Flip Chart Fairy Tales

This gave me a wee smile.

James G, who blogs at Whatsthatsmell, is presumably doing a management qualification:

There is so much to say but so much to do.  One of the main issues for my non-blogging is that I have been busy at work and I have schoolwork piling up.  And the reason the schoolwork is piling up is because it is Human Resources Management this quarter.  And I cannot get excited about it at all…

Neither can a lot of the people who work in it, James, so I wouldn’t worry too much.

HR Management is a function run for the benefit of the PC police….

Hang on a minute, you’re making it sound much more exciting than it really is.

[It] usually has overblown contentions about its own effectiveness and how it can be a strategic partner to the business…

Ah, now don’t get me started on that.

 It’s all a load of tosh…

Now here’s where you’re wrong, James. If it was all a load of tosh, companies would have dumped their HR functions years ago. OK, maybe some HR people and quite a few HR lecturers are a load of tosh but the need for a good HR function is now probably stronger than ever and, if you have a management role, you need to deal with HR people and get them working for you. That approach can be surprisingly productive.

Have a great weekend anyway, James. Oh, of course, you won’t because you’ll be reading HR books while the rest of us are out enjoying the sun.

I nicked this from Donal Blaney’s blog.

A sales rep, an administration clerk, and the manager are walking to lunch when they find an antique oil lamp.

They rub it and a Genie comes out.

The Genie says, ‘I’ll give each of you just one wish.’

‘Me first! Me first!’ says the admin clerk. ‘I want to be in the Bahamas, driving a speedboat, without a care in the world.’

Puff! She’s gone.

‘Me next! Me next!’ says the sales rep. ‘I want to be in Hawaii, relaxing on the beach with my personal masseuse, an endless supply of Pina Coladas and the love of my life.’

Puff! He’s gone.

‘OK, you’re up,’ the Genie says to the manager.

The manager says, ‘I want those two back in the office after lunch.’

Moral of the story: Always let your boss have the first say.

I’d like to think that no boss could be such a miserable, unimaginative git. Then I remember some of the people I’ve worked for in the past…….

Stefan Stern sums up the attitude of most companies to employees who are a bit off-the-wall in his FT piece, “Give us mavericks - just don’t let them run anything“.

Time was when employers used to say they wanted people with ‘balanced profiles’. Steady people with nothing in their characters or their pasts that might frighten the horses. Actually, no-one cares about the horses, it’s the board and the City they don’t want spooked.

More recently, though, there has been talk of wanting people with ’spiky profiles’, people who are a bit edgy and who challenge the status quo. Firms worried about being left behind want to recruit more entrepreneurial types and people with ‘flair’. Even the public sector has been infected by this. There is even talk of entrepreneurship in the NHS.

But when most large organisations recruit these maverick types, they almost immediately start to piss people off. It’s not surprising that the Kingston University study, referred to in the FT, found a mismatch between the sort of people senior execuitives say they want and the people they are comfortable about having in their organisations. 

The trouble with mavericks is that they are difficult to manage. They ask awkward questions, they don’t conform to established ways of doing things, they break rules, or worse, try to re-write rules and, above all, they make people feel uncomfortable. And people don’t like to feel uncomfortable at work.

The longer you have been in a company and the more senior you are within its ranks, the greater the likelihood that you feel comfortable in that organisation. Therefore, when a maverick comes in and starts shaking things up, it is the more senior people who are most likely to feel put out by some of the things he or she says and does. For this reason, organisational cultures often spit the mavericks out. A friend of mine likens it to a body rejecting a transplant.

Executives in most large organisations are prepared to tolerate mediocre performance and significant inefficiencies for the sake of avoiding unease or discomfort. That’s why so many of them wait until the last possible minute before tackling performance issues by which time, of course, it is often too late. Mavericks, though, present the opposite problem. They create discomfort just by being there.

A few years ago I did some work for an organisation that very rarely sacked people. The managers preferred to let the poor performers chug on, provided they didn’t bother anyone. Then a new senior executive was recruited to help the company move into a new market. He ruffled feathers almost from his first day by asking difficult questions, ignoring procedures and openly criticising much of what ad already been done. He was ‘managed out’ of the organisation before the year was out.

For mavericks, the normal discomfort equation works in reverse. Usually, it is uncomfortable to fire someone but if the discomfort caused by the spiky person is greater than that which an executive would feel when sacking him, then delivering the coup de grace becomes that much easier.

This tendency becomes even more marked when a company is in difficulty or there is an economic downturn. Such dangers make companies more conservative. Just at the point when, perhaps, they should consider doing something different, they go back to what they know. The world is just too dangerous to try anything different. So, if the firm was tolerating the nutter with the good ideas up until now, they might not do so for much longer. The heightened nervousness of the other executives may start to blind them to his contributions. His strange behaviour and refusal to conform is more likely to be seen as just more stress that the rest of the team don’t need.

Again, I saw this sort of retrenchment during the mini-downturn we had a few years ago. A number of the wackos I know who now run their own firms left their employers during that period.

For this reason, there will probably be less talk of recruiting people with spiky profiles over the next couple of years and some of the mavericks who joined the big corporates will, no doubt, take their payoffs and run.

Off-the-wall-types, spiky profiles, mavericks - call them what you like - can make a lot of people uneasy, especially when the outlook is already uncertain. As one executive in the survey said, “life is actually easier if you get rid of them”.

A couple of employment law bloggers have written about the case of Lillian Ladele, the registrar who won her case religious discrimination claim against Islington council (see previous post). Both reckon the tribunal judgement was flawed.

Carl Gardner, a barrister and former government adviser, says that the judgement was wrong on all three counts. Islington, he argues, did not directly discriminate against Miss Ladele. Furthermore, he continues, any indirect discrimination would be justified on the grounds of the requirements of the job:

Giving a fair and equal service to the public and ensuring the availability of registrars must be an eminently justifiable reason for requiring registrars to work on civil partnerships. The Tribunal’s refusal to take Islington’s approach seriously risks giving religious minorities extreme, unwarranted protection as employees - to the extent that pursuing a secularist approach to public service provision is unlawful. 

He also doesn’t buy the harassment claim:

As for the Tribunal’s findings on harassment, I think they’re shocking to be frank. I don’t think the Tribunal properly addresses the question whether the so-called harassment (which at least in part consisted simply in the council’s applying what it genuinely considered - and I think for good reason - a non-discriminatory and secularist policy) was on grounds of religion. And it deals in the most cursory, question-begging way with the question whether what Islington did created an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment.

Usefully Employed, in a more detailed demolition of the tribunal’s judgement, draws similar conclusions.

Both lawyers expect the case to go to the Employment Appeal Tribunal.

I have been doing a bit of digging on the Employment Equality Regulations. It appears that the wording on harassment in both acts came from this EU directive  (see Article 2 Paragraph 3).

Now I don’t want to sound like one of those nutters who thinks the EU is the source of all evil but we do seem to have been lumbered with legislation which is almost certain to create conflicts between competing groups in the workplace. When it comes to creating an intimidating or offensive environment, gay people and religious conservatives could almost claim that the simple presence of the other creates such an environment. The same could also be said of competing religions.

As I have said before, I think we are going to see a lot more cases like this but I would be interested to know what the effect of the legislation arising from this directive has been in other EU countries. Have similar cases come up elsewhere?  Answers in the usual place, please.

It always sounds terribly smug to say ‘I told you so’ but I just can’t resist it.

Last October I predicted that there would be conflicts between competing rights in the workplace. Already, we have seen trouble between different religions in the workplace. Then, yesterday, the Central London Employment tribunal issued a judgement which the FT claims could redraw the boundaries of anti-discrimination laws.

When the law changed to allow same-sex civil partnerships, Lillian Ladele, a registrar for the London Borough of Islington and a devout Christian, refused to officiate at these ceremonies. Her employers tried first to persuade her and then to force her to do so by using the council’s disciplinary procedure. Miss Ladele then claimed that her employer was discriminating agaist her on the grounds of her religion. The tribunal agreed and found in her favour, which means that Islington will have to pay her compensation.There is no limit to the damages that can be awarded for religious discrimination, so this could end up costing the taxpayers of Islington a lot of money.

So what are the implications of this case?

In employment law there has long been the concept of a ‘reasonable management request’ - the idea that, within reason, a manager can ask an employee to do anything that would reasonably fall withing his or her job specification. From the point of view of the managers at Islington, Miss Ladele was employed to carry out civil ceremonies. The law had changed to allow same-sex ceremonies but the nature of the registrar’s job had not. Therefore, in the view of her employer, when Miss Ladele refused to officiate at same-sex ceremonies, she was disobeying a reasonable management instruction.

So does this ruling now mean that management requests can be refused on the grounds of religious belief? Has it, as some people are saying, changed the law so that people can simply refuse to perform a part of their jobs on religious grounds? Strictly speaking, of course, it hasn’t because ET rulings are not binding on other courts. However, judgements are used as guidance and the effect of this ruling will almost certainly make employers more reticent about challenging religious claims in the workplace.

The judgement makes interesting reading. After Miss Ladele had refused to carry out the civil ceremonies, two gay colleagues, Dion and Viktoria, complained that they felt discriminated against and intimidated by what they regarded as her homophobic attitudes.

Now the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003 define harassment as “conduct….creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”.

The Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003 contain, you guessed it, exactly the same wording. It was under this law that the tribunal found against the London Borough of Islington.  

But, given the complaints against Lillian Ladele from the two gay members of staff, one is left wondering whether the employer was in a no-win situation. If Islington hadn’t taken action against Miss Ladele, could Dion and Viktoria have gone to a tribunal and won a case on the grounds that their employer had allowed a homophobic environment to persist? Wasn’t this simply a case of who went to the tribunal first?

And therein lies the problem. The equality legislation has created conflicting rights and the employer is stuck in the middle. Of course, Islington Council will appeal and the tribunal’s judgement might be overturned but it is only a matter of time before another similar case is brought, perhaps, this time, by a gay employee.

This legislation will continue to be a headache for managers, although it will, no doubt, help to keep an army of HR managers and equality advisers in jobs. And, of course, one or two claimants and a lot of employment lawyers will get very rich.

At the risk of sounding as if I’m obsessed, I’m taking issue with another of Chris Dillow’s posts.

Johann Hari describes the theory (fact) of evolution through natural selection as “the greatest insight of any human being so far.“ This sort of claim has always struck me - and I suspect most economists - as a gross exaggeration. The notion that competition can drive selection is mundane; it happens in economics all the time.

I suspect many hold Darwinism in the awe they do precisely because they are not economists. They don’t appreciate that order can emerge from “blind” processes, without conscious design.

What’s more, it’s not sufficiently appreciated just how close the similarities are between natural selection in biology and the way the market selects among companies.

Sure, the idea that an environment selects out those best able to compete was not new. If resources are scarce, in a natural or an economic environment, only the few will survive. But as this Wikipedia entry points out, taken on its own, the term ‘Survival of the Fittest’ is a tautology. It simply says that those best able to survive will survive. It tells us nothing about what they actually do to enable that survival.

Darwin’s great insight was that the characteristics which equip a species for survival are passed down through the generations, multiplying and thus strengthening that species as time goes on.

This is where the analogy with companies breaks down. Firms use any number of methods to survive and make profit in the marketplace. Economic efficiency and customer service are what most like to claim to be the secrets of their success but often that is post-hoc rationalisation. What they actually do is make deals, form cartels, screw their customers and hope they don’t notice, indulge in costly internal wars, stab each other in the back and, quite often, simply stumble upon ideas that work which they then later claim to have been coherent strategies.

What many find difficult is being able to repeat this success. When management Guru Tom Peters wrote ‘In Search of Excellence’ in the 1980s, drawing lessons from successful companies, Business Week noted that, two years later, one third of the successful companies he told everyone to emulate were in financial difficulties.

This is hardly surprising because within any organisation there are a number of individuals with different motives, sometimes competing, sometimes co-operating and often not knowing what the hell they are doing. As the great J.G. March said, the most appropriate analogy for organisational decision making is a garbage can “into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated.” Shake the garbage can around and somehow a decision comes out. 

A McKinzie survey last year highlighted the ad hoc nature of decisions in organisations.

Despite the good intentions and intense involvement of senior executives in resource allocation, the results appear mixed. For example, corporate-level executives responding to the survey with an opinion indicate that 17 percent of the capital invested by their companies went toward underperforming investments that should be terminated and that 16 percent of their investments were a mistake to have financed in the first place. Business unit heads and frontline managers say 21 percent of investments should not have been approved and indicate another 21 percent should be terminated.

[T]he less-than-ideal combination of optimism, risk aversion, and one-off decision making is perhaps exacerbated by the prominence of corporate politics. Respondents say that behind-the-scenes lobbying and logrolling—and sometimes outright deception—are fairly frequent and seem to inhibit constructive debate and dissent throughout the resource allocation process.

OK, sometimes the metaphor of biological evolution does explain corporate performance. In some cases firms survive by adapting and go under because they keep doing the same things that worked in the past, long after the business environment has changed. But these are only some of the reasons why companies succeed and fail. Often a dinosaur will fall only to have its place taken by another equally slow and ponderous dinosaur. A random event can lead to a strong company being taken over by a weaker one.

Using biological evolution as a metaphor for corporate survival might look attractive but it ignores the random nature of decision making in organisations. Companies do not evolve in the same way as species. In only a few cases do they manage to reproduce and strengthen those characteristics that enabled them to get ahead of the game. Success in the corporate world is a lot more random than company executives would like us to believe.

This is timely. Nick Ryan and Chris Macmillan from HR Zone have written a piece about the need to do background checks on potential employees to make sure you don’t end up having to fire people when their dodgy pasts come to light. As they point out:

Why do businesses still fall into this trap? Because most organisations simply do not carry out the appropriate pre-employment checks.

One director of a pre-employment screening service advocates running checks on:

[A]n individual’s identity, financial status, employment history, academic background, criminal record information, driving licence details, directorship status and professional body membership.

Most employers don’t do this, though, because they are often desperate to get people on board, especially if there is an urgent need and they have been looking for someone for months. Nevertheless, as recent research suggests, telling lies on CVs is realatively common. A bit more care, especially when recruiting for high profile jobs, could, therefore, save a lot of embarrassment later.

One person who probably wishes he had taken a bit of time to run some pre-employment checks is Boris Johnson. Had he  done a few simple checks on Ray Lewis he would soon have discovered the Lee McQueen statements on Mr Lewis’s CV. Mr Lewis’s former boss even suggested that Boris should give him a call, apparently hinting as far as he dare in writing that something was amiss, but even this offer failed to alert the Mayor or his team.

If the Guardian’s Hugh Muir is right, the Tories were desperate to get Ray Lewis on board.

They gave him connections, he gave them much-needed credibility in the sphere of social policy. When Boris decided to make youth crime a touchstone election issue, Central Office inevitably sent him to Lewis…

How often does that happen? A company is moving into an unfamiliar business area, perhaps after some rash commitments from the board, but no-one is quite sure how to make it happen. Suddenly a candidate appears who seems credible and has all the answers. Amidst all the excitement about the new venture and the relief at finding someone to run it who actually knows what he’s talking about, no-one stops to think about background checks.

Furthermore, when an organisation is moving into unfamiliar territory, almost inevitably some of the new people it recruits will be different from those it has hired in the past. Any doubts or unease the existing management might have about the new hires are often, therefore, explained away with whatever stereotypical view they have of the new sector.

“Well, these retail types are all like that, aren’t they?”

“People who do Corporate Social Responsibility are all a bit airy-fairy.”

Senior Tories probably fell victim to a similar thought process. “You know, these third-sector chappies have their own ways of doing things.”

Now, for want of just a few simple checks, they are left looking very embarrassed. However, the Conservative Party is not the first organisation to make such a mistake and, you can be sure, it won’t be the last.

I know I had a bit of a go at Chris Dillow a couple of days ago but he is right about this.

Although a lot of us shop at Marks and Spencer, it does not represent the entire British economy. Just because its like-for-like sales fell by 5.3%, it doesn’t follow that everyone else’s will do the same. Yes, there is an economic downturn but it could be that M & S is doing something wrong too.

I sometimes wonder why I bother reading the papers. Someone picks up a sensational angle on a story then they all repeat it parrot fashion.

This morning, you could be forgiven for thinking that Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary has produced an entire report on how police sergeants are too scared to tackle scruffy constables. It’s the BBC news headline both on TV and radio. The Daily Mail, Sky News, Daily Mirror and even the Yorkshire Post carry similar headlines.

This story is based on a few quotes in a much wider report on the role of sergeants in the police force. Leading from the Frontline (warning- this is a big file in horrid pdf format) is an extensive survey which used questionnaires, focus groups and observation to try to understand the challenges facing sergeants in today’s police force.

Before I go much further, I should state my position. I firmly believe that one of the most neglected areas in British organisations is the training and support of first line managers. I remember only too well being promoted to my first job in which I had to manage other people. Suddenly, I had to worry about my own workload and other people’s as well. I was given very little support and was somehow just expected to make the transition. As time went on, I realised that my bosses were cleverly delegating their delegating to me, including all the difficult messages they didn’t want to pass on themselves.

From what I have observed, twenty years later the support given to first line supervisors doesn’t seem to have improved much. Companies still spend lavishly on leadership training for senior managers while leaving the team-leaders, chargehands and supervisors to muddle through as best they can. The HMIC report on police sergeants should be viewed in this context. The police, it seems, are no better but probably no worse than many other organisations. Much of what is in the report will be familiar to anyone who has been promoted from the ranks into a supervisory role.

Like all managers, police sergeants are working in a society in which deference has been in decline for at least the past fifty years. ”Because I say so” doesn’t work in schools, factories and offices any more and it won’t work in the police force either. In the report, sergeants complain of constables who answer back:

I am fed up with the amount of times I have to justify myself to PCs when I’ve given them a lawful order.

I saw a sergeant say to a PC on his team. ‘You need a haircut.’ He said: ‘You can talk. You look like a bag of [expletive]’. But the thing is, the sergeant didn’t do anything.

But, having grown up in a society more hostile to hierarchy, the sergeants themselves seem uncomfortable with their own authority.

Significant gaps between different ranks have been blurred, PC – sergeant – inspector. Relationships now very informal, eroded over the years and individuals called by their first names, particularly at sergeant level.

Sergeants can’t have stripes and be one of the lads.

Ah, the dilemma of every supervisor promoted from the shopfloor. Having been one of the lads or girls, how do you change that relationship now that you are expected to manage the performance of your friends?

Like many managers, they are also unsure of their authority, especially where they perceive there might be legal difficulties:

PCs now get away with blue murder as people are afraid to challenge due to HR legislation and are not supported by managers.

What HR legislation might that be then? The law on bullying and harrassment at work is unclear and confusing. Added to that, it is also unclear how much employment legislation applies to the police, given that they are not legally classed as employees. Even so, employment law still allows managers to give reasonable instructions to staff. The law on bullying does not prevent managers from giving reasonable instructions.

However, none of that matters if the supervisors concerned don’t understand the law. This sergeant’s dilemma is typical of that faced by many front-line managers. They know there is a risk that staff might raise grievances but they have no idea how much authority they have in responding to such challenges. In fact, the law still assumes that managers can tell people to do things, within reason, and tribunals take a dim view of malicious grievances. But unless managers understand that, many will err on the side of caution to the extent that they feel left with no authority at all.

That last quote also illustrates a lack of senior management support for the sergeants that pervades the whole report. It also appears that some role modelling by senior leaders is called for. A Chief Superintendent explains:

We pondered whether we should challenge staff about poor standards but had to admit that we [superintendents] often had poor dress – e.g. no ties or epaulettes.

We may have become less deferential but we still look to leaders to set standards. This Towers Perrin study found that staff throughout an organisation pay close attention to how senior executives behave - what they do rather than what they say.  If bosses are scruffy, the staff will be scruffy, no matter what exhortations may come from the top. Another aspect of the decline in deference is that we expect leaders to justify themselves and to lead by example.

The HMIC’s Leading from the Frontline is an excellent case study of the importance of first line managers and of how, like many organisations, some police forces get it so drastically wrong. There is a wealth of material in it which will be of interest to managers in a wide range of organisations. I could go on about it all day but I haven’t got the space. 

The report contains some examples of good practice too but its overall conclusion is that leadership development for the sergeants and better support from more senior officers is urgently needed. We shouldn’t beat up too much on the police though. I suspect that the issues raised in this report would be familiar to junior managers and supervisors in many companies throughout the country. Their bosses, too, need to invest in their development and give them a lot more support.

Since he got a regular column with the Times, Chris Dillow’s blog articles have become increasingly outlandish. His recent piece on why women are crap is a case in point.

However, although his arguments, if that’s what you can call them, are silly, they are no worse than some of the rubbish that apparently respectable columnists write about men. Those all-men-are-hopeless articles have been around for at least the past twenty years. Some of the bullshit has been repeated so often that it has become ’stuff everyone knows’.

For example, we all know that men can’t multi-task. It is accepted as an article of faith. Women repeat it in the workplace and men either nod or keep quiet. There is no point in arguing with the cod-psychology of a thousand Cosmopolitan and Femail articles. The fact that there is not a shred of evidence behind this assertion doesn’t seem to cut much ice.

There’s lots of other ’stuff we know’, like women being better at communication and having the interpersonal skills that men lack. Much of this is taken as read but, again, there is precious little evidence to back it up.

Against this background, Chris Dillow’s diatribe seems somewhat mild. I have no idea what his motivation was for writing it. I suspect it was just to cause a bit of a stir. Whatever his reasons, the piece shows how silly it is to make sweeping judgements about gender characteristics.

I wrote this while picking up my phone messages and eating a biscuit. Does that count as multi-tasking?

Update: Just because Chris does it, that doesn’t mean you have to join in.