Although critical and recommending change in HR, he is constructive – also recommending commensurate compensation, and – perhaps more importantly – highlighting the distinction that is rarely made in articles complaining about HR (like the old “Why We Hate HR” from Fast Company, which is still a teaching tool in some very high level HR courses and still draws comment even in Fast Company. The latter, by the way, is a very solid talent-management based commentary on HR strategy as it’s evolving.

Lawler’s ultimate point is the theme that HR is merely administration surfaces again and again for a reason- but one which has a solution. Lawler doesn’t make the link, but we can see the parallel in finance. He argues HR should be regarded as having two distinct levels or divisions – one handling highly administrative tasks needed to be done by someone to keep organizations going. This isn’t to say these are simple, easy or unimportant, but they aren’t the whole story. The other level or division needs to be concerned with more strategic solutions – organization effectiveness, which is far more intangible, takes time and is often short-changed when busy HR people get bogged down in the admin duties.

Think finance divided into Accounting and Business Strategy – Controllership and CFO roles, which admittedly are sometimes combined in smaller organizations. Even when combined, however, we need to recognize clearly the differences and we are helped if we distinguish between the wrongly maligned ‘bean counters,’ whose jobs are nonetheless essential, and the financial strategists in our organizations.

Admin versus strategic roles are often lumped together by complainers who dislike financial or HR controls that were set up as part of a strategy at one point. It’s human to personalize a gatekeeper as the author of a ‘stupid’ rule, but there are virtually no articles suggesting the companies try to run entirely without finance people or that they completely outsource finance. Most organizations would rather have the bean counting end of finance in-house actually, where they can argue and improve procedures they don’t like than outsource to an inflexible, lock step system that doesn’t quite fit their organization.

This is so much the case that you probably haven’t even heard much about financial outsourcing apart from occasional admin items such as payroll or basic bookkeeping. Few suggest finance be outsourced entirely and let line managers set their own strategies, yet we continually hear this question or “threat” about HR. The answer is, of course you can outsource whatever you want, but outsourcing HR is more than sending out benefits admin and letting managers decide who can have promotions, days off, special pay increases or be fired on their own. Promote the wrong people through expediency or favoritism and you have a formula for destroying the very engagement you want HR to strategize for.

By keeping in mind the distinction between admin and strategic principles, we give gatekeepers in HR the opportunity to seem more logical. They aren’t preventing a pay increase to be petty, nor because they fail to understand good people need bigger rewards. Unfortunately some in the admin roles leave the impression they are personally making the decisions about what’s “right” or “wrong,” leaving a trail of line managers who feel they have “tangled” with HR too many times and just want to be rid of them. What we need is everyone to understand the strategies and that includes gatekeeping HR staff who have to explain at the lowest level why they can accede to every individual’s personal desires of the moment.

Oddly finance doesn’t seem to suffer this personalization except perhaps in the way people feel about them when their travel expenses are refused. But in the end that’s just money and generally not a lot of it, not highly emotional questions like whether I get paid for a sick day for taking my kid to the hospital. With every one of these situations involving different facts, the myriad of possible answers and long-lasting frustration is far greater and more delicate than ‘you can’t charge that new tie because you spilled gravy on it.’ Do we really want to outsource such HR decisions to a lock step process or would it make sense to use such complex questions to improve policies over time in keeping with a long term culture strategy?

Internally we have a greater challenge in educating HR gatekeepers about how to communicate such decisions and refer people to the strategy level when they simply don’t understand the explanation. HR has to be the best communication department in the organization to prevent these sorts of frustrations from festering. Keeping both eyes on both admin and strategy, but recognizing the difference, is crucial.

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Shares of the suspected target, Bank of America, tumbled 3.5% or $4 billion worth in a few hours. Of course, that’s the stock market for you and presumably some seemingly savvy investors would then take advantage of buying low and help stabilize the price almost as soon as it was perceived to be dropping. After all no one actually knew at that point (and still don’t) whether Assange’s claims to have damning evidence of downright illegal dealing actually were being made about this particular bank or not. Only by putting together information he dropped in earlier interviews was any connection guessed.

Whatever the outcome of this event, a few things seem clear. Assange has found a new use of the Internet and hacking (which he was convicted of earlier in life). Many people seem OK that he’s revealed classified documents from governments. Whether they seem as willing to stand by now that he’s moving on to business is an unknown. The debate will no doubt rage extensively.

What his move toward business revelations raises is the question of what would have been the right approach if this isn’t. If you or I had evidence of illegal activity of a business or an individual, the more accepted course of action would be to present it to legal authorities, the police or SEC, and expect them to deal with it.

Innocent until proven guilty clearly falls into a gray zone if such information is simply published. No matter how clearly damning the ‘evidence’ might be, there are rules about whether it is validated, admitted into judicial process and more. Simply dumping into the public domain may be a journalistic scoop approach applicable to public figures, institutions and public information, but when it is classified or proprietary material, however obtained, one would expect going through proper authorities first might be more appropriate. Would that be any less public? Perhaps initially, but certainly not as soon as charges are laid. and that, too, removes much of the right to presumption of innocence unless convicted.

What’s also clear is there are very few true secrets one can or should depend on staying secret no matter what line of work or social endeavor you’re in. In one sense it’s great if we operate all the time as if anyone should be able to know what we’re saying or doing. Companies with rules against negative, behind-the-back gossip, for instance, clearly are straying into questions of confidentiality of individual conversations, hearsay and innuendo.

On the other hand, if a manager has a clear discussion with an employee about short-comings, isn’t gossiping behind their back, and puts this on record as a warning or developmental advice and that sort of personal information is made public by something like WikiLeaks, I think both we and law enforcement would take a pretty dim view of that. It seems likely we’d conclude the information would be damaging to all concerned. The employee’s reputation and future job prospects would suffer and so would the ability of managers to act properly in evaluating work in the future, thus damaging the ability of employees to improve. Some might argue pure verbal discussions should suffice, but we all know that until something is in writing it is often ignored.

It’s not like any of this is completely new. It’s probably more that a single individual with no grounding or connection to established process, like editorial over-sight, for instance, has been able to rock some very large boats single-handedly in a dramatic way. Like so many new initiatives fuelled by wide open Internet and technology, this simply raises old questions in new ways and suggests that we’re all going to be extremely busy trying to figure out what’s best and what policies are needed to ensure that. If it’s all right for Wikileaks to leak your information, how can you ensure your employees don’t routinely use conduits like that to reveal what they cannot themselves? Interesting?

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David has an unerring way of zeroing in on the most interesting or controversial points, in this case Conaty’s assertion that he and CEO, Jack Welch, knew their top 600 managers “intimately.” That last word means know considerably more than their names when you see them. In a work sense it certainly includes knowing their career aspirations, strengths and developmental needs. It should include having enough of a relationship to understand their growth trajectory, not just enough to pigeon-hole them in a convenient category like ‘will never make senior management’ as many top teams tend to do.

Creelman challenges Conaty about 600 being a very large number, almost unbelievable, and Conaty grumps that’s what everyone says, but it’s absolutely true. I believe him and so does Creelman.

What do we make of this? I can’t make the same claim from my days at Hudson’s Bay. My excuse could be there was substantial turnover. I might have tried for that number in the 17 years I was there (Welch was at GE for 20), but I’d have been starting over with about 20% to 30% of them annually versus GE’s reported turnover at the time of well under 10%. As it was I have to admit I didn’t try hard for a large number in part because I believed I’d never manage. I probably settled at 150 or so.

We can all make excuses. GE’s territory is far-flung geographically, so distance is poor excuse. They operate quite decentralized, so their need to know people at each is greater, so perhaps they’re more motivated, but surely there were at least 600 critical people mostly centralized at Hbc if one considers who should have been in the grooming lineup for senior jobs. 600 is certainly a number to make you review your own situation.

I suspect several key supports at GE were so taken for granted they fall below the radar. It surely helps if top team members routinely share information about people and solicit input from their reports and key contacts. And if they take those discussions seriously when promoting people, so the best are selected after assessment by several people rather than what many companies depend on – the CEO making the choices from among a cadre so small you’d almost call them cronies. If the CEO tries to know more, the team will, too. If the CEO makes all decisions on thin information, in an offhand ‘time-saving’ way, among people he or she happens to know, the team won’t bother with more. But if the CEO regularly wants to hear to others’ opinions, they will bring them forward. Discussions will be on-going and growing in depth and detail.

Of course the over-riding protest is usually ‘takes too much time.’ But really, if the business depends more on people than anything else and the four pillars of success are understanding your people, your customers, your financials and your process/products/services, shouldn’t we spend a quarter of our time – more than one day per week just on the people proposition? Of course many bosses find it easier to give all their time to technical and financial questions. Customers to some degree and people to a much larger one tend to get only whatever time is left over, which is usually none since ‘work expands to fill the time allotted’ and if you prefer other work, there’s definitely plenty to expand. A CEO who claims no time for people assessment and ‘intimacy’ is really saying he or she doesn’t have time to be CEO, which is why some smart owners hire a CEO as soon as they can so they can concentrate on the parts of the business they enjoy. None of this helps HR, though, unless we convince the business community of these facts and get more willing participation from more CEOs.

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So it follows that HR strategy should be integrated with and enhance business strategy. No problem there if we read the research. Financial results can be increased by 3 to 20 times if effective HR practices are implemented. One reason why the impact is so powerful is that HR is the last function to be understood properly and applied effectively by senior line managers.

The day after Courtney’s presentation I had a meeting with David Creelman (Creelman Research) who, among other projects, frequently interviews and reports on ideas from the top HR minds in the world – Mintzberg, Pfeffer and many more. Our topic was to brainstorm how best to reduce or eliminate hurtful organizational politics for some leadership training he’ll be doing in Pakistan  (everyone is concerned about leadership). We fit among a growing network of HR experts working on questions like this including why, despite the fact we all know what works in HR, so few executives put this knowledge into actual practice -as Jeffrey Pfeffer named it as long ago as 1999 in his book entitled The Knowing-Doing Gap.

Strangely this Gap is closing very, very slowly. We’re all concerned about how to close it faster. The few companies that ‘get it’ are eating the lunches of the rest and we’d like to ensure Canadian companies are in the former group. Strangely this has to do with both high level strategy and the lowest level behavior we see in organizations.

At the high level, as Courtney pointed out, we can include in strategy a vast number of things, many specific to individual companies and situations. At Stelco, for example, previous CEOs who cared little for, and generally ignored, HR led to collective agreements (and pensions) that shackled the company to virtual bankruptcy while nimble, less burdened competition grew around them. So a key strategy over many years should have been more logical union agreements. He recouped some of the lost ground thanks to an HR VP partner who had kept up very strong relationships with the union locals, but that wouldn’t have been of any value if he, as CEO, had no interest, knowledge or concern for what was possible. So another strategy has to be for Boards to promote CEOs who have such concern – a very highest level issue.

But the point of Courtney’s book and presentation is to reinforce good people practices that all organization executives should apply at the most basic levels of all, all the time. These sound so simple they hardly qualify in most discussions of ‘strategy’ for organizations, yet they are fundamentals without which nothing else works – listen to, recognize, involve and thereby engage people and their creative thinking. Promote positive ‘hope’ in your vision for the organization and do these things consistently every single day. Recognize as a leader you’re on stage every minute and a single clashing, throw-away remark can destroy months of careful trust building if you aren’t consistent and authentic with your behavior, words and intentions. Could any of this be simpler? Why the gap, why do so few seem to manage these? We all have ideas, what are yours?

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A blog I ran across recently, The Rare LeaderT, for example, asks, “.Do I Have To Like People To Be A Leader?” Just asking the question signals the message – the answer is more complicated that liking or not liking people. The short answer is no. You don’t have to socialize a lot or even actually like people, but you do need skills to relate effectively. Blogger/coach, Steve Riege, makes a useful distinction between Social skills and Relationship skills and points out the danger of assumptions based on whether you score as an Extravert or Introvert on the numerous tests we’re inundated with. I like his tone and there seem to be more good posts about style, leadership behavior that’s effective and what it takes to succeed today.

We hear more and more that you don’t have to have a particular style or personality to be an effective leader – simply effective behaviors – and we see tons of books, articles and other material about what those are. What’s missing is a framework to make sense of so much advice. We know the elements cited are the same time and again. So why does each consultant, coach, speaker seem to have to reinvent the wheel. If we know the behaviors so clearly and we now have an idea why this evolution is occurring, why doesn’t everyone who’s handed a leadership role simply apply these skills?

There seem to be two key blocks. Overload – most of the advice looks similar, but is tied to examples that are unique. Lots more books are routinely produced because it can be hard to see how the behaviors of a top military General, a President or band leader actually apply to how you should handle your team in IT or marketing. It’s hard to sort out the key useful parallels from just interesting stories.

Second block – psychological inertia – is it really going to be worth the risk and time involved to change to new skills. It means you have to “unlearn” some comfortable, present habits that conflict with what consultants say are better. The problem here is that leadership is complex, involving multiple skills coordinating together, so learning one or two without a complete new set can feel (and may well be) pointless. Again, having a clear model would help clarify how much or how many skills we need to work on.

First, there are only a few skills – maybe two or three of a total of five that most leaders might need to concentrate on. They’re not rocket science, but basic things anyone can do. Second, they’re written about so much you can pretty much choose any leadership book off the shelf and get a reasonable idea of what will work better than our most ‘natural style’ (telling people to ‘do it my way’ – the approach most people naturally use when first promoted).

In my work I describe the five skills as ‘being positive, being honest, thinking strategically, building habits. in balance.’ Only two – developing creative strategies and good judgment for balance are areas where people may conceivably need help or so we might thing. But it’s amazing how many managers are uniformly more positive or optimistic than realistic or ‘honest’ about their failings – or vice versa – dyed in the wool optimists or pessimists. It really shouldn’t be so hard to find a balance, but many people have this problem and it holds them and their teams back. And it’s always surprising how many executives come up with decent strategies, but fail to execute because there in to big a hurry to build habits through conscientious repetition. Some of this seems ‘baked’ into personality, but anyone can learn skills in these straight forward areas. Yet time and again when people analyze what went wrong in some project, they’ll conclude it was a leader who omitted one of these five keys. Nothing here says you have to like people, but you have to respect their needs enough to ensure all five keys are attended to.

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Undoubtedly we’ve all been moved to similar antics in situations. I recall writing “Phooey Ptui” when giving up on a high school physics exam in a peak of frustration. It didn’t help my mark any and I’ve always suspected Mr. Jansen of having less than a stellar sense of humor, but perhaps he just wanted to coach me about losing my cool.

The problem is, as a small number of my teachers demonstrated, when you’re taking out frustration on people below you, not those above, no one is in a position to call you to account unless you step over an invisible line of sexism, racism or harassment of other discernable forms. Call your employee a “b-tch” or the like and you may or may not get hauled up on a carpet somewhere, deservedly, though many don’t. Remarks about people’s work, work ethic or intelligence frequently pass without penalty.

Later in life as a teacher and even later as a manager, it seemed amusing to refer to someone as ‘one brick short of a load’ or any number of other disparaging phrases we hear. Of course, WE would never say that to someone’s face (or where they might hear about it). But some do.

Humor, including banter and snide characterizations, can ease tension at work or anywhere else if handled appropriately, which is to say at least such barbs must be private in some sense. But when they become public daily comments about subordinates, company departments or even customers, their usefulness as stress relievers ends and these are now impulsive evaluations that often substitute for taking corrective action the perpetrator should be seriously considering instead of settling for an easy snipe.

Strangely many executives don’t make the connection. They slide into a habit of commenting negatively on all sorts of people and behavior with such offhand remarks, but don’t act. Venting this way is harmful to everyone who has to hear it and most of all to the executives themselves who should be working on ways to solve the problem rather than simply sidestepping. A habit like this slowly spreads across entire cultures because it means managers lower down don’t get backed to take effective action and they, too, fall into the ‘drive by shooting’ style of evaluation.

We actually need to encourage recognition of impulsive motivations, but see them as a signal that we need to come up with a better idea not a snide comment. Necessity is the mother of invention. The need to blow off steam can be turned to innovation. something companies desperately need all the time. If we’re angry at customers. why and what can we do about it? Same with other departments, co-workers, suppliers, etc., etc. Work is full of frustrations. We call it work for a reason. We need to work at it, but the goal should always be improvement.

Similarly in management we need to be aware of what frustrates employees (not just our behaviors, but those, too). If customers and employees are beginning to resent each other, there are major strategic issues at stake. We can’t simply suggest these are things we should tolerate. They’re signals, loud and clear.

Maybe we should change HR to the Human Signals Department and start picking up on these offhand signals.

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Readers, it turns out, prefer frequent, short, clearly written tips. But many small business bloggers especially are stuck for how to keep up with the commitment to do a post every few days, which is what the experts recommend if you’re going to do a blog for serious marketing.

One solution is to engage a service to help. You can still write key pieces related to your business, but to fill in the ‘tip sheets’ readers come back for, a writer like Toronto’s Vera Held is an option. Vera is a professional writer who also writes a monthly column in The Toronto Sun called "Make it Work".  She just let me know she’s begun a new writing service for her clients. This service consists of (a) a weekly blog and (b) a bi-weekly media release for prices ranging from $149 per month for a 12-month contract. Topics are developed to highlight client priorities.  If you’d like further information, she can be reached at (416) 785-3556 or vheld@sympatico.ca.  Please have a peek at the following ‘how to’ blog Vera has just written on why leaders really have to listen—to lead effectively. You may find you appreciate the reminders, just as I did the reminders on clear writing, another of Vera’s advice specialties:     

Why Leaders Need to Listen, Actively

by Vera N. Held

Listening actively maximizes your value to your organization. It’s a key business skill that everyone needs to hone—especially the VP, GM and the CEO.

Contrary to popular belief, listeners are “active” participants. Educator John Dewey said, “The hearer is an indispensable partner” in any conversation. Why? You can only share a mind set, concept and idea, persuade someone or be persuaded when “true” listening occurs. Without the desire to listen to another perspective or point-of-view, little gets accomplished.

Indeed, good communicators listen more than they talk. And it is vital to treat all staff with the respect and appreciation that comes from being paid attention to and listened to. Listening actively is the one sure-fire way to keep staff motivated, and to continually build positive work relationships.

In return, staff will not only carefully listen to you, but generously answer your questions. In fact, staff may even provide you with some terrific unsolicited ideas to allow your business to grow by leaps and bounds.

5 LISTENING TIPS

1. Listen to gather data and gain knowledge. Learn.

2. Ask for clarification to make sure both sides are on the same page. Bond.

3. Always let the other person finish his or her thought. Build a bridge.

4. Show respect and interest—even if you disagree. Be polite.

5. Listen with an appropriate amount of empathy. Be open, confident and share.

Leaders are expert at connecting the 18-inches between head and heart. In the words of French writer and philosopher, Voltaire, “The road to the heart is the ear.”

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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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Then I came on this blog post by Paul Herbert: I Love Forced Rankings. Since Jack Welch has recanted on this theory that the bottom 10% should be identified each year… and then fired… forced rankings have lost favor in most operations. But as this article shows, there are always two or more schools of thought about any given HR practice. Human resources isn’t a cut and dried series of principles that you simply apply. It has to be tailored to your culture and situations.

The problem arises when you recognize that managers and cultures aren’t fixed in stone. Let’s say a company follows Herbert’s advice and institutes forced ranking to help encourage judgments between good and unproductive employees. That information can then be used to reward the good and coach or redevelop the unproductive and that may be the original intent, but as surely as grass is green, some manager will take this the opposite way and punish the unproductive while simply taking the top performers for granted.

Either way, we want managers to reward and react to performance. Many don’t. They simply sail on with the status quo and duck managing performance at all. The hardest hurdle seems to be to get them in general to apply judgment case by case rather than use rule of thumb systems like "let’s use forced ranking" as if this alone would solve the problem. It isn’t the process, it’s the assumptions about it, good or bad, which so many apply without the least bit of understanding about what the impact will be on actual people.

Is it any wonder that senior management has trouble buying into any given HR policy when there are such widely varying interpretations and uses of them? If only the core keys were understood, I believe, that problem could be resolved. The fact it hasn’t been in several millennia suggests it isn’t as easy as I think it should be, though.

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The book: Make It Glow: How to Build a Company Reputation for Human Goodness, Flawless Execution, and Being Best-In-Class.

Big surprise. Would that be: consistently work at human goodness, flawless execution and being best in class?

Likely there really is more to say. For instance, how would you work at these things and what would your priorities be in relation to the more typical "make the numbers at all costs" approach to managing? Nevertheless the sense of it being so obvious made it easy to ignore.

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It’s all about following the money."

I started to write a return comment and realized it needed to be longer and more people might want to see it…. Thanks for the comment Darren. I think you’ve succinctly captured one point of view. Where can I start to explain more clearly. You can always outsource "hard" HR basics – the transactional systems, record-keeping and benefits. But people absolutely are assets in every company – like the financial minds you mention. Those minds can get balled up in worrying about minor stuff on benefits or they can worry about when their next promotion is coming. While they’re worrying, they aren’t creating as good returns as they could. Often those worries don’t fit in boxes like, "what does the dental plan pay for this?" The real key is continual coaching approach from their direct leader, but who helps the leaders who aren’t naturally good at this?

People are unique in being assets you don’t own or control. Leaders can use them up by hiring for great potential, using them for a while till they feel they’re being used and toss them out as some bosses regularly do or you can have someone who helps develop and coaches bosses who in turn listen and respond to concerns. In a small business (as most are) if you hand pick business leaders and they have good listening skills, see the need and the CEO listen as well, you can get by without a designated HR person for a long time. But as you grow, merge, acquire others and have to expand your ranks, it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure enough people who give the continual time to listening that is needed as part of their job, as part of getting the work flowing smoothly and to give the thinking time to make good decisions about every person. And coordinating all this takes time.

In every company someone tends to fall into the role of listener and thinker for resolving HR "soft" issues. That person becomes the de facto HR person, the go to individual when someone has a problem or a manager has a problem with an employee. They may do other things, too, as I did even in a very large corporation, but they need some latitude to help set the tone for how people are treated and to counsel those who behave outside the program, to be a second set of ears and eyes for the CEO to marshal people on track continually to get the best return on those assets. As Colin Powell says in his first book, "every division needs it’s ‘chaplain’ [his description for someone who listens and helps resolve]." You can leave the role informal, but that tends to hide a very important lever in getting things moving and keeping them moving smoothly.

Quite often this person doesn’t carry the title HR and isn’t hired for that alone, but they are in a real sense running the HR program of the organization and it takes a real and usually substantial portion of their time. If you lose that person, your return on human assets tanks fairly quickly. Research shows great HR multiplies financial results by four or more times over the average company. I probably don’t need to say that anything that runs "great" like "great HR" is great because it is run by an effective leader. Who is leading HR in any company is a key question. It’s a daily culture-building influence that you cannot thrive without. Someone organizes that and it almost never can be the entrepreneurial leader who drives the business attack – the roles and the things you have to do and dedicate the majority of your time to are simply incompatible. So do you give the HR role to someone formally (full or part time) or just let it happen by itself, haphazardly? Contractors can’t do this for you unless they’re on site virtually full time and have the ear of the senior leadership continually.

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One of the deluge of consultants’ newsletters recently mentioned a change management acronym I had not heard of previously: ADKAR, but I recognized its similarities immediately. It represents a description of ingredients for change management process: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement – from work by an organization called Prosci.  I was startled to realize this is very similar to the five key principles that I promote as the core of people skills and leadership.

In short it means people must become aware of the need to change, they must have a desire to change, the knowledge to, the ability (which is different from knowledge) and then they need reinforcement while making the change.  All of these are true and actually very insightful, especially the emphasis that is put on these being the core, key and essentially only ingredients to pay attention to.  It’s a dramatic simplification of what’s needed to make individual personal or organizational change.

When you find a potentially competitive theory, you want to analyze it carefully to see whether or not it achieves or fails at the objectives you are trying to achieve. This one has some interesting parallels, but also important differences. Because it’s so close to what I use as the keys to being effective, I will offer some deeper analysis in a series of posts.  Let me just say the theory seems to make a clear distinction between individual change and organizational change. The same principles apply so I’m not sure why that is.  Therein lie some interesting questions, which we will explore.

In any case I think this is an excellent summary of the ingredients that are required for successful change. What I’m trying to achieve that’s a bit different is to show how people actually manage to create these ingredients and get them working together.  How do you help someone become aware of the need, to develop the desire, find the knowledge, build the ability and where will they get the reinforcement?

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You can listen right now by clicking the “play” button” (the triangle) in the player below. (For IE7 there is not need to download Quicktime, but you will need it for Firefox and others.) If you prefer to save it or listen later, you can “right click” on the link above, click “save target as” and make sure to pay attention to where you save it so you can find it later. This group impressed me with their business-like approach and the progress they’re making. The show is about 50 minutes, but the advantage of an archived version is that you can skip around, stop and come back, all without much difficulty.

I was lucky that a friend, John Klotz, has expanded his TorontoTalks.org small business presenters line-up to this i-radio format. I think it really works and have listened to several earlier archived shows. I’ve found Internet radio to be so superior as a medium I find myself listening to far more than I ever expected I would. When you can’t listen live, it’s completely straight forward to download and listen later. That way you can access topics when you need them or even download them to listen to while commuting or working out via iPod or MP3. 

The point I’m trying make both in this blog and on the radio is that the same principles of success apply to every situation – work or personal, front-line worker, family member or executive officer. They also work in any medium and any business or non-profit. Sometimes it helps to read, hear, see and try out things in various ways so you get a complete overview. I wouldn’t try to communicate solely by any one medium because each contributes things you can’t get from the others.

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Case in point: one of the many email newsletters I keep finding myself on the list for is from Lynda Goldman (http://www.impressforsuccess.com/). The first I’ve seen arrived recently with a tip for being more charismatic.

The tip: Stand and walk tall. There’s a lot of truth in this. You’ll project confidence, speak more strongly, seem a bit larger than life and generally send the message that you know what you want, what you’re doing and that you can’t be dissuaded. Confidence is attractive and, to some degree, catching, so people feel better aournd you.

Is this really charisma? Well, probably if you practice it enough to make it your usual style of presenting yourself, it could be. It won’t be if you do it only occasionally or drop the manner suddenly in the middle of something. Then it will appear false, as a facade, a feeble attempt to be something you’re not. Whether you "are" or "aren’t" really depends more on whether this becomes habit. If it does, you’ve raised your charisma level permanently.

Only you can decide if this is something you want. There are trade-offs. Particularly if you begin to believe your own press (very appropriate word here since Goldman is a communications expert) you may become insufferable. But you don’t have to. You can find a balance. You can develop skills to use in appropriate situations and not in others. It takes time either way. Adding a new capability always gives you more options.

Can it ever become "as good as the best natural" charismatics? That depends on how much you puruse the initial stage you reach. You can always go further, add other behaviors that typify charismatic people. Over time you can pretty much go as far as you want. Can you ever catch up with someone who started in their early teens or get ahead of them. That, too, depends – on how hard, how often and how insightfully you practice.

So the tip makes sense. Whether you choose to pursue it depends on your sense of whether you need it, whether it adds something you want to your skill set and how much time you are willing to devote to it in lieu of devoting time to other things. It rarely takes as long as you might think.

Given that we have such choices, the next challenge becomes sorting out which to pursue. It makes little sense to waste a lot of time on something you’re not going to follow up fully.

Now all I need to figure out is why I can’t accept a perfectly good tip without analyzing it to death. The short anwswer is that it doesn’t make as much sense to me if I don’t.

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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.

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