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Category: Business & Communities

3 jawdropping facts about Linkedin members in UK

I’m a member of LinkedIn, the professional networking site. You probably are too. If you live in the UK, you are one of 1.8m members. Around 30m people in the UK are of working age. So about 6% of us are LinkedIn members.

So, is it worth belonging to LinkedIn? And if you are, who are you likely to meet there?

I painstakingly took some numbers off Google Adplanner and I have three surprises that will make you rethink Linkedin membership.

When you’ve whizzed through the headlines, narrative and graphs, tell me what you make of this picture.

#1 College graduates in UK do not dominate Linkedin

That’s a surprise isn’t it?

Check the graph. Linkedin in the UK is dominated by people in the range of “some post-school education but less than a degree”.

Education & Gender on Linkedin from UK (drawn in Chartle)
Education & Gender on Linkedin from UK (drawn in Chartle)

Should we be surprised?

About 25% of people in UK have a degree. 33% of male Linkedin members in the UK finished University. Slightly fewer than 30% of female members of Linkedin in UK have degrees or graduate degrees.

So the facts go in the right direction.  Graduates are more likely to join Linkedin than people with other levels of education, but, because three-quarters of the population have not been to university, even members who have no further education at all outnumber those with a first degree.

This is a salutary lesson for us all. Even on Linkedin, the real world dominates. And in the real world, most people do not go to University.

#2 People who earn 50K pounds a year (or more) dominate Linkedin

I will surprise you again.

In the next two graphs, we see that people whose household income exceeds 50K a year dominate LinkedIn.

Salaries of Men on Linkedin UK (drawn in Chartle)
Salaries of Men on Linkedin UK (drawn in Chartle)

OK, this is not so surprising in itself. After all, Linkedin is a high-end service. Google also reports household income. Average income in the UK is about 20K per person and if two people work, 50K is an average amount. So we shouldn’t be surprised to have Linkedin users from households who earn 50K a year.

(BTW, a 50K salary puts a person in the top 10% of the UK.)

But given that Linkedin is dominated by ordinary people – may be this figure is surprising?

When we look more closely at the graphs, we see that education makes it easier to earn household incomes of 50K+, but there are lots of people out there with ordinary education levels who also have household incomes of 50K+.

To spell this out:

  • If you are a male Linkedin member, with a graduate degree, you probably earn 50K+.
  • This is also true if you have a Bachelor’s degree – but about a third of ordinary degree-holders on Linkedin earn in the 30K to 50K range.
  • If you are in the dominant group, “the post-school but no degree” crowd, you are more likely to be in the 30K-50K range but, there are as many people in this group earning 50K+ as there are degree holders earning 50K+ ! There are also more of this group earning 50K than graduates earning 50K+ – largely, I suppose, because there are fewer people with graduate degrees in the market.  “The post-school but no degree” crowd rule, OK?  Fonzi, still rules!

Burn this on to your brain.  If you find someone with high household income on Linkedin, they could come from almost any education level.

We have two apparently conflicting facts.

  • Education helps us earn money!
  • But earning money telling us little about a person’s education!  There are just as many high earners from lesser education levels (at least on Linkedin).

The pattern for women on LinkedIn is similar. But, it is confused by the over-powering dominance of women in the “more than high school but no degree group”.  They rule even more than they do among men.

Salaries of Women on Linkedin UK (drawn in Chartle)
Salaries of Women on Linkedin UK (drawn in Chartle)

#3 The high earners in Linkedin are young and the younger members of Linkedin are high earners!

This is the really stunning surprise!

See at the next graph.

The 25-34 year old group have high incomes AND they outnumber older people with high household incomes!

Have a good look at that graph and burn it onto your memory –

Who are the big earners on Linkedin UK? (drawn with Chartle)
Who are the big earners on Linkedin UK? (drawn with Chartle)

Now to the interpretation.

It is not a surprise – though nor is it acceptable – that women earn less than men. We should also disentangle the more complicated picture at the the mid-age levels. But we all knew this already.

More importantly, where are the older high earners? Why don’t they join Linkedin? Are they that complacent, or are they outnumbered by young people in real world too?

I did check with the UK Government Statistics Office. And I spoke to a professional statistician. They don’t have numbers going from high salaries to age. They have a 1% sample of taxpayers and they present data from age to salaries in percentiles. Their reports suggest – as common sense suggests – that the workforce is dominated by people in the 40-49 range who also have higher salaries.

So what is happening here?

Because we haven’t any baseline data for the UK working population, we have to work with some sweeping generalizations – never a good idea.

It looks as if Linkedin is attracting younger people who are high earners.

Remember these things.

  • 29% of men on Linkedin in UK who have household salaries of 50K+ are aged 25-34
  • 35% of women on Linkedin in UK who have household salaries of 50K+ are aged 25-34
  • 57% of men on Linkedin in UK who have household salaries of 50K+ are aged 25-44
  • 68% of women on Linkedin in UK have household salaries of 50K+ are aged 25-44

Interpretations?

Possibly, because women tend to partner men who earn more than them? Worth exploring, I think.

So what eureka moments did I have in this time-consuming micro-analysis of Google AdPlanner?

  • The typical member of Linkedin in UK does not have a degree (700K out of 1,8M)
  • The typical household income bracket of UK Linkedin members is 50K+ pounds.  University education makes it more likely you will be in the high earning group but people who finished university are outnumbered by people who didn’t or didn’t go at all.
  • The high earning bracket is dominated by 25-35 year olds!

How will I use this in practice?

  • I am going to find out who are the young (25-34 and 35-44) women on LinkedIn with household incomes of 50k+.
  • I know that less than half will have a degree but I can fine-tune this information AND find out what they do.

What will you do with it?

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5 pretty petals of future work

I can see clearly now

Today, I visited Wirerarchy, Jon Husband’s blog. I was delighted to find the 5 principles of future work in plain language.

I do encourage you to go over and read his version.

To make sure I fully understood what Jon was saying, I rewrote his five points in my own words and compared them to other writings on the future of work.

Yes, Jon’s principles almost perfectly match the work on positive organizational scholarship, poetry and work, Hero’s Journey and positive organizational design.   Jon uses much more accessible language though.

Here is my version. I’ll add links to other versions below. And then I’ll walk the talk and tell you how I used the principles in the most unlikeliest of circumstances!

1 Changing focus

The future of work is not about institutions and organizations.

The future of work is about you and me.

2 Listening to the people who do the work

We don’t want to talk about abstract theories any more.

We want to hear the stories of people. Directly. With no translation.

3 Valuing what we can do for ourselves

We don’t want organizations and institutions to decide things for us.

We ‘ll support changes that allow us to do things for ourselves.

4 Representing ourselves

We won’t listen to so-called experts who secretly represent other people.

We’ll listen to people we know or who our friends recommend.

5 Being active and positive

We aren’t interested in being told to wait.

We will begin with what we do well. Right here. Right now.


How would you phrase these rules-of-thumb?

I would love to hear what you think of these rules-of-thumb and the way I have phrased them.

Links to my previous posts and slideshare

All phrased a lot more esoterically –

Previous posts on future work

The essence of a happy life is a point of view

5 point comparison of the Hero’s Journey, Appreciative Inquiry and Positive Psychology

5 poetic steps for exiting a Catch 22

Lighten your personal burden for navigating 2009

Be still: Kafka and Joseph Campbell

Slideshare on future work

Positive organizational design

Positive organizational scholarship

So how will we get things done in this enchanting, new world?

For three years, I taught Management to a very large class of 800 to 900 students in a lecture theatre with 400 seats. You may remember attending lectures in one of these oversized rooms yourself. Hordes of students come in and sit in rows and struggle to stay awake as the lecturer drones on.

Of course, no lecturer wakes up in the morning intent on being deadly dull. But they do feel constrained. After all, how much can you do with this format and the size of the class?

Well, a surprising amount – if you follow the principles above.

The world through the eyes of the individual

I was teaching Management and Organizations. Students simply aren’t interested in perspective of the organization. But if you can think of how they view the organization from the vantage point of their part-time jobs and where their careers are going, then you have their attention.

Give me the whole story at once – circumstances, goal, steps, feedback loops, quirks and fancies

Students aren’t interested in the rules of organizing. No matter how elegant these rules are or how much work we put into thinking them up and trying them out!. They do like case studies, though, where they could follow a story. Then their active intellects take over. They imagine themselves playing a similar role in similar circumstances and start asking probing questions.

Don’t leave me out of the story – let me try out parts of it

Students don’t like being passive. Taking notes is better than sitting still. Solving puzzles is even better. I used questionnaires a lot in which they could see illustrations of concepts and relate them to themselves. Or I used two sets of power point slides – theirs had blank spaces and mine had the answers. In this way, they could anticipate (not just fill in) what I was going to say.

The way I relate to other people is part of the story – I’ll do this with others

Learning is social and students are influenced more by their peers than by us. They like to see and hear what other students think. There is a surprising amount of feedback from the noise and murmuring in a lecture room which is why so many students come to class in the first place! We also took polls often with a show of hands. It is active in an minor way. More importantly, students could see how much opinions varied. Developing a keen acumen of how much we vary in our preferences will be important to them as organizational leaders and influential citizens.

Harvard has a video of 2009 Reith lecturer, Michael Sandel, using the Socratic method with 800 students in one lecture theatre. Our students would have liked that – as long as we were able to be as courteous as Professor Sandel. Students really don’t like being put in the wrong in front of their friends, particularly in such a large room. (Who does?)

There is no journey unless I can take the first step

The jobs my students imagined after graduation were, to my surprise, not particularly ambitious. Though I didn’t fully approve at the time, now I think they had a well developed sense of starting with the ‘ground beneath their feet’ and growing from there.

These students particularly liked techniques that helped them do their jobs better, right now, or helped them put in words something that had puzzled them for some time.

Am I exaggerating the good points and dismissing the weak points?

You might be thinking that this was a University – we set the curriculum and the exams and the students did not have much control.

It is true that we began each year with a ‘classical’ textbook. But we would take topics that students had responded to well and use those as cornerstones to introduce new topics -or extend the conversation, so to speak. Thus as the year proceeded, a theme would emerge that was distinctive for that class.

One year, for example, the refrain became: “I will be me as I am. Not who you want me to be”.

You might recognize this line as coming from the film about Steve Biko, Cry Freedom.

Organizing for  “Me as I am.  Not who you want me to be.”

The challenge of management, as we put it to that class, is to design organizations where each of us can be “Me as I am. Not who you want me to be.”

What do you think?

Can you imagine organizing along these lines? Would you like to give me a case and see if I can rephrase it using Jon’s five principles?

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Beating the odds in recruitment and selection

338187446_682b87504a_mOne of the biggest complaints we hear from businesses is that they cannot hire the skills they want in the UK market.  It’s called the talent war.

I want to show you a simple calculation I did for someone that might explain what is giving you a headache in your recruitment and selection.

Person specification

This little firm was looking for ‘partners’ to work in a role similar to agents or franchisees.  Their partners don’t have to have any particular qualification, so they should be easy to recruit.  After a little thinking and talking, this is what we came up with.

  • The partners don’t have to be super-bright,  just normal bright and have finished high school .
  • The partners should be energetic & persistent and are likely to have demonstrated this energy by excelling in competitive sport, the arts, or some activity that has required them to make a clearly great effort than their peers.
  • The partners should be entrepreneurial.  They should have a history of trying things out and be just as happy when things don’t work out.  They are curious.
  • The partners need to be honest.  I don’t mean financially meticulous – I mean wanting to deliver a good service.  They are likely to have done something well in the past even when people around them wanted to take shortcuts.

Running the numbers

Now we can add some figures to this model and here is where you might get a surprise.

Let me remind you of some figures.

  • The midpoint on any characteristic divides the world 50:50.
  • The next step up divides the world 83:17.
  • And then next level up divides the world 97:3.

These splits correspond to 3 standard deviations on the right hand side of a normal curve.  You might recall that?  We could use finer divides but we will start with these to get a preliminary fix on where we are going.

Intelligence

The people we are looking for do not have to be super intelligent.  University and above is at the 83:17 divide.  We are happy at the 50:50 divide.  Below that, people may have trouble filling in commercial documents.

Energy & persistence

We are looking for someone who stood out in some way – played at the highest levels of school sport, for example, or raised a lot of money for charity, or even did well at academics.  Probably at the 97:3 split.  Someone who took a big prize at school.

Curiosity

These people don’t wait for someone to tell them what to do.  They work things out and find new opportunties.  They aren’t people for the sausage-machine of institutions. They are the people who make us think, “I wish I had done that”, or “How did you think of that?”  And they view setbacks as adventures.  97:3

Honesty

Unusual levels of integrity and sincerity.  At least once in their lives, they’ve done something properly when people around them were spinning, skiving or taking shortcuts.  97:3

How many people in the UK fit this description?

There are 30 million people in UK of working age.  How many of them fit this description and are candidates for our recruitment and selection drive?

Half of them have the intelligence required: 15 million

3% of the top half of intelligent people are very energetic and persistent : 450 000

3% of these have unusual levels of entrepreneurial spirit or curiosity:  13 500

3% of these have the commitment to integrity that we need: 405

(and this is from aged 16 to 65 – 405 people in the UK match our specification).

And how many of the right people are looking for a job?

Well, first of all let’s look at turnover.  It is usually 14% a year in the UK and that includes the high churn sectors like hospitality and catering.  Even if we bump up the turnover rate arbitrarily to 20% for the recession, we have only (.2 x 400) =80 people in our group who are looking for a job.

And of course some of these are doctors and lawyers, and some people are in the wrong sectors or wrong part of UK.  They are not available to be recruited or selected by us.

Not many left are there?

Shocking isn’t it?

I am used to the process of selection and to these numbers, yet they still shock me.  So please find my error and dm me.  I am hoping you will find my mistake because the numbers are shocking.

My point – and it is a serious point –  is that you cannot have one demanding requirement after another.

There simply aren’t enough people in the UK to meet your demanding needs.

There aren’t enough exceptional people in the economy to run it if is based on exceptional talent.

Our businesses need to run with normal people.

  • When we are selecting, it’s best to set the minimum requirements of the job, preferably from the candidate’s point of view, and begin there. Trim your list.  Ask, “Is this feature absolutely required,  and if so why?”
  • Stop adding requirement after requirement!  No more than three requirements!
  • After that, be ruthless in thinking about this recruitment assignment from the candidate’s point of view.

Ruthless in thinking about selection from the candidate’s point-of-view.

No one taught you that at uni, did they?  Yep, we like to keep some secrets to ourselves.

But now, it’s yours.

Review your HR specifications.  And keep it real.  Let your competitors be the ones to live in the world of make-believe.

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5 lame excuses in HR for bad job descriptions

I’ve been in UK for two years now and frankly, I find the HR documentation here well. . . what euphemism shall I use  .  . . undeveloped.

From time to time, I’ve been sufficiently unwise to comment – and these are the excuses I get, sometimes concurrently, a dazzling tightrope of logic.

Excuse 1 : We are too chaotic

Turnover is so high that we cannot keep up with the documentation.  So we issue poor documentation or none at all.

Excuse 2: We are learning

Nobody knows what will be done in the job.

Excuse 3 : Not made here

This is the system we have worked out.  That must count for something.

Excuse 4 : We can fudge it

Well, we will put in a clause “And any other task required by the Head of Department”.  90% of work comes under that clause.

Excuse 5 : If we are sufficiently muddled, we can shift the blame

I know I didn’t mention it but it is on page 56 or in the middle paragraph of an email addressed to someone else and copied to you.

Beginner’s dilemma

I remember years ago, one of my former students asked to see me at my house on a Saturday morning.  He had been given a rough talking to be a line manager at work and he didn’t really understand what he was doing wrong.  “I just took him some forms to fill in,” he said,”and the guy laid in to me”.

My reply was to ask whether he was a high-paid messenger boy.  Did the organization need a graduate to move forms from one point in the organization to another?

What the organization needed was an intelligent, thoughtful, informed person to ask the line manager questions in the line manager’s language, translate into HR-speak, fill in the form and return it to the line manager for signing.

And the line manager should look at it and look up with a shine in his eyes, and say: “Oh, that’s what this is for!”

The line manager should feel that scales have fallen from their eyes. They should see the work they do as clearly as if someone wiped the mist off the mirror and they saw themselves for the first time.

Example of good work

This morning I stumbled over this excellent example of a job description, and given the quality of job descriptions that I am seeing daily, I thought it would be good to flag it up and link to it.

Job description of a website owner

It says clearly

  • what the person’s day looks like
  • what the job holder does
  • the decisions they make

It says clearly how each task contributes to

  • Work for the day
  • Long term planning

Get the organization organized

And now you might say, I would like to but this place is just not that organized –  the work changes from day-to-day.

Then that is your first job. To get it organized.

Actually, the organization is probably more organized than you think.  Wipe the mist from the mirror and let them see themselves.

Just write down what they do all day and sort it out.  It may take you a few hours but everything else in HR flows from there.

When the job description is clear, it is easy to

  • communicate with job applicants
  • select people who can and want to do the work (without discriminating)
  • pay equitably
  • train & develop
  • coach & manage performance.

In short, you cannot do your job until you have worked out what people do on the job.

And writing it down allows us to check that we have a common understanding.

That is our job.  To be the mirror of the organization so that we develop a common understanding and confidence in each other.

Collective efficacy, believing that the next person is competent, adds 10% to the value of an organization – and a 10% that cannot be copied by your competitor.  No money in the world can buy collective efficacy.  It comes from the continual work of developing  confidence in each other.

And we cannot be confident of each other when we each have a different idea about what we are supposed to be doing.

It’s as simple as that.

How did the story end?

Well, my former student’s eyes lit up as the penny dropped.  He went back to work and started delivering value to his line managers.

The firm did fold eventually (but not because of him).  Indeed, they kept him on to manage the redundancies.   When he was done, he joined Ernst & Young as a Consultant.  Then he moved to a bank and after that he started his own firm of consultants.

I hope you enjoy the job description. It is a fine example of good work.

PS I’ll tell you where the 10% comes from if you want.

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Use the internet for career coaching and interview preparation

Image representing Skype as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

Arrgh!  Interview preparation!

The worst thing about preparing for a job interview is the time it takes.  Google “job interview preparation” and it will take you a good half-an-hour just to pick out some good resources.

Then, you have to wade your way through the article.  And you are no better off! It’s like learning to drive from a manual.

Down the right hand side of the screen, Google helpfully lists adverts for career coaches who help you practice for job interviews.  They may save you some time.

Practice your interview over the internet

Hmm, but no coaches who practice over the internet.   I’ll do it for you, if you like.

  • Email me your job description and the “person specification“.
  • I’ll email you back 5 questions to prepare.
  • And I will ask you another 3 questions that you must answer without preparation.
  • We’ll connect at an pre-arranged time through Skype.
  • And I will give you feedback.

Fees?

EXECUTIVE : 100 pounds (for preparation, interview & feedback)

PROFESSIONAL: 50 pounds (for preparation, interview & feeback)

SCHOOL-LEAVER or OPERATIONAL:  33 pounds (for preparation, interview & feedback).

Contact Me

  • Email me with suggested times and your questions on jo dot working2.0 at gmail dot com.
  • I’ll confirm a time and answer your questions.
  • If you are happy, you can send me your job description.
  • I’ll need around 24 hours notice.

Look Me Up

My professional profile is at Jo Jordan on Linkedin.

Let’s get this done!

PS This post was made to test Google Adwords.  If you do need interview preparation, do let me know.  I may be able to refer someone who lives in your area who can help you practice.

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The hidden tricks of high level HR

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Have you heard of Elliot Jaques?

I was on Brunel University campus on Monday and glimpsed the Elliot Jaques building.  Elliot Jaques was blazoned in large letters across the side.  Of course, in the grand tradition of prophets not being respected in their own land, Jaques’ work is barely know to British HR managers and occupational psychologists.

Jaques on organizations

Jaques wrote about large organizations and the role of each level of the hierarchy.  What does the Colonel do that is different from the Captain and what does the Captain do that is different from the Lieutenant?  And more to the point, are these differences also found in a hospital?  What does the Consultant do that is different from the Registrar and is that different from the Houseman does (what do they call housemen these days?).

Jaques in practice

Understanding these differences is useful to organization practitioners for three reasons.

1.  To design jobs so that we aren’t tripping over each other or talking over each others heads.

2.  For designing pay systems (I did say that British organizational gurus seem to have skipped Jacques).

3. For designing training & development programs and by implication assessing where people are on their development path.

The system was modified slightly by a fellow called Patterson to take into account very large organizations like the Royal Mail and Tesco’s who train their staff from absolutely basic level jobs.  Let me explain the expanded Patterson system because when I looked for a good link on the internet, nothing much came up in the first three pages.

Patterson job levels

  1. Unskilled work.  I can show you how to do the works in a few minutes and I can see “from the outside” whether you have done it.  British pay rates are about 6 pounds an hour – the minimum wage.
  2. Semi-skilled work.  You need to be trained, much like learning to drive, but once you can do the work, you do it without thinking.  Your work is checked more by quantity and usually checked at the end of an shift.  Much of work in the British public service seems to be in this category.  Check the box.  Unless the equivalent of a car-crash has happened, it is counted as done.  That’s not to say it is not important.  It’s very important.  It’s simply done at this level of complexity and is the big difference between the work done in a Japanese factory and an Anglo-American factory.  British pay rates are about 7 pounds an hour which you will notice is 1.16 or 16% more than the first level.
  3. Semi-skilled work with responsibility.  In this category, you may have slightly more complicated skills, like driving a long-distance goods truck.  You are on your own and the damage you can do if you don’t achieve minimum levels of performance is fairly considerable.  Alternatively, you might supervise people at levels 1 & 2.  You will dole out their work and check they have done it.  But you are unlikely to train them or be able to vary the system.   I’ve just looked up a driver who carries cash and the pay rate seems to be 9.50 an hour.  This is about 36% higher than the last level.  Interesting as it was the same organization as the first.  I’ll comment on that in another post.
  4. Skilled work.  All skilled workers fall in this group, be they nurses or doctors, mechanics or engineers, accountants or teachers.  Generally, it takes 3-5 years training to acquire the skill and in each and every situation we encounter, we have to work out logically what we have to do.  So the mechanic has to look at your car and decide how to service it (does this still apply?). The hairdresser looks at your hair and decides how to cut it.  The GP finds out your story and takes some readings and dispenses some advice.  British pay rates at the entry level are about 11.50 which is about 25% more than the last rate.
  5. Skilled work with responsibility. Yes, skilled work is responsible.  All work is responsible.  At this level, we have enough experience to work on our own and enough experience to supervise people at level 4.  Note well, there might be trainers and supervisors at level 4.  Lieutenants and sergeants fit into level 4 this category because their basic skill is supervising.  Lieutenants are trained to do this from the outset and sergeants have come up through the ranks.  At level 5, we include the trial balance bookkeeper who runs everything efficiently, the CEO’s PA, the ward sister, the Registrar who has ‘been there and done that’, and the Captains and Majors in the Army.  Pay rates in the UK are about 15 pounds an hour which is about 30% more than the previous level. (Note the Army pays more.)
  6. Middle management.  The middle manager coordinates the work of several skilled people.  Each person is experienced and used to reading the situation and applying their professional know-how.  And they are quite capable of supervising the novices at level 4.   The big question is how does the jigsaw puzzle of these jobs fit together and as this is not a jigsaw puzzle but more like air traffic control at Heathrow, what do the skilled controllers need to do their job well and what degrees of freedom do you have for altering circumstances under which they work?  Some factors like flights coming in are not under your control, for example.  Which factors vary and are under your control?
  7. And the roles after this include middle management with responsibility, senior management (2 levels) and top management (3 levels).  Another day, another post.

Why is it important to get these levels right?

Let’s take something we look out for in assessment centres.

What level are you communicating at and what level have you assumed the other person to be?

When a skilled person becomes competent, they are able to explain what they do.  When they work with a novice, they point out the features of the situation that are important, ask the novice for a plan to check they are using the right professional know-how and to relieve the novice’s anxiety that they have understood, and then set a time to review when the novice has had a chance to try out their plan and to see if their efforts work.

Let’s be clear.  If you haven’t had similar training, you will not understand what is being said.  If you have been around a while, you might be   able to ‘follow’ without doing, just as a pilot understands what an air traffic controller is doing without being able to do it ‘himself’, and vice versa.

Difficulty 1.

The 1st difficulty comes in when the senior person simply doesn’t have the experience themselves to communicate clearly how situational details and professional know-how comes together.  Hence the rules to young lieutenants – listen to you sergeants, listen to your sergeants, listen to your sergeants.   To take the air traffic control example, an air traffic controller who is not totally fluent shouldn’t be supervising someone who is in their first 1 to 2 years service.

Difficulty 2.

The 2nd difficulty comes when the senior person tries to communicate with someone who is not trained in their area.  They are in for a shock, aren’t they?  That is a whole new experience set and takes time to learn.  Imagine an air traffic controller talking to the cleaner.  It takes a little work to understand that, no, it is not obvious to the cleaner why they shouldn’t put the paper strips in the waste.

Difficulty 3.

The 3rd difficulty comes in when the skilled person is promoted to the next level up and they haven’t understood their new role.

They are now supervising skilled people who know what they are doing.  Contingent leadership theory covers this well.  Don’t give detailed instructions!  Don’t try to motivate!  Delegate!  Just indicate what needs to be done and how it fits in with other work going on in other sections. Your skilled staff will take it from there.  If you’ve explained the overall situation well (and believe you me, we all mess up from time-to-time), your staff will deliver.

The sign of the inexperienced manager is that they forget there are many different situations and they assume their interpretation of the situation is relevant and start instructing their staff as if they are novices.  Interpreting the situation is the skilled person’s job.  The skilled person is on the spot and has immediate information about the circumstances.  The manager does not have this information and is likely to make the wrong call.  Third, the manager’s job is to provide the resources for your staff to respond to situations as they arise.  That’s the manager’s job.  Don’t wander off the job and start doing someone elses job just because it is in your comfort zone!

Take air traffic control again as an example.  Imagine an air traffic controller manager hears the voice of an traffic controller become more urgent.  The worst thing in the world would be to take over.  If, to take an extreme example, it was clear the air traffic controller was having a heart attack, the manager would get another controller to take over the station.  If the manager takes over, he or she would not be doing thei job – which is to monitor the overall situation and the interconnections between the jobs. It there was some tension at a station, they might walk over, but not to interfere – but to be immediately available to receive requests for more resources.  The picture from Zemanta illustrates beautifully – two senior people are standing-by to take instructions from the skilled person on the job. They haven’t taken over and the next scene will be them turning away to organize what the air traffic controller and the pilot needs to resolve this crisis successfully.

In business settings, the relationships may not be so clear.  If you walk past someone who is doing something you don’t like, don’t interfere and don’t start to comment. To keep yourself oriented, ask yourself these questions.

  • How does this job fit into other jobs?
  • Does the person doing the work understand how the jobs fit together – or better still, have we forgotten to tell him or her something?
  • Ask yourself what you are reacting to – your inexperience, or a real danger that the jobs won’t fit together at the end of the day?

Can you maintain your role?

This is a tough one for people moving into management, especially if they haven’t had good role models in their own managers.

To judge where a manager is a on the learning curve,  psychologists get quite sneaky in assessment/development centres.  They’ll drip feed you ‘rumours’ that a skilled person is not working in a skilled way, and then see if you can maintain your role.

  • Can you maintain your focus on how the outputs of all your level 4 people fit together and work together to achieve a good collective result?
  • If not, why do you think that the situation is so alarming that you have to do the equivalent of interfering with an air traffic controller as they speak to an aircraft?
  • Is your reaction based on professional information at this level 7.  Or, is it based on panic because the skilled person has a different style from you?

I remember one superb candidate in an assessment center who disregarded the ‘dripfeed’ and began a performance review of a senior salesperson “how is the market, John?”

Brilliant question.  To state this in a general abstract way. Ask “how are you finding the situations that you were appointed to manage?”

This exceptional candidate received a full report from her ‘subordinate’, listened to it carefully, and responded to it in its own terms.  Then, once they were both oriented and playing their own roles without muddle, she attended to rumors that he had been using a company car for personal purposes.  She didn’t muddle the issues and she didn’t let him off either.  She made it clear in a cheerful but implacable way that the car was not to be used in that way and she didn’t get into the excuses.  When one of the excuses was dissatisfaction with pay, she put that aside to discuss that later.  That was important and very much her job.  But it had nothing to do with cars and cars had nothing to do (really) with how much work it was taking to achieve sales in that sector.

She was only able to achieve this clarity because she was clear at the outset about their respective roles and she didn’t fall for the temptation of giving her opinion on matters that were irrelevant.

Rehearsing for your middle management job

Finding the right question is qhard though.  I wonder how many psychologists serving assessment centres and HRManagers interviewing could phrase them.

So figure out your question.

Let’s imagine an air traffic control manager was following up a complaint about a skilled air traffic controller.  Yes, it is tempting to jump to the complaint.

  • Begin with the responsibility of the job.  How is sector ABC?  Find out what is going through the air traffic controller’s mind.
  • Then it is easy to begin with – I’ve had a complaint about this.  And wait to see how it all fits in.
  • It’s very likely you will learn a lot.  Keep the conversation at the level of managing sector ABC and how ABC sector fits in with DEF sector and GHI sector (and of course, with finance, marketing and HR).

Sometimes there is no issue except panic and the panic is yours. So deal with it.  And thank your stars you have a light day today!

Going back to Brunel and Jaques

Yes, I am surprised that local HR gurus don’t know their Jacques. He’s handy for structuring thinking about big organizations in all three areas – job design, pay and development.  We can take it as said the pay scandals wouldn’t have happened if HR had been reviewing their handiwork with his principles and those of his descendants.

I have another question though.

How do hierarchies fit into social media?

We know the old dinosaurs of large mechanistic companies have to change their ways.  GM is on life support.  The banks in Britain are alive mainly because of the massive ‘blood transfusion’ from the rest of economy that may kill us instead.  The organizations of the future will be smaller and networked but there aren’t enough around yet to see patterns – or are there?

Yes, in a sophisticated networked organization, most students join us around levels 2 and 3.   Graduates should be trained for level 4 (skilled) with the idea they will be at level 5 in 3-4 years (skilled and able to supervise novices).  I think this pattern will remain much the same.

Thereafter, do we have hierarchies?  Maybe – it’s possible to conceive managing networks the same way as managing hierarchies.  Or are we going to have to understand the complexity of organizational life differently?

Is the Elliot Jaques sign at Brunel University just a curiosity like the lace buildings in my town?  What do you think?

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Stylish events in London

Rounding up Week 4 at Xoozya

Event manager supremo in London

Squeezed in between writing tenders, I was able to attend a most excellent reception in London hosted by the Blur Group and event-managed by the inimitable, Julius Solaris.

Cafe Phillies

On a blowy, summer evening, we converged on Cafe Philles, just off Kensington High Street, an Italian Cafe with elegant, contemporary snacks, light wines and Belgium beer.

Getting down-and-dirty with social media

We were a small gathering of start ups in the social media space.  Everyone was articulate about what they do – and they are doing.  Julius had carefully selected the guests and conversation was relaxed but focused on the economy and the in-depth discussions of business models, be they the economics of on-demand printing, databases for the assiduous management of  backroom cooperation between real estate portals, or communication systems for disaster management.  Everyone worked for start ups and was comfortable in their own skins.

Time to call in the professionals

It was a pleasure to be there.  I am not an event manager at all – I abdicate my events (!), but they are expensive affairs, even for the guests.  I would like to go to more events that are focused and smooth.

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Dancing with fellow professionals

Week 4 at Xoozya

Yup, that bid took it out of me.  I was so tired this weekend,  I couldn’t even be bothered to go for a walk in the sun.

Back at work and another tender – but this was sorted out fairly quickly.

They have it or they don’t!

There is definitely a pecking order of clients.

People who did stats or personality theory at uni will remember an unidimensional factor means everything correlates.  If you are high on one thing, you are high on everything.

You notice this pattern when you work on projects.  When the documentation is good, the verbal briefing tends to be precise and you can also find information about the firm on the internet.

And when everything is clear, we can get on with the work.

Because we are usually bidding to fellow professionals, we also find we can get directly to the point .  .  . and use big words.

I am all for expressing our services in lay language.  I think every professional service needs to pass the plain language test.  For the lay user, I must be able to say simply:

“This is what you are doing and this is where I can help you.”

But between professionals, we want to communicate nuance and detail very very quickly.  We don’t want to stop to explain technical terms that they really should know.

Is it true that HR staff are this bad?

Thinking about this took me back to a project I did “in-house” many, many years ago.  I was preparing the salary information for industrial level negotiations.  All our competitors would be present, we would negotiate annual awards with the unions, and we would recommend a set of minimum conditions to the Ministry of Labor for reconciliation with awards offered in other industries and promulgation in due course by the Minister as a Statutory Instrument.

My immediate boss was going away on holiday.  He was a visual guy and didn’t want numbers.  This was before the days of desktop computers, so I grabbed a pad of graph paper, pulled an all nighter, and because there was so little time, drew him a bunch of line graphs.

He duly departed to the beach and the MD paid me a surprise visit.  A rare occasion indeed.  He usually just dialed the switchboard and told them to summon me on the factory wide tanoy: Jo Jordan to the MD’s office.  A bit like being summoned to the Headmaster but after a while Jo Jordan was associated to MD and that was definitely in my favor, so I wasn’t complaining.  Things began to happen so much faster for me!

On this hot afternoon, the MD plonked himself down in front of my desk and proceeded to explain how to draw bar charts, without actually mentioning the word bar chart.  I mischievously let him go on and after an hour, I smiled gently and asked: So you would like me to draw bar charts?  He was a good guy and got the joke, though I was almost half his age.

We subsequently discussed the substance of what he must achieve in the negotiations and some time into this, he once again he went into a tortuous explanation, this time of the minimum wage.  I wasn’t quite so patient and interjected tersely, “you mean the y intercept.”

That evening,  I rang up the HR Manager who had recruited me, but who had left the company herself, and I asked her, why did Mike, for that was his name, why did Mike talk to me like that.  Her answer was because so few people know.  Hmmm.

Professional training

Now compare this with professional internship viva’s.  Graduates often come in and try to claim the procedures they use – rather than the data about the client – are confidential.  We always set our students straight.  Any procedure that we use as a professional must be tested and published, or a known convention and therefore also published, or a law which we can cite with paragraph, section and sub-section.

Basically, within a profession, we have a common knowledge base.  We know what is common to the curriculum across the country.  We usually have a pretty clear idea of what we know and what we don’t know.  There’s lots we don’t know, of course.  We’ve only learned the stuff in our profession and there is heaps more to know about the world.

But students talking about work in their professional internship don’t need to explain.  They just say what they did.  The examiners are just providing an audience so they will be motivated to write down what they do.  With 4 vivas a year for 3 years, they get better at describing what they do and move from a superficial account, through using plain language, to telling us how they improved the system.  Now, they are communicating with us quickly.  The questions we’ve asked them over the years help them separate background and foreground, what is expected to move suddenly from what is likely to be static or slow to move, what looks better from a different angle or in a different light, what is ‘boilerplate’ and what is an interesting, nuanced account.

Learning at the edges

It was interesting when an intern learned a new procedure, or was able to use a procedure in new circumstances.  Usually sometime in their third year, students would ring up the Convenor and alert us to an interesting log book coming in.  And they would ask to address a plenary session rather than just a viva panel.  They wanted to address everyone!  Every student and every examiner.  And so they did.  And everyone came too.  They wanted to extend their knowledge and they weren’t going to miss out.

Sometimes we would have someone in between.  They knew their stuff but couldn’t explain it yet.  This was awkward when the person is senior but didn’t have a strong connection with the professional body.  Maybe they’d been working abroad and had just come back.   I have actually attached students to such people and told them to follow them around and come back and tell us his thought process.

Once I was working with a very experienced psychologist in the UK on an assessment center.  I made a few remarks about a candidate.  She simply asked pleasantly for me to walk through what I was doing and when she thought I was referencing a model that she wasn’t familiar with, she said, very pleasantly and inquiringly, “What are you doing?”

I worked for a long time with a positive organizational scholar in New Zealand who would never stop to explain what he was doing.  It was hard work keeping up.  In fact, I’ve only just found one of the poems he would cite.  It was used to advertise BBC poetry week.  I heard it and thought, yes at last, dived for my laptop and courtesy of the Beeb, found the long lost reference.  But I am glad I put in the work.  All those years of saying what is P talking about, looking things up and piecing it together has paid off.

Lack of shared knowledge or lacked of shared manners?

Yes, there are gray areas, but I am finding too many awkward moments when someone is teaching me to suck eggs and they sadly don’t have Mike’s sense of humor.  I feel like Jeeves with Bertie Wooster, except that Bertie knew he didn’t know.

  • Thinking, thinking . . .  is it a matter of lack of shared knowledge.  Or is it a lack of shared manner system?
  • Is it that inquiry and particularly joint inquiry is not seen as the essential scaffold of the working relationship?
  • Is it that we have become Flat Earthers at heart?
  • Or is it the old masculinity/class thing – the conversation is to do with recreating the pecking order – our job is simply to yes sir, no sir, 3 bags full sir?

My questions to buyers of professional services

Here is my challenge to everyone who sends out a Request for Tender or advertises a job.

When people ring you for a briefing, what do you expect them to ask?  What information have you compiled and put in a handy place on your desk so you can ask questions precisely and concisely?

What do you expect to learn when people ask you questions?  What did you learn last time you managed a tender?

My question to you

What do you think?  Do you get caught in these dilemma?  How do you make sense of my predicament?

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Get it done, completely

Day 3-15 at Xoozya

Wow! Day 3 became Day 15 in no time as I was buried in a demanding pitch.  The work I did on strategic planning 12 days ago is in the form of scribbled notes in a box.  I wonder if I can read my writing.  It’s such a waste of time to have to pick up tasks that have been suddenly abandoned.

The secrets of successful protovation

Hence the flip-side of protovation and an amplified, connected life.

Only start what you finish and dispatch in one move.

And the corollary of that – break tasks into small pieces.

Finish what you are doing as you go and put it away, file it properly, as you end it.

Who would have predicted that the internet world will make us tidy.

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