart Fairy Tales

A recent conversation between a regional manager and a training manager at corporate HQ:

Regional Manager:  Could you come down here and run a few days training for us?

Training Manager:  Sure. What do you need?

Regional Manager:  Something on how to behave appropriately at work…., erm, with particular emphasis on dress-codes.

Training Manager:  Rrrright…….  How has this arisen?

Regional Manager:  Some of our graduate trainees have started coming to work in jeans.

Training Manager:  Well, couldn’t you just tell them not to?

Regional Manager: (sounding very disappointed)  Oh…. erm…. yes, I suppose so.

It’s that old get-out option again. Need to give someone a difficult message? Don’t sweat about it. Send them on a training course instead.

I had a bit of an over-indulgent long weekend, so I was feeling a bit jaded this morning. This story cheered me up though.

The Italian government has posted the earnings of every worker in Italy on the Internet. Far from being a mistake, like our government’s data leaks, this was deliberate. The outgoing centre-left coalition claimed that the move was part of a programme to improve transparency. More likely, it was to create a mess for Silvio Berlusconi to clear up once he takes office later this week.

The website was jammed by Italians trying to find out what their work colleagues earned.

The more mischievous among you will already be imagining what might happen if our government did something similar. Some people might look at the pay of the rich and famous but most would try to find out what their colleagues and friends were earning. The result, as Guru says, would be a headache for employers as they tried to justify unfair and arbitrary pay differentials.

And pay levels are always unfair. Sure, we have job evaluation schemes and other criteria that are designed to look objective but, in the end, pay levels are always influenced by the subjective judgements of those in power. Or, to put it more bluntly, by favouritism. Which is why most senior executives would be horrified at the idea of pay transparency. Most of them know that they would not be able to justify the disparities in pay to disgruntled employees.

I am sceptical of the results of this survey which claims that 60% of HR managers would be prepared to disclose their salaries in the interests of pay parity. They probably said that only because they know it will never happen. Of all people, HR managers would have the most to lose from a pay transparency policy. They would be the ones left to deal with the aggro.

The Italian pay data has now been removed from the Internet. This is a pity. It would have been interesting and entertaining to see the impact on employee relations in Italian companies. Would it have had the positive impact on motivation that the advocates of such a policy claim, or would there just have been weeks of chaos and paralysis as managers tried to sort out the mess? Alas, we’ll never know now.

Rob Briner is on HR’s case again in this week’s People Management. He posed some questions to students on a masters programme:

To get things going I posed some questions. What is currently a real priority for you in your job? What tasks are occupying your thoughts and demanding effort and time?

Their responses were perhaps not too surprising. They told me that important policies and initiatives were being rolled out. Crucial systems were being aligned across business units. Key practices were being standardised and pushed down the line.

I then asked another question. What difference does what you do make to the performance or well-being of your staff or organisation, and how do you know if you are having an effect?

What would your answer be? There was a fairly consistent response from the students. They either didn’t believe that they made any difference or, equally worrying, they simply had no way of knowing whether their work was having much of an impact on important individual or organisational outcomes.

Instead, their activities were based on complying with various business demands: to get new stuff going, to tidy up, sort out, consolidate and streamline.

To be fair, you would probably get similar results from groups of managers in some other functions. It is not just HR people who have lost sight of the purpose of their jobs. Organisations are full of people beavering away on things that seem very important but which have a tenuous connection to performance or profit. The larger the company, the more people there are in this situation.

The less clear people are about their overall objectives and how they fit into the organisation’s aims, the more likely they are to just find something - anything - to do. The brighter people are, the more complex the systems and processes they set up to keep themselves busy. For example, I recently heard about a person being employed just to make sure all the projects in an organisation were using the same methodologies and standards. A good idea, I’m sure, but did the outcomes really justify his salary?

When I first started work, I assumed that people in positions of power ran things on some sort of rational basis. However, as I watched what senior managers actually did, I realised that they were driven as much by vanity, status and the desire to protect their own positions. The cleverer ones were also good at using logic and reason to justify their actions after the event.

Rob is right to call for management practices to be more evidence-based but I wonder how many senior people in organisations would really want to have their empires scrutinised to that extent. Do they seriously want to have to prove that their activities contribute clearly and effeciently to the corporate goals? Wouldn’t many of them prefer simply to collude with each other to maintain the fiction?

I won’t ask too many questions about what your department does if you don’t ask too many questions about mine. That way, we can all draw big salaries and bonuses and leave the company with fat payoffs before anyone finds out what we’ve been up to.

The idea of evidence based management is fine if we assume that an organisation works in the pursuit of a small number of compatible goals. If so, we can measure everything against how far it contributes to those goals.

If, on the other hand, we accept that an organisation is actually a ragbag of competing interests, how easy will it be to measure the effectiveness of what people do. When we ask what something contributes to the bottom line, whose bottom line are we talking about?

OK, so perhaps I am being cynical but I wonder if a more evidence-based approach to management will simply be used to provide a post hoc rationalisation for empire building by powerful executives.

If evidence-based management catches on, clever executives will doubtless learn to use it in the service of their own ends.   

I have just done something I haven’t done for over twenty years.

I voted Conservative. Well, I put my second preference cross in the Tory box but in this election that amounts to the same thing. 

I didn’t vote for the party but for Boris Johnson who will, I hope, be a better Mayor of London than Ken Livingstone. 

If he gets in and everything goes pear-shaped, feel free to take the piss mercilessly. 

Not long ago the papers were complaining about the impact of large scale immigration from Eastern Europe. Now, there are fears that the Poles and others are heading for home as the exchange rate and the UK’s economy make working here less attractive. Suddenly managers who employed large numbers of Eastern Europeans are in a panic.

What if they all go home? Will we have to start employing local people again? Will British people work as hard for the same wages as the Poles? Hell, we might even have to start training people again!

Well it’s not as if we haven’t been warned. This was always going to happen. The Eastern Europeans didn’t come here because they liked the weather or because they were fleeing oppression. They came because there were plenty of jobs that paid more than those at home. Now their economy has improved, most will go home, unless they can find other EU countries that are still paying significantly higher wages.

The mass exodus of the Poles was always a near certainty. Businesses that did not plan for it are just as guilty of negligence as the government that failed to prepare for the East European influx four years ago.

Once again, one of Laurie Ruettimann’s posts has left me struggling with North American nomenclature. A Valedictorian is, apparently, the student who makes the final speech at the graduation ceremony. There is, it seems, a whole palaver surrounding the election or selection of the Valedictorian before a school or college graduation.

That explanation out of the way, onto the meat of the story. One candidate for Valedictorian at a Canadian school has got into trouble for his politically incorrect speech on the hustings. After Brandon Rosario’s appeal to the high school voters was posted on YouTube, he was investigated for his remarks about Jews, Colombians, black women, gays and the disabled.

When I watched it, I was astounded by the seventeen-year-old’s comic timing. I went to school with some fairly clever, articulate and confident people but I can’t imagine any of them being able to deliver a speech like that in their final year at school.

Anyway, Brandon Rosario is now unintentionally famous. Have a look at his speech. Is he just a nasty kid getting cheap laughs or is he a wit with a repartee beyond his years? And would you hire him?

Whatever you think, I wouldn’t be surprised if we hear from him again in next few years.

Bad luck, folks, I haven’t been run over by a bus, I just had a breakdown in communication with my ISP which made them think I wanted to cancel my account. All sorted now and no harm done.

This book review in People Management looks interesting. Tribal Business School, by management consultant Jo Owen, draws lessons from the survival skills of traditional communities and applies them to business. As the reviewer Rob Sheffield tells us:

Fewer than 20 of the original FTSE-100 companies still survive after 25 years, says the author. He has researched traditional communities that have been around a long time: if they’ve survived for so long, “perhaps they are doing something right”. Owen spent seven years trying to understand their various practices and thinking. This included the Aborigines in Australia, Saami in Finland and Likipia in Africa.

Almost immediately, my natural scepticism kicked in. You could argue that the English, the Swedes and certainly the Basques have “been around for a long time”. The Saami and Aborigines are distictive only in that ever diminishing numbers of them have tried to cling to their old ways in the face of a rapidly changing world. Should such communities really be used as models for today’s businesses?  Surely that can’t be the core message of this book.

Reading the synopsis on Amazon gives a slightly different perspective.

If you want to learn about survival and success, learn from people who have survived hundreds of years in the most hostile environments in the world. The indigenous people of the world cannot afford the modern corporate luxuries of complexity and confusion. For them, the penalty of failure is not to miss a bonus, the penalty is often death.

Once you strip away all of the corporate life support systems of HR, IT, Legal, Help Desks and manuals you discover the real rules of leading for survival and success, you discover the heart of management.

Well, yes, I can see that but the findings, as reported in the review, are hardly Earth shattering. I realised why I was sceptical when I read this quote:

Each tribe has a very strong mission – to survive. Modern organisations face the same challenge, but their employees don’t share the same mission.

And why the hell should they? Most people don’t stay with organisations for very long. Sure, they want them to survive for as long as they are there but after that, most couldn’t care less. Three of my previous employers, all well-known blue-chip companies, have either ceased to exist or have been taken over by others and are now completely different from when I worked for them. Do I care? Not really. They gave me great experience and paid me reasonably well but now, most of the people I knew there have left. The companies are just names on my CV.

That’s the problem with trying to draw parallels with companies and other forms of social organisation, such as families, tribes and nations. Companies are, by their nature, ephemeral. They change their names, their locations and their people at a much faster rate than tribes or nations. Individuals can also choose whether to belong and can be expelled relatively easily. Membership of tribe and nation is more permanent. My employer can sack me and remove me from the firm but I would still be British, even if Gordon Brown decided to send me into exile for saying rude things about his silly ideas.

The idea that companies should inspire the same feelings of belonging and, therefore, the same stake in their survival as tribes do is preposterous and even a little sinister. Your community, nationality and family are part of your identity. A company is, when all is said and done, just somewhere you go to work. Management theorists would do well to remember that.

Having said all that, I have not read Tribal Business School, so maybe I am being unfair. Perhaps I have misinterpreted its message from a selective reading of the reviews. All the same, I don’t feel any urge to go out and buy it.

If anyone has read the book, please drop me a line and let me know what you think.

Via HR Zone I discovered HR with Guts. What a great title for a blog.

This piece on giving bad news caught my eye. As Jan Hills says, most of the training managers are given on this subject focuses on dealing with the reactions of the person receiving the bad news. However, she argues, it is just as important to look at the emotional state of the giver of bad tidings.

She’s right too.The problem with bad news in organisations is that people often avoid giving it until it is too late. If you have a word with someone when you notice his performance slipping, you are less likely to have to haul him into a disciplinary six months down the line.

But I bet most of you don’t do that. You hope the problems will go away until you are forced to do something about them and then the conversations become a whole lot more unpleasant, so you end up crapping yourselves even more before the horrible meeting. “If only I had acted earlier and nipped it in the bud,” you cry, “I wouldn’t have to deal with all this mess now.” I know, I’ve been there too.

If you are able to manage your own state of mind and control your emotional responses to the reactions you are likely to get, you go into the meeting with more confidence, therefore you are more likely to tackle these problems earlier on. Coaching or training in this area can be useful. Well, it worked for me anyway. I still hate giving bad news but at least I feel more in control now when I’m doing it.

It looks as if a lot of managers may be having to give bad news over the next year or so. Getting some help to prepare for these horrible conversations is not a bad idea. 

I always spell her name wrong at the first attempt but, even so, Laurie Reuttiman’s blog is always good for a funny story. This one made me laugh.

Years ago, before I was married, my father-in-law asked me, “What is Human Resources? What do you do?”

I wanted to impress my father-in-law with my knowledge & importance, so I shared a very boring and über-jargony description of my HR roles & responsibilities.

I told him that I was responsible for partnering and educating my client groups; I help my clients ‘own’ the talent management process; I proactively address employee development needs; I meet with my clients to design and recommend training programs; and I coach leaders to address performance management issues in the earliest possible part of the employment life-cycle.

My father-in-law said, “I have no idea what that means, Laurie. What else do you do?”

I said, “I also lay people off.”

He said, “Oh, it’s just like the old Personnel Department.”

Huh? What? The personnel department? Are you kidding me? I’m so different than the old ladies who used to work in Personnel — the spinsters with the thick glasses and bad sweater vests — except, wait, I’m not.

I have no idea what a sweater vest is but that probably doesn’t matter.

Earlier this week, the bosses of banks like HSBC, Barclays, HBOS and RBS, together with leading investment bankers and hedge fund managers, trooped in to see Gordon Brown and demanded that the government ‘do something’ about the credit crunch. Sure enough, this was followed soon afterwards by the Bank of England’s bail-out plan in which the taxpayer will take on the liability for the the banks’ mortgage loans in return for government bonds.

Now am I missing something here or have the bankers just taken chutzpah to new heights? Through their incompetent investments and dodgy financial instruments they get the economy into a mess, then they demand that the government does something to dig us all out of the cesspit they have dropped us in.

Let’s briefly recap on how this happened. Banks packaged up dodgy mortgages using financial instruments that made them look like good bets. Other banks bought them without looking too closely at the potential risks. These financial instruments were so complex that, when things began to go wrong, the banks were unable to work out who was left holding most of the sub-prime babies. Therefore they stopped lending each other money.

So if the banks aren’t willing to lend to each other, is it reasonable for them to demand that the government does so? If the banks can’t work out which mortgage assets are sound and which ones are not, how on Earth is the government going to make this call? Sure, the government may issue bonds for a lower value than the mortgages it takes on but how will it be able to accurately assess the value of these mortgages when the banks themselves admit that they don’t know where the toxic debt is? Once again, this looks like another case of privatising profit and socialising costs. Vince Cable, one of the few politicians who cuts to the chase on these issues, is worried. As he says:

We cannot have a situation where the banks are able to privatise their profits and nationalise their losses.

The Government must now insist on a orderly programme for identifying the losses in the banking system to ensure the banks themselves cover those losses.

This looks like rewards for failure and irresponsibility.

Indeed it does. In most industries, if you screw up there is a penalty but banking, it seems, does not work like that. Because the banking system is so crucial to the stability of the economy, the industry’s magnates know that the government cannot let even one bank go to the wall for fear of the knock-on effect that might lead to the whole system collapsing. Therefore, they can be confident that, when push comes to shove, the government will always step in and bail them out.

If you mess the travelling public around by cancelling their flights, forcing them to sleep airport terminals and making their bags disappear, eventually you get fired. But if you make people homeless and destroy their pensions, savings and livelihoods by making silly investments, hey, that’s just the way things go isn’t it? The government has to ‘do something’ and the bankers slink off into the shadows, having been let off the caning they so richly deserve.

Free-market fundamentalists will argue that the only way to deal with this incompetence is simply to let banks collapse. The idea of a metaphorical Anne Robinson saying “Adam Applegarth, you leave with nothing” does have a certain appeal. However, the effects on the economy would probably be catastrophic and even in the spiritual home of free-market capitalism they are not prepared to let that happen.

Yet, as Martin Wolf said in yesterday’s FT, it is important that bankers suffer for their bad decisions or they will get us into this mess again.

It is…crucial that the institutions, and unsecured creditors, feel some pain: the burned child fears the fire; singeing is less effective.

But he is sceptical about the effectiveness of regulation.

Regulators are doomed to close the stable doors behind financial institutions that always find new and more exciting ways of losing money.

In other words, the same weasels that invented the instruments that got us into this mess will invent new ones to get round any future regulation.

Those bankers that demand government intervention to get them off the hook will, probably in the same conversation, also assert their right to be free from state regulation. But it is time governments stopped allowing them to call the tune. If they want state intervention, they should be made to accept regulation as a quid pro quo. I don’t know enough about banking to know what would work and what wouldn’t but I have heard a few interesting ideas recently.

Forcing the banks to keep higher levels of liquidity would be a good start. Making them pay some of their huge profits into a bail-out fund as an insurance against a bank’s collapse would ensure that the costs of a rescue would not have to be met by the taxpayer. Other professions such as lawyers and travel agents do this so why not make the banks carry similar insurance too?

And as for the government taking on their dirty mortgages, shouldn’t it also take a share in the banks or impose a special tax on their profits until these debts are either paid off or returned to their original owners?

Bank shares have already risen this morning in response to the Bank of England’s rescue package. Soon, the banks will be making vast amounts of money again. By right, shouldn’t they owe some of that cash to the taxpayer? Isn’t it time that pain and profit were shared more equally between the banks and the the rest of us?