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Tag: HRM

Recruitment agents and Opportunity UK

Published March 16, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Andy at SironaConsulting reported earlier today that the former CEO of Woolworths has started a new recruitment agency.  For non-British readers, Woolworths was a High Street chain which, at its peak, was a precursor of $1 shops.  This year, it finally went under and put a lot of people out of work.

Andy wondered how the CEO of a failed company could front a start up and his question led me to a question of my own.

Which recruitment agencies in the UK (or elsewhere) specialise in the 4 BCG segments?

Cash cows

Cash cows dominate their own market but are growing slowly if at all.  They typically offer stable careers, plenty of training and good benefits, such as final salary pension schemes.  They are a great place to raise a family.  And  importantly, cash cows tend to recruit from other cash cows.  There is an inside track of cash cows, so to speak.

Downside:  If you have been working in a cash cow, you’ve been living a soft life.  You are ill-prepared to enter the hurly-burly of a small business and the other 3 segments.  Once in cash cows, it is better to stay.

Question-marks

Question-marks are typically start-ups.  They don’t have much cash and pay low wages with stock options.  If the company makes it, like founding employees of Google, employees get very rich indeed.

Downside:  If the company does not make it, you have little to show for the years you spent with them.  This is not a good place for someone with a family to support or someone who wants to return to a cash-cow.

Stars

Stars are in a high-growth phase.  Basic pay is still modest and benefits are not luxurious.  Indeed, bonuses are linked to performance and may be lavish to compensate for the low pay and the very real possibility of not receiving a bonus at all.

Downside:  The official downside is that if growth does not happen, you will not get a bonus.  The real downside is two fold.  You only know how to do business in growth conditions.  Anyone can do business in an up-turn.  Can you also succeed in a down turn?   And as we have all learned, some growth is fictious.  If you don’t really understand the business, you might be involved in a Ponzi scheme.

Dogs

Dogs have had their day.  They no longer dominate their segment and they are no longer growing.  Oddly, though, employees are paid very well in a dog and in cash, not benefits or stock-options or performance bonuses.  Why?  Well obviously, no one with any sense will work there unless they are paid almost in advance!

Downside:  You make a lot of money helping to squeeze the last pennies out of a dog but you become a dog specialist.  You would be disruptive in the lazy life of a cash cow.  Startups and their delayed payments will scare you. And you don’t know anything about growth.  Once in a dog, you move from dog to dog.

Recruitment Agencies

The credit crunch has changed the trading conditions for companies in the UK quite and it is likely that many companies have switched segments.  The star of yesterday may well be the dog of today.

An intuitive understanding of the four segments and the HR policies that go with them seem to play beneath current public discussion about the credit crunch.

  • Should cash cows have been managed like stars and hasn’t this confusion led to their collapse?
  • Can the banks be reformed back into the slow, passive cash-cows they once were?
  • Now that derivatives hang around the bank’s necks like albatrosses, are they not indeed dogs?

For my part, I suspect the banks are simply stars that were managed with insufficient understanding of the business.  But if they had been managed as startups (which is consistent with a level of ignorance about a business and its trajectory), they should have had delayed stock options.   And given their strategic importance to UK, the powers-that-be should have insisted on some careful modularization and ring-fencing of risk.

It might be possible to mould the banks back into the slow and cautious form of the cash cows that we once knew banks to be, but I wonder if cash cows are made so readily.   I suspect that banks need to be unbundled into the four segments: safe operations of cash cows,  unknowable outcomes typical of start-ups, growth related work of stars,  and cashing-up operations of dogs.  But I’m not on the inside.  This is only armchair analysis.

What I am curious about, given Sirona Say’s post of today, is which recruitment agencies specialise in cash-cows, which in startups, which in stars and which in dogs?

And how has the credit crunch changed the mix of companies you deal with and hence your own focus and service?



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3 questions to head-off burnouti

Published March 13, 2009 by Jo Jordan

LOS ANGELES, CA - MAY 10: A homeless man who ...
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Overtired and babbling like a three year old?

Have you every felt so tired that you know your performance is impaired and that you really should take a break?  I don’t mean go home at a reasonable time.  I mean take a very long holiday?

Of course many professions build breaks into their work cycles.  I remember reading the biography of the best published mathematician in the world.  He worked at Oxford and he took a holiday every vacation – 8 weeks on, 3 weeks off!  He thought 3 weeks was the minimum time on an active physical holiday to recharge.  During term time, he also went rock climbing every weekend from Saturday lunchtime to Sunday evening.  During the week, he got up early to work, as many creative people do, and found he had his best ideas on Monday.  If he had a good idea on Tuesday too, he took the rest of the week off!

Are you heading towards burnout?

Until today, I always thought burnout meant the feeling we get at the end of a work cycle – when we are really tired and need a break.  Or maybe, the feeling that we get when we didn’t get a natural break and we worked two terms back-to-back.

Today, I was lucky to meet psychologist, Jo Haworth (on the telephone).  Jo works out of Strixton about 10 miles north of where I live in Olney.  She is a clinical psychologist who works in the business sector. What she said about burnout amazed me.

Burnout before your eyes

Jo has clients who burnout spectacularly.  One day they find themselves staring at computer screen, maybe in a foreign country, and they have completely lost track of what they are doing on their task, in their career, and in their lives.  They find their way home and they realize they don’t know their neighbors.  They’ve lived in the corporate cocoon for so long, they don’t know how to use a washing machine!

I have found the same pattern with executives made redundant from leading companies.  One day they are “It”.  The next, in a stroke of a pen, they are jobless, and lifeless.  Their income is gone.  Their toys have gone.  Their status has gone.  The people who are hit worse have invested their life-and-soul in the company.  They belong to no clubs and have no life outside work.

Doing without burnout!

We can be amusing and concoct expressions like ‘from 9-6 my soul belongs to the company – but when I drive out that gate, my soul belongs to me’.   We can be serious and say leaders at work must be leaders in other spheres too – and check that our staff have a life.

To be practical, we need to take time out to monitor whether our work, or rather our employment, has a place in our lives.  Forget mincing expressions like work-life balance.  Do you have a life?  Can you answer that in the affirmative without the tell-tale language of a lie – some rapid blinking, some looking away, some touching of your mouth?  Can you walk away from you job tomorrow?  Or, is it your entire life?  When I ask you that simple question – do you have a life? – will your eyes shine or will they dull over?

3 basics for a good life

These are my suggestions.

At all times we should

  • be able to walk away and take a year off to do what we want to do
  • be able to support our partner if they want to take a year out and do what they want to do
  • have 3 alternative jobs lined up so we have enticing and exciting alternatives on a 360 degree horizon!

If you don’t have 2009 resolutions, let these be my gift to you.

It is quite extraordinary how people do live lives they want to live.  They aren’t selfish and they aren’t foolish.  I’ll wager people who ‘live a life they can call their own’ live, like corporate poet, David Whyte who in writing these words, do something of immense value for other people and are quite successful financially.

Some sales objections, hey?

I can’t do this during a recession, you say!  Of course, you can.  Deciding that employment will meet these criteria, even if you bring changes about slowly and incrementally, will encourage you to notice possibilities around you.  I don’t know what changes are possible, or which you will appreciate, but you do and the more you pay attention, the more you will see them.

Or you say, I can’t do this now because I have to work two jobs or spend 5 hours a day commuting on grubby trains in the UK.  Not easy I know. You have trouble remembering your own name under these conditions.  For you, I say, write on your mirror in bright red lipstick: I will find the life big enough for me to live.  Write on the front flap of your diary, “I will organize my affairs so I always have time and room in my life to explore, imagine, support others, and to move on to something more exciting and more adventurous”.  Then use the downtime while you commute to ponder these issues.  The ideas will come.  Believe me, they will come.  On the scale of living through chaos, I am likely to beat you hands-down!

So here’s to a life that is big enough to live!

Dr Srikumar Rao talking at Googletalk estimates no more than a year to reorganize your life without any abrupt moves.

Let me know how it goes?

And thanks to Jo Haworth for an instructive lesson.  I must stop confusing fatigue with burnout!

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Which firms in UK consult their employees?

Published March 12, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Clio Springer linked to an article in the Times which says employees of big banks are being denied credit card and other insurance that we call on when we lose our livelihoods during the recession.

Informing and Consulting Employees (ICE)

I’m a noobe in the UK but in 18 months here I have not come across any one who consults employees about the financial prospects of their organization as provided by ICE.

For those who aren’t familiar with these regulations, as I understand them, in a firm with more than 50 employees, if 15 employees request consultation, employers must provide it.  That number drops to 10% at 150 employees and 2500 employees in the largest firms.  The consultation is fairly extensive and includes the profit-and-loss account.

You are tagged – tell me about ICE, please!

There are all sorts of frivolous memes on the internet.  This is a serious one.

British/UK HR practitioners –

  • Which companies operate ICE consultations?
  • Which unions insist upon ICE consultations?
  • Do/did the banks offer ICE consulations and if not, why not?

Tagged!  John Ingham, Scott Macarthur, Rick of Flipchart Fairy Tales, PJLaw, Michael Carty, and anyone else they tag to straighten me out on this question.

Which firms consult their employees fully viz. their financial futures?

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21st century feedback, training, management, HR

Published March 7, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Feedback, poor much aligned feedback!

Feedback is one of the themes on the internet in the last 10 days and as a psychologist, I almost always weigh in.

The lay meaning of the term tends to be: Can I give you some feedback?

That’s a polite beginning, and as with all politeness, it obscures a depth of tension.  Think of “Won’t you come in?”  “Do come in!”  “Come in.” ” Come!”.   The more polite we are, the more tense we really feel.

So in this sense, “Can I give you feedback?” means, “Can I tell you how irritating you have been been?”

The best response is for us to put on our “active listening” hat, option 3, angry.

An angry person wants their anger to be acknowledged.  Accept their anger and restore their status.  It is not hard.

Then, if there is a practical issue too, deal with it.  But first deal with the social issue.  They feel “dissed”.  Restore their status by accepting their right to feel dissed and to tell you about it.

Professional meaning of feedback

The proper meaning of feedback, though, is “distance to a goal”.  This is the essence of motivation.  The mouse runs faster when it sees the cheese.  And because it is the essence of motivation, feedback is the most powerful tool in the psychology of high performance.

Once a university asked me to teach employee engagement to MBA’s in 3 hours.  Not possible.  Teaching the principles of feedback, practicing them till we are fluent, and using them in context, is a language that takes more than three hours to learn.   And it is too important to be tossed off as a topic.

So this is a long post.  But I hope you find it useful and towards the end, when I speculate on how we can improve the “feedback” we collect about training,  and how we can do better HR when we manage the feedback loops in an organization, I hope you jot down some ideas and give me feedback.

Three types of feedback

Feedback

Feedback tells you whether you achieved your goal .  Feedback means it is informaton given after the event.

Feedback has all these elements and characteristics.

  • We have a goal and we need to know what it is.  In an organization, we all need to know what the goal is.
  • We have a way of measuring how far away we are from our goal.  How close are we to our cheese?
  • And we are told the distance to the cheese after we have stopped looking for it!  If the task is repetitive, like target practice, feedback after each trial is useful. Top class medical transcribers raise their performance another 20% if you tell them each day how many words they typed!
  • But if I tell you after a year, the information is worthless.  So why do give it?
  • Sorry to be dismissive, but if your boss is giving your feedback after the event and maybe a year later, he or she is not exactly on top of things.  Think big banks running the 6th richest country in the world onto the rocks of bankruptcy.  Giving feedback at the wrong point of the system is disastrous.  Think seriously about getting a better boss.
  • And in HR, it is our job to monitor how feedback is used and to design it into jobs properly.

So this is feedback.  It is useful when we have a repetitive task but it must be delivered before we begin the next trial.  No wait, let me be more precise, before we start preparing for the next trial.

Feedforward

Feedforward tells us about our goal and, importantly, the context of the goal.  Feedforward is provided before an event.

  • The best example of feedforward comes from the military.
  • SMEAC – Situation, Mission, Execution, Administration, Communication
  • The boss is required to lay out the team’s operation on one piece of paper giving
    • the goal for the organization level above him or her (situation)
    • his or her goal – the group mission in one sentence (mission)
    • the goals for each member of the team in one sentence each (execution)
    • any non-standard resources (administration)
    • the points at which we must communicate (feedback which becomes feedforward to someone else).
  • So we need information at three levels of the organization.  We need to know who is doing what around us. We need to know how we will coordinate.
  • Sadly, I’ve only seen this done in the best organizations.  When I offered assessment centres to these organizations, we included delegation tasks in our assessment centres because they quickly reveal whether a manager understands the organization.  And organization, not control, is what managers are responsible for.

Feedfoward is provided before work begins.  It is taught carefully in the military and we can learn a lot from them.  In my experience, when something goes wrong, almost always I can track the problem back to information that is missing from the description about the situation.  We didn’t brief people properly about the context.

Continuous Feedback

Continuous feedback, which oddly does not have a specific name, is the third type and is the most important for high performance.  This is feedback that comes from the task itself.  It is fairly immediate.

  • You’ll have noticed that in the SMEAC system, we delegate a goal with one sentence only.  I ask you, if someone is fully trained, why do they need more than that?
  • A trained person will get on with the task and is obtaining information from the work as it progresses.  A chef works on sight, smell, touch.  The feedback is inherent in the task.
  • We experience flow when the feedback is built into a task.  We experience flow when time vanishes because we are so engaged.  We are inside the task.  We enjoy doing skilled work in a skilled way and if we want engaged, happy employees, or motivated, happy students, this is what we have to get right.  They must have tasks where the feedback comes to them from the task itself.
  • Bad jobs remove feedback.  I refer to bosses who “steal feedback”. They intercept information and stop it going back to the person who does the job.  They cause accidents.   “Stealing feedback” is like making someone drive blindfolded and directing operations from the back seat.  It is micro-management.
  • The military are aware of this problem and carefully judge communication loads. Lieutenants command three sections so the co-ordination task is sufficiently demanding and leaves no time to interfere with their sergeants.
  • If information goes to a manager rather than to the person doing the task, don’t be surprised if the task does not get done and the whole team runs into trouble.  The manager is attending to information that should be going elsewhere and they are not attending to their own role which is acting as the coordination point between 5-10 people and between that group and the organization at large.
  • Sort out this feature of task and organizational design, and your productivity leaps forward.  Depending on the your baseline, you may get gains of 10% or 20%.  I’ve seen gains of 100%, 200% and in one remarkable case, 1200% with no capital outlay.  Just HR doing its job.
  • And best of all managers have time to manage – that is coordinate and attend to the environment.

Continuous feedback leads to high performance. And it creates the highly pleasurable sensation of flow.

Feedforward tells us what needs to be be done. It is the critical briefing about the context of a task before we begin it.

And feedback tells us what we did yesterday.

So if feedback is about yesterday, why is it used so extensively in business?

I think it is because people want to express anger and their anger is about status.  A boss is establishing status.

Sadly (IMHO), English-speaking countries have masculine cultures.  We spend a lot of time establishing the pecking order.  Not all cultures do this.  They don’t have to put other people down to feel good.

And because we spend a lot of the time engaged in one upmanship and oneupmanship is really impolite, we have to deny what we are doing and be “polite” on the surface.

Let me spell out what this means in practice.  In Commonwealth countries, officers and “men” don’t eat together.  Or didn’t.  Has this changed?  In European countries, they do.  This I understand (has it changed), makes joint military operations between the UK and our allies very difficult.  In less masculine countries, artificial status differences are unacceptable.   You lead by doing your job.

Interestly, this is the difference between Gen Y and the Baby Boomers.  Boomers who think they are liberated still subscribe to the pecking order culture.  Gen Y don’t.  16 year olds befriend 50 year olds happily on the basis of common interest.  They are less experienced in some respects and more skilled in others and expect to be incorporated on the basis of their contribution not their place in some kind of queue.

So what has this to do with feedback or the distorted way we use feedback?

Everything.  The industrial system, a la Taylor, works on a principle of Gap Management.  Not “Mind the Gap” of the London Underground which is a useful bit of feedforward.  But a gap that is presumed.  This is how it goes.

I am the boss. I define the way the world should be.  And I must make sure you live up to that idea.  First, I assume there is a gap and I look for it.  Second, I assume the gap is a bad thing so I suffer negative feelings.  Third, your performance in so far it differs from what I imagined disappoints me.  Fourth,  I am the boss, so my feelings of disappointment anger me.  See how it goes?  Now is the time someone says, “Can I give you feedback!”

An alternative to gap management, anger, and “feedback” at work?

There is an alternative and even the Americans “get it”!  For quite a while now.  It goes by the rubrics of positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship.

People get distracted by the word “positive” assuming this to be advocating “politeness”.  We all know people who advocate vacuous pleasantness and optimism but who are mean and vicious underneath.  When we come at the world with a masculine, pecking order, mindset, positive seems all wrong.

So lets let’s put pecking orders aside and look at the alternative.

In many situations, if not most situations, defining a goal in advance is unrealistic.  Even it is possible, we will lose out a lot.  In the military, they say no plan survives meeting the enemy.  We always have to improvise on the day.  Under these conditions, you can see that gap management and feedback is counter-productive.

So why do we do plan?  The military say it is not the plan, but the planning.  We prime ourselves with relevant information so that we can process unfolding events as they happen.  But we allow alternative ideas to develop.

That does not mean chaos. It means the opposite.  And it does not mean a boss who has no idea what is happening.

It means a boss who is picking up communications, or feedback, from each of us, reconstructing the overall picture, and holding that up to us so we can see our collective position.

When we have an annual feedback review, this is what should be happening.

The boss, who is responsible for the annual cycle should be saying, “This is where we were a year ago. This is what our challenges have been.  This is where we are now.  This is where we are going.”

In a large organization, again, this is situated at the three levels.

  • Situation – which includes the actions of other departments around us.
  • The aggregate team level – where we came from and where we are going.
  • The members of the team and the team structure – who was with us at the beginning, the role they were playing, how we morphed to who is with us now, and the general role each person is playing now.

How different this is from the rituals of anger and one upmanship that are played out in most of the organizations we know.

21st century management is  about “eating with the men” and feedback is about showing how you have improved the organization.  Your team wants to hear.  Your team wants to applaud.

Feedback in Training

I started writing this post because Jackie Cameron (@jayseetoo) was talking about feedback in training.  This is how I think we depart from our tradition of gap management in training.   Let me know what you think and we can develop these ideas together.

My understanding of the training situation

In a training situation, a person comes into the room with a goal.  But by definition, they do not know all the goals they could have.  If they did, the training would not be useful to them.

They also come into a group situation (unless you see training as 30 separate bodies sitting passively like physical objects).  And they interact with each other to mutual gain and quite often to mutual irritation.

Irritation and anger are part of life.  We need to stop pretending they aren’t.  Though they feel bad, they aren’t bad.  They are simply emotional signals that we feel we aren’t being heard.

With this description of training, what “feedback” do we need?

1  How did our goals change during the training course?

I want to know how our goals changed during the training session.  And that includes the goals of the trainers.  We aren’t doing gap management – one person doesn’t know everything!  Thus I ask, whose goals have changed, and how?

I see training as a timeout where we follow a process which culminates in the comparison of the goals we had when we began with the goals we have as we return to the world and our lives.

And it is possible that we end a training course annoyed and disappointed!  That’s OK.  We may have been deluded at the outset about the possibilities available to us.

My evaluation questions go like this:

  • Did taking this course help you define goals more clearly and help you get more out of life, or alternatively, avoid taking a wrong turn?
  • How much did you gain as a % of the fees we charged you?  Or, how much would you have spent if you had continued in the wrong direction?

2 Are we confident about our new goals?

I want to know that a person can act on their own and so I want each person to actively work on their own plans.

A person might come to the conclusion “bin this subject – it is not for me”.

They also might end the course by deciding to follow up another question.

Both are acceptable outcomes to me.  What I want to know is whether they have moved on in some way.

The end of a course is a time of  “adjourning”  too.   People are moving from group to individual action and they need to visualize and mentally rehearse using the material as an individual and without my support and the support of the group.

So I collect the goals expressed at the end of the course and analyse them in my post-course review and evaluate extent to which they are active and specific.

I also add this evaluation question:

  • How confident are you that you will complete this action?

Self-efficacy is not sufficient for completion but it is necessary for completion.

3 Were we in good company?

I also want my course to be a resource to a person as they go through life and it is here I get the most important feedback on what I could do to improve the course.

I ask these questions, or variations, thereof:

  • Are you proud that you took this course?
  • Do you believe that the people who were on this course with you will do what they say?

Collective efficacy boosts performance and if people are proud to be in the room, they will learn heaps more.

I add practical questions here too.

  • Have you met people, or renewed contact with people, whom you will contact after the course and find helpful in your work?

4  Did I believe I you?

And then I ask the humdinger of the question:

  • Do you think that I believed in you?

The Pygmalion effect has a dramatic impact on people’s self-efficacy.

And I might also ask an open question:

  • How did I express my belief in you?

5 Did I believe in this group?

And lastly, I’ll ask myself this extremely important question.

  • Did I believe in this group?

If they ring me up next week, would I be happy to take their call?

Am I happy to have them follow me on Twitter and would I find their tweets interesting?

Can they follow me on Facebook and do I trust them to respect me?

What did I learn from this group and when I gave the summation and showed who we were when we began and who we were at the end, what did I feel and why?

If my evaluation of my group is not positive, I simply shouldn’t be leading them.

That is the challenge to English-speaking corporates.  Why are the people in-charge allowed to be uninspired by their “followers”?  It is not good enough.

I’ve also learned to ask this question positively:  What happened today and “WHY DID IT GO SO WELL?”

HR and the urge to give feedback

Those of us in HR need to monitor these urges to “give feedback”.  What is the real issue that has flipped this group into a negative spiral?

Once we notice that a group is so annoyed with each other that they are “giving feedback”, we should do something.  This is my thought process.  Yours?

  • Is the job badly designed and is the boss interfering in the level below?  Or rather what are the goals above the boss, at the boss’ level, and the level below?
  • Has the group task been badly designed and are the communication points between team members miss-set?  Maybe we have been over-ambitious?
  • If one team member has tripped up, why?  Was their goal consistent with circumstances and resources?
  • Is it a matter of training and selection – did we trip up?  Did we set up one of our employees and their colleagues for a fall?

If you aren’t able to facilitate a return to an upward spiral by going through these qustions, I will eat my hat.  Try me out.  I far prefer to wear my hat so this is a serious offer.

But remember, you may have to accept a lot of anger at the outset, dressed up as “feedback”.

And if you can’t do that, it’s probably because you don’t believe in this team enough, and maybe you should get another person to take on the job!

21st century management

21st century work is not about one person defining the goal.  It is about all of us working out what is possible.

Managers play an important role in negotiating and facilitating our sense of what is possible and simultaneously defusing strong emotions when these threaten to set us all on a downward spiral.

A manager’s role is to hold up a mirror so we see our collective dream in sharper relief and heighten our confidence in each other.

It is beautiful when we see it happening.

Feedback?

And did this help you at all?  Do you have a reaction which would help me?  Are we in better place than we were before?

I am.  Writing helps organize thoughts.  This is a pretty rambling post incorporating culture, feedback and organization with management, HR, training and selection but it has helped me heaps.  Thanks and sorry about remaining typos and grammatical errors.   There is a lesson in this.  Don’t write long posts.  So thanks.  If you are reading this, you’ve stuck with me for a long while.

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4 fold plan to map your own future

Published March 5, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Botrychium lunaria
Image via Wikipedia

Take charge of your life, please!

I’ve just watched a Reuters slide show of people looking for work in the States, China and Japan.  Sometimes we have to look for work!

But to do it without having a larger plan is the most frightening and desperate thing we can ever do.

It is a mistake to define our life by the opportunities created by other people.  It would depress me.  It would depress anyone.  It will depress you.  It is such a bad idea.

Finding a job is like traveling abroad

A young friend of mine described choosing a career direction as being in a foreign country and asking people for directions.

Have you ever noticed that the locals in a foreign country don’t know where anything is?  It’s not surprising really.  They go to the same places every day.  They don’t know what is useful to a visitor or newcomer.

My young friend has made the gustiest decision he will ever have to make.  He has decided not to rush it.  He’s continuing with his student job while he works out what he really wants to do.

What I’ve suggested to him is that he pretends he is an adventurer in an uncharted place and draw the map as he goes.   So to extend the metaphor,  when he sees a mountain, put it down roughly.  When he sees a lake, add that to his picture.  And so on.

He’s contributed a pretty nifty metaphor that completes the other three I wrote about this week.  This is how they work together.

1  Define your core value (five minutes)

  • Scan a list of flowers and their symbolic meaning to capture your sense of the value you deliver.
  • I found btw that I want a red carnation for me (meaning I carry a torch for you) and lunaria for my company (meaning prosperity).  I don’t mean I just want my company to be prosperous.  I want that, of course.  I mean that the job of my company is to deliver prosperity to other people.
  • Which flower captures the value you deliver?

2  Resolve to do well by doing good (relax)

  • Be like my neighborhood restaurant in Olney.  Do what you think is right and do it for free.
  • Don’t be so focused that you only think of getting a job or how much money you can make out of other people.
  • Let people help you.  And you will find that people do.
  • People want to applaud you success.  Let them have have the pleasure!

3  Each day find 1 signpost and 1 person who is closer to where you want to be than you are now

(1 hour searching and 10 minutes recording)

  • Do a daily exercise finding a website representing activities that take you one step further and make contact with one more person who is closer to where you want to go than you are now.
  • Do this daily, and don’t break the chain!  Then add a rough diary of what you did during the day and WHY IT WENT SO WELL!
  • You’ll have 30 websites and people at the end of the month.  In month 2, each day also discard a website and person each as you find another pair.  (Or put them in another box.)
  • In this way, you’ll edge towards the place you want to be.
  • I don’t know how long it will take, but you’ll be surprised at how fast it goes.  My guess is 3 months.  You tell me when you’ve tried.

4  Draw your map (7 minutes)

  • And each day add to your map.
  • What is the landscape of your field and its future as you see it?
  • Keep adding features as you go.
  • And whatever you do, don’t try too hard.  Your map might mutate into a map of the underground or something like that.  Just don’t jump to defining answers.  Doodle!  We want your creative juices flowing freely.

Who should do this?

The recession is so severe, everyone should be doing this.  If you are in a good place right now and it looks secure, then sure, do it intermittently.  Jot down websites and people intermittently and review the box once a month.

For everyone else, I would say this exercise has fairly high priority.  The bankers say they didn’t know what they were doing.  The government says it is uncharted waters – meaning, they have no map.

We are all in a strange place asking the locals for directions.  Best to start drawing the map!

And don’t aim to come out with a job that is defined by others.  Define your own future.  Let other people stand in your queue!

Is this possible?

Of course it is.  How do jobs get made?  They get made by people like me and you.  But you know, they followed their dreams.

Will we always be an employer?  No.  Sometimes we will choose to work for others because hitching a ride on their wagon, so to speak, makes sense.

But we don’t want to feel desperate.  If that is what you feel.  Do this exercise.  You will feel better very rapidly, I promise.

If you are not feeling desperate, begin now and gather around you the people you need on your journey.  They will be grateful.  They want company too.

Talk to me!

And let me know how you get on.  I like company too.

Thanks to my young friend who helped me finish this series.  I appreciate his help – again.  Actually we are friends, despite the difference in our years, because he has helped me before.  As now, he didn’t set out to do anything in particular.  But he added value to my life.

That’s how it works, isn’t it?  We journey part of the way with other people and we help carve out a future together that we believe is worth having.

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3 steps when goals seem out of our reach

Published February 13, 2009 by Jo Jordan

I think back to the most frustrating times of my life and I felt exactly like David Whyte standing in front of a ravine, desperate to be the other side and with palpitations because it seems impossible.

Whenever we feel frightened it helps to visualize the ravine.  And draw the ravine on a piece of paper.

  1. What is on the other side that we want so deeply?
  2. What is the gap and the frayed rope bridge that seems too dangerous to use?
  3. And where are we now?

I want to be clear: when we are really frightened, we forget to do this.  And we chide ourselves for forgetting!  But we shouldn’t – we are anxious because our dream is important!

When we remember, our task is to imagine the ravine and draw, or jot down, our answers to all 3 questions.

Then we concentrate on question 3 and write down everything we can think about where we are now.  We might want to concentrate on the other two questions.  That is understandable but we should write down point after point about HERE & NOW.  Set a goal – write 1, then write 2 more, then write 2 more, until we are on a roll.

Lastly we underline the parts that work well. This is important.  We go through our list of HERE & NOW and underline what works well.

And if you don’t think of something that will move you forward, write to me and complain!

But I guess you will write to me to say how well this method works.

Come with me!

  • Think of your biggest dream that you have put aside to attend to your obligations or because you think you have to be cautious during the recession.
  • Feel your fear and honor it!  You only feel fear because this goal is important to you.
  • Then draw the diagram and remember to write down in detail where are now  Finally, underline what works well.

Are you feeling better?  Can you see a way forward?

Prepare for a winning week!

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Initiative – are you interested in taking charge of our destiny?

Published February 2, 2009 by Jo Jordan

What are we waiting for?

As the financial crisis gathers like a tempest around us, I am struck by what people are doing, and not doing.

When we receive bad news, we go through stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And we go through the stages at different speeds.  We do need to be patient.  I need to be patient.

What distinguishes

  • people who might get moving if someone bellowed “all hands on deck” in their ear
  • those people who are already on deck and who got there immediately it was obvious we were in trouble
  • and the people still sitting below in the mess room clutching a cup-of-tea?

This seems to be the question of our time.

Are you waiting for someone to tell you what to do?  Or have you got to work already?

My task this week: initiative

I don’t want to feel impatient, or worse express impatience, with people I work with.

So I’ve set my task this week to review the work of German psychologist, Mike Frese, who writes on initiative.

What readies us to take action and to remain effective even when the world is swirling and crashing around us?

Come with me!

I am going to read over Mike’s work and explain it during the week.   I’d be interested to know of instances of action and inaction that puzzle you.  And whether Mike’s work, or my my explanation of Mike’s work, helps you solve the puzzle!

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A comprehensive 2 x 2 x 2 on HR and the recession

Published January 27, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Organizing ideas about HR and the recession

Many people are landing on this blog looking for information about HR and the recession.  I suspect, though without any evidence, that many people seeking this information may be students, or people deputed to write a position paper on what HR should be doing.

This is intended to help you out. It is a summary, though a long summary, of earlier posts. I’ve also framed it with ideas you will find in classical text books on HR. I am writing mindfully that you may want to use the information for a presentation.

Any one else reading might like to check through to see what I have forgotten. You might also be interested in my inclusion of positive HR that is not yet in most textbooks. It is a long post though, and you may want to bookmark it for later.

Introduction

HR strategy, in business or in other organizations, be they public or private, follows a disciplined logic. Before we decide what to pursue in the HR arena, we ask 4 questions.

  1. What are macro-environmental factors that affect everyone – us , our customers and our competitors?
  2. What business are we in, and what are the institutional factors that affect all firms in our line of work?
  3. What are the micro-environmental factors that set us apart from our competitors?
  4. What are the laws and regulations specific to the jurisdiction where we will be hiring people?

A recession falls mainly under the first question. Recessions may also affect the other three questions as well. For this post, though, we will look only at the way a contraction across the entire economy changes the general pattern of HR, no matter what business we are in.

HR managers struggle, typically, to assert itself within the management team. To clarify our role, initially to ourselves, we typically look at our contribution along two dimensions: hard to soft, and strategic to administrative. ‘Hard’ HR looks at issues like productivity and legal contracts. ‘Soft’ HR looks at emotions, morale, loyalty and engagement. Strategic HR asks the big questions about the type of HR that we need – much as we are asking in this post. Administrative HR is the HR we all see – the forms, the interviews, the communications.

We need to be good in all FOUR areas, and all four areas change in emphasis when the economy slows down. I’ll summarise those changes in a moment.

It being 2009, we also need to add a third dimension: positive HR to ‘gap’ HR. Gap HR is the HR that is commonly described in textbooks, which sadly are always somewhat out-of-date. In gap HR, someone – somewhere – has decided what is good, and the rest of us are required to live up to that ideal. It is akin to a jigsaw puzzle. The picture is known, and we are the scrambled pieces to be put together following a preordained pattern. Positive HR is generative. We may have a picture in mind, but we do not believe it is the only picture. Indeed, we define a good day as the day that we discover a better picture than the one we had previously imagined. This is akin to leggo. We have building blocks which we use to test out possibilities.

With three dimensions, each crudely broken into two, we have 2x2x2 or 8 types of HR, that we can think about and ask systematically, how they change when we move at a national economic level from positive to negative growth.

And then we can ask how we can integrate our observations into a general approach to HR in a recessive economy.

1 Hard, strategic, ‘gap’ HR

A typical task of hard, strategic, ‘gap’ HR is scenario planning. Along with other people who are responsible for the future of the organization, we imagine how the economy might change and we anticipate how we, our competitors and our customers will react to each scenario as it unfolds.

Small business owners do this too. They follow discussions about the economy and they will typically look at a worst case, best case and a likely scenario. Yesterday, a business owner told me that he was working on the economy contracting until around September 2009, and then beginning to grow very slowly.

From this thinking, we are able to make ‘guess estimates’ of sales, and work backwards to the number of people who are needed by the organization and the skills they should have.

2 Hard, administrative, ‘gap’ HR

At the administrative level, it is likely that we will bring some contracts with employees to and end using redundancy provisions – so we pull those regulations off the shelf and dust them off. We are also likely to be pulling out the early retirement rules. We may be recruiting less – so we will try to maintain our relationships with the colleges and schools in the area, while tactfully indicating we will be hiring fewer people. We will also be looking out for government-backed schemes to train people and to subsidize employment in one way or another.

3 Soft, strategic, ‘gap’ HR

At the other end of the hard-soft continuum, we imagine what our organizations will look like, and the way members will interact with each other in five years’ time. We discuss, for example whether Gen Y are different from Gen X and baby boomers.

Planning the way we interact is the most likely area of HR to be sacrificed in difficult times.  Letting this area go is the biggest mistake we can make.  Managers will react under pressure, in the way we all do, by over-emphasizing their fears, and putting too much faith in their own judgement. We will hear a lot of talk that dismisses the views of other people.

When we hear this talk, it is the sign of an organization in deep trouble. It is in trouble financially. It lacks depth in its leadership. It lacks loyalty to its employees and other stakeholders.

HR leadership needs to be there, to turn around this emotional climate.  We should not let this go.  This is our main contribution during a recession.

4 Soft, administrative, ‘gap’ HR

On the soft side ,at the administrative level, much training, whether it is directed at productivity, or soft interactional skills, is also sacrificed, while more money is spent on stress-relief (usually for senior people) and counselling for people facing redundancy.

It is important to help people cope with the emotional distress of extremely unpleasant changes to their lifestyles, but regrettably in a ‘gap’ system, HR usually steps in after the distress has occurred.  We would be better advised to step in earlier.

5 Hard, strategic, positive HR

Turning now to postive HR, we should note at the outset, that positive management styles are not necessarily cheerful.  To be cheerful all the time is like expecting a 12 month summer, and a harvest every week. Positive management styles accept that life is changing, and that we need to change our ways consistently with changes in the real world. Hard, strategic positive HR attempts to take us, from worlds we know, into worlds we don’t know.

It is an obvious fact that we don’t enjoy recessions because we are losing a world we like. As in winter, we see little sun, and as in winter, if we don’t know how to dress warmly and to cook comfort foods, we may have a difficult time.

This recession that we are encountering now, though, is more like an earthquake or tsunami. We aren’t just dealing with a season that we encounter every year. We are dealing with a large mess that arrived abruptly. Structures, we have formerly depended upon, have been destroyed. What else can we do but rebuild, and rebuild better structures, that will last us for the next 50 to 100 years?

Just as in a natural emergency, first we attend to safety. We count heads and we count our supplies and we set about giving everyone the basics : water, food, shelter, medicine. Then without a break in our stride, we depute appropriate people to work on the bigger issues. We set about searching for missing people. We put people in groups to identify priorities. And we put people to work.

BTW, it is standard practice to fly in psychologists to emergency areas to ‘debrief’ or help people cope with the immediate shock. The psychologists are rotated, and are debriefed themselves as they are pulled back ‘behind the lines’. Emotion is contagious, and emotional sanitation, sorry to call it that but to make the point, is as important as clean water and ways to handle human effluent.

In short, we deal with the situation in which we find ourselves in. There is no going back, and the only forward is together, respecting our distress, and making use of all our resources, within which we will find our answers.

The HR leader understands this process and brings it into the practical work we are doing on a day-to-day basis.

6 Hard, administrative, positive HR

As with hard, administrative, gap HR, we will be looking at regulations but with an eye for possibility. We want to be like the on-line out-sourcers who responded to Hurricane Katrina, and put their computer systems at the disposal of authorities. We want to be associated with ‘delivering a bigger bang for our buck’.  We don’t want to be associated with cutting costs and bringing misery to people who depend on us and trust us.

An example from UK, is the offer of a four day week to KPMG staff. It is a positive move. At the same time, computer geeks in the south-east have got together to make business services available to people starting their own businesses. It would be good to see large firms, who are essentially very profitable and who made a lot of money when times were good, reach out to help parts of the community who are far more distressed than they are.

We can have immense satisfaction and even in triumph in our use of routine facilities.

7 Soft, strategic, positive HR

Soft, strategic positive HR is the most demanding of our 8 areas, and is needed more during a recession than in good times. When we are faced with loss, it is extremely difficult to sit down with other people to think of ways forward. We become very concerned that we will lose out, and we tend to focus more on what we will gain personally, than on what we can create together.

We need soft strategic, positive HR  to proactively help leaders remain generative. Once they’ve moved into a psychological position where they are prepared to be disloyal to their employees, it will be difficult to turn them around. We need to act swiftly to keep their mood positive, so they can imagine possibilities and see constraints as enjoyable hurdles.

To neglect early soft strategic HR will be our biggest failure. From that we can never recover.

8 Soft, administrative, positive HR

Soft, administrative positive HR is slowly coming in to focus in an area dubbed .personal leadership.. Personal leadership is easiest to understand when we observe the 24/7 nature of the internet. Whatever we do, where ever we do it, becomes visible as someone photographs us and tags us on Facebook, or another network.

The internet provides both the challenge, and the opportunity, to live coherently and authentically. No longer do we go to work as one person and change into another at the door. Gen Y are used to being the same person all day long, and though employers have found that confusing, it is now an advantage.

Gen Y are very receptive to setting personal goals that are big enough to include the company, but also not totally dependent on the company. They make energetic partners, who sense wider possibilities, which they bring into the firm. Yet they are willing to move on if necessary.

HR’s role is to ensure that everyone has developed their personal plans and are pursuing them with gusto.

Putting it all together

Eight parts of a portfolio are many parts, and these are only the features of the macro-environment, the first of the four questions we asked at the start. But lets pull together these 8 ideas before the patchwork grows any more complicated. This is the order in which I would think about an HR policy during a recession.

  1. Look after ourselves. In a recession, we feel as if someone has taken away our toys. We aren’t happy, and what’s more, we worry, that someone will come along and take away some more. Our first goal, in this state of stress, is to restore a mood in which we can deal with threats objectively, and return to a generative and imaginative outlook. In short we must be as good at winter as we are at summer. And because winter makes us gloomy, we need to look after ourselves and deliberately allocate time and resources to nurturing an appreciative outlook. Are we enjoying the winter?
  2. Be purposeful, one and all.  Recapturing a positive mood is not simply a way to have a party. We have a purpose. After a recession, and particularly this one, we are not going back to where we were. This is the equivalent of a hard winter that will affect the next summer, and harvest as well. So we need to set up goals for the cold season, and the seasons that follow. Each person should have a goal. If mum and dad are retiring to have quiet mumbles, leaving the kids to do whatever they see fit, they will be surprised the day there is no food on the table. Our task is to get everyone to discuss the practical issues openly and calmly, to work out the schedules and goals, and to monitor our progress. Our goal is not to carry on as usual. It is to understand the meaning of a hard winter and to find roles for ourselves where we contribute to the common good.
  3. Weave in dreams.  Nonetheless, we don’t really understand what is going on and there is some panic about. We might be trying to hide our panic but, to continue the analogy, kids know more than we think, and can solve appropriate age-related problems quite well. People like being consulted and depended upon, so we should put people onto solving the problems where they have the greatest expertise. The hardest problem to solve is the disappointment of people who need to delay life plans – a person who has to delay going to college, for example. Our task as leaders is to acknowledge the difficulty, and to bring the person’s life story into the frame. What are the things that they could be doing now that they are particularly good at, that help everyone else too, and that get them ready for their life ahead? There is a a lot of work doing this with everyone in even a small firm, and we must remember that we too, need to rest, recover and attend to our own dreams.
  4. Let former experts work on well understood problems. Though there is much we don’t know, there is still plenty that we do. I would ask a mixture of implementers and defensive pessimists to explore and plan our responses to well known issues.
  5. We still need the regulation gurus. New government regulations will almost certainly come into play. People with detail-oriented, administrative minds and experience will take charge of this for us.
  6. Bring all the good ideas together and let people see them. All this while, people are generating good ideas that are grounded in their own work and experience. We want to catch the ideas and weave them in to our plans, in an open wiki, so everyone can follow how our ideas are developing.
  7. Celebrate our past, good and bad, as our foundation of the future. And finally, I would capture the essence of what we are doing and show how we are carrying the strengths of our past with us into the future. I wouldn’t bury the negative. I would look to it for what we learned, and the relationships which emerged from our difficulties.

Come with me!

I hope this helps you. I have started a wiki called MGMT101 to organize ideas about managing in the 21st century. If you would like to add your own ideas, or comment on others, please do drop a comment here, and head over there to add your thoughts.

Have a winning week!

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Frazzled? Get a one line job description

Published January 13, 2009 by Jo Jordan

I don’t know about you, but the last two weeks have been pretty busy for me.  People are coming-and-going, new projects begin, tax returns are due (January 31 deadline for individual online returns in the UK) and I have all those New Year resolutions swirling around my heads, too.

Poet, David Whyte, talks about being so busy that every one around you appears to be too slow.  The person walking in front of you on the street is in the way; your partner left dirty dishes in the sink, again; you colleague, superior or subordinate has dropped the ball, again.

I hate it when I feel like that. I feel like that now, and I know my ‘job description’ is to blame.   It’s just too busy!

Prune

In December, I ruthlessly cut out anything that is rushed or disorganized.  I learned this trick from commercial bankers.  If you are in a hurry, the answer is No.  You are obviously disorganized and your project will fail.

And lest I forget, I staple evidence of disorganization to the front cover of the file!

But I have pruned and pruned, and still, I have too much that I want to do.

Prioritize

I spent much of my life working in universities.  It surprises most outsiders (and students) that the main job of university lecturers is not to teach.  They are required to teach adequately – I was even told by my Dean once – CHEAT don’t TEACH.

Research is their main task.  It is the only thing they can be promoted for and to protect this priority, people get up to work early in the morning and it is a big no-no to disturb any one ‘working at their papers’ or ‘in the lab’.

Admin or community service comes a poor last and tasks are shared and rotated.  Even being Head of Department is rotated.   You do your share, perfunctorily.  That’s it. And it is done in the afternoon.

I’ve tried priotiising, but I don’t have three goals.  I don’t even have five.  I got down to nine and the list has lengthened since the New Year.

My difficulty is that when I am doing one task, I am worrying about the others.  Once we get beyond entry level jobs, it is not the tasks themselves that is important, it is the interrelationships between tasks that are critical.  To shift sectors, triage is more important than task.  University lecturers add value by showing students where a field is going rather than by reciting the lecture they gave last year and the year before.

Picture

As yet I have never found a system that allows us to track the inter-related progress of several projects and whether we will achieve our grand plan.  What I do, when I need to work at this level, is draw my goals in a circle and imagine bringing all the goals in successfully at the same time.

Pictures are great for seeing interconnections.  Systems theorists are pretty good at drawing pictures of how the world fits together.

What I did this morning was to write my job description in one line.  A job description should only have ONE goal, shouldn’t it?  Basic Fayol.  This how it begins

My job is to achieve, simultaneously, .  .  .  .   .   .

I took a blank piece of paper and put 2009 in a circle in the middle and started putting my sub-goals in circles around the page.  Hey, presto, they fell neatly into five groups.  I thought some might fall away but they grouped quite naturally.

My next test was whether I could I set quarterly and monthly goals for each of the five groups.  I took another page, put 2009 in the middle and drew FIVE spokes, marked off quarters and months for the first quarter, and jotted down some notes.  Yep, this works.  And I got better names for the spokes, making it clearer what I do, why I do it and how each spoke makes the others possible.

And best still, the pull on my attention seems to have resolved a little.  The tasks that have been getting short shrift, somehow feel like they should be done first thing in the morning, though some can be prepared the night before, and the tasks that I enjoy doing but have more elastic timescales can be done in the late afternoon.

Mmmm, definitely worth trying.

Come with me

a) I’ve already said ‘no’ to one or two people this year (amazing), though in each case I’ve been able to follow through with a good introduction or significant friendly help.

b) My prioritization has sucked, but at least I’ve been aware of it. I’m feeling a bit better.

c) I’m testing out my one line job description: my task is to achieve simultaneously .   .   .

A picture would be better still.

Can you state your job description in one line?

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3 characteristics of recession-lovers

Published December 8, 2008 by Jo Jordan

I need your help

This is a serious post and I would love some of the heavy hitters out there like Jon Ingham, Scott MacArthur,  Bay Jordan and Jon Husband to critique it. Others please join in!

I am a work psychologist. That means I am as much concerned about work as I am about psychology. I do a lot of background reading about management, organizations, new work like nanotechnology, etc.

McKinsey’s advice on management & organization in a recession

McKinsey have just circulated an old report 2002 report on risk and resilience in recessions.

They argue that firms that come out of a recession in the upper quartile, differ significantly from other firms.  The winning group, lets call them “recession-lovers”, either hung on to their upper quartile position, or came up from below.

The McKinsey report has a few sentences I find ambiguous. They are also talking about firms that make the UQ. They aren’t talking about firms who climb from LQ to Median say, so we should be careful not to over-extrapolate.

3 winning characteristics in a recession

I have found THREE characteristics of the ‘recession lovers’.

1.  ‘Recession-lovers’ surge ahead because they were always clearly focused on what they are doing. Prior to the recession, recession-lovers are involved in less acquisition activity than their rivals. Recession-lovers maintain their acquisition activity during a recession, while others drop acquisition activity to the steady level of the recession-lovers.

Can we conclude that firms who are less successful during a recession were involved in shakier business prior to the recession?

2.  Recession-lovers make 33% more sales per employee than their rivals. During the recession, they maintain this ratio by spending MORE money on sales and general costs. To do this, they absorb lower margins (TESCO’s just announced this I think).

Can we conclude that more successful firms move to protect and maintain their central markets?

Can we conclude that less successful firms are willing to jeopardize their market position by taking quicker profits?

3.  Recession-lovers spend more money on R&D and double this expenditure during the recession.

Can we conclude that rivals had thought that their markets and products were stable and by cutting back further believe that markets will be essentially unchanged after the recession?

3 thought-provoking questions for HR Managers to ask

If I have summarized this report correctly, then there are hard questions HR Managers should be asking as they consider redundancies, cutbacks, etc.

1.  When we hired staff, we assured them of their importance, and the value and importance of the products and services they would deliver.  What has changed?

2.  Now the market is tougher, surely we should give staff  more, not fewer,  resources to do their work and to sell our products and services.   If we don’t allocate more resources, than why?    Was our previous allocation of resources thoughtless, or,  is the market is worth protecting, in which case .  .  .  What are the ethical and legal implications of what we are saying?

3.  If we are making less provision for R&D, then are we saying that the demand for our products and services will be stable into the future?  Is so, why not write long-term contracts for staff on those lines?

What’s your take?

I would like to phrase these questions as constructively as possible and I don’t want to overreach.

How can we improve our understanding of a business so that in the future we can ask the right questions earlier?

Where do young HR managers in UK develop and test their understanding, BTW?  Which are universities and firms known for turning out HR Managers with solid business sense?

UPDATE: For an HR Managers perspective on the Recession, I have written a summary on a new post.

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