But are we understanding ‘raw courage’ fully with this ‘over the top’ message? Is it all about just pushing ahead ourselves and shouldering all the responsibility of sending the troops out to do our bidding?

I’ve written a few times now about Proust’s ’seeing the world through new eyes’ and Einstein’s ‘need for a different level of thinking than the one that created the problem.’ Here’s one more. By promoting this ‘manly courage’ model in which the sole hero on a white charger rides in with the answers, the media are overlooking the many other ways to solve a problem, including many that are just coming to be understood – like crowd-sourcing, for instance (asking a great many people to make their best guess or toss in their best ideas or pool their thinking in various ways).

As we enter an era in which no one person can come up with all the necessary ideas to survive and thrive in any particular enterprise, we have to shift to a leadership style that calls forth the best ideas from everyone and is willing to try them out – to risk – to put faith in others instead of shouldering all the responsibility oneself.

Maybe the level of courage we need today in leaders isn’t so much the individual hero who risks everything he or she owns in one shot and leads their troops into a new strategy, but the “humble” hero (to borrow a word from Jim Collins’ excellent leadership strategy book, Good to Great) who has the courage to ask for help and will back ideas from subordinates who seem to have a handle on what could work. It takes no less courage to shoulder the responsibility when a subordinate’s idea goes wrong than to face the firing squad when it’s your own failure.

Why do we persist in these military analogies if not for media hype about the rawness of courage required of great CEOs and leaders? In fact, it’s the day to day small decisions to encourage an employee with a potential solution and make it clear you’ll take the blame if need be. Of course, we want those to be carefully thought out, but the risk ultimately isn’t really different.

Are we just missing choosing the ‘lower level’ of risk-thinking because we revere the ‘higher level’ so much that we can’t be seen to do less? Does it have to be our idea for us to feel we’re seen as risk-takers. I fear that’s exactly what stops many bosses from taking risks on subordinates ideas. It doesn’t feel like a risk if you think you can off-load the blame on someone else. Who said ‘no guts, no glory?’ And did they mean there are no ‘guts’ involved in supporting your team’s ideas as if they were your own, without them having to in fact be your own?

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And in the same newscast, the lead item was government approval of a sporting workplace in which the main objective is for one employee to batter another as brutally as possible, albeit within rules that prevent the use of lethal weapons, but in ways virtually guaranteed to result in at least a few deaths – a sport where doctors have called for a nationwide ban. What happened to the new Workplace Violence and Harassment legislation, let alone Health and Safety laws? Don’t workplace rules say you have to provide a shield so employees never come into contact with dangerous moving parts? Can you see inspectors ordering a screen between battling competitors in such a violent sport?

The Romans set up rules for gladiators, and bullfights and cockfights follow rules as well, but we wouldn’t really want to call any of those safety rules, so let’s ignore the argument that there are rules that make this safe. Safer than handing out swords for sure, but really.

The Romans used their ‘games’ to divert and pacify unruly citizenry during tough economic times. It cost their governors a lot of money to run them, but apparently the results were worth it. We seem to have done one better since MMA, so-called Mixed Martial Arts combat (where’s the Art?), will be a source of revenue for promoters and tax-collectors. How does that make it OK that someone else’s sons will be given the “opportunity” to beat each other unmercifully? Interesting that we still won’t let those same young men ride to their combats on motorcycles without wearing helmets or in cars without seat belts fastened, but we suspend virtually all normal safety rules for sport.

My point? I can’t answer whether it is completely right or wrong in the grand scheme of things to let youth who want to beat each other do so under some sort of supervision. We know from YouTube it happens spontaneously, without rules. Perhaps they would find more dangerous ways of doing the same if left on their own. But we have laws in other areas to try to prevent as many people as possible doing dangerous things to themselves or others. Maybe this is a small safety valve for the aggressiveness that would otherwise bubble over somewhere else in society as it seemed for the Romans. Maybe, but reliable studies show at least with children that seeing violence generally results in desensitization and more violent behavior.

Perhaps the larger question is whether we will ever raise a generation of leaders who stand for a better solution, one that protects everyone while still achieving economic objectives, that engages workers so they feel satisfaction not the desire to strike out. This has certainly become the strategic goal of many companies that are doing well on a grand scale. Perhaps there will always be rogue CEOs who encourage harassment and battering of employees verbally or otherwise as a means to get rich and MMA is just one limited, perhaps minor, example. But isn’t there some hope that we will someday be better than this?

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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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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 author’s observation that there is “universal appreciation that a happy workforce is a productive workforce” reminded me that this is the origin of a major debate about how to define engagement versus commitment versus “employee satisfaction.” The latter, presumably, is closest to “happiness” and doesn’t correlate with productivity as well as the others, according to a number of observers.

Are we just splitting hairs or is this a key point to make with senior executives, especially those who equate these factors and are particularly skeptical of being sold plans designed to “make employees happy.”

Happiness may well be, and usually is no doubt, a long term byproduct of both engagement and productivity, but likely can’t be purely the purpose. On the other side of the coin, this is the reverse of the truism that money shouldn’t be made the primary object of business either, but is more often a byproduct of good service and filling customer needs. You can make money or make employees happy short term but, to sustain results, you need engagement, productivity and good service consistently for both. Focusing solely on outcomes – whether money or happiness – tends to overlook the core human issues that really engage and satisfy employees and drive results over the long haul.

I was even more interested to note the comment (about China) that they have a problem getting senior HR people engaged in their HR association as is the case in Canada (and in the United States) – another “engagement” issue, this time in-house so to speak. The Strategic Capability Network and the Human Resource Planning Society specifically target and do well at attracting senior HR people versus main-stream, certification-granting associations. Perhaps it’s just that there’s a place for both or perhaps a desire for exclusive focus on senior issues or smaller groups (since both these fit) for senior execs. But even within these focused groups, the number of senior executives turning out is still very small as a percentage of the total.

Is it that we in HR feel we have human resources all figured out and so want to attend meetings with a broader range of functions and function heads or do those other areas seem more important to learn more about? We now know effective HR can make a far bigger difference to organization results than finance or technology, in part because there are so few companies that do it well and knowledge of how to do it well is not as widespread. So rather than us engaging in their territory, perhaps we have another engagement issue of pulling these other function heads into our association meetings along with us. Somewhat like an insightful comment on my last blog post - that engagement has to go two-ways. As much as we want employees to engage in key issues, we need senior execs to engage with the key issues that stand to really drive results: HR issues. That’s something we – and they – still have more to learn about.

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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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Depending on how you read these, the messages are puzzling. The long term HR head is replaced with a former operations executive. Layers of management have been laid off to streamline things and shake up the physical bureaucracy, but whether this shakes the bureaucratic habits of thinking and behavior that inevitably form the anchors of culture remains to be seen. HR is dropped from some key operating senior teams, but is tagged as an ‘enabler’ of the change process. Enabling from the outside?

There are suggestions that the new CEO sees the culture change as ‘done’ (or more likely sees it as having been given a momentum-driving start through his bankruptcy restructuring, which appears to have been sold to managers as ‘a gift’). There are other hints he understands it must be a continuing process. I’m skeptical of calling precipitous down-sizing a gift. For sure you can try to make lemonade from such lemons and if you look at the CN restructuring (in Les Dakens excellent new book, Switchpoints) that preceded the sort of culture change GM is talking about, you can see it is possible to make necessity work more for you than against you, but it’s still a wrenching process with some uncertainty as to what it produces.

You can also see with the CN example that it took 10 years in various stages to evolve something like the full impact on culture that GM almost certainly needs. Yes, you can make early gains, but if you assume that’s all, you will certainly fall short of what’s possible and perhaps even create a situation where culture falls back toward what it used to be. Habits take time and repetition to change.

It’s very hard to tell from reports such as this whether the people managing the new structure really understand that it takes years of stable and continuing reinforcement of consistent practices to actually change culture. Are reporters putting their interpretations on things – that change is ‘done’ or that it is ‘in progress?’ We won’t know for some time, but the reporting is worrisome.

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Several recent developments suggest blogging is far from dying, despite those who still see it as a passing fad or as being replaced by twitter. BNet has started up with a massive volume of email alerts you can sign up for, pointing to blogs   and information from Harvard B-School and many other business sources – a true aggregator of business/management information. Is it over-kill?

Although none of us is sure we need all the stuff, it’s amazing how interesting the headlines can be. One case in point for me was yesterdays alert pointing to a blog by former HBS President Rosabeth Moss Kanter – the Top 10 Ways to Find Joy at Work – something many of us could use more of. One of the most useful things on top blogs is the comment section.

A similar approach is being taken by Fast Company with it’s formerly occasional newsletters. It will be interesting to see if daily, yes daily, newsletters will turn people off or attract more readers. Every site is looking for the magic formula. At least when it arrives every day I feel free to ditch it if I’m too busy, knowing that I’m only hours away from my next fix. Interestingly I often click because of the subject line, but find other article of more interest when I get there.

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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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What I mean is HR sits in the middle of controversy by its very nature. I was fascinated yesterday to read two seemingly opposing views of using the Internet ‘for fun’ while at work. Richard Proctor of APL Borealis (who sell blocking software) argues it’s a six-hour a week productivity time-waster (seemingly confirmed by articles such as this from a Gallup study) that should be blocked while a study from University of Melbourne finds those using it at work average 9% greater productivity. The truth almost certainly blends the two points of view as you can hear in the Melbourne professor’s comments:

Notice that many of the figures are likely in the ballpark:  14% are addicted and would benefit by having at least some, maybe all, sites blocked, but on average there’s greater productivity overall from allowing people to use the Internet casually at work. Coker cites millions of dollars ‘wasted’ on blocking and appeals for understanding the ‘psychological’ factors that lead to productivity.

If you’re HR, working for a CEO or CFO with a clear point of view on this, you’re likely not going to waste much energy debating beyond tabling both sides of the argument. Many knee-jerk reactions will go one way or the other absolutely and we know which level of the organization chart dictates which way wins.

And yet this, of course, is an HR problem, right? This is about people and productivity. Once decided, no one’s going to argue with the CEO, but they’ll blame “HR” for not standing up for what’s ‘right’ (their opposing view, whichever that is). Both will have ‘numbers’ on their side and accuse HR of being oblivious to facts and incapable with measurement. We’re a convenient whipping boy for frustrated human beings.

HR on the other hand will do its best to mediate, to argue for compromise. and turn the issue back where it belongs – onto managers who are on the spot, who can lead productivity by getting people effectively engaged in getting results and dealing with slackers whatever it takes (and sometimes, yes, it does take offering distractions to clear the mind where in others it requires a strong management hand). Managers alone are in the best position to observe who’s addicted and slipping into a productivity-wasting pattern versus those who are really producing and need the distractions. No HR solution ‘fixes’ this challenge once and for all. It requires day-to-day leadership from every manager at every level.

Is it any wonder HR is criticized by managers who’d rather have an easy solution of blocking rather than have to manage addicted employees and employees who resent big brother cutting them off from Facebook and Twitter? That’s a lot of people who probably realize at some level HR is in an no-win position, but still rationalize their need to blame someone.

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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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