In a surprising reversal of its own prior rulings, Canadian employees will now over time gain stronger rights to bargain and probably to strike to get their way. HR practitioners and leaders take note: this won’t happen overnight, but employees in general will slowly gain considerably more say in organizations where they may have been ignored before. As Canada “internationalizes” its labor laws, so will the US in time.

Many have argued unions have served their purpose and are no longer needed in our modern era because employees have all the rights they should expect. Yet bullying, arbitrary terminations and capricious management decisions continue to occur in most organizations.

I’m relatively a conservative who would sometimes take a dim view of this. However there is no doubt, not a shadow, that there is still room for employees to be increasingly involved in decisions and management of organizations. How this happens will be very important. This ruling allows it to evolve over a long period of time, through lengthy and expensive court challenges that will define a further new era in employee involvement. Although costly for the few “bad actors” who will be involved directly, this way of staging change “slowly, but surely” should actually prove beneficial, far better than some sudden leap to new legislation.

Whatever your view on this, you might want to take a look at this article by Queen’s law professor, Kevin Banks, which concisely explains how the Canadian Supreme Court has determined to open up labor laws to further, perhaps endless, challenges that unions can now undertake to extend worker rights.

The upshot is to give added impetus to what HR managers have been saying for decades – you get the unions you deserve if you act poorly, and you prevent third party involvement if you proactively ensure your employees are involved, engaged and consulted. This will slowly drive less HR-conscious companies to get with the program and start involving people more broadly. Stats show this actually pays off in far superior results, but if that carrot hasn’t provided enough incentive, this will certainly continue the “stick” threat toward much deeper and more complete implementation of effective practices.

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

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

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

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

While making new attempts to convince an audience in a speech yesterday I found myself clarifying convergence between HR, leadership and people skills in ways I had not fully thought through before. Sometimes when you talk and think about ideas for a while they suddenly start to make sense in entirely new ways. Conversation drives insight. This led to more ideas later that will cause me to revise my presentations to emphasize where we are in “the state of the art” today.

Several very different factors are evolving rapidly in society, having begun 30 or 40 years ago, now becoming visible in many places. Best known, most obvious is the impact of the PC dating from the first Apple computers built in Steve Jobs’ garage in 1975. Not only have these changed world history, but we don’t yet know how much or what the most powerful impacts will be. From pure record-keeping to social networking the story is far from finished.

Less well known, but now quite clear in direction, we can date recognition of the amazing power of effective HR from the takeover of GM’s Fremont, California car plant by Toyota, who were able to double production with the same people, machines, suppliers, etc., in just two years and have continued to boost productivity steadily since - for 25 more years - a management/human resources process that in incredibly powerful.

Then Complexity theory, with roots in biology and mathematical systems, least well understood, tells us that complex situations behave in similar ways in all endeavors, all challenges from physics to human behavior. HR - or human behavior - is the most complex area of all.

Complexity theory tells us that thousands or millions of “independent agents” working on problems will evolve rapidly to produce amazingly powerful, unexpected answers that turn out to be based on simple principles. Of course this is exactly what we’re seeing on the Internet… and at Toyota’s Fremont adventure called NUMMI - notice their simple principles: teamwork, equity, involvement, mutual trust and respect, and safety.

With blogging and social networking conversations, often truncated, halting and confusing, by millions of people someone will stumble on answers and ideas that will change the world in dramatic ways - and some of those will be further clarity in HR and leadership.

We now know HR process can revolutionize results. What we don’t fully understand yet are the simple principles that work together to create the right framework for this to occur in the widely varied organizational situations we face. We know what work on auto assembly lines.

Hospitals are struggling to apply complexity theory directly, a confusing path based on the concept of “positive deviance” or “copying the successful people from thousands of attempts” at solving a problem like rampant, drug resistant infections. More of these efforts are being tested world wide. The potential to solve political and organizational problems never before resolved logically is enormous. Those whose conversations lead them to the best solutions stand to reap equally enormous benefits.

Every HR professional is facing a bigger set of new learning challenges than ever before. How are we going to learn the new social networking technologies, among them Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, Twitter, YouTube and Second Life and still have time to do the basic job. There is only one answer: try them yourself whenever you have a few minutes. Do a bit at a time. Learn by doing.

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?

Welcome to the new Crisp Strategies blog. I’ve chosen balance-and-results as my long term theme to emphasize not only that the two are compatible, but they actually MUST work together if one wants to achieve the best results possible.

Lack of balance for people means they cannot persist long enough to succeed in a big way, that they will burn out before that happens. Lack of balance for organization strategies means some stakeholders will be left out and will ultimately derail the objectives. Lack of balance in arguments ensures that many will not buy in…. You get the idea. Balance is a word I’m accused of using far too often, but the fact is you can’t succeed highly effectively without it in every situation.

None of this takes away from the fact that at times we need to throw balance to the winds and simply “go for it.” But we need to step back and look at the bigger picture, too. We can’t rush headlong every day on every issue without damaging both people and results in the long run. As often as we laud supreme, Herculean efforts, we need to praise the ability to sustain effort over time and refuse to give up no matter what humdrum setbacks we encounter. Different kinds of commitment and persistence must balance together for total success.

I’m thrilled to be able to start a new site and blog that I can entirely operate myself. Wordpress looks like the answer and it seems to improve steadily as most free, open-source software does. It’s been remarkably easy to get going, though surrounding questions like what to do about past sites and links abound. They can all be worked through - with persistence - and I fully intend to enjoy the journey as much as the results.

So, welcome, I hope you will find it as interesting as I do. I will shortly say goodbye to my old blog at http://www.crispstrategies.typepad.com/and eventually my old web site, too (www.CrispStrategies.com), combining both here.

Every once in a while you stumble onto a gold mine and wonder why you missed it for so long. Trevor Gay is a long-term British Health System executive who retired into his own consulting practice and has created a blog actually worth looking through.

His own blog, Simplicity, I’d describe as a rather quirky, opinionated version of the concept, but that’s a plus. It takes your thinking in new directions and collects links to some other very interesting, somewhat quirky stuff as well.

I started with his video and then some background, but was very interested to skim some of the blogs he links to, like these: Promanager , Hillbilly PhD, Phil Gerbyshak’s Make It Great which in turn refers to this list: Top Productivity and Lifehack Blogs (a Lifehack, by the way is blog-speak for cute tips and shortcuts you can use to improve your life - or "hack" your life, in other words).

The only trouble I have with blogs, including my own is too many and too much to read. They work if you keep focused, but it’s easy to get sidetracked in a thousand directions.

What bloggers link to is often misleading because they mix personal and business interests and some bloggers waver back and forth between the two far too much to make either aspect useful. If you believe in Serendipity (lucky coincidence) great, but finding what you’re actually looking for can be a long haul.

"Success is not complicated. Clear objectives, workable implementation plans, and the discipline to stay the course…" reads a testimonial on the website of a change consultant from an organization he helped. 

Exactly.  The "clear objectives" noted in the quotation are the Strategies (as I call them in my model) that you choose to arrive at your goals.  "Workable implementation" means building Habits.  And "the discipline to stay the course" is all about finding Balance in the midst of constant up and down emotions ranging from highly Positive to Honest recognition of the hurdles.

Why emphasize the same five key words in every single situation instead of finding a specialist and learning specialized words for each new challenge?  The reason is simple.  Doing so connects what we do successfully in one situation to all others. When we generalize our skill we give ourselves a far greater chance of succeeding immediately in every new situation without much additional training.

Every time we read a success story, we are likely to find the author using different words from earlier ones.  The result is people imagine the principles may be different in each situation when they are not.  By seeing the pattern in the skills you develop for one situation, you can apply the same principles immediately to the next.

The ultimate objective is to give people themselves the tools they need in the simplest possible form to achieve whatever results they want.

Showing how to apply these five basic concepts consistently in every situation means people become expert at all of them and at balancing them together.

One way to reinforce this for yourself is to translate what you read about success in any situation into these five ideas.  You’ll begin to see the pattern instantly wherever you look.  That will add to the ease with which you use the skills in an unfamiliar situations.

Last week here consultants from McKinsey presented research on what makes Human Resources strategies succeed and produce better business results in organizations. More studies are being done in this area, in this case based on over 115,000 questionnaires from executives in 230 companies. Their original research is described by Forbes with a link to their write-up provided. To see their longer article you need a free membership as it will tell you at that link, but if you work in HR it’s definitely a valuable newsletter to get.

I’ve long pointed out my objective isn’t to do research myself. Several people, noting my interest, have suggested I start a PhD. Not for me, thanks. I love working with actual clients way too much. Their needs are usually short and easy compared to the time needed academic work. Besides there are others who enjoy it more and are probably better at it. I see my role as simplifying a lot of hot new findings and relating them to what produces results for individuals and organizations.

This relatively new (last year) McKinsey work deserves a much wider audience. It reinforces much of what we already know, but puts some solid proof behind it. And it simplifies quite usefully.

The take-away is this: you or your organization can get far better results from people by focusing on just two things. First, stop doing dumb things or using patently bad practices. Second, focus on three to five key practices that work together. Pursing practices that don’t work together or choosing single "quick fixes" is one of the bad things you should stop doing.

That raises two questions. How do you figure out what’s bad? Easy. Most people already know because others have told them many times, but they don’t want to admit it. A sure-fire way is to ask others what you do that bugs them. Then stop it. At a company level, my old employer persisted with a bonus plan everyone laughed at. The biggest gainer each year was a guy who purposely set stretch goals and failed to meet them. The problem was his goals happened to be to reduce his sales to ease the company out of his line of business. Each year he didn’t make the effort to reduce so his sales far exceeded the low target he set. Paradoxically that meant he beat people who set targets to raise sales and failed to make as much over target as he did. A simple fix could have made this logical, but senior management refused to change anything several years in a row. So the entire bonus plan became a joke… and a serious irritant. Similarly bosses have often been told not to yell at employees. These things aren’t rocket science. Just stop. But many executives can’t seem to grasp this.

Interestingly, the key HR practices that the McKinsey guys found reliably improve results turned out to be very close to the five I recommend at every level, for all size of situations from individual to total organization. In their findings, these boiled down to setting a clear, inspiring vision of the goals needed, then developing a culture of positive trust and openness (honesty) and finally helping each person see clearly what their own role is in achieving these goals. I would only add - keeping these factors in balance as you move forward. That’s captured in their insistence that these only work if they work together. When one or two are allowed to dominate and aren’t balanced with the others, things break down.

They go on to point out, as I do, that neither individuals nor organizations need to be perfect. Far from it they say. What’s needed is consistent effort. And their stats show companies who do this versus those that don’t end up with double the results financially (and every other way) over the courses of a year or two. You can see why I get a kick out of following such research. It consistently validates what I show people how to do. Pretty simple, but highly effective.

A reader of the earlier post on the Toyota Way raised a very hot question. Among retail employees Wal-mart has often been dismissed as an awful place to work because people say you have to do everything the Wal-mart way or leave - boring, rote, automatons? It’s similar in many respects to the Toyota Way of managing. When Wal-mart arrived in Canada in 1994 I wasn’t kidding when I started a presentation to a Zellers annual strategy meeting that was held about two weeks later with this chant: "Give me a Z." I waited. Then I called out, "Give me a Z, give me an E, give me an L." When there were more puzzled looks I tried again. They got it. Wal-mart is renowned for starting every day in every store with the Wal-mart cheer - "give me a W, etc." Zellers senior management didn’t respond very enthusiastically though.

My comment was, "We won’t know if this will work with Canadian employees till we see them try it, but if it does… watch out." In fact, we all pretty much believed Canadians were way too reserved and immune to hokey ploys designed to raise false enthusiasm. We thought for sure Canadian staff would revolt. Not so. I don’t know for sure if it’s alive and well today, but for a number of years this was standard here as it was said to be everywhere Wal-mart operates. Does it make a difference? Should employees be "coerced" into it (even if coercion is mostly just peer pressure from everyone else going along)? Does it take away our individuality and personal choice? Would anyone choose to utter this cheer without "encouragement?" And perhaps most "important" of all - is it too hokey for words? Personally I’d rather do that than a so-called "team building" ropes course climbing a mountain. Much less invasive.

From outside this sort of relatively trivial behavior looks mostly annoying. But it symbolizes a consistent effort to get everyone following the same strategies - attention to the customer, a sense this is a good place to work and shop and so forth. But no one gets out of bed wanting to start their work day with a cheer. At least no one I know and certainly not me.

But, as we later observed, Wal-mart bought Woolco Canada and it’s employees, kept almost everyone employed, turned them from a demoralized bunch that we basically put out of business into the most successful retailer in the country. While Zellers and the Bay, the previous top pair, added about $3 billion in sales over ten years, Wal-mart Canada apparently added $10 billion - a billion a year. That’s kept a lot of employees a lot happier than they ever were before and people line up to sign on with them.

There’s huge excitement in success, in being the best. We can argue that in many ways Wal-mart should be better and there are thousands of its employees world-wide doing their best to make that happen. It’s hard to see how that’s boring for most. There are some who like less "sticking to the strategy" and a more freewheeling chance to innovate, but as some scientists now studying the process of innovation point out, the best ideas often grow within the most constrained environments, when ‘necessity truly must become the mother of invention’ in every small detail in order for it to add value within a larger stable framework.

Boring resides mostly in each individual’s perspective. Of course, choose a company culture that seems interesting. But there’s lots to be said for a steady, essentially guaranteed job, improving results and a chance to offer ideas that are really valued and used. In any job it’s often somewhat difficult to get your ideas implemented in the grand scheme. Many people find it no more difficult and often easier in these companies and they find lots of other stuff to be positive about as well.

David Norton presented in town recently at a Canadian Society for Training and Development meeting. He is co-developer of the Balanced Scorecard, now used for setting strategy reliably in many industries. Again its origins go back 15 or more years, but it has been adopted by far more organizations than the more complex Toyota Way. Hearing directly from the author always adds emphasis to the concepts, which by now are widely proven.

David didn’t present a lot that was new, but some audience members asked questions as if it was. It’s always interesting to see how deeply a tested approach has penetrated… or hasn’t. Its entire purpose is to ensure that when setting strategy companies build in goals, visions and measures for more than just financial results. The added ones needed to "balance" the overall picture usually include process improvement (like Toyota), people learning and growth (like Toyota) and customer focus (not so obvious, but clearly in the Toyota system). More and more those who use Balanced Scorecard approaches are including relations with suppliers and other stakeholders, too, in the aim of safeguarding sharehlolders "long term" interests.

It was interesting to see the evolution that’s happened in the Scorecard approach itself. Specifically it has become even more clear that managing people well for engagement and commitment are now recognized as broad foundation issues and often key in all the elements, not merely "part of the puzzle." That has broad implications.