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Category: Business & Communities

Managing in Africa: We may have wild animals but we write concisely. We have a to-the-point culture.

Published November 7, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Harare International Ariport
Image via Wikipedia

Yes, there are wild animals in Africa and sometimes you meet them

A jet on a domestic commuter flight collided with a squad of warthogs that had found their way onto the runway during the night at Harare International Airport.  The jet hit the pigs just as it screaming down the runway in take off.  The undercarriage was damaged and the plane veered off the runway at speed.  The pilot brought the plane to a safe stop and all 30-40 passengers were evacuated safely though obviously startled.

That’s my summation.  I am following this story because I want to know what happened to the pigs.  It’s called the zeigarnik effect. We always want to know the ending!  No one says what happened to the pigs (or whether anyone has mended the airport fence).  So I keep reading the stories to find out!

Manage for animals and be to-the-point ~ very to-the-point when you work in Africa

While I’ve watched the story I read an extract from a statement from the airlines chief executive.

In exactly five sentences, the CEO summarizes the situation and he does so in logical order.

A template for perfect business writing

I’ve copied the statement below and added a heading before each line.  It’s a case study of a perfect business memo.

Situation : something has happened and we must pay attention

“An Air Zimbabwe MA60 aircraft impacted with warthogs during the take-off roll on November 3, 2009 at approximately 19:36.

Mission : this is why we must pay attention

This resulted in a rejected take-off.

Execution: Specific events in logical order

The aircraft was on the take-off roll and was about to lift off the ground when it hit the five warthogs.

The nose and left main landing gears collapsed after the impact.

The aircraft veered off to the left side of the runway and stopped off the runway with damage on the engine propeller and on the wing tip.”

Missing:

What will happen next and who to contact?

NB:  There is no mention that the passengers got off unharmed because no one is hurt.  We take it for granted that if casualties were not reported, that there is NTR – nothing to report.

I still want to know what happened to the pigs.  I know it is not particularly relevant. It is just the zegarnik effect, I know.

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More bad news coming. The internet will expose more institutional spin

Published November 7, 2009 by Jo Jordan

I know my institutions and can read their behavior

Many years ago, I friend of mine was negotiating his salary with his employer.  To aid his efforts, he paid a friend who was an employment agent to advertise a job just like his and to offer a wonderful package.

My students at the time were all excited.  The advertisement vindicated their choice of major.  Yes,  if they worked hard, they could follow an institutional path and be rich!!

Not even knowing my friend’s devious scheme (I found out later), I dismissed the advertisement with a contemptuous, “It’s a scam”.

See, I knew three things that my students didn’t know:

  • The prevailing salary rates, not just in my profession, but in sister professions of accounting, marketing, etc.  I knew what the market thought was reasonable.
  • Business conditions and the amount of gross profit available for institutional careers (you know the one’s guaranteed by the taxpayer no matter how much you mess up)
  • That people run institutions lie.

Before I worked as a work & organizational psychologist, I too thought institutions were honorable

I remember the first time I fell for an institutional scam.  It was a painful experience and it took me years to get over it.

We trust institutions

When we are young, we believe that institutional leaders are honorable.  Institutional leaders go to great lengths to make us believe that because that is their job.  After all an institution is only an institution if it is stable and trusted.  So they will tell you anything to have you believe they have done their job.

But we should remember that to check whether they are trustworthy

And that is why we must not trust them.  We must ask for evidence.  Hard, cold evidence.  What are the career paths in the organization?  Where are the statistics?  What are the future scenarios for the organization?  Can you look at them?

An institutional leader cannot use his own spin as evidence

Lord Mandelson is doing the right thing by making universities show students the destinations of graduates An institutional leader cannot hold up his own spin as evidence that he has succeeded in making order and stability for us.  He was to show us the evidence.

In the days of the internet, data on the institution’s performance should be freely available

And I am afraid that if that in the days of the internet that if that evidence is not freely available on the internet in slurpable form – meaning that you can download the  input data, not the processed data – then they obviously have something to hide.

Harsh words, I know

But remember my friend, and remember how my students were taken in.

Ask questions and the first question is ~ what happens when I ask?

First sign of scoundrels running the organization

If they don’t want to answer, or if they set up a meeting where we are doing all the answering and our questions come after they have made up their minds, then they are frauds.  Then they are frauds and and we have found them out.

Disappointing, of course.  Doubly disappointing.  Trebly disappointing.

  • We don’t get what we want.
  • Institutions by definition should be honorable.  So we don’t get what we want AND we know we have frauds in our midst.
  • Institutions are usually paid for by the taxpayer.  We don’t get what we want, we know you are trying to cheat us AND we are paying for you.

My priorities when you use public money to cheat me

Hmmph.  Well for now, my priority must be to get what I need and want.  Then I will participate to clear out the rotten institutions.  Then I will think about recovering my money from you.

Is that the right order?

For the young & inexperienced

And if you are young and inexperienced, stop trusting institutions who don’t trust you with hard, cold data.  Spin that they have done their job of making a safe, orderly environment for you is not evidence. Ask for the evidence.  If they don’t have it, act accordingly ~ warily ~ get what you need and in due course, expose their shenanigans.

 

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Your first job in social media

Published November 4, 2009 by Jo Jordan

I was delighted to see that Daryl Tay of Singapore has outlined what he is doing at BLUE.  He doesn’t tell us what he is doing for their clients.  For that we should hasten over to the Blue website.

Daryl tells us about the rhythm of his day.  The routine and regular tasks, how he sets priorities, and how he balances work and play.

If you are looking for your first job in an agency, have a look. If you have an internship in a social media agency, perhaps add a post and we can make a carnival?

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HRM – ready for the recovery? On your marks! Go!

Published November 1, 2009 by Jo Jordan

HRM in a fast moving world of the recovery

Earlier today, I posted my understanding of HRM and work psychology in today’s fast moving world.

In the previous post, I laid out the questions that employees or individual players ask, and the questions that project leaders or organizational representatives ask.

And what HRM has to do to pull together these questions in near-real-time so that the organization can move swiftly to negotiate and capture value before an opportunity evaporates.

HRM service for a fast moving world post-recession

One of the practical services that HRM is called upon to provide is a website and community forum that

  • Articulates the vision of a collected group of professionals
  • Provides a readwrite website that allows everyone to comment freely
  • Manages the technicalities and social features of the website
  • Is trusted by their past, present and future employees who are happy to add their visions

Moreover, it is probably necessary to launch a website like this simultaneously with major changes including

  • New appointments
  • Departures
  • New projects
  • New developments in other companies!

HRM skills in a world speeded up by social media

Do we have the facilitation, copy writing and technical skills to work at speed in the public gaze?

We do need to work publicly and fast in today’s world of social media.

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We are getting whooped by people who use ‘pull’ management? Why don’t we?

Published November 1, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Management hasn’t changed a lot in the last 100 years.  And what has changed, changed a long time ago – 50 years ago.  If your company hasn’t caught up, this is what you need to know!

‘Push’ management

In the olden days, or in a NZ meat-packing plant for example, the assembly line dictates the pace.  A carcass arrives.  A worker cuts off the relevant part, rinses the knife in water, and repeats.  Each cycle takes less than 30 seconds. The carcasses keep coming.  That is ‘push’ management.

Work is pushed at us. Adverts are pushed at us. As the poet said in The Charge of the Light Brigade – Ours is to do and die.  Ours is not to wonder why.

‘Pull’ management

Toyota perfected “pull” manufacturing ages ago.   There are three terms that you want to know.   (The New Yorker has just written an excellent case study which you may want to bookmark if you are in management education.)

  • The andon allows a worker to stop the assembly line whenever they think it is necessary.
  • The kanban is their signal that they need more parts.
  • And kaizen means continuous improvements which are driven by them.

All-in-all, pull manufacturing moves the engine of improvement from managers to workers.

Why have we been so slow to implement ‘pull’ management?

If ‘pull’ management works so well, why don’t we copy Toyota?

Simply, we because the only way to get the advantage of the system is to do it.  And that means trusting in our workers and their ability to drive quality.

And it that works so well, why don’t we trust our workers in the west?  What is it about our system that we don’t trust the people who work for us?

Or is the truth that we know that they cannot trust us?

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HRM – drop the shopping list and give me the information I need!

Published November 1, 2009 by Jo Jordan

The psychology and HRM that we are teaching is not good enough

We, psychologists and HR Managers do ourselves a disservice. We train our students in technicalities. Psychologists learn to run laboratories and do stats. Future HR Managers are taught the steps of recruiting, selecting, and paying people who work as employees.

We produce drones, who have enormous difficulty communicating with other people in an organization.

Even our blogs tend to drone on-and-on as shopping lists of what to do when. People hate us – for good reason. We concentrate on forms and procedures. We know the price but not the value. We know the answers and not the questions.

I want my HR Manager to know

  • Who I am
  • Where I come from
  • What is important to me
  • Where I am going
  • Why I am here
  • What specific things I bring to the party
  • The things I want on and off-the-job
  • And not least, where I can find people elsewhere (outside the organization) who can meet my needs – including ex-employees!

As a manager, I want to hear from HR

  • How many people are interested in the work I am doing
  • Where they come from and where they are going to
  • Whether interest in our work in the ascendancy or in decline
  • New interests that are emerging
  • How people in the field relate to each other and how their inter-relationships are changing
  • And some ideas of how I can build my interests on the interests of others as they come and go, morph and change.

HRM in fast moving industries

In fast moving industries, our interests and motives are continuously changing and quite fast.

HR has a large challenge to come up with a report structure or dashboard which keeps abreast of changes and opportunities in the labour supply.

  • As a player inside the organization, I have needs that come up very quickly. Is the organization able to meet my demands in time to create value?  What does the organization need to do in the background to have that readiness?
  • Equally, the people who work in my field and who could create exceptional value if we worked together have needs which come and go. How do we detect that it would be a good time to approach them and can we negotiate a deal before they move on to other opportunities?
  • Can we get ahead of the game by making a place where people come together to discuss their ongoing and ever developing needs? How do we invite them to join in, how do we help them to influence discussions, how can we show them how to extract what they want, and how do we help them to decide when they should move on?

Should we decide to work together in for a longer period and should we need a formal contract, what structures will facilitate the mutual journey?

Our role is to facilitate the interests and motivation of people who are moving very fast. That is what we must understand and that is what we must shape.

  • Do we hold up a mirror so they can see themselves change?
  • Can they see patterns in how every one else is changing?
  • Can they see ahead and position themselves to take part in the most lucrative join ventures that are emerging?
  • Can we keep the information up-to-date in near-real-time because the opportunities change as people react to each other?

Please drop the shopping list approach to HR! Organizations will not exist to amuse us.

We must make organizations that allow value to emerge in specific industries. Anything else is just clerking.  It is close to worthless and utterly dull.

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Ask better questions about leadership! Lose the tired ideas about who is a good leader

Published October 31, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Are leaders made by their followers?

The first time I encountered this idea was 25 years ago. It assaulted my classical training as a psychologist! It was very difficult to understand that no one is a leader.  All my training said otherwise!

But we are leaders only by consent of our followers and in specific situations for a very short time.  Martin Luther King was a leader for a few years only.

It is time to ask the right questions about leadership

Over time, I came to understand that we had been asking the wrong question; and the wrong question was muddling my head.  The question “are leaders are born or made” belongs in the trash can.  I’ve put it there.  You can too.

The right question is a sociological and anthropological. What role does “leadership” play in organizing society? What concepts do we use? Why do we use those concepts and not others?

Why, in other words, are we hung up on the idea that some people are leaders and some people are not?

Leadership in organizations

As a work psychologist, I spend most of my time working in work organizations. We have been consistently mis-advising banks, schools, hospitals, factories, armies, shops, and every workplace that exists out there.

Leadership resides in the followers

Leadership does not reside in senior positions. Leadership does not reside in individuals. Leadership resides in the followers.

There are times when all the right ingredients are present.  Someone is in the right place at the right time and it all comes together. As organizational consultants, our job is to help everyone in the organization to find this sweetspot.

We chose a leader as a shorthand to tell the world about ourselves

Leadership begins when people start talking to each other in what we call a bounded space. That is the workplace or a project. The people talking together look for a leader, not to tell them what to do, but to represent who and what they want as a kind of shorthand to themselves and to the world.

A leader needs to be replaced regularly because after a while they aren’t a quick summary of what we want to tell the world

The day a leader stops being representative of our collective wishes, either because s/he has stopped listening or because s/he no longer is what they want, then the relationship falls apart and force needs to be used to maintain the position of “leadership”.

Why do we allow leaders to stay too long and use force against us?

I suppose another sociological/anthropological question is when and why we allow leaders to run away with power and to use force against us.

It has long been agreed in the democratic English speaking world that the essence of good government is replacing leaders in an orderly way.  I wish we could see the same as the standard in business organizations.

The use of force against employees is a sign that the agreement is broken

The use of force against employees is a sign that something has gone wrong. Alarm bells should go off.  And HR should be on the scene in a flash trying to understand why the leader believes so little in his or her people that s/he feels the need to bully them.  Young managers often don’t trust their subordinates. A skill that is rarely talked about is the skill of believing in one’s people and seeing their strengths.

The job of HRM and work & organizational psychologists

  • Our job is to broker these agreements.
  • Our job is to coach the group during the inevitable shift in the agreement. How long should they carry on with the arrangement? When should they renegotiate?
  • Our job is to step in immediately force is used and declare a “state of emergency”!
  • Our job is to design organizational systems where leaders are replaced regularly. How long is a good time in the organization we help? How can we design the process of renegotiation and replacement of the leader?

Leaders are only a shorthand to tell the world who we are and what we want.  We need to change them regularly and we need to manage the process to produce the leaders we deserve.

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Friday Week’s Review: 10 minutes of your life in this creative agency!

Published October 30, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Oh the coolest of Friday lunchtime games:  join this creative agency and plot your direction with a red flag, give yourself a sugar-fix (once) and block the opposition with an umbrella (once).

Then evade Creative Directors of various characters and particularly avoid bulldozers which will demolish your work and make you stay all weekend to redo it!

Interactive salaryman!

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Who is the largest social media team that you know? How long have they worked together?

Published October 30, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Academia and practice in social media – two different worlds?

Not many people I know in the social media world went to the Oxford Social Media Convention in September.   Actually, no one I knew went.It didn’t really market itself to social media practitioners yet it was replete with examples of social media work in both the USA and UK.

The essential character or soul of social media

My conversation with James Kemp from Nominet Trust and with Matthew Hindman, author of The Myth of Digital Democracy got me thinking about the professionalism of social media practice.

I like the ‘hacking’ atmosphere of social media. The hands-on try-it-out ethos is its history and its style. And for many of us, it is also its essence.

Would professionalism be counter to our ethos?

But I’ve begun to wonder – are we ready for more?

Are we ready to manage ourselves as professional units? Could we retain an ‘A’ team like quality – flexible, inventive, supportive and with specialized roles?

Who would be Faceman – smooth talking marketer? Who is B. A. Baracus, the man who can solve any technical problem? Who is Vin, the guy who can land a plan anywhere even though he is nuts? And who would be Hannibal? Who would strategize and adjust our prioities as the plan meets the enemy?

I sometimes get the impression that we all want to be in charge of everything and at the same time, work exclusively on parts we love.

We can’t really do both.

How can we build strong teams of social media specialists?

But if we are to build up teams and have the professional strength of working together, what would the first step?

No one discussed the formation of social media firms at the Oxford Social Media Convention.  I want to discuss the formation of social media firms.

Maybe we can have a session at the Social Media Mafia unconference in London on December 17?

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