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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That’s a testament to a number of key observations. First, you can set out to and succeed at creating a great place to work. Second, it’s hard to retrofit once cynicism has started if you haven’t created one from scratch (but I’ve seen it done). Third, line officers have to get involved to drive the process and walk the talk. You can’t just task HR with it and walk away.

He goes on to draw out the idea that engagement can actually go up in difficult economic times, but only with specific attention to making employees feel safe, valued and not hopelessly over-worked. Companies that have managed this are clearly positioned to get the best from everyone and are far more likely to outdo those who don’t believe it’s possible.

He also pokes fun at another common myth – that managers shouldn’t have to ‘engage’ employees, that staff should just take care of that themselves, presumably along with being grateful to have a job. He quotes an astonished CFO who notes, “. an epiphany; I realized for the first time that managing
people is a big part of my job.” When did we allow ourselves to promote people to manage others who didn’t realize this? Forever, unfortunately. We don’t expect financial results to manage themselves, or new technology or marketing.

Pretty well everyone knows perfectly well we normally don’t give people the title “manager” unless they are being promoted to a position with people reporting to them, but somehow about 80% fail to notice that actually managing them is a key part of the job and most companies fail to ensure any specific training is provided in this. Most act as if it comes automatically. Duh! We know many people learn finance and marketing in school. We also know nearly no one learns leadership there. so how do we suddenly presume them to be effective at it? This would be amazingly funny if it wasn’t so sad. and so universal.

Does anyone see this changing?

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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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On CLO Magazine’s blog, the question came up, “why aren’t there more people willing to step up to front line leadership?” One commenter observed, we don’t train enough. True, but I wrote this:

“I agree that we rarely teach practical leadership skills when we promote people or prepare them for promotion. We throw them in and let them sink or swim… and then some time later we try to teach them. In fact the skills have to be learned on the job with a coach (the boss, if the boss has leadership skills, which 80% don’t according to many surveys).

“However I think a growing factor today is that we expect the leaders to make sure the work is done even if they have to do it themselves – no excuses – do it or you’re out, so taking on leadership is taking on an unbelievable workload… still with no training on how to get others cooperating in getting it done. Sound like a good deal? Here, you be leader, you do all the work,  we won’t show you how to successfully delegate… and then maybe we’ll fire you… in many states ‘at will’ with no recourse or severance… and you’ll be totally humiliated in the process most likely. Wow. I’ll take that risk. I’m exaggerating… slightly, but there are lots of organizations who do this to at least some of their promoted managers. Any wonder it scares people off?

“We desperately need to remedy this, but it seems to be one leader at a time and it starts with taking a brutally honest look at what those we promote are expected to do.”

This certainly doesn’t apply to every situation or organization, but not only is little training provided to actual managers, very few believe in trying to help potential leaders learn the skills BEFORE they are promoted. Often I see leaders who are being offered training or coaching where it is ‘too little, too late.’ They’ve already alienated their teams or at least fallen into patterns that aren’t highly productive and now have a hard time changing. It only really became clear answering this question and realizing that I was trying to be bluntly honest. If nothing else I think it illustrates the benefits of asking ourselves these questions via blogs and other means. Self-examination certainly reveals what we need to fix. I’m sure I’ve been as guilty as many when I didn’t provide training BEFORE it was needed.

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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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Author, David Brooks, cites interesting research showing that CEOs of today’s successful companies lack people skills, extraversion, openness and social agreeableness in study after study. that what distinguishes most is emotional stability and conscientiousness (these are ‘the Big Five’ that psychologists generally agree define personalities). He suggests charisma isn’t valuable, as Jim Collins showed in Good to Great, but in doing so he mixes apples and oranges.

First, it confirms my assertion that many of today’s large organization CEOs lack the skills they will need to lead with utmost effectiveness especially in the coming years of a new type of worker. That’s what Collins is getting at, too. He found only a handful of big company CEOs had taken their companies from Good to Great and kept them there. However, Collins’ findings reinforce that you need openness and sociability (though perhaps not extraversion) to reach the most successful CEO level – to lead effective teams. Quiet team-builders emerged as his preferred model and I agree.

What the other research confirms is what Collins also found – that most sizable company CEOs today are OK, but not superstars. It’s not their lack of charisma (Collins’ winners didn’t have it either), but more importantly lack of ability to build teams. Most are detail-oriented drivers who keep everyone’s nose to the grindstone where more open, creative solutions would be better. The grindstone approach keeps things going and creates incremental improvement, but doesn’t help things take off. Brooks notes that, but equates Collins’ top leaders with the grinders, which isn’t accurate.

All in all, as we struggle to get clarity about how top leaders should actually look, we find few companies yet understand it well enough to make the best choices. And that may be due to the fact that we have years of grinders lingering at the top choosing people like themselves. These are ’safe’ candidates, without a lot of personality actually, unlike the major characters that bring together all the right skills like Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, Walton of Wal-mart, Welch of GE and other highly individual, but interesting styles.

Just because the bulk of OK companies today are run by ‘grinders’ (if I can call them that somewhat unfairly because most bring something more than that, just not enough more), that doesn’t mean this is what companies SHOULD look for. There is a better model. Collins got it right. We need to figure out how to develop it and then we need to start hiring for those qualities.

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Reading their link to the “First Pages” of the older book is really worthwhile to make instantly clear the history of effective HR and OD and how early lessons apply directly today, ultimately explaining how smart financial leaders led us into the current mess.

Conclusion? McLaughlin quotes Weisbord. .from 1987! “The world is changing too fast for experts, and old-fashioned “problem-solving” no longer works. For the past forty years productive workplaces on several continents have been evolving another way entirely of thinking and acting. First, they have been moving away from problem-solving toward whole-systems improvement as the secret for solving great handfuls of problems at once. Second, they have been moving away from getting experts to fix systems toward having experts join everybody else in learning how to make improvements.”

Doesn’t that sound like social networking and The Wisdom of Crowds over command-and-control leadership? You bet! So why haven’t we arrived yet at the point where everyone understands this? I suppose double-entry bookkeeping wasn’t thoroughly accepted by 100% of business for its first hundred years either, though now you wouldn’t start into serious business management without such basic accounting.

McLaughlin goes on to link another excellent article by NYT’s Nicholas Kristof, illustrating how well-functioning groups should be able to out-do experts and ties it directly to today’s disasters. When will we finally learn these lessons and concentrate on leading in new ways?

PS: I love one of Kristof’s references to Berkeley’s Philip Tetlock (author of the 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment – which could have been subtitled ‘yeah, right’). Tetlock, he notes, uses the description “hedgehog” in a negative way. For me that illustrates balancing Jim Collins’ use of it in Good to Great to describe the positive need for focus, which in turn illustrates again the need for balance rather than too much of any one element of effective leadership. And in many cases balance only is achievable by including more people in the process of leadership.

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Kenneth is an HR systems guy who says he totally agrees with Beatty that “HR fails to understand the real link between productivity and people.” Here’s someone who, like Beatty, presumably works with HR people in large organizations blandly continuing the stereotype and broad-brushing ‘all’ HR.

My point? If HR doesn’t start to stand up and correct these mistaken, but all-day-every-day, comments we will truly be the failures so many already take for granted. It’s because of such standard assumptions that HR has such an uphill battle for budget, resources, great people and ‘a seat at the table.’ It’s fine that some individuals have spectacularly overcome these, but we’re doing a disservice to other professionals in our field if we don’t speak up whenever and wherever this myth is propagated.

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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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The first knee-jerk reaction in many companies is serious lay-offs. In good times these would generally please stock analysts because they seem to cut the cost base and therefore should increase profits, but when they’re done in tough times, they’re more of a last grasp at survival and won’t have that positive effect. Moreover, they cost a lot – a sudden cash  outflow for severance and notice pay… and you inevitably lose a number of excellent people. You can’t identify, nor can you automatically be sure you’re removing, the so-called ‘deadwood’ (lovely way to refer to staff), right?

So you end up short staffed in some areas and still over-staffed for the moment in others. You can’t simply shuffle the extras into the gaps. It never quite works out as you want or anticipate. Even before the inevitable upturn comes you have to madly try to hire great replacements just when everyone else is trying, too. Cost savings haven’t even begun by this time because you’re still paying for terminations and now you’ve got to pay more to hire. Especially this time we’re going to come out into a very tight hiring market due to boomer retirements and the massively growing need for better leadership for flatter, more dispersed organizations. And by the way, no one will trust you due to massive layoff hangover.

So what should you do? I’m all for biting the bullet in a number of ways. Beef up performance discussions and use them as a basis for carefully chosen lay-offs on a much smaller scale. Two or three months of performance focus usually identifies and justifies focused departures. Don’t be so sure a big across-the-board cut now is the answer. Focus more on performance and positioning people for better performance when things start to turn so you’re early out of the gate with better leaders and better teams revved up to succeed against weakened competitors. Spend some money on training the right people. Use the time you should have ’spare’ from lesser workloads. Don’t fill everyone’s time with scurrying to find cuts or justify not cutting in their areas. You’ll just stress them and tire them out for when you need them at full speed in the upturn.

When things start to pick up, don’t automatically start hiring. Use your improved skills to absorb the work through increased productivity – gaps that weaker companies have to fill by rapid hiring and the mistakes that they will inevitably make as a result. You can always hire when the burst of panic hiring is waning and people who took the first job that came along are becoming dissatisfied.

Does this paint a picture? Those companies that don’t react with panic either in the down- or the upturns have a much greater chance of doing things better than the competition. A recession can be a golden opportunity to position yourselves for a far more secure future. But, of course, most companies argue that this is all very logical, they just can’t. Sadly, for some that’s true, but for others, they just aren’t looking at the logical time frames that such relatively slow HR processes inevitably take. If layoffs today meant cost-savings tomorrow morning, panic might work. But in the months these things take to roll out, times will start to change. Don’t get caught like so many rolling with exactly the wrong waves at the wrong moments.

Does this sound familiar? Successful organizations don’t manage today, they manage tomorrow. A little planning and courage go a long way toward making better leadership.

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The answer unequivocally is yes. While it may be obvious that you ought to be able to achieve this, it clearly isn’t obvious how, since the McKinsey & Company survey presented by their head of North America (partial data here, more more data here) confirmed once again the long known fact that most mergers and significant changes fail. Only a third of all transformations succeed well or extremely well and major change tends to be even worse on average.

If you had to leave early you’d be forgiven for thinking this is old news, though always useful to know if it’s changing. And it seems to be… slightly. The study was useful in distinguishing types of change, some being harder than others, and especially for identifying what it takes to succeed and pitfalls. It was very interesting to hear these backed up by real experiences of the panelists who represented major organizations: a bank, a telco and a large hospital.

What was most interesting was to see the use of ‘complexity science’ language to describe what’s needed. Positive Deviance describes the process of looking for an example that is unusually successful and then using that to discover what works and why to replicate it. It’s a scientific advance especially in human behavior matters that again should be totally obvious, but isn’t. It’s been used with amazing results in situations as diverse as ending plagues in Africa to avoiding antibiotic resistant infections in modern hospitals (health care has been particularly active using it, but it fits in any industry).

In general what turned up was that all these organizations are using the knowledge gained from research and data more and more when it comes to managing people – again obvious, but late in developing. Many senior leaders wouldn’t think of ignoring market research or financial facts, but blithely used to toss aside scientific discoveries in the HR/people management field because "they know how people behave." After all, don’t we all. We’re people; we’ve watched people manage well and poorly for years, so of course we all think we know. Yet the success rate of keeping people engaged shows otherwise. It was gratifying to hear from such senior people in major organizations that more weight is being given to actually learning from research. I will likely find more to say over time about this particular event, which made a lot of points concretely visible. Great work!

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One article talks about how to retain staff, advice as it happens from a fellow speaker, sales guru Jeff Mowatt. To help employees stay engaged by finding the interesting parts of even a dull job, he likens this to the Japanese Tea Ceremony, where the details become interesting even in a supposedly mundane event. By so doing, you keep them excited about what they can do for the customer of the job even when many people would find the work by itself boring.

In another, another fellow speaker, Steven Little, encourages rewarding oneself for basic achievements that take work – in his case, a milkshake for getting himself to a distant speaking engagement. And then he proceeds to casually outline five keys to effective leadership in organizations as an added bonus.

Then Berlitz Canada offers advice on adding key skills that improve your thinking and career options simultaneously – no surprise this would be learning another language, a bit obvious, but nonetheless very true.

More and more we see popular press picking up bits that in years past would have appeared only in management magazines. Today every employee wants and needs to know about the skills involved not only in managing their own success, but what would help organizations they’re involved in, too. The great value of this is that it makes managing more transparent for everyone, demystifies it and shows the links between what’s good for the individual as well as the organization at the same time.

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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.

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