The Biggest Problem For HR Strategy

Author: Dave Crisp

28 Aug

Over the last years and months I’ve come to believe the biggest problem with HR Strategy and getting results is individual leaders. We know in all companies there are pockets of satisfied, highly motivated, engaged employees who turn out superb work. We also know those are mostly the exceptions. Results and motivation are lost because the good work in one area is cancelled out or sidetracked by what’s going wrong in others. Only a handful of companies have spread engagement thoroughly across their organizations.

We further know that it’s the leader of each unit who makes this happen or not. So I’ve been pursuing the question ‘what’s the problem, why is it so hard to develop enough positive leaders to establish a culture (a set of typical habits) of supportive, innovative leadership across an entire organization?’ We know exactly what behaviors are actually necessary to achieve this and they are things anyone can do, any day, anywhere, if they simply keep them in mind and do them. These can work almost literally by rote if need be. And if you get someone behaving a certain way, their thinking usually changes to match according to psychologists. So why can’t we get leaders giving positive reinforcement, asking for feedback, supporting trial and error and so forth – the keys to great results?

The answer seems to be that we all too easily fall back into ‘natural’ ways of behaving toward others. We find it hard to empathize in most situations (some are far better than others) and without that guide to how another person might feel, we do what first comes to mind – which often means we immediately critique what’s wrong, follow our own instincts without reference to others opinions, etc.

Reading the 2008 autobiography of a US turnaround specialist (The Turnaround Kid by Steve Miller) gives some insight into these problems. He helped Lee Iacocca save Chrysler and then wrote a particularly damning condemnation of Iacocca’s leadership behavior, which he repeats in the book – lack of listening, favoritism, ego-generated strategy blindness and more.

A couple of assignments later he turned around massive construction company, MK, where he followed fired CEO Bill Agee. Bill ‘managed’ MK for his last two years from his Pebble Beach, California mansion, requiring Boise, Idaho head office execs to fly down for ‘instructions.’ Visiting Boise he was known to wear a bullet proof vest for fear of employees and his execs learned to wait a day before implementing his orders because his much younger, controversial wife from a scandal-rocked former work liaison would often convince him to change decisions. Really. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s all on record. But people still hire Bill for management advice. Really.

Miller, a self-styled sensitive manager, despite being a hard-nosed, typical CFO-type by style and training was able to do the right things – most of the time. He did remarkable jobs in numerous situations, including Chrysler and MK, of motivating and aligning large numbers of employees and unions to accept cuts and bankers to take lower rates on loans.

Surprisingly, even he stumbled later when he took on saving Delphi, the near-bankrupt auto parts spin-off of GM, where he promptly put his feet straight into his mouth. He insulted unions and even landscape staff as greedy for accepting on-par pay with the rest of the automotive industry. At the same time he was proposing cuts for them and increases in the C-suite. That’s a far cry from earlier massaging of pay cuts by empathetically pointing out everyone was in the same boat and awarding himself a $1 a year salary. Most recently he’s back (just this summer) to save AIG. It remains to be seen which approach he will take, but the bigger question is how can even a person who knows how to behave effectively suddenly do the reverse and create major problems? Was it just perception or a major glitch? At least we can be sure he has noticed and will rethink.

I’m not sure I have answers, but for HR and organization effectiveness this may be the biggest question of all.

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Filed under: 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Books, Coaching Yourself, Fix The Jerks, Leaders of the Future

What’s Courage, Whose Courage?

Author: Dave Crisp

21 Aug

From “old blood and guts” Patton to the newest entrepreneur, the media idolize courage – the sheer guts to initiate an enterprise and take the risks needed to pursue it persistently and make it work – as if it is all personal, all the ‘guts’ of just one individual.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We’ve Come A Long Way… Maybe

Author: Dave Crisp

15 Aug

Perhaps the title should be “the more it changes..” Last night’s news highlighted two workplace-related items. First 61 charges laid, with potential fines totaling $17,000,000, for safety violations in a building renovation that resulted in four workers dying. Will company leaders get the message? Does it really take that much to ensure people understand job safety is mandatory?

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

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

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

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

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

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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, Business/Strategy, Current Affairs, Fix The Jerks, Leaders of the Future

Learning Emotions – A Strategic Imperative Now

Author: Dave Crisp

30 Jul

Every so often a new idea comes along that you know will have huge impact – like email or Google – simple, yet startlingly powerful. Can you see the implications beyond the basics?

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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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, 5 Habits - Action, Business/Strategy, Human Resources (HR), Leaders of the Future

Who Trusts Whom?

Author: Dave Crisp

25 Jul

A number of topics reminded me in recent weeks of the Proust quotation: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. This applies, for one, to the usual way we look at trust in organizations..

One of the measures relevant to engaging employees is always whether they trust management. But isn’t it even more relevant to ask whether management trusts employees.

That is – to ask whether leaders believe employees have the capacity to contribute meaningfully. A great many managers treat employees as cogs in the machine. They don’t want or expect employees to bring their brains to work, just their hands as has often been observed. Follow orders, produce what’s asked of you when we ask. Shift to the new strategy when we tell you to. All formulas for disengagement on a massive scale.

Effective leaders take calculated risks. And one major area of risk is trusting employees to come up with useful ideas and then supporting and helping troubleshoot with them through the inevitable organizational hurdles – no budget, tried that before, not workable for any number of reasons.

Now it’s likely the manager isn’t going to fully understand or see the idea in the same light of certainty as the employee. In fact, highly effective leaders often spend lots of energy encouraging employees to try ideas that neither of them is completely certain about. If either was completely certain it wouldn’t be a very creative, novel, untested idea with the potential to dramatically improve things, but just a moderate extension of what’s already known to work.

It takes courage to encourage (notice the similarity of words) a subordinate to take a risk that may reflect badly on both of you at some point. That’s why it’s so important in companies to establish a culture in which ideas, pilots, trial and error and reasonable mistakes are supported and promoted. That way managers feel supported in supporting their employees’ ideas in turn.

So when we look at trust, it’s important to see that it works both ways and, as with all strategies, starts from the top. If top managers don’t support risk-taking and trial and error and don’t trust employees to be testing things that seems a bit outside the box, how can we expect employees to blindly trust managers? This becomes increasingly true day by day as we evolve into an era in which every organization’s survival depends on continual creativity and improvement – so much so that no single senior executive or executive team can possibly come up with, let alone test, enough ideas to sustain competitiveness into the unpredictable future we all face.

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Filed under: 1 Balance - Judgment, 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Fix The Jerks, Leaders of the Future

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

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

Interesting Leadership Blog

Author: Dave Crisp

9 May

Having just returned from the think-tank-like HR|People & Strategy 2010 conference in San Diego, some follow up searching led to a blog I hadn’t found previously that has some very interesting analyses of current trends in management. It’s well researched, including some references to ideas and individuals who were presented at the conference.

It’s a UK organization called Four Groups and the article that particularly caught my eye is this one. Issues like portability of talent, the futility of individual bonuses and other myths surrounding top talent are not only topical in the HR field, but apply to any organization that wants to maximize performance. This piece also contains a link to an interview with Dr. Karen Stephenson, the only speaker at the San Diego conference to get a standing ovation from the human resource professionals present.

Dr. Stephenson spoke from years of research about the current trend toward emphasizing trust within organizations. These are all timely, of course, in light of how much trust and confidence have been lost by the public in business generally, and these are highly related to my theme of ‘fix the jerks’ that emphasizes how poor leadership destroys value in organizations of all shapes and sizes.

What also comes out of this is how wide spread the move to more detailed understanding of HR is and how much there is to study.

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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, Business/Strategy, Coaching Issues, Fix The Jerks, Leaders of the Future

Do senior execs ‘engage’ with HR issues?

Author: Dave Crisp

14 Mar

One advantage of reading a lot of HR blogs and news in a short time is that items fall together and suggest new ideas. The Canadian HR Reporter piece about HR in Vietnam and Cambodia (“Growing HR in Vietnam, Cambodia,” March 8, 2010), got me re-reading last year’s piece about HR in China (“Business of people behind Great Wall,” Canadian HR Reporter, May 4, 2009). Great strides are being made in all three countries, but some toss-away comments stand out most.

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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Napoleon’s Glance

Author: Dave Crisp

23 Feb

Strategically it sometimes pays to step back from daily routine and read or experience something different… but not necessarily too different – the busman’s holiday they call it – as when you work for a charity, gaining pleasure and learning from doing more of what you do at work. Reading for pleasure, I stumbled on a book by William Duggan, associate professor of management at Columbia Business School, an expert on strategic thinking and author of three books in the field – The Art of What Works (2001), Napoleon’s Glance (2004) and Strategic Intuition (2007). The gist: Napoleon and other amazing leaders followed a route to highly effective strategy that is very, very different from what is normally thought of as strategic planning or strategic thinking.

The principles apply directly to HR strategy. Oddly, just recently, one of the many HR/Learning & Development blogs out there published “Four tips for Effective Leadership,” namely: Be counterintuitive, live comfortably in gray areas, learn by doing and exercise soft skills – exactly what Duggan points to with his great strategists. Strategy isn’t arrived at by ‘planning’ in the sense of laying out exact steps and stages with time lines and benchmarks. Napoleon and the others ‘put their teams in motion,’ ‘looked for small battles they could win decisively,’ ’stuck to the course with firm resolution,’ and learned to evolve strategies as they went rather than work them out in detail beforehand.

Reading these, I realized that, yes, most successes I ran into along the way evolved ‘in the midst of action’ (a phrase I also recognized from a Zen master talking about finding your way calmly ‘in the midst of action’). Does this apply to HR? My former company got into elearning early and heavily, with great results, because we were asked to look at ‘expert systems’ that the CEO saw at a conference (a different computer technology) and we jumped to use the budget and just get going, without being in the least sure where we were headed, but seeing some possibilities in using technical systems to leverage more people learning more things.

If we’d waited for our IT process that called for developing a technical plan in detail, with projected costs three to five years out, we’d never have gotten off the ground. Yet planning is valuable. In the words of Eisenhower, the top allied General of WWII, “Plans are nothing, planning is everything.” The difference, in other words, is active versus passive. Get going, planning as you go, through the unexpected twists and uncertainties – don’t wait for “a plan” designed to resolve something you think may happen – it won’t.

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Archive for the ‘Leaders of the Future’ Category

The Biggest Problem For HR Strategy

What’s Courage, Whose Courage?

We’ve Come A Long Way… Maybe

Learning Emotions – A Strategic Imperative Now

Who Trusts Whom?

Diversity Powers Innovation

Times Are Changing When Police Can Teach HR

Interesting Leadership Blog

Do senior execs ‘engage’ with HR issues?

Napoleon’s Glance

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