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.

Thanks to the library’s automated waiting list I got an early copy of the new book “Punching In” by writer, Alex Frankel. I can’t recall where I heard about it, but it’s quite an interesting description of his experience testing and observing applying and working as a front line employee at half a dozen top-rated US employers - UPS, Gap, Starbucks, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, the Container store, Apple and applying at others where he wasn’t selected.

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.

Today’s Training Zone (UK) item about pros and cons of blogging (free registration) drew the main opinions - it can be good for marketing, certainly for self-reflection by the writer, but nay-sayers cite their lack of time (and a wide-spread belief that it’s a vanity thing).

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.

Sometimes you just read something and say, “Right on, brother.” David Malouf’s post today is one of those! And they say accountants don’t understand people.

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.

Workforce Management collects the most intriguing human resource challenges imaginable. A California software company announces it will hire only Vegetarians (the owner is one, so we must assume he imagines there is some moral issue involved unless he means higher cholesterol will cause greater health cost as we’re seeing with tobacco). On one hand one can applaud someone with the gumption to put their money at risk to promote what they believe in. He will certainly forego many great employees and others will lie, which will inevitably damage cohesiveness and teamwork. On the other hand do we find it OK to impose one’s will because one can?

Of course this goes on nearly everywhere in one form or another. It’s just that hiring managers mostly don’t mention their pet beliefs in their job ads. When I talk to groups of executives in job search I use my own case of being screened out of some jobs because I never played football or hockey well. I was terrible at basketball. I can’t run due to asthma. Scrawny as a kid, I went on to squash and swimming and grew to appreciate the team sports I missed sometimes taught great leadership lessons… though they also sometimes taught a sort of elitism that excludes a wide range of people as in the vegetarian example. No specific experience or lack by itself dictates later job results. It’s what people do job-wise that counts.

Today, for the moment, employers generally can’t be quite so prejudicial though many still subconsciously apply their beliefs for far less moral reasons. They really should look instead at the work an applicant can deliver and their motivation to do the work. Unless it’s for a job playing football or working for a company that makes it’s living selling vegetarian, then why are these relevant? In the grand scheme it doesn’t matter. Unless the number of vegan owners far exceeds their percentage in the workforce there will always be jobs for meat eaters.

Still, raising this low impact question highlights a raft of related issues managers should ponder when making decisions.

Googling "people skills" dredges up some mighty strange stuff. Their sixth highest listing is a blog or column in a publication called AskMen.com, Canadian Edition. I haven’t looked at the American version because this one is so… well… astounding. However, I’m easily won over. If it’s true that 5 million read this stuff, it has to have some value and impact.

If this is what it takes to get men, presumably mostly young men trying to find their way up in organizations, to read some of the 40,000 articles claimed on the site, it can’t be all bad. But you have to read to believe. The article in question on "people skills" is a said to be a re-post. Apparently this is a popular topic. It supposedly responds to a guy who asks how he can stop swearing so much at work. Would anyone really ask that? No matter, it supports developing effective social skills - much to be applauded.

The author suggests in the first couple of paragraphs under the tip "Speak Clearly" that men should wake up and become "eloquent" as a way of getting ahead. Sounds like a fairly big jump. To quote: "He can beautify, amplify and impress his colleagues with his million dollar words and witty comments." Say what, "beautify… his colleagues?" Even allowing for cultural differences in approach and language, that’s an unusual suggestion.

I was also mightily intrigued by the words linked to other articles. "Listen" shows up as a blue link to an article about the need to listen to your significant other - excellent advice, but some of the examples might be called questionable. The same with the article linked for "Emotions." Again, a laudable topic with undoubtedly good intent, but definitely backed up by what you’d say at the very least are ‘unusual’ examples. I’ll leave it to readers to check these out since reporting the contents would not really fit here.

The bottom line? Everyone is and should be concerned about their people skills at some point. If it takes rather odd examples to get through to a certain segment of potential leaders, so be it. It won’t be my market, but I’m glad someone’s making the effort. I just hope they graduate to something a little more focused at some stage.

Do you get much out of webinars?  I hear people say if they got one thing it was worthwhile.  Is it any wonder Gen Xers prefer faster media like texting and short You Tube videos?  Often the best ideas come from very short comments. But you may not even notice them without context.

A webinar today on the subject of effective coaching from Bluepoint by the authors of their new book, Unleashed, suggested we can often benefit from the following question in lots of situations and expect many people to jump to answer this: "who knows a dangerous conversation we need to have?"

In context this is a brilliant observation.  If you’re coaching someone it could be the dangerous conversation they need to have is with themselves or with some significant other - as spouse, a boss, a coworker or any of a dozen other possibilities.

Perhaps even more importantly, this would almost always seem helpful in team meetings.  Maybe change the wording slightly to "dangerous questions we need to ask?"  How many times have you been at a meeting, knowing people are sitting with concerns, but feeling unable to ask for speak up?

Another option: "Who knows a challenging question we should ask?"  The possibilities and the opportunities are endless.  Are there situations where you can apply this today?  Is there a dangerous question you can ask yourself?

Yes. Learning to tolerate uncertainty. Once you have, you’re home free.

We’re finally beginning to understand complexity and it turns out to be simpler than expected. In virtually all complex situations a small set of principles makes you most successful… with one caveat: you can’t predict the exact outcome or when it will occur. In all complex situations there are no guarantees. Some solutions will fail and some will succeed beyond anything imaginable when you begin.

The good news is that when working with people, we know the small set of principles and we know that successful outcomes outnumber failures by a vast margin - in the order of 99 to 1… if you stick to the principles that work most often. I’ve covered those before on my web site… here. http://www.crispstrategies.com/index.php?src=news&category=Articles+about+the+Five+Skills

The challenge is that you need to apply the five skills consistently for as long as it takes to succeed. You can’t know for sure how long that is. You can’t be absolutely certain it will work (although 99% of the time it will. This is astronomically better than the odds you get when gambling which are usually far more than 99% tilted toward losing. But the results of gambling are usually instant, which makes it the most appealing behavior on Earth, the most addictive and difficult to walk away from. This is the opposite. It can be very challenging for anyone to stick with a long, slow, uncertain process.

If nothing else, you may just feel stupid hanging in. That’s a really bad feeling. I recall how difficult it was doing my first major search for a new job at age 33. I wanted to make a change from being a rank-and-file teacher/guidance counselor with no obvious management experience to a business-managerial role in some totally different industry where I had no experience. I had to sit at lunch ever day for a year with a bunch of other teachers who thought I was attempting something insane and impossible. Though few commented, I could feel the weight of their skepticism adding to my own every day. But I plodded along. As a result I ended up in a dream job that led to a dream career with results so far beyond what I could have achieved in my old role that it’s hard to compare them in the same breath. Talk about tripling your results… and then some.

The neat thing is that you don’t have to let yourself feel stupid. No one really knows or cares how you feel. It helps to use the five skills constantly in all sorts of situations. That way you soon see them working in one way or another. Confidence develops and you realize you can succeed at virtually anything more than 99% of the time if you just keep at these daily. After a while they become second nature and you do them without any conscious effort. They become habits you always apply automatically, not stressful, not time-consuming, easy to fit in with whatever else you want to do - in a word: EASY!

Gregg Thompson writes, in the newsletter for Tom Peters’ spin-off "Blue Point Development" that we shouldn’t believe all those articles we see promising leadership "secrets." He’s right to point out there aren’t really any secrets. We know what there is to know, but he goes on to explain why so we see so many of these articles by saying we know all about leadership, but, "It’s just tough, and we’d like to find an easier way to do it." 

I beg to differ. I rarely found leadership tough at all. In fact, I often felt I had one of the easiest jobs in the world. What’s tough is to struggle under bosses who don’t let you do anything, who constantly dish out orders and keep you from leading or doing anything your way. I was lucky that most of my bosses over the years didn’t exert that sort of strangling control. And I worked steadily on ways to get out from under that sort of supervision.

The key to leadership is that you have to have a clear point of view of your own, not someone else’s. You need to pursue it steadily, not change directions constantly as many managers and companies do. Not everyone will buy in initially, so you have to persuade, convince people with small results demonstrating reliability along the way. And along with persistence, you have to listen and adjust to incorporate what others need to see along the way while still moving in your chosen direction.

The balance between stubbornly persisting along your own route and incorporating others’ opinions is the big challenge. Fortunately you don’t have to be perfect. There will be times when you annoy people by sticking to your way and other times when you accuse yourself of being wishy-washy because you gave in to easily on some key point. If you constantly pay attention and remember that you are stretching the envelope, you’ll notice these and adjust continuously without ever giving up on your overall objective.

That probably sounds tough. It really isn’t. It just takes focus - paying attention consistently and not forgetting where you’re trying to get to. It becomes habit, pushing slowly, but steadily toward your goal while doing your best to take others along with you. At times progress will seem slow or non-existent. At others you’ll be startled by major leaps forward. Either way, you mustn’t give up your efforts to move forward step by step (I’d use the word "slogging," but that makes it sound hard and it isn’t). Just persist steadily at a pace and pressure level you can comfortably sustain. Make sure you get distractions and relaxation in there to recharge your batteries. The end result belongs to those who keep going, not those putting in the greatest one-time effort. Enjoy the journey. You only pass this way once.

Today we’re constantly bombarded with useful information, so much so we don’t have time to go read much of it and if we do there’s a danger of all of it becoming uselessly entangled due to overload. I’m not sure what the solution (though speed reading seems to be needed). Blogs are supposed to be all about gathering links to stuff their readers would find interesting as a way of helping people find just what they want or need. I’m not sure. Here’s an example.

Here’s a piece on managing barriers to thinking and creativity and what blocks us from seeing things in new ways - a theme that seems to fit with my approach: The Seeing Believing Gap. To make it short, I liked the opening story (a good article feature I haven’t yet learned to do well myself) and I like the paragraph headings (which save us from reading most sections for detail). From the headings I liked two paragraphs: See Past Isolated Concepts, which emphasizes a key point I make - that seeing connections helps - and I liked the last one: See past your usual circle because it mentions another source, a book that might be interesting, and again, a broader view.

Then I glance to the bottom of the page, a Blog World conference link catches my eye and I wonder ‘what’s that; maybe I need it’ and I’m off again on a hunt for more interesting stuff that might be useful. I realize there’s lots I don’t know. I don’t even know if this page I’m reading on Fast Company is really a blog or just how the two relate. It’s all interesting, but not "transparent" or self-explanatory - it’s just stuff at some level.

Human beings are great at processing "stuff." The actual work we accomplish today takes up less and less time. Yet we’re busy with "stuff" - ideas, possibilities and continuous learning. That seems to be working for us although it often leaves us feeling overloaded and perhaps not having accomplished as much as we’d like.

I don’t have the answers for this. If anyone does, I’m always looking for "stuff" to read (and pass on) that might help. Help. Some days I almost want to be back in corporate where constant interruptions demanded that I actually do stuff. But no, I’m happier overall working on my own and deciding when to goof off with "stuff" without feeling like I’m cheating anyone, but me.