The Einstein quote is well known enough: Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. But perhaps Einstein had something different in mind than the obvious meaning that you have to rise up to a higher level of thinking to solve a problem created at a lower level. What if it’s the reverse?

In management strategy we frequently encounter the problem that the solutions we propose are “too simple.” For instance, we point to the tremendous power of simple recognition by senior managers as a powerful force for engagement and performance of staff. Just acknowledge good work we say. It isn’t rocket science. All it takes is literally saying something as simple as, “wow, thanks, that was great” or “I really appreciate your taking the time to think that through, I’m not sure I could have found such a great answer.”

What stops managers from saying stuff like this and reaping the benefits of improved performance from people who will strive like mad to do even better the next time just for a few more words of praise? Can we ever get enough praise? Do we ever get enough so we don’t need more for weeks and weeks and weeks? No. Most of us can absorb that kind of comment almost daily and still crave more. We know what this feels like personally, but we somehow don’t ‘get it’ that others who report to us respond the same way.

Managers argue that employees will tire of this, take it for granted, be even more upset when they don’t get praised next time because we established a baseline (and, oh, it’s work, it takes time, it’s hard to remember to do it – true until it becomes habit!). Many worry that most of the praise would be false, provided for work that’s just a basic expectation of the employee to do a job. Well, I’ve seen tons of employees not do the basics, so it never bothered me to thank people for doing their job and doing it quite well. I never seemed to have too much trouble distinguishing something I could thank someone for and make an even bigger fuss over something truly unique. Psychology tells us repeatedly that positive reinforcement works. So why not?

Isn’t this exactly a case of a problem being solved at a different, but ‘lower level’ of thinking – basic human needs – than the level that created it – expecting all employees to be so ‘grown up’ they just do their jobs because, after all, isn’t that what they’re paid for? Maybe managers are hung up looking for ‘higher level’ solutions when ‘lower level’ would actually work better. Maybe I’ll be accused of ‘lowering the level’ in organizations or in HR, but if it works, if everyone is happy and productivity increases, why not? What do you think?

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Senior GM execs had a private elevator key that allowed them to get from their guarded top floor suite to their private garage without stopping at any other floors to let anyone on, Rattner notes as a typical example. Perhaps not quite as obviously dreadful as flying in private corporate jets to ask the President for bailout money, but maybe more significant. At least one can argue the economic value of a corporate plane – sort of.

Cutting oneself off from team members and from their casual input on a day-to-day basis, even as much as one might pick up in an elevator ride, is deadly to leadership. Worse, it reinforces your status as untouchable by rank and file. The message is clear – don’t tell us anything, we’re not interested. If relationships never develop on any sort of casual basis, people will hesitate and decide not to approach you about things they worry might be important, but not important enough to risk embarrassment if you turn away or get annoyed.

Not everyone fears speaking to a senior executive just because of their title, but many do. Seeing others engage in casual conversation helps everyone feel OK about it, too. Every leader has to constantly work toward encouraging all sorts of comments. It doesn’t just happen by accident that people keep their leaders up to date. So the private key isn’t just a symbol, but one more actual roadblock that only the worst sort of leaders set up.

Hannibal drank from puddles alongside his troops; Genghis Khan rode with them. No one doubted who was in charge, and you can bet they talked. If you’re afraid to talk to your boss about every day work stuff, you can bet most others including his or her highest lieutenants are, too – so nothing is getting through. Time to be dusting off the resume.

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Perhaps the most important concept is that happiness isn’t a single thing. When thought of as if it were you tend to think of leisure and joyful moments, but it really runs much deeper. Todd Kashdan makes the point in his excellent brand new book Curious? that we might not even want to set happiness as the most important goal in life. That’s carried through in the very interesting Positive Psychology News Daily (PPND) web site authored by graduates of the first MA programs in the field.

In fact, the PPND site impressed me with several graphics or “image maps” that allow you to click on elements that make up, for instance, ‘a life well lived image map‘ and find the components to a ‘positive emotions image map‘ and other facets of living well. The concepts they capture reinforce Kashdan’s point that maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree trying to focus on happiness alone.

A similar point emerges from another new book, The Happiness Equation, by others of the Positive Psych movement. It gives brief information about 100 items that add to or subtract from happiness and well-being – quite a list, from which you can generate a score to assess how happy you are relative to others, but even more importantly you can see from that which factors are contributing or are missing that create a sense of a good life.

Once again one of the most impressive things about this is the vast amount of research and publication that’s been done in the few short years since this field of study emerged. It really puts in perspective the sort of counseling that goes with mild mood prescriptions to form what Jonathon Haidt and others have shown to be the best antidotes to depression and how closely some of these relate to the elements needed for people to be happy and engaged at work.

While it might seem that these are intensely personal concerns, the fact is that happy employees have consistently been shown to produce better results. It isn’t either/or, but both/and. We can do the right thing by helping people identify what would make them happier and simultaneously improve profits and market share. What a concept! Great to see it born out again and again in modern research.

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There are currently two opinions commonly published about HR. First, that most people in it are useless, especially at understanding, justifying their cost/value or contributing to results in their organizations. Second, the growing alternative view, like much of what Jon collected, that while most HR people are useless, it’s neither entirely their fault nor true of all since some actually reach the level of valuable, measured proof of strategic contribution.

I argue there’s a third view that we should hear a lot more about. that HR is making a valuable contribution almost everywhere, but only to the extent they’re allowed, assisted and supported by the rest of the team. (Try running your organization without any.) Consider that HR is largely doing what it is told and empowered to do by more senior organization leaders who control what HR is paid (typically less than most functions), who’s appointed (qualified. or not), what it’s entitled to do (mostly essential administrative stuff with a smattering of more strategic items ‘if there’s time’) and who listens when HR has something to contribute.

Instead of solving these problems, most people seem content to stand back and blame HR for not ‘proving its value’ as if there isn’t already a mountain of scientific evidence showing that the impact of doing HR well is enormous (Pfeffer’s work offers great examples). We should be talking about how to focus what we know can be done to fit our specific organizations not blaming the guys in the middle who are striving to do what they can with the resources they’re given. Pile on is not constructive.

I’ll expand later, but for now let’s make one thing clear. Try appointing a junior accountant as CFO and then encouraging your managers to ignore what she or he ’suggests’ if they feel they have a better idea. Of course things would come crashing down in less than a fiscal year. CFO dictates aren’t ’suggestions’ and are invariably backed up by CEOs and armies of accounting staff policing the rules daily. But with HR issues, people are so adaptable they put up with and take orders from blatantly bad leaders as well as good, the former being tolerated for years, often encouraged and even promoted because they ‘get the numbers.’

Most people continue to produce as faithfully as they can at least for a while till something better comes along and they cover poor performance of those around and above them up to a point. Financial lapses aren’t so self-repairing. Let me say for the record, if HR had similar rule-enforcing support bad managers wouldn’t be tolerated, let alone promoted. That would certainly make measurement of HR practices a lot easier, too, by enabling a much more consistent application of HR strategies than the hit or miss hodgepodge we normally see.

Now HR could never and should never strive to operate via pure enforcement. Human situations are simply too varied. By its nature HR has to work through other leaders in the organization and ideally help develop them to be the best possible. Nevertheless, clear HR values guidelines would help insist that leaders act with good will, positive reinforcement and other basic effective leadership practices. Needless to say perhaps, HR can’t be the body enforcing those values. As Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I’ll move the world.” Let’s help HR with the tools and measures instead of suggesting they ought to make them all up by themselves. Help make HR part of the team or spend the rest of your declining performance time questioning why they can’t perform.

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I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. We’re so overloaded that just skimming the regular newsletters, ads and emails from sites I’ve joined takes more time than I care to think about. Sometimes taking a break allows for a re-orientation of your thinking. That’s why Google encourages their people do take a day a week or so to spend on their own projects exclusively.

In the last few weeks, I’ve developed some new insights (new for me at least) into leadership and HR and what’s really happening with them. First I realize that I’m intrigued to continue working in the area because it poses Zen-like paradoxes – so simple, yet so frustratingly difficult to coach people in. I was getting down about this without stopping to define what it really was. The fact is this is the intrigue and the frustration simultaneously – the two aren’t separable. It’s reassuring to know that leadership and HR are developing on their own without depending solely on me to show the changes and the benefits. But that, too, can be frustrating. We never want to be left behind or bypassed. Ego!

I realized also that one way to think about HR is as Human Relations instead of Human Resources. I’ve always avoided that terminology, thinking it was really a mistake people were making, like the difference between ‘moot’ and ‘mute,’ which are often confused. Now I’m coming to believe that if we called what we do in organizations ‘human relations’ or ‘human relations management practices’ we’d actually get ourselves closer to being understood. I’m going to explore this in further posts.

In the mean time I’ve gone back to reading (and now writing) in these areas with renewed energy to pursue them from a Zen-paradox point of view that I’d lost touch with. This link will be one I’ll pursue and comment on, mentioned in  Workforce Management today, now that I’m back scanning again: it’s at Compensation Force.

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Unfortunately most managers worry about justifying layoffs or cuts they believe have to be made. So they emphasize the intensity of the crisis. How else, they reason, will employees recognize that managers don’t want and didn’t expect to take some of the tough actions, but they must? This risks convincing staff the company is a sinking ship they should consider abandoning if they have the chance and that management is weak for not panning better.

A far better course is to communicate it’s business as usual… prudently choosing contingency plans to fit a tough market and trimming carefully in keeping with what everyone knows are growing challenges as we are all too used to hearing. Efforts to minimize layoffs are noticed. The main message has to be confidence, that we have a plan.

You also have to anticipate that as information gets relayed through layers of supervisors their fears and interpretations lean toward the worst more often than in good times. Senior leaders can buffer this by anticipating it, emphasizing the need to give a balanced message and taking the time to answer middle management’s questions in greater detail than usual. These aren’t idle questions, but ones they will need to know how to answer the moment the step back into their departments.

Wrong answers have a greater impact in times of stress and fear than positive ones and are most easily acted on by your best people. They are the ones most likely to make firm decisions quickly… and you don’t want them deciding to take an offer from someone else. Other companies are looking to poach to replace three or four laggards with your superstar… so a lot depends on motivating those you want to keep. Yet many managers secretly believe everyone will be happy just to have a job. That belief will show in their neglect of communicating motivating information even to key people. 

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First, I often am introduced for my success in handling some major mergers, not easy when 80% are known to fail, mostly for "HR" reasons – poor culture fit, bad leadership, etc. What I point out is that most of the layoffs I had to manage – and there were many in the turbulent retail years I held a senior role there… most occurred in good times, not in recessions. Layoffs don’t only occur in tough times nor does hiring only occur in good periods. Both go on all the time. It’s simply a matter that there are a few more in one or the other.

I got the watershed job in my own career history the very day a major city newspaper emblazoned this headline on page 1: Worst Job Market in 20 Years (the height of the 1982 recession). And I’m not the greatest job hunter, being basically a shy, non-marketing type. "If I can do it, you can," is a pretty accurate message.

In most years average turnover is about 15% – one job in six has to be refilled. Most are filled from within… in good times… and then replaced by hiring junior staff. This background rate of turnover doesn’t vary too much in bad times. And when many companies lay off, they inevitably find just afterward that turnover continues. Other companies are grabbing their best people hoping to fill growing gaps with better players; your own company cut to the bone and didn’t anticipate continuing routine departures of people they depend on. They still have to hire.

While it’s true that relatively speaking it will probably take longer to get a job (managers who might average 3 to 5 months searching might need 6 to 9), they will inevitably find work. Those who keep looking will at least! Of course that’s hard on people. No one likes to envision such lengthy periods without pay, but allowing for just a bit of luck, severance packages, outplacement counseling and good planning really do help.

By the time layoff are decided, paperwork processed and job searches are fully underway (usually 2 to 3 months), don’t forget that we’re that much closer to the upturn. Those laid off early may have longer searches, but they’re more fully networked and closer to finding work earlier in the  upturn than those laid off later, who take a few months to get well started. So even though layoffs may continue for a while, it isn’t all doom and gloom for everyone. Those who keep their heads, stay focused and pursue all leads as consistently as they can usually end up with better jobs that the ones they left.

It’s not a time to panic and jump at the very first job offer… unless it’s a great one. Steady, logical work pays off all the way through the process from networking to negotiating the offer. It’s just a bit tougher to stay positive. As always balancing pressures and alternatives is the key to coming out on top.

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Two in particular come to mind this season. Vertex One, an unusual Canadian investment company, always sends an unusual book to its clients. This year: A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage. His “first glass” describes plausibly how beer likely was one of the great forces pushing humans to create cities, leaving behind 150,000 years of wandering in hunter-gatherer bands virtually overnight a mere 10,000 years ago. From there we’ve evolved the amazing science, technology and organizations that offer us totally different lives today. Yet beer continues to exert an influence. Such time scales change the way we look at our present, miraculous information evolution in less than a generation via the Internet. I would never have thought such a book would be worth reading, let alone the source of numerous amazing insights.

That led to recalling the phrase “remember how unlikely is your birth” – each one of us being entirely unique. Shaped by millions of interwoven circumstances, we’re both significant and amazingly insignificant in the grand flow of time and the universe. This is a line from a Monty Python song from one of my favorite movies, highly irreverent “The Meaning of Life,” mostly forgotten in the daily flow of minute by minute.

It’s one of those ‘you have to see it’ things. Fortunately you can, though whether it should be legally free is another puzzling question from our instant communication revolution. It’s here on YouTube via Stumbleupon, another Canadian success story.

The best part of holidays for me is the time to ponder the imponderable. I’m always glad to get back to practical challenges, but with a new perspective. Have a great new year!

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Then I came on this blog post by Paul Herbert: I Love Forced Rankings. Since Jack Welch has recanted on this theory that the bottom 10% should be identified each year… and then fired… forced rankings have lost favor in most operations. But as this article shows, there are always two or more schools of thought about any given HR practice. Human resources isn’t a cut and dried series of principles that you simply apply. It has to be tailored to your culture and situations.

The problem arises when you recognize that managers and cultures aren’t fixed in stone. Let’s say a company follows Herbert’s advice and institutes forced ranking to help encourage judgments between good and unproductive employees. That information can then be used to reward the good and coach or redevelop the unproductive and that may be the original intent, but as surely as grass is green, some manager will take this the opposite way and punish the unproductive while simply taking the top performers for granted.

Either way, we want managers to reward and react to performance. Many don’t. They simply sail on with the status quo and duck managing performance at all. The hardest hurdle seems to be to get them in general to apply judgment case by case rather than use rule of thumb systems like "let’s use forced ranking" as if this alone would solve the problem. It isn’t the process, it’s the assumptions about it, good or bad, which so many apply without the least bit of understanding about what the impact will be on actual people.

Is it any wonder that senior management has trouble buying into any given HR policy when there are such widely varying interpretations and uses of them? If only the core keys were understood, I believe, that problem could be resolved. The fact it hasn’t been in several millennia suggests it isn’t as easy as I think it should be, though.

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This is a chance for senior execs and HR people to hear first hand what it’s like on their front lines or ones that might be very much like theirs. It reaffirms a number of observations that probably ought to be obvious. First, many applicants honestly don’t know what sort of jobs they might fit into and which they won’t. Frankel was impressed that some screening processes correctly judged, but you’d have to say most didn’t.

The overall conclusion he almost gets to is that fit and perceptions are incredibly important. He really liked UPS, a job that sounds as if it would kill some people, while he hated (and implies most people might hate) some of the others. What struck me most is the last chapter in which he returns to his UPS experience and becomes positively rhapsodic about it, to the point where he almost toys with the idea of re-joining permanently. It’s particularly interesting to read how he fell in love with them – via experiences before, during and after his time there – and note what a special and unusual time it was (the Christmas rush, when package delivery takes on a special meaning it doesn’t have to the same extent the other 11 months of the year). For some employees it takes quite a complex of coincidences to hook them.

Considering these are all companies with applicants lined up at the door due to their reputations as employers, it’s daunting to see how difficult it is for even top organizations to impress and hold staff and what a combination of factors it would take to make each company irresistible.

In some ways even more impressive is his recognition that each of these companies has true believers among its staff, people who feel about their employer the way he feels about UPS. He notes how the attitudes of these individuals, particularly when they’re in leadershp roles, get close to rubbing off on him despite his own feelings and scepticism. The human factor is in many ways the most powerful influence, potentially outweighing specific policies and culture as I read it. I’m interested in whether others agree.

Coincidentally this week’s Herman Trend newsletter points to yet another study, this time by BlessingWhite, assessing engagement levels (and strongly correlated retention rates) across organizations in UK/Ireland, Asia Pacific and North America. In general considerably fewer than a quarter to a third of employees are actively engaged while nearly 20% may be actively disengaged. This is actually an improvement on results previously quoted in a number of studies, but not by much. There may be a small trend to improvement as the Hay Group’s Bill Cheshire has noted in Canada, but arguably still a long way to go to reach maximum potential, although we have only thin evidence that this might be in the range of 60% (a number estimated by Michael Koscec at Entec Corporation). While it’s overly optimistic to think we could ever expect all employees to be onside with any organization, it’s important to get a clear picture of where we are at in general. Frankel’s book is an interesting personal look at how such figures come about.

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The larger question is who reads blogs and do they help? Clearly most of the people writing business blogs intend them to help and most must believe at some level that they do. Vanity undoubtedly drives a lot of short term efforts to get seen on the Internet, but to stick with it year after year, disciplining yourself to write two or three or more times  a week on your subject takes something more than vanity, especially if few ever read or comment on the majority of what’s out there.

Why bother? Of course some derive solid marketing benefits. I doubt that I will. I’m not great at marketing in any forum and see that a more of a by-product of the real question. For me that is… can blogging about leadership really help?

In organizations over the year, my most startling observation is there are so many people talked into leadership roles, for the money, the power, the prestige, the challenges and on and on, who have no training, no real inclination to lead or much knowledge of what its about at least when they start. In some ways perhaps that makes sense because leadership is best learned by doing. But lots of people never learn, which produces pain and misery for vast masses of employees, co-workers and organizations themselves so to speak.

The hopeful fact is that the best approach to leadership is extremely basic, human and easy to follow. Conversation about it can help. For me, I haven’t fully been able to figure out the best way to say it or develop those conversations widely. This medium may work. Only time will tell. It’s a new way to feel that I’m making the effort. As time goes on the results will enhance reflection and perhaps jointly the blogging community will ultimately identify what creates value and how. Right now it’s a bit of the wild west.

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You can spot the good ones because they are alive, people with plans themselves for things that need to be or could be done that aren’t yet. They will talk about possibilities not only for you, but for themselves, their teams and the organization. You can feel them inviting you into the process. Others in the company will speak highly of them as coaches and cooperative supporters. Just ask around.

By contrast I very often get to hear (from people looking for new jobs) about current bosses who can’t imagine their report ever progressing. No one in their opinion is ever ready. They’ll consider hiring outside in almost every situation before looking at anyone internally… or they’ll constantly pick people they believe will simply follow orders. “Loyalty” plays big with the latter type. Cross them (ie: have a new idea they didn’t tell you to pursue) and you’re on the hit list forever. Bosses who aren’t interested in growing people abound. Which makes it easy to be a great boss.

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Often we discount others’ abilities to understand. Many times in frustration, we get at the real truths under the every day stuff we keep hearing over and over. I particularly like his comment about being tired of “leaders” who never interact with their protegés. Although I’m one of those who promote the (in my case) “five” irrefutable laws of leadership, I like to think all I’ve done is take the simplest advice available and used it to encourage exactly that – interaction with the people you’re trying to grow and lead.

Thanks David.

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I’ve always loved technology, so it’s easy for me to say. But none of it is completely transparent and easy. The new blog hasn’t been as easy to finish setting up as I’d hoped, but it’s been a chance to try engaging help via elance (a popular site for hiring virtual help, mostly in this case for techie challenges like web design. It’s only one of many, though that provide a mind-boggling array of services.

The technology is amazing, but the first time you try anything there’s a learning curve. Fortunately you can usually get advice from Google at any point along the way.

The real quesiton is going to be how many of these new initiatives you can juggle along with everything else. What’s the ROI for individuals trying this stuff? Are we going to drive ourselves crazy or can we anticipate there will be a limited number of sites and programs to learn and then we’ll feel “fully equipped?” Somehow that seems a bit unlikely just at this point. What’s your take?

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People need to vent. It helps to have someone just listen. Often this can’t be a spouse because it causes them too much worry and they usually just want to convince you things aren’t so bad. Co-workers may cause problems, too, by gossiping about your venting. With splintered families and social relationships there are fewer listeners. A non-work friend or coach is definitely a better choice, but they in turn need to learn coping skills to handle the deluge that usually arrives.

Venting is healthy – to a point. When it goes over the same ground too many times and becomes circular, it’s just more worry. You need to break off the conversation and come back later. Once the person is stuck in the rut, they can’t and won’t let go. They just want your commiseration at that stage.

When you pick things up later, a technique called reframing helps. First, see the challenge differently – it’s a learning opportunity. You’re going to encounter many others like the person now causing grief. If you can learn to handle this one, you’ll be far less likely to reach this awful level of despair next time… so can we move from that to get focused on strategies for coping and improving the situation?

Examples might help.

Recently a friend told me how he’d actually jeopardized his career because he was so frustrated with his boss. He’s in charge of quality improvement and needed the boss’ support to insist other managers follow the process he’d designed. The boss kept advising to cool things off, but my friend is evaluated on results and there weren’t going to be any unless people cooperate. In a risky outburst he basically told the boss she wasn’t doing her job and should get off the pot and do it. This resulted in a counter-speech about "catching more flies with honey than vinegar."

Ouch! Listen when you get that comment. The boss is telling you to cool it and they mean it. Further outbursts are definitely likely to be career limiting. A far better solution is to draw the boss in by asking for coaching. Ask how you should approach people, how important it is to get results, what should you do if there aren’t any by year end? This way the boss can solve problems with and for you and can see what you see… that results, which she, too, is ultimately responsible for won’t be easy to get without a better strategy.

Another recent case: a co-worker of a friend was asked to present to a team meeting on my friend’s project (and take credit for work my friend has laboriously achieved in improving relations and results with a difficult client). This capped some obvious prior efforts by the co-worker to get my friend to give her all the information about the project. Was the boss suddenly favoring the co-worker and ignoring my friend and her effort? Well, it didn’t sound like it to me. My friend had opened our conversation by telling me she’d just been given a terrific performance appraisal rating her in the top 10% of all employees… by the same boss.

Once the venting was over (or at least waning), I suggested the boss might see my friend as so superior she was becoming a "fixer" – opening new client relationships, getting them up to speed and then being able to turn them over to a weaker co-worker and take on yet another challenging situation. If that’s true, that’s not only a great compliment, but a major step toward ensuring promotion to more money and responsibility.

Before venting to the boss or complaining, it’s important to seek feedback that could help determine if the better interpretation is or could be in play. Perhaps the boss hasn’t been fully aware that’s what they were doing and how my friend might react. If asked, "is this what you want me to do, train my co-worker," he might leap at saying yes… or at least begin thinking, "that’s not a bad idea," to my friend’s great benefit. Venting could hurt.

Often these useful twists only come to mind after the initial conversation. Both parties have to get out of the rut they set for themselves when they approach the situation with highly emotion. Emotions don’t let go within that first conversation. You need time out. The next day or so is usually soon enough to step back and ask more strategic questions, look at other possible interpretations and where they could take you. You can even go get several opinions (again, ideally from non-work, non-spouse parties). If you ask, "why else might someone have done [whatever it was]," you may be surprised.

Next – what if there isn’t a really good alternative interpretation? Settle on the most positive one you can even it seems far-fetched… and then check it out… doing so may actually help it come about. No single guess may be the best view. It often takes trial and error to work toward something positive, but just the step of coming up with one new idea to try takes a lot of the sting out of the situation and gets you back to driving toward a solution instead of just sympathy.

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