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

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

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

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

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

Marcus sure gets mentioned a lot both by those who agree you shouldn’t waste time trying to change your weaknesses, only work on strengths and those who strongly dispute that. If you’ve followed my posts you may guess I believe in doing both! That’s the Zen answer. But which ones when and how much?

A key function of Human Resources is trying to get people hired or existing ones moved into jobs that fit their strengths. Buckingham would be right in thinking I’d be wasting my time aiming for the Olympics, definitely not in my strengths. But every athlete or manager who legitimately wants his or her role and has talent still has “weaknesses” to work on. It would make no difference to me if my biggest problem in the 100 meter dash  was my start, but for those who win or lose by microseconds, knowing their weaknesses and working on them is huge. And to suggest they not bother would be completely wrong.

So, should we only work on strengths – no way! But starting with strengths and working on them as well as what makes them weaker than they could be is essential. Since studies show the lowest rated skills for most leaders are all aspects of working with people (versus things), we clearly need to promote those with inclination and relevant ability, but we also need to work hard to ensure they get exposed to experiences that help them grow people skills.

Tips: How to choose what to work on

Ideally trial and error and solid self-reflection have landed you in a job you like a lot. (If not, figuring out what you really prefer is priority #1.) Then, to get better at what you like doing:

1.    Try to evaluate and especially ask others for their opinions of your strengths and weaknesses for this work. Take time to assess accuracy. Don’t be reactive to emotional issues about these and don’t take anyone’s first word, especially your own.

2.    Work on your three or four biggest strengths… by looking at your weaknesses in those areas, planning a strategy to improve them and consistently doing a bit each day whenever they come up. Set reminders for yourself or you’ll forget.

3.    Then look at your two or three biggest weaknesses. Really look. Some may not be as bad as you think; others are worse. Be aware you have a couple of approaches – first, get someone else to do those things instead (a team member, co-leader, spouse, etc.). Figure out how to be great without ever doing these. Don’t let yourself be tempted. Pamper the people who do this for you so you’ll never have to. …But also… decide on one, just one, weakness you really, really, really want to change. Create a plan and work on it every day, asking people continually how you are doing and asking for their help and suggestions. Make this into a daily habit of practice. In a few months or a year or two, evaluate your results. Chances are you’ve made enough progress (and built some continuing habits) that you can choose a second miserable area to work on. But expect to keep working on these for the rest of your life. They will never come entirely naturally.

4.    Periodically assess your results and the balance between work on strengths and weaknesses, not letting either completely absorb your energy – do both. The proportion of time you spend on each is a balance only you can decide.

The bottom line is you can’t easily change weaknesses, but you better know what they are and have a strategy to prevent them de-railing you. Over time you can certainly improve some of these areas, but only if you work hard on one at a time and choose only those you really want to change… and then persist, persist, persist. For me this has meant a lifelong drive to get over feeling shy. I’ve developed tons of behaviors that work most of the time, but there are still areas where my original habits continue to affect what I do and unless the day ever comes that isn’t the case, I’ll keep this in mind and keep working away at little bits.

A steady stream of items reflecting progress in human resources arrives every week now. Momentum is picking up. Each step takes us further on the way to full recognition that HR is, in Jack Welch’s words, “the second most important job in any organization.”

Widely reported in the past week, major retail jewelry operator, Zale Corporation, promoted it’s EVP of HR, Legal and Corporate Strategy, Theo Killion, to President. Now you might expect as in years past this would be a legal expert serving as in-house counsel who makes deals and plans strategy from a legal-financial perspective and, oh yes, happens to have HR tucked under his wing. In this case Mr. Killion is a 30-year HR veteran who worked his way up to over-see the other jobs. HR is first in his background. Moreover he is tasked in part with continuing to promote diversity, which he personally exemplifies - a forward-looking strategy for results as well as doing the right thing.

Then the mail bag brought the latest “People & Strategy” - the journal of the Human Resource Planning Society - filled with a series of articles about CEO succession (and pay).

No great news on managing pay better I fear. Boards continue to struggle with the best ways to pay CEOs. Although the theory is firming up they should be paid for on-going performance once they’ve been attracted with a competitive base salary, the problem is how to measure the connection with performance. One article proposed a system that was then nearly universally dumped on by a half dozen experts.

So, what’s good on the horizon for the future?

As an aside, I hear from sources in various industries that top HR salaries are getting into the ozone, too, giving CFOs some concern they might be eclipsed pay-wise. The same group noted they are seeing more MBA students who have chosen the HR track in the belief this is where the action will be. They are right. Hopefully they are getting that advice from their MBA schools, too. The goal really isn’t to get paid well just for the money, but to see HR and what it does for organizations recognized and given the clout at least on a par with other senior roles.

The four main articles on succession were right on, backed up well, agreed on the same key points and made sense. What really stood out were two listing competencies for CEOs of the future - among them both explicitly emphasized a heavy dose of humility along with confidence - in balance. It was refreshing to see it clearly spelled out as a specific requirement!

CEOs need courage to take risks in rapidly changing environments and at the same time the ability to listen, absorb advice and ideas from others in the Board and the organization and meld all of that into best guesses. All this requires the humility to understand no one person has the ultimate right answer to any situation any more and Boards seem finally to be getting that. Complexity is the driving factor and makes the ability to assimilate diversity of opinion, knowledge and experience increasingly crucial.

And why is humility in a CEO such a gain for the HR perspective? For a dozen reasons including primarily that people work best when they are included, listened to and worked with cooperatively. HR struggles to promote this in vain in many organizations where the whims of individual leaders take precedence over team work and cooperation, where the majority of senior executives quite often follow the (bad) example of the CEO. With the right choice of CEO, having senior execs copy the new behavior would be a huge advance.

Again today I found myself giving a would-be human resources (HR) manager the same advice I give all job hunters - the new boss is the most important factor in any job you’re considering. A great boss can encourage you, give you projects, mentor, coach, guide and introduce you to a world of further possibilities. In other words, they can make your job exciting, worthwhile and a continual learning experience… or they can pigeon-hole you from day 1 and demand nothing, but routine, even menial results.

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.

I’ve spoken with two university researchers recently who express concern that the hoopla over the uniqueness of Gen Y recruits may be overblown.

It’s been 4 months since futurist Dan Pink (other books: Free Agent Nation and A Whole New Mind) jumped into the fray with The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, said to be the replacement for What Color Is Your Parachute specifically for Gen Y.

Maybe. It’s light and light-hearted in manga comic format so it’s clearly targeted there. Many reviewers are quite taken with this, but the questions remains, are Gen Ys buying it or reading it when it’s bought for them.

Dan’s advice is six simple (all in favor of that!) principles for career path choices:

1. There is no plan. [The economy changes too fast for your career to have a plan]
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses. [Find your advantages]
3. It’s not about you. [Serving others serves you best]
4. Persistence trumps talent. [Keep showing up]
5. Make excellent mistakes. [Take risks, but fail forward]
6. Leave an imprint. [Do something that matters]

The issue is, of course, there never was a plan. We mostly stumbled into careers before so that’s not new. Neither are the other items.

Will Gen Y really change the workplace or, when they get mortgages, spouses and kids, will they “sell out” just as everyone acuses boomers of doing? More to the point, will our concern for what Gen Y thinks continue past the first blush of staffing shortage. Will we genuinely start listening to diverse employees’ needs and interests?

Meanwhile Pink doesn’t substitute for good career ‘how to’ books like Parachute or Barbara Moses’ excellent What Next. It’s a useful add-on whatever your generation - things we should all be considering, not just when we’re starting out, but for once, could we hear from Gen Y if they actually want this stuff instead of hearing from “grown ups” that they for sure will? If we’re really as interested in listening as we say, perhaps we should show it by doing so. Anyone heard what they think?

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.

So many people recommended Timothy Ferriss’ book, The 4 Hour Work Week, I ultimately bought it to avoid a ten-month wait as #250 on the library waiting list. My initial thoughts were largely confirmed.

The one truly useful idea we all ought to be thinking in terms of is… how we can accomplish more in less time. Today’s technology offers opportunities undreamt of in the past to streamline work both within as well as outside organizations. Yet most people still plod in to the office or workplace to do relatively repetitive jobs that don’t seem to change much or accomplish a lot. We seriously need to take a look at alternative approaches to what we’re doing daily and Ferriss certainly presents an authoritative case for one, but only one, variation. While useful to stimulate ideas it’s impossilbe for everyone to use his model nor should most try.

That catchy title is what’s driving book sales. It’s become another of his get rich schemes it appears, though Ferriss insists in interviews (sample here) that he isn’t making a career of this. The other ideas he collects are not a lot to get excited about, though someone probably needed to gather them all into one place as a "state of the times" tale and a challenge to the rest of us to find better ways.

Ferris is a gen X’er who found and applied the ideas hinted at in Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation and the web resources that seemed to grow out of those ideas, like elance.com and others - virtual assistants ready and willing to help him set up online businesses and similar direct mail-type endeavors that, according to his report, have made him rich - one of "The New Rich" as he defines it.

The book and related web sites such as here contain useful information, particularly if you want to market "stuff," travel the world with your new-found wealth or hire virtual assistants or Free Agents to help you. My sense from other sources is there are lots of virtual agency sites that he could have included, but hasn’t.

His underlying messages form a strange mix, some logical, even insightful, and others distinctly disappointing. You can make millions with little personal time investment… if you happen to hit a lucky idea, are willing to risk some questionable practices and find the right people to do it all for you. Of course, just off the top, it would be impossible for everyone to do this because there’d be no one doing the actual work, no virtual assistants because every one of them would be attempting to find their own virtual assistants to help them become big winners.

I tend to agree with the negative reviews of his book on Amazon, which you can find if you scroll way down this page, but it may be worth skimming just for the fire it lights in every reader to find a better way to think about and reach their goals. If this dubious approach can succeed, surely there must be better ones. This is one I could have "read" in the book store or library in 10 minutes.

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.

We can keep asking why we haven’t learned yet that leaders and employees applying EQ or emotional sense, identifying and meeting real customer needs, is the key ingredient for success. We can also feel hopeless about getting the message through. A vast number of companies and leaders can’t seem to get this. But giving up would guarantee no progress… and we know that many, many individual leaders are capable of establishing an environment and modelling highly effective behavior for their people, creating highly effective business units within any organization and sometimes even throughout complete organizations.

If only we had enough of these magically skilled leaders. Can we create more? How do we identify them? That’s the massive "talent" question everyone is asking. It can’t happen overnight.

I was startled by an insightful article by a very articulate graduating student in Anthropology and International Development from York University in the ICA magazine "Edges: New Planetary Patterns." ICA is a Canadian-based international training and facilitation agency specializing in helping non-profits around the world become more effective. You can see the magazine information here (http://icacan.ca/Edges.cfm). She describes how her super university education has trained her to think so critically that is had made contributing effectively seem entirely hopeless. With everything "connected to everything else" and all of it open to severe criticism at every turn there is no way to intervene to improve the world, business or social structures. Everything is gloom. She concludes by saying, "…so I’ll just do the best I can. Wish me luck" and her bio says "…still trying to figure out how to make a difference.

This is clearly one of our young leaders. This is a person our organizations are dying to hire and figure out how to keep. Now McKinsey’s advice to "keep people motivated, provide meaning and purpose and leaders who model and coach" (in the last post) comes into stark perspective. It’s a truism in management development that "leaders teach leaders." The problem is how do we get more if we have only a very small number now who know what to do.

The answer has to be a slow, but constant support building a program within every organization of growing leadership skills little by little, knowing all we now do about what that takes. If we don’t…. The good news is that people in senior roles don’t have to be good leaders themselves (or they may be). What they need to do, though, is ensure that a great development program is put in place. Future generations, both inside and outside their organizations will thank them.

Often you know you’ve learned something once you finally and fully are startled by its simplicity. Typically it’s a blinding flash of insight into what from then on seems perfectly obvious. Why wasn’t it just moments earlier?

What triggered this observation was reading an article in the Speakers magazine about Dick Richards and his book "Is Your Genius at Work?" He asks four questions:  1. What do you consistently attempt to give others?  2. What do others come seeking from you (maybe ask some)?  3. What’s the common denominator in 1 and 2?  4. Can you distill this to two words: _____________ _____________.

Maybe this arrived just as I’d answered these for myself. People come to me for the right way to say things (and ideas) to deal with challenges with people, to get the results they hope for. And I consistently attempt to deliver exactly that - to make people, as I see it, better at managing, more positive, etc. But the key for me was "what do they come to me for?" That’s the marketable product - what they already want, not something that I have to drum up business for, some intangible "leadership model" or set of skills. Those are just the mechanisms once they’ve asked for what they need.

My only quibble: two words might be "People Solutions," but I can’t resist making it "positive people solutions for high performance."