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.

Listening to Kevin Cashman this week on the update of his well-known leadership book offered a chance to reflect on the extent to which the climate in which HR (Human Resources) operates is changing… or isn’t. Interesting that Cashman’s writing retains its Zen flavor, something one might think wouldn’t sell well in the corporate world, but he’s been consistent for more than ten years now.

Cashman updated his book to include more research and case studies that confirm the value of its recommendations – that to create change, a leader must first change him or herself. It’s a message more leaders need to hear. In fact, in my piece for Canadian HR Reporter, I make the point that this is why there are so many bad leaders, a question we constantly hear. A leader who thinks their role is to tell others to change, but has no intention or expectation of changing themselves is a bad leader and there are lots.

Cashman’s point with the update is there are many companies beginning to notice this principle and use it to hire or promote better CEOs who in turn create and lead better executive teams, who in turn lead more effectively for results. The problem is that “many” is a relative term. Where before there might have been a handful of such companies, now there are twice or three times as many – still a handful compared to the vast number of organizations out there.

Listening to Cashman and knowing he’s been stumping the world at conference after conference for years makes one wonder how many of have to push this message out before it becomes everyday stuff for leaders in organizations. Somewhere there is a tipping point, to borrow Malcolm Gladwell’s book title and concept. It can’t come too soon for all the people who continue to struggle in companies that haven’t picked up on this message.

As it happens, it’s my pleasure to MC a Gladwell book launch event shortly after his new book, Outliers, hits the shelves finally next Tuesday. I’m grateful to have this opportunity to finally meet him as well as hear directly what he has to say. Of course, I’ll be posting about it shortly after that.

Times are really changing for leadership and HR when such information is absorbed so readily and more people seek to put it to use. How Outliers is received will be the next measure of how much.

There’s that magic word “or” again. John Haggerty was lamenting this week on Workforce Management that  most of the HR people he meets lately are “business partners” – generalists who sit in the business next to business leaders and help them implement general HR solutions. He asks whether we shouldn’t expect these individuals to be specialists in at least one of the HR “silos” – compensation, benefits, labor relations, etc.

You probably know my take on “or” by now. It should almost always be “and.” Yes, generalists should have a specialty… and specialists should also be generalists. No matter how long they’ve worked in their specialty, no matter how much time they spend on it and intend to spend on it in the future, they should NOT fail to review what they do and propose in generalist terms. Will the average line manager understand and value what they’re suggesting, will the business “in general” benefit?

The reason HR is often perceived as isolated from the rest of the business is exactly this problem. Generalists sitting in the business side with line managers in viewing most of what comes from central “centers of excellence” as we now call them as being too ivory tower oriented, not workable in the real world. Specialists on the other hand tear their hair out wondering why the line never adopts programs fully (and then complains they don’t work).

But isn’t this a challenge in almost every area of a business. The marketers don’t want to step over to get experience in HR. After all they know for a fact that marketing is much more important and so that’s where they want to spend all their time. They complain those finance guys limit their budgets because they don’t understand. But the finance guys don’t want to get any experience in marketing and certainly not in HR because, after all, finance is the ultimate key to the business… right… sigh.

So let’s hear it for specialists who are also generalists and generalists who have a specialty. I mean for real, not simply some silo’d wonk who thinks they understand the business better than the people who work at it day to day or vice versa. At some point in every career, people need at least a bit of experience in both… or very good empathy and imaginations to understand what it’s like to walk in the other person’s shoes. Being one or the other simply isn’t effective; we need to think “both.”

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.

Yes… and no. Many HR professionals believe protecting employees is one of their duties. That is true in a large sense, but it is rarely easy to protect individuals in specific situations, at least, not without their help and cooperation, which frequently is lacking.

It will be interesting to see what action Norway’s SAS airlines takes now that  public bullying of older pilots by young ones who want them to retire (to reduce possible layoffs) has received world wide attention (example - Canadian HR Reporter).   Workplace Violence News quotes a study by the global-oriented Employment Law Alliance which found almost half of all employees at one time or another have been bullied by a boss. 50% of those bosses and 84% of the victims are women, suggesting bullying is equally distributed, but victimhood belongs to those at least  perceived to be in the weaker position.

Fortunately today there are lots of resources for bullied individuals who care to search. I like the Robert Mueller’s BullyingBosses.com for one, but there are lots and it helps to read several before deciding what to do.

The key, inevitably, begins with the victim sad to say. SAS is a relatively typical example - a company alerted months ago, yet  to date unwilling or unable to manage effective solutions. In the past they’ve stood out as a good employer with some great HR strategies. But bullying is particularly challenging to address.

Of course it should have started long ago with a Harassment Prevention policy clearly posted and consistently managed. That would make it easy to fire the s.o.b. who posted suggestions for harassing older pilots by freezing them out of social activities. It would also set them on the path of finding and having the police charge those who reportedly are talking about breaking legs and worse. There is no excuse and should be zero tolerance for such outrages – a case where zero tolerance makes total sense.

Most bullying is not so overt, however, or at least it is not so visible to management. Most bullies would likely be happy to bully everyone, but don’t because some people are immune for various reasons and so they settle on those who aren’t and who react. Most tire of persecuting those who shrug and ignore them. Their miserable behaviors are focused in limited areas on specific individuals. If companies have trouble helping victims, that’s even more true of surrounding co-workers who tend to offer advice quietly, but probably correctly want to stay out of the direct line of fire.

If it is so easy to say “just ignore them” why do so many victims suffer repeated torture to the point of quitting or worse? There are as many answers as individuals involved, but first and foremost, people get rattled and don’t recognize the many actions they could take. Bullies, on the other hand, will inevitably apply their nasty side to someone, so the lowest tolerance individual, even if they’re reasonably good at ignoring the bully, will continually be subjected to unacceptable behavior. Ignoring only takes you so far.

The fact is this sort of behavior goes on constantly. HR can’t stamp it out totally any more than they can stamp out office romance. It’s human nature and will creep back in no matter how “zero tolerance” we say the policy is. We need to be careful about what we characterize as zero tolerance because there will always be ways around it, situations that fall through the cracks and individuals we can’t touch who will make a mockery of the concept.

The biggest challenge is we don’t prepare people effectively. Strong employees realize there are things they can do. Weaker ones will be basket cases before they’re discovered or complain loudly enough to be heard. By then it is usually too late to protect them. They have reached the point of quitting and do so either directly or indirectly by falling into long term illnesses, constructive dismissal or human rights retaliation.

What we need is a general sort of protective training that makes everyone, including bullies, aware there are always solutions to disrespect and bullying in all their subtle variations. But those solutions begin with people reaching out and seeking solutions and participating in working with the boss/bully to solve the behavior as opposed to waiting for it to break them down and then lashing out in whatever form they fall into. We need these systems in place long before instances of bullying start coming to our attention or we can’t “protect” individuals. The first defense will always be to help them be strong enough to work through solutions. That is unlikely to take root if they arrive already at wits end.

Marcus sure gets mentioned a lot both by those who agree you shouldn’t waste time trying to change your weaknesses, only work on strengths and those who strongly dispute that. If you’ve followed my posts you may guess I believe in doing both! That’s the Zen answer. But which ones when and how much?

A key function of Human Resources is trying to get people hired or existing ones moved into jobs that fit their strengths. Buckingham would be right in thinking I’d be wasting my time aiming for the Olympics, definitely not in my strengths. But every athlete or manager who legitimately wants his or her role and has talent still has “weaknesses” to work on. It would make no difference to me if my biggest problem in the 100 meter dash  was my start, but for those who win or lose by microseconds, knowing their weaknesses and working on them is huge. And to suggest they not bother would be completely wrong.

So, should we only work on strengths – no way! But starting with strengths and working on them as well as what makes them weaker than they could be is essential. Since studies show the lowest rated skills for most leaders are all aspects of working with people (versus things), we clearly need to promote those with inclination and relevant ability, but we also need to work hard to ensure they get exposed to experiences that help them grow people skills.

Tips: How to choose what to work on

Ideally trial and error and solid self-reflection have landed you in a job you like a lot. (If not, figuring out what you really prefer is priority #1.) Then, to get better at what you like doing:

1.    Try to evaluate and especially ask others for their opinions of your strengths and weaknesses for this work. Take time to assess accuracy. Don’t be reactive to emotional issues about these and don’t take anyone’s first word, especially your own.

2.    Work on your three or four biggest strengths… by looking at your weaknesses in those areas, planning a strategy to improve them and consistently doing a bit each day whenever they come up. Set reminders for yourself or you’ll forget.

3.    Then look at your two or three biggest weaknesses. Really look. Some may not be as bad as you think; others are worse. Be aware you have a couple of approaches – first, get someone else to do those things instead (a team member, co-leader, spouse, etc.). Figure out how to be great without ever doing these. Don’t let yourself be tempted. Pamper the people who do this for you so you’ll never have to. …But also… decide on one, just one, weakness you really, really, really want to change. Create a plan and work on it every day, asking people continually how you are doing and asking for their help and suggestions. Make this into a daily habit of practice. In a few months or a year or two, evaluate your results. Chances are you’ve made enough progress (and built some continuing habits) that you can choose a second miserable area to work on. But expect to keep working on these for the rest of your life. They will never come entirely naturally.

4.    Periodically assess your results and the balance between work on strengths and weaknesses, not letting either completely absorb your energy – do both. The proportion of time you spend on each is a balance only you can decide.

The bottom line is you can’t easily change weaknesses, but you better know what they are and have a strategy to prevent them de-railing you. Over time you can certainly improve some of these areas, but only if you work hard on one at a time and choose only those you really want to change… and then persist, persist, persist. For me this has meant a lifelong drive to get over feeling shy. I’ve developed tons of behaviors that work most of the time, but there are still areas where my original habits continue to affect what I do and unless the day ever comes that isn’t the case, I’ll keep this in mind and keep working away at little bits.

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?

A steady stream of items reflecting progress in human resources arrives every week now. Momentum is picking up. Each step takes us further on the way to full recognition that HR is, in Jack Welch’s words, “the second most important job in any organization.”

Widely reported in the past week, major retail jewelry operator, Zale Corporation, promoted it’s EVP of HR, Legal and Corporate Strategy, Theo Killion, to President. Now you might expect as in years past this would be a legal expert serving as in-house counsel who makes deals and plans strategy from a legal-financial perspective and, oh yes, happens to have HR tucked under his wing. In this case Mr. Killion is a 30-year HR veteran who worked his way up to over-see the other jobs. HR is first in his background. Moreover he is tasked in part with continuing to promote diversity, which he personally exemplifies - a forward-looking strategy for results as well as doing the right thing.

Then the mail bag brought the latest “People & Strategy” - the journal of the Human Resource Planning Society - filled with a series of articles about CEO succession (and pay).

No great news on managing pay better I fear. Boards continue to struggle with the best ways to pay CEOs. Although the theory is firming up they should be paid for on-going performance once they’ve been attracted with a competitive base salary, the problem is how to measure the connection with performance. One article proposed a system that was then nearly universally dumped on by a half dozen experts.

So, what’s good on the horizon for the future?

As an aside, I hear from sources in various industries that top HR salaries are getting into the ozone, too, giving CFOs some concern they might be eclipsed pay-wise. The same group noted they are seeing more MBA students who have chosen the HR track in the belief this is where the action will be. They are right. Hopefully they are getting that advice from their MBA schools, too. The goal really isn’t to get paid well just for the money, but to see HR and what it does for organizations recognized and given the clout at least on a par with other senior roles.

The four main articles on succession were right on, backed up well, agreed on the same key points and made sense. What really stood out were two listing competencies for CEOs of the future - among them both explicitly emphasized a heavy dose of humility along with confidence - in balance. It was refreshing to see it clearly spelled out as a specific requirement!

CEOs need courage to take risks in rapidly changing environments and at the same time the ability to listen, absorb advice and ideas from others in the Board and the organization and meld all of that into best guesses. All this requires the humility to understand no one person has the ultimate right answer to any situation any more and Boards seem finally to be getting that. Complexity is the driving factor and makes the ability to assimilate diversity of opinion, knowledge and experience increasingly crucial.

And why is humility in a CEO such a gain for the HR perspective? For a dozen reasons including primarily that people work best when they are included, listened to and worked with cooperatively. HR struggles to promote this in vain in many organizations where the whims of individual leaders take precedence over team work and cooperation, where the majority of senior executives quite often follow the (bad) example of the CEO. With the right choice of CEO, having senior execs copy the new behavior would be a huge advance.

Thanks to the library’s automated waiting list I got an early copy of the new book “Punching In” by writer, Alex Frankel. I can’t recall where I heard about it, but it’s quite an interesting description of his experience testing and observing applying and working as a front line employee at half a dozen top-rated US employers - UPS, Gap, Starbucks, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, the Container store, Apple and applying at others where he wasn’t selected.

This is a chance for senior execs and HR people to hear first hand what it’s like on their front lines or ones that might be very much like theirs. It reaffirms a number of observations that probably ought to be obvious. First, many applicants honestly don’t know what sort of jobs they might fit into and which they won’t. Frankel was impressed that some screening processes correctly judged, but you’d have to say most didn’t.

The overall conclusion he almost gets to is that fit and perceptions are incredibly important. He really liked UPS, a job that sounds as if it would kill some people, while he hated (and implies most people might hate) some of the others. What struck me most is the last chapter in which he returns to his UPS experience and becomes positively rhapsodic about it, to the point where he almost toys with the idea of re-joining permanently. It’s particularly interesting to read how he fell in love with them - via experiences before, during and after his time there - and note what a special and unusual time it was (the Christmas rush, when package delivery takes on a special meaning it doesn’t have to the same extent the other 11 months of the year). For some employees it takes quite a complex of coincidences to hook them.

Considering these are all companies with applicants lined up at the door due to their reputations as employers, it’s daunting to see how difficult it is for even top organizations to impress and hold staff and what a combination of factors it would take to make each company irresistible.

In some ways even more impressive is his recognition that each of these companies has true believers among its staff, people who feel about their employer the way he feels about UPS. He notes how the attitudes of these individuals, particularly when they’re in leadershp roles, get close to rubbing off on him despite his own feelings and scepticism. The human factor is in many ways the most powerful influence, potentially outweighing specific policies and culture as I read it. I’m interested in whether others agree.

Coincidentally this week’s Herman Trend newsletter points to yet another study, this time by BlessingWhite, assessing engagement levels (and strongly correlated retention rates) across organizations in UK/Ireland, Asia Pacific and North America. In general considerably fewer than a quarter to a third of employees are actively engaged while nearly 20% may be actively disengaged. This is actually an improvement on results previously quoted in a number of studies, but not by much. There may be a small trend to improvement as the Hay Group’s Bill Cheshire has noted in Canada, but arguably still a long way to go to reach maximum potential, although we have only thin evidence that this might be in the range of 60% (a number estimated by Michael Koscec at Entec Corporation). While it’s overly optimistic to think we could ever expect all employees to be onside with any organization, it’s important to get a clear picture of where we are at in general. Frankel’s book is an interesting personal look at how such figures come about.

Again today I found myself giving a would-be human resources (HR) manager the same advice I give all job hunters - the new boss is the most important factor in any job you’re considering. A great boss can encourage you, give you projects, mentor, coach, guide and introduce you to a world of further possibilities. In other words, they can make your job exciting, worthwhile and a continual learning experience… or they can pigeon-hole you from day 1 and demand nothing, but routine, even menial results.

You can spot the good ones because they are alive, people with plans themselves for things that need to be or could be done that aren’t yet. They will talk about possibilities not only for you, but for themselves, their teams and the organization. You can feel them inviting you into the process. Others in the company will speak highly of them as coaches and cooperative supporters. Just ask around.

By contrast I very often get to hear (from people looking for new jobs) about current bosses who can’t imagine their report ever progressing. No one in their opinion is ever ready. They’ll consider hiring outside in almost every situation before looking at anyone internally… or they’ll constantly pick people they believe will simply follow orders. “Loyalty” plays big with the latter type. Cross them (ie: have a new idea they didn’t tell you to pursue) and you’re on the hit list forever. Bosses who aren’t interested in growing people abound. Which makes it easy to be a great boss.