According to a recent survey on Managing Change by XpertHR, half of 114 HR professionals surveyed were unhappy that their expertise was not maximised to its full potential during change management programmes. Nearly all (96%) respondents said HR should be involved at the earliest possible stage of the change management process so it can minimise the negative impact on employees. Two thirds said they want to be more involved at the pre-planning stage. Additionally, most HR professionals feel that change programmes are driven by finances and then presented to HR with short deadlines for execution, as well as, achieve savings.
So what's new? Sadly this is an all too familiar refrain from HR practitioners and it is closely aligned to the "we don't have a seat at the table" cry that surfaces on an all-too-regular basis. Part of the problem undoubtedly stems from management who are completely blinkered as to HR's ability to add value other than acting as a bureaucratic mechanism for personnel control and management. However the larger part of the problem is that HR spends far too much time complaining over a lack of participation from leadership and not enough time being proactive in engaging with the Business on a commercial basis and proving our abilities so that we don't get locked out of the room when the grown up meetings start.
The way for us to address these issues is not hidden, nor is it rocket science. If we are to be successful, we must find ways to market our ability to think in terms of the total business. So said Adrienne Talani in 2006. Her 10 Steps for HR to become a strategic partner still hold true today:
Understand your organization's business and financials. Know the key drivers of your organization and the realities of your business.
Spend time in each HR staff meeting educating the team about company matters. Be a communication conduit.
Measure and publish total workforce return on investment--not merely HR metrics.
Be a business partner, not a police officer. Don't make your first answer "no." Find something to say "yes" to.
Push the responsibility of policy administration ownership on line management. For example, if HR is told to create an organizational succession plan, offer HR's help in facilitating the task, but point out that management must "own" the task and responsibility.
Increase the organization's intangibles--such as integrity, customer service and quality of product--through collaboration, innovation, efficiency and risk management.
Develop and prepare all the resources of the organization to perform at their highest level by auditing and creating organizational capabilities.
Find other ways to get transactional tasks done to free up HR to work on more strategic, more value-adding activities.
Build and cultivate relationships. "Get out from under your desk" and talk to managers about what's going on in HR, Talani said.
Keep abreast of developments in your professional area of expertise by reading professional books and articles, attending seminars, and taking classes.
I would also add to the list that you should not ask about people in your first question during conversations with Leaders, ask them instead about how they are moving towards achievement of targets, what are their drivers and challenges. That way, you are engaging with them on their level and, actively listening to their response, you can start to focus on HR solutions and services that can enable the reduction of their challenges where staff are concerned.
Now I know that, reading the above, you will say you are already doing all of the above and still the leaders won't engage you before the decision is made. If that is indeed the case, then ask yourself why that is. Are you really demonstrating a true understanding of the business? Engaging with leaders on their level, not yours? Focusing on the value add, reducing the transactional? If you are not, then try harder. It will change. If you are doing all of the above and still nothing changes, then you have two choices; wait for a change in management, or, find a company that responds to what you have to offer. Either way, stop complaining and start engaging!
You may not have seen it, given you may not be based in Sydney, but in today's Sydney Morning Herald there is an article referring to a NSW government agency responsible for investigating workplace bullying that is harbouring a serious bullying problem in its own ranks which it has been attempting to keep quiet. According to the article;
The inquiry, conducted by one of WorkCover's own safety inspectors, Petar Ankucic, found bullying had been ''occurring for a prolonged period of time and that various factors, including selective supervision, multiple chains of command, workload equity, continuous negative feedback and a somewhat autocratic management style … have contributed to unintended bullying''.
In the same paper, there is an article in the Executive Style section asking "Are you a bad manager?" that begins like this:
Many are out of their depth when they get promoted into management positions. I call it the competency trap. Good technicians and people who are particularly skilled in an area are turned into managers. The problem is that the qualities that made them a great technician – the ability to work on their own, think laterally and cut corners – are not the same as the skills required to be a manager. And then there are those who are promoted because they are smooth talkers who have sucked up to the right people and said the right things
The article goes on to reference a checklist of "7 Signs You May Be a Bad Manager" by Steve Tobak of BNET.com, which may perhaps have come in handy for some of those NSW Workcover staff allegedly responsible for the bullying that has taken place. Actually it is a useful little list to run against yourself at any time you may be feeling you are a genius at managing people or indeed just as a quick reality check.
You have probably heard of the Peter Principle. The theory was proposed by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle. According to Wikipedia, it states that "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence". The principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. However, sooner or later, they will be promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their "level of incompetence"), and there they will remain, being unable to earn further promotions. Peter's Corollary states that "in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out their duties" and adds that "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence".
If you have been in the workforce for a given length of time, let's say slightly longer than one day, it is highly likely that you will have come across one or more people who will fit the above Principle. I certainly have encountered them many times in my career. I have also come across a significant number of potentially very good Managers who have been poorly equipped to face the realities of their new positions and so have become incompetent in that role. Also, too often it can be the case that the individual who is promoted is the one most skilled at their current role from a technical perspective rather than suitability to lead people in their roles.
I believe a large number of these individuals could have been rescued from that failure. Through careful selection, planning for promotion and recruitment of Managers, focused leadership training at the appropriate level, supportive mentoring and appropriate performance management put in place by a business that recognises the value an effectively prepared and equipped Manager can play. HR has a key role to play in ensuring the development of such holistic programs that have as an aim the effective management of the business. If we get it wrong, we run the very real risk of fulfilling Peter's Corrollary with every post being occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out their duties.
When the business fails to prepare it's leaders for new roles, not only is the business failing to meet it's obligations to its shareholders but it is failing the individuals most critical to its success.
I can remember, when I was a lot younger, my mother saying to me "that you know you're getting old when policemen look like they're just out of shorts." Now, quite obviously, I never thought that this would ever be the case for me as I was still in shorts myself, but lately I have found myself exhibiting signs of OMS, better known as Old Man Syndrome.
This can manifest itself in a variety of ways; deafness or as my father calls it "selective hearing". The fact that my glasses need changing more often than the oil in the car. Talking back to the television. I know I am not alone in this one but I have found myself arguing with the Today team in the mornings before coming in to work. One of the more bizarre manifestations of OMS that I have been made aware of is a habit of leaning back in a chair while at a meeting and gently pulling my eyebrows. I have no idea where this came from however I think there must be some sort of genetic switch that activates in men of a certain age and has them begin doing this. After all, you don't really think that old men get big bushy eyebrows just through letting them grow, do you?
The real question is whether I am bothered by these progressive symptoms of OMS and the honest answer is "Not really, No". I have always liked wearing hats. Probably because I started saying goodbye to my hair when I was 22. The only difference between then and now is that the overnight mass extinctions have petered off into single random follicle deaths investigated by none save the washing machine. I have always lost my keys even though they have been right in front of me and pubs have been letting me in to drink since I was 13..."Shorts, Sir? Must be cold running in this weather. Another glass of whisky?"
I am very happy to be me. I get to be who I want to be. After all, it has taken me all of my life to become who I now am and I am comfortable with that. If there's a little eyebrow pulling and television arguing along the way, so be it. Mannerisms are individual and infinite, they make us who we are and, to my mind, add a little flavour to our characters.
When managing change in organisations, we need to be acutely aware of the mannerisms and foibles of the organisations in which we are seeking to implement that change. Just because they exhibit certain characteristics, it does not necessarily define how that organisation will react to the changes being proposed. We need to immerse ourselves and understand how an organisation acts and reacts, how it, for want of a better word, breathes, before we plan and implement a change.
All the best
Jim
p.s. Try this link for more growing older jokes...
I'm a fan of Fast Thinking; a magazine that regularly focuses on innovation and change. In the latest issue, there is a thought provoking article titled "Ignorance is bliss and it's back" which posits that society is seeing a gradual decline in scientific rationalism and intellectual vigour and an increase in unverifiable beliefs and rejection of often proven scientific fact. As the article succinctly puts it:
IN AN ERA where just about anything can be Googled and quality information is more freely accessible than ever before, when scams are easily uncovered and millions of peer-reviewed scientific papers are laid wide open to public scrutiny, how can we explain the rise of conspiracy theories, religious fundamentalism, astrology, folk cures, homeopathy, and even dodgy email scams? Are we abandoning rationalism, and is ignorance on the rise?
Reasons discussed in the article cite a number of factors for this change; rise in social networking which means that there is more of tendency to believe what we are told by our friends, distrust of science, the fact that science has advanced so significantly over the last 10 years, let alone the last 30 years, that most people are unable to comprehend how everyday objects work - mobile phone, anyone? This phenomenon shows itself in the strangest of ways. An example given being the Flat Earth Society.
As the new president of the society, Daniel Shenton, says in an article in The Guardian:
"There is no unified flat Earth model," Shenton suggests, "but the most commonly accepted one is that it's more or less a disc, with a ring of something to hold in the water. The height and substance of that, no one is absolutely sure, but most people think it's mountains with snow and ice."
The Earth is flat, he argues, because it appears flat. The sun and moon are spherical, but much smaller than mainstream science says, and they rotate around a plane of the Earth, because they appear to do so.
The question you may be asking is how can a rational person in the 21st Century believe that the earth is flat when all evidence points to the contrary? Well, Shenton himself says that "...the world does appear to be flat, so I think it is incumbent on others to prove decisively that it isn't." In my mind, there are plenty of facts that point to the world being spherical; spherical trigonometry and astronomical observations that date right back to Aristotle in 330BC, satellite imagery, the view from an aircraft, the list goes on. I tend to be a fan of the scientific method but accept that there are, as Hamlet said, "more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy". Maybe that's fence sitting but it suits me. I choose to check the facts and make my own decisions. Daniel Shenton professes to have done that and arrived at his own conclusions, which differ from mine. fair enough.
What does this mean for HR? One thing I tell everybody that I teach on Change Management is that they have a duty to challenge the status quo. You should never simply accept a reason provided for implementing a change without checking the facts. Personal ownership is critical to personal success when passing through change and the first step is to gain all the facts and, if they don't add up, to challenge the assumptions that prompetd the change to be mooted in the first place.
To do otherwise is to accept that the earth is flat simply because a friend on Facebook said that everybody else said that it was true.
By the way, the Fast Thinking article states that "even today, 70,000 people are members of the Flat Earth Society". Do you want to know something interesting? I googled left, right and centre and the largest number I could find for membership was 571 members of the Flat Earth Facebook group. I'm not saying that the 70,000 number is wrong, just that I can't find their basis for it...
About 6 weeks ago, my iPhone was still impressing me with its battery life consistently finishing each day of normal use with about 55% left in the charge. Then something strange happened, almost exactly to the day of the 1st year anniversary of buying it, the battery stopped retaining its charge all day and instead lost all of the charge within 4 hours of switching on. Forget normal use, it just died without use at all!
So when I saw this article by Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame, it firstly made me laugh which is why I share part of it below, but secondly got me thinking about planned obsolescence.
Today, if something is made to perform a function, it will perform that function for a short while, and then it will stop, and you will throw it away.
This applies to everything, except fondue sets. Actually, it might apply to fondue sets as well, but no one can be sure because everyone's fondue set is at the back of a kitchen cupboard where it's been since the fateful night 30 years ago when it tipped up, spilling hot fat all over your uncle, killing him.
Anyway, it applies to everything else. Examine, if you will, exhibit A: your mobile telephone. How long have you had it? I'm willing to bet the answer to that is "less than two years". Good. So what happened to the one you had previously? It's in a drawer somewhere isn't it? And it's broken. It might not have been broken when you put it there. But it is now.
Planned Obsolescence, according to Wikipedia is "a policy of deliberately planning or designing a product with a limited useful life, so it will become obsolete or nonfunctional after a certain period." Now I confess my naivety by saying that I thought that this was a bit of an urban myth, yet according to Vance Packard in his book, The Waste Makers, it has been around for nearly 80 years. In the 1930s an enterprising engineer working for General Electric proposed increasing sales of flashlight lamps by increasing their efficiency and shortening their life. Instead of lasting through three batteries he suggested that each lamp last only as long as one battery. In 1934 speakers at the Society of Automotive Engineers meetings proposed limiting the life of automobiles.
I know I sound like a grumpy git when I say my parents still use kitchen appliances that they bought when I was a baby and they still do exactly what they were designed to do but we had a toaster that died in less than 12 months! I understand that there are lots of good commercial (read "financial") reasons for designing in a limited lifespan, but what I can't really grasp is why we accept it.
So how does planned obsolesence play in the HR space? Hopefully it shouldn't but we should be aware that if the companies for whom we work use the concept in the products that they sell, then customer complaints will no doubt be high. That in turn has implications for the company in terms of brand management and HR in terms of training, stress, OH&S to name but a few. It is not going to go away, not in this modern era of rampant consumerism, and you may not agree with the ethics of such a practice, but you should be prepared for its consequences.
I'm a Director in a boutique consulting firm specialising in HR, Change Management and Business Effectiveness solutions.
Check out our website: http://hr2be.com.au
Posts
