In January I was lucky to convince iconoclastic Henry Mintzberg to speak to the HR think tank I volunteer for (Strategic Capability Network) through a friend, David Creelman, who keeps up with a wide range of management and HR (Human Resources) guru’s. Henry’s presentation showcased a new program he’s been developing as an antidote to his complaints about MBAs (as in his book: Managers not MBAs). It’s called “Coaching Ourselves.” The idea is to get managers together in small groups to walk through a PowerPoint handout that guides them to ask questions about a particular management topic they’re interested in. Mintzberg’s organization develops the PowerPoint  guides for a variety of topics so groups can select the topics relevant to them at the moment – just in time learning, action learning and self-guided learning rolled into one. It’s a great idea, which I think will develop a great following over time, no doubt with lots of imitators.

That was January. Since then speaker after speaker has pointed out that Gen Y (and piggybacking on them, all the other generations now at work) want more autonomy, more discussion, more input into strategy development, to be listened to more by their managers and senior executives, to have a real hand in what’s going on.

True, there’s always an overtone of “they don’t want to pay their dues,” but what is becoming increasingly clear as we all think about that is that no one ever wanted to pay dues. When we started out, that’s just the way it was. Bosses could insist that we trudge along in humdrum jobs “paying our dues” and waiting till we were promoted to have any say in what went on. Now with instant communication keeping every employee a lot more in the loop and allowing everyone to be heard whether senior management expects it or not, there is simply no holding back the ideas that flow from more and more employees.

What’s truly new is that many Gen Y staff don’t have to hang around if they don’t want to. Mom and Dad are willing to put up with them moving back home. Mortgages and babies don’t hang over their heads to the same extent they did with the Boomers, who inevitably had to shut up and go along.

Now not only Gen Y, but many workers have more independence. Being out of work isn’t the disaster it was 40 years ago. We tell executives to get used to interruptions and 4 to 5 month job searches periodically due to re-organizations and lay-offs. Today it’s part of normal career progression. And all this comes at a time when, despite economic setbacks we still believe there will be a shortage of good managers and leaders well into the future, so we have to learn to cater to their desires in order to keep as many as we can and attract the best of the others. Many companies have started to figure this out and so are far more willing to listen… and listening is most of what it takes to develop a new, better kind of leadership.

Over the course of this past year there’s been remarkable progress toward a “tipping point” where more and more companies realize they need new coaching-style leaders. I’m just going through the 10 or so reviews I’ve written over the year on forward-thinking HR practices and strategies plus tons of stuff I’ve read and realizing every single thought leader has urged pretty much the same solutions. Still, we continue hear arguments about details – whether we need this or that Talent Management System, which is the best Performance Appraisal method or Succession Planning program and so forth.

While we’re debating the nuts and bolts, though, we need to recall there is now very broad and clear consensus on what makes HR work best – carefully integrated practices and styles throughout the organization’s people programs, not piecemeal fixes – all directed at involving, listening to and engaging all levels of staff and management to retain the best and attract more like them. In the midst of complexity we’re finally beginning to find simplicity – points on which pretty soon everyone will agree. Remarkable what can evolve in a year once the ball is rolling.

Listening to Kevin Cashman this week on the update of his well-known leadership book offered a chance to reflect on the extent to which the climate in which HR (Human Resources) operates is changing… or isn’t. Interesting that Cashman’s writing retains its Zen flavor, something one might think wouldn’t sell well in the corporate world, but he’s been consistent for more than ten years now.

Cashman updated his book to include more research and case studies that confirm the value of its recommendations – that to create change, a leader must first change him or herself. It’s a message more leaders need to hear. In fact, in my piece for Canadian HR Reporter, I make the point that this is why there are so many bad leaders, a question we constantly hear. A leader who thinks their role is to tell others to change, but has no intention or expectation of changing themselves is a bad leader and there are lots.

Cashman’s point with the update is there are many companies beginning to notice this principle and use it to hire or promote better CEOs who in turn create and lead better executive teams, who in turn lead more effectively for results. The problem is that “many” is a relative term. Where before there might have been a handful of such companies, now there are twice or three times as many – still a handful compared to the vast number of organizations out there.

Listening to Cashman and knowing he’s been stumping the world at conference after conference for years makes one wonder how many of have to push this message out before it becomes everyday stuff for leaders in organizations. Somewhere there is a tipping point, to borrow Malcolm Gladwell’s book title and concept. It can’t come too soon for all the people who continue to struggle in companies that haven’t picked up on this message.

As it happens, it’s my pleasure to MC a Gladwell book launch event shortly after his new book, Outliers, hits the shelves finally next Tuesday. I’m grateful to have this opportunity to finally meet him as well as hear directly what he has to say. Of course, I’ll be posting about it shortly after that.

Times are really changing for leadership and HR when such information is absorbed so readily and more people seek to put it to use. How Outliers is received will be the next measure of how much.

Presenting this week to a class of MBAs taking an HR overview course, I had a chance to ask them what they were doing and why. Several mentioned they’d taken HR undergrad, but switched to marketing. I asked why. One said, “HR seemed to be all policies and rules. Marketing is more creative.” I chuckled, but I could see heads nodding around the room. I couldn’t let that go.

HR, done right, means figuring out with people what to do to make them more effective in the varied and challenging situations they encounter daily. It shouldn’t be about consulting the policy manual and telling them what the rules are. If that’s all it is, you can be sure we’ll soon see “Why We Hate HR 2″ written with even more negative accusations that the original.

Nothing, absolutely nothing is more creative than trying to figure out individuals’ idiosyncrasies and what strategies they can pursue to get what they want while ensuring everyone else has a shot at their goals, too. Rules truly are made, if not to be broken, at least bent, stretched, modified, turned to everyone’s advantage. And HR is the primary place that should occur. How else can we keep some sort of logic and balance in the midst of constant surging forward?

I purposely chose HR because I thought it was the greatest creative challenge, not the least and certainly not less than marketing, which always seems to boil down to trial and error based on focus groups and surveys. Sure there’s creativity in the pieces - the art, ideas, copy-writing and so forth, but mostly they evolve from earlier attempts and testing new materials. The elements of HR are often more constrained - union rules, CEOs orders, financial requirements, etc., but being hemmed in makes the challenge of finding a creative solution even greater.

In  most non-HR situations there’s usually time to test. With HR, you rarely have that luxury. You need solutions today or tomorrow. You need a true sense of what makes people tick… and the variations that exist in your particular culture, organization, unit, team and more. Figuring out how to align all that for everyone’s benefit is, to say the least, the most complex sort of challenge we ever face… so much so that many people just ignore it because they can’t face the creative struggle it often requires. So tell me you like marketing because it has rules, concepts or patterns that can evolve and room for new ideas, but don’t tell me it’s more that way than HR. It’s may not be your chosen field; you don’t have an aptitude for it, but not ‘uncreative.’ If that’s what we leave people with as an impression of HR, we deserve all the condemnation we’ve been getting.

There’s that magic word “or” again. John Haggerty was lamenting this week on Workforce Management that  most of the HR people he meets lately are “business partners” – generalists who sit in the business next to business leaders and help them implement general HR solutions. He asks whether we shouldn’t expect these individuals to be specialists in at least one of the HR “silos” – compensation, benefits, labor relations, etc.

You probably know my take on “or” by now. It should almost always be “and.” Yes, generalists should have a specialty… and specialists should also be generalists. No matter how long they’ve worked in their specialty, no matter how much time they spend on it and intend to spend on it in the future, they should NOT fail to review what they do and propose in generalist terms. Will the average line manager understand and value what they’re suggesting, will the business “in general” benefit?

The reason HR is often perceived as isolated from the rest of the business is exactly this problem. Generalists sitting in the business side with line managers in viewing most of what comes from central “centers of excellence” as we now call them as being too ivory tower oriented, not workable in the real world. Specialists on the other hand tear their hair out wondering why the line never adopts programs fully (and then complains they don’t work).

But isn’t this a challenge in almost every area of a business. The marketers don’t want to step over to get experience in HR. After all they know for a fact that marketing is much more important and so that’s where they want to spend all their time. They complain those finance guys limit their budgets because they don’t understand. But the finance guys don’t want to get any experience in marketing and certainly not in HR because, after all, finance is the ultimate key to the business… right… sigh.

So let’s hear it for specialists who are also generalists and generalists who have a specialty. I mean for real, not simply some silo’d wonk who thinks they understand the business better than the people who work at it day to day or vice versa. At some point in every career, people need at least a bit of experience in both… or very good empathy and imaginations to understand what it’s like to walk in the other person’s shoes. Being one or the other simply isn’t effective; we need to think “both.”

I must be even slower than I thought at marketing. It dawned on me today that every email pitch for a webinar, seminar or program is suddenly adding something about “in troubled economic times” to the end of their usual program titles.

To wit: Talent Acquisition… in Troubled Economic Times” or “How Training Eliminates the Talent Gap… in T.E.T….” Get the idea? So I guess mine are “Effective Leadership… in T.E.T….” or “The Five Easy Skills for Success… in T.E.T….” (Repeating this so often on a page would probably not make Google happy, but apparently readers have an insatiable appetite for it.) This sounds suspiciously like “find the pain and offer to fix it…” plus our natural tendency to want to check every news or blog item that might have something intelligent to say about a situation that defies answers.

Personally I’m sitting on what I own and feel lucky I’m not so leveraged that I have to dump things at today’s loss prices. I’m not enough of a risk taker to go get a big loan and buy up what look like really good bargains at the moment, but I believe the market will come back… just no idea when.

The bottom line for leadership, though, is that we need to be better every day, rain or shine, good times or bad. It’s consistency that wins in the end, not temporary panic fixes. If we wait for “T.E.T.” to get serious about doing the right things, we’re missing a lot of boats along the way. Ah, human nature.

Under the heading Management buy-in key to learning, the UK’s widely read Training Zone (free) newsletter reports this (which applies worldwide): Lack of line management buy-in is the key barrier to learning retention, according to 40% of people who responded to a World of Learning on-line poll. The survey also revealed that 37% of the 300 respondents believed that the lack of follow-up further hindered the success of learning retention. Another 25% felt that lack of coaching/mentoring negatively affected the effectiveness of learning and development opportunities. A similar proportion – 24% - felt that lack of learner buy-in was a major issue.

Of course, these are really the same four issues. Buy-in by managers would mean they would follow up their staff’s training with coaching and mentoring thus producing learner buy-in. So how do we get this? The most successful answer is to start at the coaching-leadership end of the chain. If managers work in a culture where they’re expected to coach and they have some experience (and training) in how to do it, it becomes natural for them to be following up regularly with how people are doing.

When you lead by coaching, you work in a pattern of coaching all the time as the primary way of managing every issue. On daily coaching rounds with staff, you naturally ask, “how’s it going” and hear about their experience at training. You enquire what they plan to do with it – “what they really want” from it and that would lead to mutual objectives that you would be asking about in future conversations. This is far from rocket science as they say.

Experiences employees have, whether in training, attending meetings, conferences internally or externally, working on teams and projects and so forth all are things a great leader keeps up with, asks about and takes an interest in. When follow up is just “the way we always do things here” we have a culture of effective leadership. Questions about “buy-in” just don’t arise. If managers and staff aren’t bought in it’s because they have no mutual interests in what’s going on daily.

Maybe the title gives this away, but maybe not. With Coaching-style Leadership, there are still times when more directive leadership makes the most sense. Speaking at the HR program I mentioned a few days ago, there were a number of professional coach trainers in the audience. One who is totally committed to coaching as the best solution for all situations took me to task on this after my presentation, zeroing in on this one comment.

I’d said there are times when command and control is still the most appropriate style – and used an example of a sinking ship where you want the person who knows best what to do to assume control and direct the best actions for everyone, the more firmly the better – no panic, life jackets, lifeboats, line up here!

The coach trainer insisted that even on the Titanic, if the captain had coached, everyone might have been saved. In fact, it would undoubtedly have led to a better outcome if the captain had coached the crew sufficiently before the emergency so they knew how to take charge, but I can’t honestly see the opportunity to coach once the iceberg was hit. If you think about the coaching process and questions, is it really an appropriate time to ask people “how’s it going, what do you really want, what should our strategy be, what needs to be different and what will we do now?” Or do you hope the crew lines people up firmly, guides them into lifeboats and tells them how to launch?

The one antidote to panic is clear confidence from a leader who remains calm and balanced and seems to know what to do when you don’t. This is true for any situation, but in true emergencies, it can take a pretty directive leader to convince people. Once things are underway, you hope individuals will take initiative and you may be able to coach that once everyone’s in boats and away, but in those first stages of crisis finding the right balance of command first before coaching seems wisest.

A benefit of being invited to speak at events, albeit as a last minute fill-in, is you get to hear other presenters. At the Conference Board of Canada HR 2008 annual conference last week, it was a pleasure to hear Bill MacKinnon, CEO, KPMG Canada, discuss how he’s helped them embrace great leadership as a true objective throughout the organization. He keynoted the main conference theme – Influential Leadership - anchored to how this improves results.

He kicked off with the emphasis on why paying attention to leadership is becoming so much more important – because organizations, the challenges they face and the tasks of managing and leading them have become so much more complex. He proceeded to virtually itemize the same five key elements I build on.
Most striking of all, he very much emphasized the importance of leaders remaining “calm” (to use his term) in the face of the daily onslaught of challenges we now face. In other words, developing and maintaining the skills of balance in the midst of furious activity ended up being the point he stressed more than any other. I couldn’t agree more.

And balance, of course, involves including all the elements that must be balanced together so you don’t get blindsided by something you’ve forgotten about… like people’s attitudes and engagement, for instance, while you are nonetheless pushing for results. “Both/and” becomes a big challenge of complexity that many managers struggle with. Practice makes perfect. It was great to hear a CEO of a major organization put it in such a “must have, every day” light!

Highly successful US retailer, Kohl’s, recently announced promotion of their President to CEO, duties until then held by their Chairman who now takes on direct responsibilities for… wait for it… HR, legal and real estate.

Industry observers correctly pointed out Kohl’s strong performance hardly suggests this is punishment for anything. It is exactly what the company says: great succession planning, keeping two strong performers growing. It’s even greater insight into what ensures the long term future of the organization – people!

You can bet the Chairman isn’t taking work away from the existing VP HR. The move is to give HR the top level, long term profile - and clout - it deserves.

This is a potentially visionary move in so many ways besides text-book succession planning it has to be copied by others. First it creates a logical separation between the roles of Chair and CEO, a fundamental under all the Sarbanes-Oxley accountability furor.

Second it separates the focus on shorter term, core objectives and the shorter term thinking that inevitably entails from longer term planning for growth and continued health. CEOs naturally tend to make personnel decisions with an eye to more immediate results. Separating that particular set of decisions reduces the tendency to judge mainly on immediate ups and downs in results and who can impact bonuses and instead takes into account the need to slowly rotate executives over time necessary to develop great leaders.

Third (and there are undoubtedly more potential benefits) it emphasizes team work among Board, Chair and CEO on these issues, exactly where more heads are better than one. It is notoriously hard for managers to select people for their own teams in isolation and promotions inevitably improve when more people are involved in the judgments. If the Chair is directly involved you can be sure others will aspire to be, too.

From a purely HR view, this is a huge step for an organization to maximize the value that it ought to be getting from this area of the business. You can be certain it will raise the profile of the VP HR, not lower it.

Now it only remains to be seen whether it will actually work. Moving toward broader team work isn’t a slam dunk. It takes patience and insight. You can be sure the learning challenge for everyone will be solid. But setting up the opportunity is an immense step forward.

HR Lacking in Accountability?

A national newspaper’s management tips column picked up a dubious McKinsey finding on HR accountability I noticed a few weeks ago, but ignored. McKinsey has reasons for publishing such findings – they sell HR consulting. It doesn’t hurt them to remind clients they need to pay attention to their HR accountabilities. But when a widely-read paper flogs the same information without comment, I’m moved to comment on the lack.

Let’s not appear to bash HR without evaluating the comments in light of other facts. In this case the study noted 64% of line managers felt HR was not held accountable for Talent Management initiatives while only 36% of HR managers agreed.

How should we compare this? I suggest two ways. First, against other departments: Marketing Today on-line reports a study by the CMO Council that “less than 20% of top technology marketers surveyed had developed ‘meaningful, comprehensive measures and metrics for their marketing organizations’” …and “The last major study on marketing ROI found that 68% of marketers were unable to determine the ROI of their initiatives.” Sounds at least as damning to me… and far worse than the oft-quoted John Wanamaker comment that ‘we know we waste half of what we spend on advertising; we just don’t know which half.’

Second I’d say we should compare those opinions of HR with what appear to be facts highlighted by other recent studies such as this from Workforce Management: “One-third of U.S. companies do not have workforce contingency plans in place, according to a recent survey by Watson Wyatt Worldwide [despite growing concerns]. Of those companies that say they have contingency plans in place, more than half say those plans center around layoffs, while an additional 46 percent say their plan is “to restructure their organizations.” I doubt that HR came up with most of those plans without direction by the way. Planning layoffs isn’t typically HR’s first choice.

If you think beneath these last two reports you’ll quickly see the blame falls not solely with the functions by any means, but with the organizations as a whole – companies need to develop ways to measure their Marketing and HR departments and results. The idea that it is somehow purely HR’s fault they aren’t held accountable or that this gives them an unusual ‘out’ is implied, but not backed up. I dare say more line mangers than Marketing managers see the lack of Marketing’s accountability in many companies. So what? HR is likely quite willing to take accountability if anyone can agree on measures.

I have no quarrel with continued insistence that measuring results is essential. What’s annoying is the implication that it must be somehow resolved solely by HR when in fact this is an incredibly important facet of overall management of all operations – one that depends on teamwork, not finger pointing, the former being unfortunately sorely lacking in many organizations.