One area that’s particularly challenging to train or develop, but extremely important in 21^st Century leadership is how to help people improve at managing emotional content.

EI or EQ (emotional intelligence or quotient) has proven to be a key missing ingredient for a lot of otherwise promising managers and has never been more necessary than in dealing with today’s more capable workforce and knowledgeable customers. Only by engaging them fully and not turning them off can we unleash the creativity and innovation needed to keep up and keep ahead.

Now, from New Brunswick, a small start-up called Lymbix, has turned a budding idea into a practical application that just might help. but only if enough senior managers take it seriously and ‘walk the talk.’

It’s an add-in for Outlook email called ToneCheck (first version actually free for now at www.tonecheck.com). Like Spell Check, but for emotional content, it can review your email just before sending to see if it is likely to be misunderstood or cause offense. Simple to use, it highlights any section that sounds angry or fits  other emotional descriptors so you can edit if you want to be sure you’re getting across not just your idea, but the tone you’re trying for.

According to Lymbix Founder and CEO, Matt Eldridge, “We want to help organizations precisely determine tone in any text-based communication. Email  and text messaging services simply don’t allow us to gauge body language and verbal queues, leaving us with just text. With the growth of business email, it is becoming more critical to get the tone of your message right because you often don’t get a second chance with a customer of an employee.” (And can’t we all just think of times when we wish we’d taken a second look before hitting ‘Send?’)

This was developed partly in response to academic research studies that show 50% of emails are misunderstood by providing a practical way to review your hasty typing to make sure it will get your message across effectively. Though it takes just seconds to use, the key will be establishing that it’s needed. Unfortunately many of those who need it most will undoubtedly be last to click the check button.

The good news is senior executives (and HR) have an opportunity to make it clear they’re using it themselves and expect others to as well. People do what the boss does and what the culture expects especially if it takes only moments. The better news is if we can get even a few of our less effective managers to improve at this (and this tool is a learning guide that is private, easy to use and causes them to think in emotional terms they may never have bothered much about before) we all benefit.

We already see developments in robotic devices that assess emotions in people, that read faces, tones and body language and report or respond appropriately to others’ emotional states. Look for this area to evolve considerably in the next decade or two.

Not only for email, but there’s a huge potential spin-off benefit here. As people work privately to correct their shortfalls via email edits, they inevitably will learn to think before speaking as well before as snapping off emails. Imagine if a lot of ‘foot in mouth’ went away as a result of a handy tool people can practice with on their own as opposed to anyone preaching to them about the need to ‘be more sensitive.’ No one is comfortable on either side of an EQ conversation. Here’s a way to automate learning that’s increasingly important for our organizations to master for future success.

The key question is whether you and your teams will be ahead of this curve or less effective than those who are. This budding Canadian success story so far has one workable tool and more planned. Who better to help the world learn to be more tuned to human effectiveness than Canada – but just handing it to staff won’t ensure it’s used. It will requires clear knowledge that it is being used and is expected right to the highest levels. Isn’t that worth the saving in upset customers and disengaged staff? Just imagine 50% of emails today are causing problems. and what do we spend more time doing?

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The most diverse teams come up with the widest range of ideas and offer the wide range of skills needed to implement them. But they are a challenge to manage, so better leadership is required.

What’s clear as well is that a single leader at the top of an organization or function makes an enormous difference. Only when the CEO (or function leader) puts an issue on his or her agenda, talks about it personally and follows its progress, does anything happen. This should be obvious, but like so many “obvious” facts, it is overlooked in a vast number of organizations.

The problem is you can’t talk about and monitor everything at once. You can’t make everything a priority. That confuses people, wears them out and makes them change priorities frequently as each item comes to the fore, so ultimately nothing is actually a priority except keeping your head above water – another “obvious” fact that is constantly ignored.

So what should a leader do? Again it sounds easy, but isn’t – pick the top three or four things and use them to drive results. Diversity today has to be among them because of the need for innovation, let alone that our employees, customers and other stakeholders are now more diverse and will work for, shop with and invest in only those they believe are on the right path (the latter being the good and sufficient reasons normally cited by diversity experts). Of all of these, it is the over-riding need for innovation that will ultimately drive the point home, but that hasn’t struck many organizations yet.

I’ll offer two examples that popped up on my screen recently. First is Antonio Perez talking specifically about how he learned the value of diversity and used it to resurrect Eastman Kodak, a company most of us thought was doomed for lack of it’s recognition that film was a fading commodity: http://bit.ly/9VbSkB and second, Clay Shirky, the media guru, talking about why newspapers have been even slower to recognize and find solutions for their dilemmas with the Internet eating their lunch (or more specifically their subscribers): http://bit.ly/18tDhy.

The more hidden point all this makes is that executives, human as they are themselves, tend to overlook basic human reasons why things are important. We see that diversity is valuable and can contribute, but we set up a ‘program’ for it and expect that will suffice. It won’t because our employees need reminders that matter from a boss that really cares about the issue and about them. We hesitate to make a ‘touchy feely’ item like diversity one of the top three objectives because we can’t quite overcome the feeling that today’s sales or marketing initiatives are more important. The fact is those will get done. done better than any one of us could do alone. if, but only if, we have a diverse and capable team around us. Get the right people in place and keep them motivated, that comes first. Is it something you can see in operation in your organization?

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Here’s an example. A problem in HR is so many of our efforts only pay off in a big way if they’re consistently applied over time. Yet we work in organizations where leaders dream of quick solutions and want to hop from program to program in hopes some new phenomenon will instantly solve immediate problems. Can you deliver both?

I ran into an interesting piece in the online Gallup Journal (http://bit.ly/9WZXTE) about creating personal well-being (a sometime topic I follow). It makes the point strongly that many personal solutions we pursue – for example, losing weight by eating right – actually align for value in the short term, too – eating sensibly keeps you awake and energized through afternoons where you’d be tired and sleepy if you eat the wrong lunch .and long term you lose weight. We know these things more or less, but we seldom push them to logical conclusion. For some reason even though we know both long and short term effects are positive and therefore aligned, we still gravitate to old, comforting habits rather than fully developing new, better ones even though we also know the new ones would become comfortable and comforting in time if we simply persist. Managers have the same problem building better management habits.

Take something like getting managers to recognize employees good work every day. Establishing a positive recognition culture has tremendous impact on results long term, but it also gets great reactions and increases motivation right away employee by employee. We tend to take both these for granted. Many managers hear the message, but still fall back immediately into their comfortable habits of command and control with no recognition. Why praise someone who’s merely done what you asked (likely not even as well as you could have)? If instead you’re asking them to think up better solutions, some of their work will genuinely surprise and please you and it becomes easy to say ‘great idea.’

Buried in these seemingly minor, hard to grasp human foibles are keys to vastly better outcomes for everyone. There doesn’t seem to be a magic pill to overcome habit inertia. At present the only help we seem able to offer is explanations. They seem to make more sense when I see how they work so similarly in personal and work situations. Will such information help line managers change their style? Will it help me eat protein as a late night snack instead of chips? Can that sort of insight help my clients to see the value of asking for ideas and praising them instead of their usual ’safe’ style of telling staff what to do day by day?

Is there a way to make such small insights help more with implementing long term HR strategies better? How can we make that leap?

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Legitimate protestors are stuck in a puzzling situation. They can continue to hold marches during G20 meetings and head toward the barriers, thus providing mass cover in which a handful of criminal agitators can hide and do maximum damage. They thereby guarantee no one hears their messages. Or a better solution might well be to hold as big a rally as possible a week or so prior to a G20 or G8 in a safe location, where organizers could video-record sensible statements of protest and logical arguments and alternatives to give to leaders ahead of the meetings when they might make a point. Vandals rarely show up where there’s nothing to vandalize.

There would be less mass media coverage, but the messages wouldn’t be lost in violence and attempted baiting of police. Larger numbers would turn out since additional protesters wouldn’t fear arrest or violence. It would demonstrate how many people are concerned about alternate solutions and would likely get more reasoned attention from leaders instead of being delivered at a time when their attention is fully occupied with deals the protestors don’t want made. Would it work? At least as well as current mangled efforts. Can anyone say clearly from what we saw on TV what the messages are? Anything has to be more understandable than that.

At least in HR we have research that proves counter-intuitive approaches are typically superior.

In day-to-day HR, for example, many line managers hate whatever pay system is in place because they don’t understand the core purpose is fair pay equity among employees and huge increases are counter-productive to their objectives. What they see is they want to pay their best people more and evil HR stands in the way. If every manager does this it will create a race to the top, extremely high pay for everyone, disengaging both top and mediocre employees. (Wait, isn’t that what’s happening with CEO pay, especially in the US where publishing pay scales has the opposite of its intended effect.) Second, based on subjective evaluations of who is ‘best,’ other employees will (and do) become severely upset unless their pay is also raised nearly as much. oops, more of the same problem.

And, third, of course, they pay no attention whatsoever to the tons of research showing that money isn’t the prime motivator – recognition is. Yet many managers continue year after year to say hardly a thank you, let alone a positively reinforcing ‘good work’ despite the fact this free option has been shown to have a far greater effect on results than dangerously raising pay, expectations, claims of favoritism and all the problems unmanaged pay systems create. As to pay, if employees at Toyota happily produce over a million profit-improving suggestions per year for about $50 t0 $100 each, why do we think big bucks are needed to motivate our people?

But counter-intuitive works in more situations than even I thought. At the G20 demonstrations in Toronto I got a front row seat (and picture above) with riot-garbed police at the foot of my downtown driveway. They pushed about 50 demonstrators down our street, past our front door to the main intersection where they promptly sat down and continued taunting police. The officers stood and waited about 20 minutes. and then. just walked away (taking time to drink bottled water from their back up vans and shed their helmets to wipe their brows in front of thirsty protesters). Then they marched back to the government buildings at the other end of the street that they’d been driving the protesters away from. The result – about 5 of the 50 protesters followed them and the rest went home. Bored, tired, dry and uninjured, they’d failed to provoke an incident and gave up.

I have to say I was stunned. I’m not sure what I expected, but in retrospect it all makes the perfect kind of counter-intuitive sense I routinely promote. Show the strength, don’t use it and it’s more effective than bashing people. Kudos to the Toronto Police Service who mostly trained and then coordinated the 15,000 officers it took to maintain this kind of order and kudos to the individual officers who were willing to follow the plan. Now if protesters and G20 planners would learn equally futuristic management, we could avoid spending much of the $1.4 billion this security exercise reportedly cost.

How stupid did planners have to be to put a G20 meeting in a downtown filled with banks and ‘capitalist’ shops with plate glass windows begging to be broken and many congested streets, vehicles and transit that are difficult to protect. Duh?! We know violence has marked every G8/G20 in memory.

With the danger zone placed squarely in downtown police have three choices – massive presence and arrests to move people away, however briefly; no presence, which would simply be an OK to throw everything including Molotov cocktails at whatever anarchists want; or a moderate presence, which would result in officers and bystanders injured in repeated scuffles and set up for a pitched battle at the perimeter fences with even more injuries and possibly even loss of life as we’ve seen in the past. What choice is there, but the former, which takes massive coordination, but provides maximum physical protection for leaders and demonstrators alike. No one wants a police state, least of all in your home town, but for 2 days G20 planners didn’t leave any of us much choice. It’s not a bad reminder of what our country could be like if we don’t manage sensibly. If you have to do something, do it wholeheartedly. and get it over with and go home. It was messy, but the least violence G-meeting in history I expect.

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That’s a testament to a number of key observations. First, you can set out to and succeed at creating a great place to work. Second, it’s hard to retrofit once cynicism has started if you haven’t created one from scratch (but I’ve seen it done). Third, line officers have to get involved to drive the process and walk the talk. You can’t just task HR with it and walk away.

He goes on to draw out the idea that engagement can actually go up in difficult economic times, but only with specific attention to making employees feel safe, valued and not hopelessly over-worked. Companies that have managed this are clearly positioned to get the best from everyone and are far more likely to outdo those who don’t believe it’s possible.

He also pokes fun at another common myth – that managers shouldn’t have to ‘engage’ employees, that staff should just take care of that themselves, presumably along with being grateful to have a job. He quotes an astonished CFO who notes, “. an epiphany; I realized for the first time that managing
people is a big part of my job.” When did we allow ourselves to promote people to manage others who didn’t realize this? Forever, unfortunately. We don’t expect financial results to manage themselves, or new technology or marketing.

Pretty well everyone knows perfectly well we normally don’t give people the title “manager” unless they are being promoted to a position with people reporting to them, but somehow about 80% fail to notice that actually managing them is a key part of the job and most companies fail to ensure any specific training is provided in this. Most act as if it comes automatically. Duh! We know many people learn finance and marketing in school. We also know nearly no one learns leadership there. so how do we suddenly presume them to be effective at it? This would be amazingly funny if it wasn’t so sad. and so universal.

Does anyone see this changing?

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It’s a UK organization called Four Groups and the article that particularly caught my eye is this one. Issues like portability of talent, the futility of individual bonuses and other myths surrounding top talent are not only topical in the HR field, but apply to any organization that wants to maximize performance. This piece also contains a link to an interview with Dr. Karen Stephenson, the only speaker at the San Diego conference to get a standing ovation from the human resource professionals present.

Dr. Stephenson spoke from years of research about the current trend toward emphasizing trust within organizations. These are all timely, of course, in light of how much trust and confidence have been lost by the public in business generally, and these are highly related to my theme of ‘fix the jerks’ that emphasizes how poor leadership destroys value in organizations of all shapes and sizes.

What also comes out of this is how wide spread the move to more detailed understanding of HR is and how much there is to study.

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The principles apply directly to HR strategy. Oddly, just recently, one of the many HR/Learning & Development blogs out there published “Four tips for Effective Leadership,” namely: Be counterintuitive, live comfortably in gray areas, learn by doing and exercise soft skills – exactly what Duggan points to with his great strategists. Strategy isn’t arrived at by ‘planning’ in the sense of laying out exact steps and stages with time lines and benchmarks. Napoleon and the others ‘put their teams in motion,’ ‘looked for small battles they could win decisively,’ ’stuck to the course with firm resolution,’ and learned to evolve strategies as they went rather than work them out in detail beforehand.

Reading these, I realized that, yes, most successes I ran into along the way evolved ‘in the midst of action’ (a phrase I also recognized from a Zen master talking about finding your way calmly ‘in the midst of action’). Does this apply to HR? My former company got into elearning early and heavily, with great results, because we were asked to look at ‘expert systems’ that the CEO saw at a conference (a different computer technology) and we jumped to use the budget and just get going, without being in the least sure where we were headed, but seeing some possibilities in using technical systems to leverage more people learning more things.

If we’d waited for our IT process that called for developing a technical plan in detail, with projected costs three to five years out, we’d never have gotten off the ground. Yet planning is valuable. In the words of Eisenhower, the top allied General of WWII, “Plans are nothing, planning is everything.” The difference, in other words, is active versus passive. Get going, planning as you go, through the unexpected twists and uncertainties – don’t wait for “a plan” designed to resolve something you think may happen – it won’t.

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But it’s been pointed out to me in a recent consulting assignment that some people of my, ahem, advanced age are just lucky to have been ‘lucky’ to have been through tough times before. We can take it as business as usual to a degree while younger managers are genuinely shocked and more financially hurt (so this young exec insisted), especially if they`re young enough to have avoided tight times either having come of age since 1991 or having missed being hit in that somewhat milder climate.

Apparently even a lot of my age group missed those earlier setbacks because audiences of all ages continue to be flummoxed by today`s crunch and that continues despite possibly premature rumors of an upturn. My friends at Verity International once again assembled an interesting panel of experts (recording is here) to comment – Citibank being one that certainly got caught more than some, and Ford being one that was far more prepared than many. Yet no one is untouched. Add to the panel a devil`s advocate talk show host who claims we should all get off our duffs and make hay while the rest are lagging and a European consulting executive who`s seen a wider perspective and you have a competent mix… one might believe. Or do you have just a bunch of individual views from where each of them sits. Is there a common thread?

The fact is that downturns always benefit someone. Sometimes it’s the lucky – people who happen to have just sold major assets before the crash and have cash to buy up lagging operations that will help them boost their business when thing improve. Sometimes it’s the sensible – people who have watched their budgets all along and don’t have to lay off masses of people. There’s no doubt that 15 years of rising markets encourages people to take risks they shouldn’t. It’s understandable that in good times many fear being left behind if they don’t take those risks… but we all need to keep an eye out for bad weather and what we can offload when ship starts to sink.

Of course the talk show host was in his glory since bad news makes for good media interest and lambasting ‘laziness’ is easy when everyone’s already down in the dumps. Are North Americans lazy compared to others? Not if you note the ever-increasing stress levels and work hours we put in. But perhaps we’re not putting them in the right places as the world changes and we no longer rule on technology and scientific advances as we once did.

Are we letting our kids get lazy? Maybe, but again, as soon as they hit their 20s they mostly develop lots of reasons to work hard. Certainly we’ve encouraged a sense of entitlement. The same young exec who berated me for being a fat-cat boomer with money socked away to burn noted that young guys like him (about 25) have reason to be afraid they might lose the house, the two fancy cars, the cottage, the boat, the clubs and all that other ‘must-have’ stuff they have a right to go after (on credit). Apparently the banks, in selling everyone on credit only too successfully, drank that kool-aid themselves and have taken their customers down with them.

Unfortunately I know all too many boomers who are caught in the same mess and are finding it difficult to dig out. But having said that I also have acquaintances who have faced and overcome bankruptcies or near-bankruptcies in the past and know that belt-tightening, while not fun, does work. My heart goes out to those stuck right now, but it’s hard to know who’s on a right or wrong track. Major layoffs demoralize staff and hurt future retention and results, but failing to lay off can drag down results, share prices, and pension investments. Finding a balance and working hard is the inevitable result either way. Perhaps that’s something we need bad times to teach periodically as so many don’t seem to learn any other way. It’s the psychology of infallibility for sure that creates such cataclysmic cycles. Can we learn to smooth out our human nature and stay balanced better in future over the long haul? It was an interesting question that none of the panelists quite addressed directly.

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The language and style are very engaging, although I’m a reader at heart, so they may not suit everyone. For a leader who exudes all five of the core leadership principles I promote, there is none better. I’m glad I’ve lived to see a truly logical, sane individual in what many consider the most powerful office in the world. I have to express surprise that a political system as much criticized as the US has been able at last to put someone of his mental caliber in the role. As Churchill observed, ‘democracy is the worst political system except for all the others.’ Sometimes it really seems to work visibly.

It’s just a shame that so many of the most vocal individuals we elect are not up to this level. Of course, the even greater shame is that the efforts and abilities of just one person are likely to be mostly thwarted by the rest, though I believe the effort still pays off in the long term by establishing ideas that won’t ever go away and someday will see action. I’m a great believer that we don’t give politicians enough credit for the good struggles they attempt and the tremendous efforts and goodwill most of them bring. Unfortunately getting consensus on consistent directions is notoriously difficult at best among so many varied interests and opinions. and often it seems like two steps back to one forward. Nevertheless our humanly flawed leaders have produced some great societies for us to live in.

Regardless of whether specific policies never get passed in the welter of competing interests, I think Obama has already given the world a gift – a logical,  well-argued set of objectives that will undoubtedly be quoted far and wide for years, perhaps centuries, to come. And his very human struggle to come to terms with his own life and place in the world are.

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Author, David Brooks, cites interesting research showing that CEOs of today’s successful companies lack people skills, extraversion, openness and social agreeableness in study after study. that what distinguishes most is emotional stability and conscientiousness (these are ‘the Big Five’ that psychologists generally agree define personalities). He suggests charisma isn’t valuable, as Jim Collins showed in Good to Great, but in doing so he mixes apples and oranges.

First, it confirms my assertion that many of today’s large organization CEOs lack the skills they will need to lead with utmost effectiveness especially in the coming years of a new type of worker. That’s what Collins is getting at, too. He found only a handful of big company CEOs had taken their companies from Good to Great and kept them there. However, Collins’ findings reinforce that you need openness and sociability (though perhaps not extraversion) to reach the most successful CEO level – to lead effective teams. Quiet team-builders emerged as his preferred model and I agree.

What the other research confirms is what Collins also found – that most sizable company CEOs today are OK, but not superstars. It’s not their lack of charisma (Collins’ winners didn’t have it either), but more importantly lack of ability to build teams. Most are detail-oriented drivers who keep everyone’s nose to the grindstone where more open, creative solutions would be better. The grindstone approach keeps things going and creates incremental improvement, but doesn’t help things take off. Brooks notes that, but equates Collins’ top leaders with the grinders, which isn’t accurate.

All in all, as we struggle to get clarity about how top leaders should actually look, we find few companies yet understand it well enough to make the best choices. And that may be due to the fact that we have years of grinders lingering at the top choosing people like themselves. These are ’safe’ candidates, without a lot of personality actually, unlike the major characters that bring together all the right skills like Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, Walton of Wal-mart, Welch of GE and other highly individual, but interesting styles.

Just because the bulk of OK companies today are run by ‘grinders’ (if I can call them that somewhat unfairly because most bring something more than that, just not enough more), that doesn’t mean this is what companies SHOULD look for. There is a better model. Collins got it right. We need to figure out how to develop it and then we need to start hiring for those qualities.

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Reading their link to the “First Pages” of the older book is really worthwhile to make instantly clear the history of effective HR and OD and how early lessons apply directly today, ultimately explaining how smart financial leaders led us into the current mess.

Conclusion? McLaughlin quotes Weisbord. .from 1987! “The world is changing too fast for experts, and old-fashioned “problem-solving” no longer works. For the past forty years productive workplaces on several continents have been evolving another way entirely of thinking and acting. First, they have been moving away from problem-solving toward whole-systems improvement as the secret for solving great handfuls of problems at once. Second, they have been moving away from getting experts to fix systems toward having experts join everybody else in learning how to make improvements.”

Doesn’t that sound like social networking and The Wisdom of Crowds over command-and-control leadership? You bet! So why haven’t we arrived yet at the point where everyone understands this? I suppose double-entry bookkeeping wasn’t thoroughly accepted by 100% of business for its first hundred years either, though now you wouldn’t start into serious business management without such basic accounting.

McLaughlin goes on to link another excellent article by NYT’s Nicholas Kristof, illustrating how well-functioning groups should be able to out-do experts and ties it directly to today’s disasters. When will we finally learn these lessons and concentrate on leading in new ways?

PS: I love one of Kristof’s references to Berkeley’s Philip Tetlock (author of the 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment – which could have been subtitled ‘yeah, right’). Tetlock, he notes, uses the description “hedgehog” in a negative way. For me that illustrates balancing Jim Collins’ use of it in Good to Great to describe the positive need for focus, which in turn illustrates again the need for balance rather than too much of any one element of effective leadership. And in many cases balance only is achievable by including more people in the process of leadership.

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Kenneth is an HR systems guy who says he totally agrees with Beatty that “HR fails to understand the real link between productivity and people.” Here’s someone who, like Beatty, presumably works with HR people in large organizations blandly continuing the stereotype and broad-brushing ‘all’ HR.

My point? If HR doesn’t start to stand up and correct these mistaken, but all-day-every-day, comments we will truly be the failures so many already take for granted. It’s because of such standard assumptions that HR has such an uphill battle for budget, resources, great people and ‘a seat at the table.’ It’s fine that some individuals have spectacularly overcome these, but we’re doing a disservice to other professionals in our field if we don’t speak up whenever and wherever this myth is propagated.

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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’ll ignore the obvious confusion of the terms ‘employee satisfaction,’ which we pretty much all know by now doesn’t relate directly to performance and ‘engagement,’ which does. I’ll even ignore the fact that he contradicts himself in several statements, some on this very issue.

However, if this was actually said as quoted, Beatty is making a ridiculous generalization: "HR wants to treat most employees the same way, and they spend considerable time trying to defend or fix poor performers, taking on the St. Bernard role," he said. "Low turnover isn’t necessarily a good thing. Think about where you might want to disinvest." Well, Dr. Beatty, there isn’t any “HR” in this sense. There are a whole lot of individuals with varying ranges of skills and opinions. And in case you haven’t looked, there are tons of HR practitioners out there who do not fit this stereotype.

I’m first to agree that HR departments need to invest more and bring in more people to work as HR staff who can develop better analytics and metrics. I certainly support rotating a percentage of other executives through the HR function both to learn and bring in new ideas and approaches – not a bad idea for most functions. To suggest that HR isn’t making an effort at the transition to a modern understanding of what’s required of it is just patently missing what’s happening in the field. Maybe it isn’t happening fast enough, but not for lack of discussion or attention from HR. Insults aren’t likely to help as any good coach knows and practices. Apparently your program doesn’t follow the path of ‘find what’s right and encourage more of it.’ I realize that doesn’t make for as good press coverage, but really..

Maybe this is a speech you hope will be a further wake-up call to HR. or maybe, as another of my colleagues suggested, it’s an “Ann Coulter-type attempt” to garner attention by being insultingly outrageous. Whichever, one has to ask, isn’t it remarkable that someone who’s been training HR leaders for years finds they are so entirely hopeless? Whose fault would that be really – your students. or their professor?

Anyway, I’m pleased you answered my email suggesting we could debate with a response of basically ‘bring it on.’ But I also note you haven’t responded to my request for more details, including what you actually said. If I’ve misconstrued, please feel free to enlighten me. While waiting I’ve read several more polite responses suggesting you must have a point somewhere, that where there’s smoke there’s fire. I’m not so accepting. If professionals in the field, in particular, continue to bad-mouth it in such a blanket, unthinking way, how can we ever expect to raise HR to the status it deserves? I’m not sure an unbalanced attack deserves any less in return.

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Wow, what a series of mistaken assumptions. First, even companies that have cut back in major ways are simultaneously talking about talent shortages. With the need to keep pace through constant innovation so high and growing, they are feeling the need to reduce ’staff’ (meaning, as they see it, widgets who fill assembly-line-like roles) and at the same time seek out and hire more creative, leadership-oriented self-starters who can move things forward. They face the prospect of having to do with fewer ‘headcount’ for two reasons – both tighter economics and shortage of such ‘talent.’ In that case, the ‘talent’ they do entice to join or stay had better be truly valuable and outstanding.

Kellerman’s assumption that there will be less spent on trying to find, recruit and motivate those we formerly thought of as ’staff’ in favor of greater emphasis on rewarding senior executives is ridiculous to put it bluntly. What got us here? And what are we angry about? High senior executive comp programs paying out for poor judgment, lack of insight and lack of listening to up and coming ‘talent’ in their organizations. To put power into the hands of a few executives totally focused on financial performance would reproduce exactly what went wrong – a focus on short term economics to the exclusion of building companies with excellent people throughout who all contribute and give the organization hope of surviving the inevitable departures of a few senior people.

Is it            or       …or both?

EVA or Economic Value Added schemes have tended to justify growing senior executive bonuses out of proportion to overall viability of their organizations – the very things that got us here. They’re not evil by themselves, but in the hands of senior executives who design their payouts for their own benefit, they are fatal. And Emotional Quotient (EQ), better thought of as ‘people skills’ are what has been lacking.

The current economic crisis may make us think about dollar signs everywhere for the moment, but it shouldn’t blind us to the fact that ignoring people and what they think – customers, the public and, yes, staff, too – has been the hallmark of those companies who fail far more than their ignorance of numerical calculations. If they’ve failed the grade on the numbers it’s not because they were spending all their time on people issues. It’s because they forgot that numbers have to make sense to and benefit human beings not just executives. So forget building your hopes around pure ‘bean-counters’ holed up in ivory towers gilded with senior executive privilege. This is exactly the time when we need leaders with a wide, balanced understanding of ALL the issues they face.

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