Diversity Powers Innovation

Author: Dave Crisp

19 Jul

While moderating a panel presentation on Diversity last week, some points really struck home above and beyond some of the issues usually raised. First and foremost, “diversity powers innovation” is becoming clearer and clearer as time moves on. And innovation is the greatest need businesses have going into the an unpredictable future in which dozens of competitors are innovating at a furious pace using the massive amount of information generated by all of us on the Internet to get ideas and ‘how to’ information they can copy.

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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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, 5 Habits - Action, Business/Strategy, Coaching Issues, How Simplicity Works, Leaders of the Future

Long Term Challenges in HR

Author: Dave Crisp

11 Jul

I suspect we often have trouble with messaging in HR because some key long term strategy issues appear trivial to many people. For instance, pursuing wider interests than just sales and profit not only takes one’s mind off day-to-day stress and so improves performance, but helps you notice how things work similarly in different contexts. Personal struggles can shed light on leadership challenges.

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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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, 5 Habits - Action, Business/Strategy, How Simplicity Works

Times Are Changing When Police Can Teach HR

Author: Dave Crisp

27 Jun

HR and leadership deal with human relations in general and what works best, which is often counter-intuitive. That’s a key reason many line managers struggle with HR approaches. The recent demonstrations at Toronto’s G20 venue provided interesting examples.

Legitimate protestors are stuck in a puzzling situation. They can continue to hold marches during G20 meetings and head toward the barriers, thus providing mass cover in which a handful of criminal agitators can hide and do maximum damage. They thereby guarantee no one hears their messages. Or a better solution might well be to hold as big a rally as possible a week or so prior to a G20 or G8 in a safe location, where organizers could video-record sensible statements of protest and logical arguments and alternatives to give to leaders ahead of the meetings when they might make a point. Vandals rarely show up where there’s nothing to vandalize.

There would be less mass media coverage, but the messages wouldn’t be lost in violence and attempted baiting of police. Larger numbers would turn out since additional protesters wouldn’t fear arrest or violence. It would demonstrate how many people are concerned about alternate solutions and would likely get more reasoned attention from leaders instead of being delivered at a time when their attention is fully occupied with deals the protestors don’t want made. Would it work? At least as well as current mangled efforts. Can anyone say clearly from what we saw on TV what the messages are? Anything has to be more understandable than that.

At least in HR we have research that proves counter-intuitive approaches are typically superior.

In day-to-day HR, for example, many line managers hate whatever pay system is in place because they don’t understand the core purpose is fair pay equity among employees and huge increases are counter-productive to their objectives. What they see is they want to pay their best people more and evil HR stands in the way. If every manager does this it will create a race to the top, extremely high pay for everyone, disengaging both top and mediocre employees. (Wait, isn’t that what’s happening with CEO pay, especially in the US where publishing pay scales has the opposite of its intended effect.) Second, based on subjective evaluations of who is ‘best,’ other employees will (and do) become severely upset unless their pay is also raised nearly as much. oops, more of the same problem.

And, third, of course, they pay no attention whatsoever to the tons of research showing that money isn’t the prime motivator – recognition is. Yet many managers continue year after year to say hardly a thank you, let alone a positively reinforcing ‘good work’ despite the fact this free option has been shown to have a far greater effect on results than dangerously raising pay, expectations, claims of favoritism and all the problems unmanaged pay systems create. As to pay, if employees at Toyota happily produce over a million profit-improving suggestions per year for about $50 t0 $100 each, why do we think big bucks are needed to motivate our people?

But counter-intuitive works in more situations than even I thought. At the G20 demonstrations in Toronto I got a front row seat (and picture above) with riot-garbed police at the foot of my downtown driveway. They pushed about 50 demonstrators down our street, past our front door to the main intersection where they promptly sat down and continued taunting police. The officers stood and waited about 20 minutes. and then. just walked away (taking time to drink bottled water from their back up vans and shed their helmets to wipe their brows in front of thirsty protesters). Then they marched back to the government buildings at the other end of the street that they’d been driving the protesters away from. The result – about 5 of the 50 protesters followed them and the rest went home. Bored, tired, dry and uninjured, they’d failed to provoke an incident and gave up.

I have to say I was stunned. I’m not sure what I expected, but in retrospect it all makes the perfect kind of counter-intuitive sense I routinely promote. Show the strength, don’t use it and it’s more effective than bashing people. Kudos to the Toronto Police Service who mostly trained and then coordinated the 15,000 officers it took to maintain this kind of order and kudos to the individual officers who were willing to follow the plan. Now if protesters and G20 planners would learn equally futuristic management, we could avoid spending much of the $1.4 billion this security exercise reportedly cost.

How stupid did planners have to be to put a G20 meeting in a downtown filled with banks and ‘capitalist’ shops with plate glass windows begging to be broken and many congested streets, vehicles and transit that are difficult to protect. Duh?! We know violence has marked every G8/G20 in memory.

With the danger zone placed squarely in downtown police have three choices – massive presence and arrests to move people away, however briefly; no presence, which would simply be an OK to throw everything including Molotov cocktails at whatever anarchists want; or a moderate presence, which would result in officers and bystanders injured in repeated scuffles and set up for a pitched battle at the perimeter fences with even more injuries and possibly even loss of life as we’ve seen in the past. What choice is there, but the former, which takes massive coordination, but provides maximum physical protection for leaders and demonstrators alike. No one wants a police state, least of all in your home town, but for 2 days G20 planners didn’t leave any of us much choice. It’s not a bad reminder of what our country could be like if we don’t manage sensibly. If you have to do something, do it wholeheartedly. and get it over with and go home. It was messy, but the least violence G-meeting in history I expect.

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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, Current Affairs, Fix The Jerks, How Simplicity Works, Leaders of the Future

Traits for Success at Pretty Much Anything

Author: Dave Crisp

22 May

Of the “Big Five” personality traits, the two David Brooks (my last post) culled from research that are more common among big company CEOs should be no surprise. For workers in general the most important has always been known – Conscientiousness. That is about following through, doing what you said you would, delivering the result. There’s an overtone of dogged persistence, true, but lots of people stick to their word without seeming to have fixate on detail or being ‘grinders.’

The second trait he pulled out is Emotional Stability. Is it any wonder a big company CEO might need the skills or temperament to tolerate rocky surroundings and keep on trucking? You can’t get to the top without being severely buffeted by conflicting demands, crazy work expectations and dramatically challenging personalities around you. To forge ahead Conscientiously in that environment takes Emotional Stability, for sure. We hope in personal life to have it a bit smoother, but for many it isn’t too different.

The fact these traits are possessed by pretty much every big company exec – and needed in most of what we ourselves do – stick-to-it-iveness and the emotional balance to persist long enough to get results – should be no surprise. So they’re ‘common’ to everyone. But that’s not to say these are their only traits nor that having them makes them ‘dull’ as Brooks argues. The top notch people I mentioned are or were highly unique personalities that we’d describe as anything, but dull.

The problem is exactly that these two are not ‘enough’ to get the very best results. Beyond sticking to it and staying the course, we need to be creative, able to work well in teams and energetic enough to care to, whatever the origin of that energy – belief, faith, commitment to a great goal, faith in people, whatever. These other three can all come from very different sources, hence the uniqueness of personality and style we see. When we look deeper we see that the first two traits can come from very different sources, too, not just gritting our teeth discipline.

Viva variety. Yet we see the five core needs for success are pretty much the same five in every endeavor, for every person. HOW they achieve them can be unique, but not whether they work. These are the five skill areas I work to help people discover and develop – ones that turn up in every book on success and which anyone can build for themselves if they simply keep focused and keep adding to steadily, conscientiously. throughout our entire lives: it isn’t over till it’s over. unless you flat out give up.

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Filed under: 5 Skills - Instant Leadership, All That We Know, Coaching Yourself, Happiness, How Simplicity Works

When to Coach; When to Lead

Author: Dave Crisp

5 Oct

Maybe the title gives this away, but maybe not. With Coaching-style Leadership, there are still times when more directive leadership makes the most sense. Speaking at the HR program I mentioned a few days ago, there were a number of professional coach trainers in the audience. One who is totally committed to coaching as the best solution for all situations took me to task on this after my presentation, zeroing in on this one comment.

I’d said there are times when command and control is still the most appropriate style – and used an example of a sinking ship where you want the person who knows best what to do to assume control and direct the best actions for everyone, the more firmly the better – no panic, life Emergencies require direction jackets, lifeboats, line up here!

The coach trainer insisted that even on the Titanic, if the captain had coached, everyone might have been saved. In fact, it would undoubtedly have led to a better outcome if the captain had coached the crew sufficiently before the emergency so they knew how to take charge, but I can’t honestly see the opportunity to coach once the iceberg was hit. If you think about the coaching process and questions, is it really an appropriate time to ask people “how’s it going, what do you really want, what should our strategy be, what needs to be different and what will we do now?” Or do you hope the crew lines people up firmly, guides them into lifeboats and tells them how to launch?

The one antidote to panic is clear confidence from a leader who remains calm and balanced and seems to know what to do when you don’t. This is true for any situation, but in true emergencies, it can take a pretty directive leader to convince people. Once things are underway, you hope individuals will take initiative and you may be able to coach that once everyone’s in boats and away, but in those first stages of crisis finding the right balance of command first before coaching seems wisest.

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Filed under: 1 Balance - Judgment, 5 Habits - Action, Coaching over Command Leadership, How Simplicity Works

Convergence in HR and Leadership Ideas

Author: Dave Crisp

30 Jul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, All That We Know, How Simplicity Works, Learning Organization

Bunko or Bunk – Gen Y and HR Challenges

Author: Dave Crisp

18 Jul

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: Dan Pink's manga format Johnny Bunko

There is no plan. [The economy changes too fast for your career to have a plan]
Think strengths, not weaknesses. [Find your advantages]
It’s not about you. [Serving others serves you best]
Persistence trumps talent. [Keep showing up]
Make excellent mistakes. [Take risks, but fail forward]
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?

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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, Books, Building A Career, Coaching Others, How Simplicity Works

Marketing Lessons for Human Resources?

Author: admin

15 Jul

Sometimes ideas seem to converge because human behavior and human expectations are pretty consistent in every area. J. Ragsdale Hendrie writing about hotel HR and performance in Hong Kong-based on-line travel publication ”4Hoteliers” points out the need for HR to be more long-term strategy oriented – and to market more in-house what they can do for their organizations.

McKinsey & Company in their latest weekly points out long term recruiting strategies are necessary in China to overcome growing shortages of managers – an external marketing challenge.

Susan Abbott who runs an excellent blog on marketing and branding points out in her newsletter today that for a group to be effective they need to keep focused in for the long term… stick to the strategy.

And finally, Sherrill Burns of Culture-Strategy Fit Inc. emphasized in a presentation this morning that a strong culture makes HR work – and that requires a long term, consistent marketing strategy focused on getting everyone step by step into the same cultural mold and keeping them there.

Happy staff... not an accident The message? People don’t just work superbly together by accident. There needs to be a strategy, clearly focused and consistently pursued, to make that happen. It’s simple enough, but so few organizations manage it that the ones who do win awards. Sherrill brought along the President/Founder, Pat McNamara, of one such award-wining model company, APEX, a 32-consultant PR/issues management firm with remarkably low turnover for their industry, achieved by internal marketing to their staff – which enables them to use that as a powerful selling feature with clients and thereby earn exceptional returns.

Awarded “Best agency of the year” twice in a row, Pat has also been named one of the Top 100 Women Entrepreurs. One of her comments – “it takes a lot of time – more than you ever expect – to engage every single person, but it’s absolutely worth it.” They turn business away to keep the positive culture and people’s lives and sanity intact. And make enough money to give perks like an extra five days off in an employee’s fifth year and a month paid sabbatical in the eighth. Sticking to those policies requires commitment… long term. The message – basics: long term, strategy, commitment, consistency and marketing internally as much or more than externally… if you want happy staff and great results!

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Filed under: 5 Habits - Action, How Simplicity Works, NewsLetters, Weblogs

Developing Leaders is Developing Everyone

Author: admin

14 Jul

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.

David Malouf's blog post

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.

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Filed under: 2 Positive - Feelings, 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Building A Career, Coaching Others, How Simplicity Works, Weblogs

Book titles that need more work

Author: Dave Crisp

29 Apr

Just back from a couple of weeks travel – conference and vacation – where I made a note to comment on this book title. I noticed it in an airport bookstore, but had made up my mind not to get pulled in while taking time away. In this case, it was easy to say this one doesn’t need to be read due to it’s rather obvious "how to" subtitle.

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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Filed under: Books, Communicating Effectively, How Simplicity Works

Archive for the ‘How Simplicity Works’ Category

Diversity Powers Innovation

Long Term Challenges in HR

Times Are Changing When Police Can Teach HR

Traits for Success at Pretty Much Anything

When to Coach; When to Lead

Convergence in HR and Leadership Ideas

Bunko or Bunk – Gen Y and HR Challenges

Marketing Lessons for Human Resources?

Developing Leaders is Developing Everyone

Book titles that need more work

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