In January I was lucky to convince iconoclastic Henry Mintzberg to speak to the HR think tank I volunteer for (Strategic Capability Network) through a friend, David Creelman, who keeps up with a wide range of management and HR (Human Resources) guru’s. Henry’s presentation showcased a new program he’s been developing as an antidote to his complaints about MBAs (as in his book: Managers not MBAs). It’s called “Coaching Ourselves.” The idea is to get managers together in small groups to walk through a PowerPoint handout that guides them to ask questions about a particular management topic they’re interested in. Mintzberg’s organization develops the PowerPoint  guides for a variety of topics so groups can select the topics relevant to them at the moment – just in time learning, action learning and self-guided learning rolled into one. It’s a great idea, which I think will develop a great following over time, no doubt with lots of imitators.

That was January. Since then speaker after speaker has pointed out that Gen Y (and piggybacking on them, all the other generations now at work) want more autonomy, more discussion, more input into strategy development, to be listened to more by their managers and senior executives, to have a real hand in what’s going on.

True, there’s always an overtone of “they don’t want to pay their dues,” but what is becoming increasingly clear as we all think about that is that no one ever wanted to pay dues. When we started out, that’s just the way it was. Bosses could insist that we trudge along in humdrum jobs “paying our dues” and waiting till we were promoted to have any say in what went on. Now with instant communication keeping every employee a lot more in the loop and allowing everyone to be heard whether senior management expects it or not, there is simply no holding back the ideas that flow from more and more employees.

What’s truly new is that many Gen Y staff don’t have to hang around if they don’t want to. Mom and Dad are willing to put up with them moving back home. Mortgages and babies don’t hang over their heads to the same extent they did with the Boomers, who inevitably had to shut up and go along.

Now not only Gen Y, but many workers have more independence. Being out of work isn’t the disaster it was 40 years ago. We tell executives to get used to interruptions and 4 to 5 month job searches periodically due to re-organizations and lay-offs. Today it’s part of normal career progression. And all this comes at a time when, despite economic setbacks we still believe there will be a shortage of good managers and leaders well into the future, so we have to learn to cater to their desires in order to keep as many as we can and attract the best of the others. Many companies have started to figure this out and so are far more willing to listen… and listening is most of what it takes to develop a new, better kind of leadership.

Over the course of this past year there’s been remarkable progress toward a “tipping point” where more and more companies realize they need new coaching-style leaders. I’m just going through the 10 or so reviews I’ve written over the year on forward-thinking HR practices and strategies plus tons of stuff I’ve read and realizing every single thought leader has urged pretty much the same solutions. Still, we continue hear arguments about details – whether we need this or that Talent Management System, which is the best Performance Appraisal method or Succession Planning program and so forth.

While we’re debating the nuts and bolts, though, we need to recall there is now very broad and clear consensus on what makes HR work best – carefully integrated practices and styles throughout the organization’s people programs, not piecemeal fixes – all directed at involving, listening to and engaging all levels of staff and management to retain the best and attract more like them. In the midst of complexity we’re finally beginning to find simplicity – points on which pretty soon everyone will agree. Remarkable what can evolve in a year once the ball is rolling.

Presenting this week to a class of MBAs taking an HR overview course, I had a chance to ask them what they were doing and why. Several mentioned they’d taken HR undergrad, but switched to marketing. I asked why. One said, “HR seemed to be all policies and rules. Marketing is more creative.” I chuckled, but I could see heads nodding around the room. I couldn’t let that go.

HR, done right, means figuring out with people what to do to make them more effective in the varied and challenging situations they encounter daily. It shouldn’t be about consulting the policy manual and telling them what the rules are. If that’s all it is, you can be sure we’ll soon see “Why We Hate HR 2″ written with even more negative accusations that the original.

Nothing, absolutely nothing is more creative than trying to figure out individuals’ idiosyncrasies and what strategies they can pursue to get what they want while ensuring everyone else has a shot at their goals, too. Rules truly are made, if not to be broken, at least bent, stretched, modified, turned to everyone’s advantage. And HR is the primary place that should occur. How else can we keep some sort of logic and balance in the midst of constant surging forward?

I purposely chose HR because I thought it was the greatest creative challenge, not the least and certainly not less than marketing, which always seems to boil down to trial and error based on focus groups and surveys. Sure there’s creativity in the pieces - the art, ideas, copy-writing and so forth, but mostly they evolve from earlier attempts and testing new materials. The elements of HR are often more constrained - union rules, CEOs orders, financial requirements, etc., but being hemmed in makes the challenge of finding a creative solution even greater.

In  most non-HR situations there’s usually time to test. With HR, you rarely have that luxury. You need solutions today or tomorrow. You need a true sense of what makes people tick… and the variations that exist in your particular culture, organization, unit, team and more. Figuring out how to align all that for everyone’s benefit is, to say the least, the most complex sort of challenge we ever face… so much so that many people just ignore it because they can’t face the creative struggle it often requires. So tell me you like marketing because it has rules, concepts or patterns that can evolve and room for new ideas, but don’t tell me it’s more that way than HR. It’s may not be your chosen field; you don’t have an aptitude for it, but not ‘uncreative.’ If that’s what we leave people with as an impression of HR, we deserve all the condemnation we’ve been getting.

Highly successful US retailer, Kohl’s, recently announced promotion of their President to CEO, duties until then held by their Chairman who now takes on direct responsibilities for… wait for it… HR, legal and real estate.

Industry observers correctly pointed out Kohl’s strong performance hardly suggests this is punishment for anything. It is exactly what the company says: great succession planning, keeping two strong performers growing. It’s even greater insight into what ensures the long term future of the organization – people!

You can bet the Chairman isn’t taking work away from the existing VP HR. The move is to give HR the top level, long term profile - and clout - it deserves.

This is a potentially visionary move in so many ways besides text-book succession planning it has to be copied by others. First it creates a logical separation between the roles of Chair and CEO, a fundamental under all the Sarbanes-Oxley accountability furor.

Second it separates the focus on shorter term, core objectives and the shorter term thinking that inevitably entails from longer term planning for growth and continued health. CEOs naturally tend to make personnel decisions with an eye to more immediate results. Separating that particular set of decisions reduces the tendency to judge mainly on immediate ups and downs in results and who can impact bonuses and instead takes into account the need to slowly rotate executives over time necessary to develop great leaders.

Third (and there are undoubtedly more potential benefits) it emphasizes team work among Board, Chair and CEO on these issues, exactly where more heads are better than one. It is notoriously hard for managers to select people for their own teams in isolation and promotions inevitably improve when more people are involved in the judgments. If the Chair is directly involved you can be sure others will aspire to be, too.

From a purely HR view, this is a huge step for an organization to maximize the value that it ought to be getting from this area of the business. You can be certain it will raise the profile of the VP HR, not lower it.

Now it only remains to be seen whether it will actually work. Moving toward broader team work isn’t a slam dunk. It takes patience and insight. You can be sure the learning challenge for everyone will be solid. But setting up the opportunity is an immense step forward.

It seems as soon as you write something like “let’s not change the name of HR” as I did just a few posts ago, the idea comes back to bite you. My point was the name “HR” reflected a true step up from Personnel and the limited administrative duties that implies, but there seems to be no step up intended in changing the name HR to People Department or something like that. Instead what most people want is simply that HR live up to its promise of drawing together everything that would make people happy and productive into one place.

I’ve rethought that. There is another step strategically for HR to take and I think it would be reflected in a term like Human Process. If HR becomes the Human Process Department and we rename its leader to VP, Human Process, I believe there should be a different strategic meaning attached.

The missing strategic step is that bosses can conveniently forget they are involved in human process every single day, that humans carry out the work and they operate according to processes that need to be understood and managed every single day… but not by the HR department, which certainly cannot be everywhere at once.

The problem with the term HR was fundamental. It implies, not too subtly either, that one executive and department owns and is responsible for everything to do with people in the organization. So if something is wrong, call HR to demand a fix. This is as dumb as saying Finance “owns” all the numbers; call finance to fix sales or cost.

We understand that every manager owns his or her own numbers. sales numbers, cost numbers and so forth, while Finance simply helps with the strategy and systems. But with HR countless employees and bosses seem to expect HR to magically fix everything - “go tell my boss” or introduce a new salary or bonus plan, a training program or, worst of all, a brand new performance appraisal system… won’t that surely take care of shortfalls in performance or better salary increases??? And HR falls into the trap time and again.

HP on the other hand would seem more likely to imply an executive with specialized knowledge and supports for human processes everywhere, but make it clearer that HP does not “own” these processes from start to finish. They must inevitably occur throughout every operation. Bosses carry out a continuous performance management process. Do they know how? Are they up on best practices? Are they managing it every day as they do with their budget numbers? Can they just turn it over to HR to create the perfect form and then fill in the blanks? Not if we understand it is a “process.” In other words, someone has to take an employee through a process to get a better result. That someone is not HR, nor is it a lock-step, check here process, hand back the form process.

So unless you expect HP to take over your department, be there every day and manage your employees, you don’t see HP as the owner of results. But you might expect HP to assist you in understanding how best to manage your employee processes based on the systems set up - the salary scales, the bonus plan and, yes, even the performance appraisal system, presuming these are designed to fit the organization, its culture and objectives.

What do you say?

The Human Capital Institute (whose Talent panel I sit on - full disclosure) has added several very interesting blogs including in my prime area of interest - leadership. The first real post raises the question of followership - what is it, how should it work, etc.?

This is typical of the growing interest in all thing Human Resources. These are perennial questions and will continue to be asked until we develop enough people who simply understand how leadership really works in their bones. Once the principles become a core part of everything we do in management, like the financial concept that income must exceed outgo, they will puzzle each new generation.

The blog refers us to a Harvard Working Knowledge item by Professor Emeritus, Jim Heskett, that is an relevant summary of what’s newly written about Followership, but it is the comments to that make it fascinating. I especially like the fourth one by Narasimhan Gopalan, VP, i-flex solutions, who observes that leadership and followership require the same qualities (and I would add skills).

Personally I prefer to use the term “supporters” rather than “followers.” The days of blind following are grinding slowly, but surely to an end. People think for themselves and are finding ways to act on those thoughts more than in the past. “Supporters” implies a leaders needs to nurture support, that it can be withdrawn at any sign of inconsistency or personal agenda and that the entire process is very much a two-way street. Leaders need supporters and supporters need leaders.

I especially like Narasimhan’s final comment which I thnk raises the most important question that hasn’t yet been well addressed. He says, ”Also, it is interesting to observe in the corporate world, the behavioural expectations set by the boss to his followers are [often] completely at a variance of the boss’ behaviour with his boss and peers. For example, boss expects his directs to engage in collective problem solving and dispute resolution through consensus, share the resources through mutual help, etc. while he/she does not exhibit such behaviour or exhibits exactly opposite behaviour. This is a case of selfishness and hypocrisy and hence it is important for the organizations to assess not only the results achieved by teams per se but also look at how they are achieved at somebody else’s cost! Here, the tools like 360 degree feedback could come in handy.

This very much echoes the comments in my earlier post about Claudia Joyce’s work that I’ve written about elsewhere (and will post when I find time). She endorses the same rules for leaders and the use of 360s to ensure they are promoting collaborative practices. Until more companies do that the problem Narahimhan reminds us of will be only too common.

Blogging, social networking and virtual worlds are going to be key tools that HR practitioners will need to understand whether they actually use them or not. They each may or may not have a place in corporate and HR strategies. Understanding typically improves with some do-it-yourself practice. In future posts I’ll cover my own halting explorations.

In the mean time tech gurus at Forrester Research have authored a great new book that gives the pros and cons of strategies and best practices - how and when to use blogging, net communities and more. It’s an easy, fast read for the uninitiated as well as many who think they know what these are all about.

Just wish the binding by Harvard Business (??) had held up longer than a week. But the information is invaluable and still readable nonetheless.

After several weeks sorting out how to get the blog running well, I realize I have so much material about what’s effective in Human Resources (HR) and leadership I could fill a dozen books not to mention a daily blog. Time to get going! Every day brings more confirmation that people are finally understanding how powerfully these topics affect results.,, but not necessarily how to manage them most effectively.

I’m happy to say there are more new communities on these topics shaping up. Just this past week I’ve joined a couple and may report further once I assess their value and openness to being identified. Each one brings a flood of new information, though, which can be challenging. What to believe, what to focus on? We can’t pay attention to everything, but HR and leadership are ascending today.

Case in point, one of the new links’ newsletters pointed to a summary of an interesting study by Booz & Company who follow the world’s largest 2500 companies and report only 2.1% of CEOs among them have been fired for poor performance while average tenure has been 9.4 years over the ten year period they looked at.

Assuming the data are correct, that’s far less turnover than the widely reported 2.6 year average tenure for CEOs in general. So, do big companies really have better people? Given that stats also show most big companies (with certain distinct exceptions) fall from grace over any 20 year you want to look at, it would appear more likely that Boards simply aren’t acting on big company CEOs as often as they should.

What most research of this sort raises is the question of which stats to pay attention to and how to interpret them when they appear more or less in a vacuum, unconnected to related information that contradicts or reinforces them.

How do you judge? That’s a question we will increasingly ask ourselves as the Internet continues to deluge us with such questions. I’m interested in opinions….

Recently I found and joined a new HR Bloggers group - a Ning community (Ning.com) - that I ran into via LinkedIn. As HR takes off as a powerful force in organizations I think there are going to be a lot more of these.

These social networking sites are starting to make sense finally. As with many things, you learn if you work with a system for a while even if you aren’t sure what use if may be. It’s a relatively easy form of risk-taking that may produce results. If not, you haven’t lost much.

Anyway, if you’re reading my blog today, you’ll see a variety of odd colors as the designers I’ve contracted via Elance work on changes I’ve requested. The elance process has been another of those learning experiences. I’m not fully opening it up to the public till the changes are in place and I’ve begun again with my HR-related posing.

As a start I thought I’d post the answer I put on HR Bloggers to the question: why stay in HR? For me it goes like this:

I’m staying in HR because this is where the action is for the next few centuries. People working better together can make our organizations far more effective. Not only will everyone make more money, but they will have a fighting chance of enjoying it while solving the problems we’re creating all over the world.

We’re seeing a sea change in organizations toward understanding that people are the most important ingredient. Ours is the most complex (therefore most interesting) and impactful area of organizational work. We will begin getting the respect this work deserves… as soon as we start convincing everyone what needs to be done. Fortunately bookstore shelves are rapidly filling with proof and advice that will get CEOs thinking they need us. Now… are we up to it?