Zealise Blog

Talent wars

Ah, the “Law of Unforeseen Consequences!” It is now 15 years since McKinsey first published their article, “The War for Talent.” I wonder whether anyone – including McKinsey themselves – could have foreseen what this would launch.

At the time of publication McKinsey were responding to the growing global economy, forecasting a looming shortage of people with the right skills to enable businesses to achieve their objectives, and hence predicting an idiomatic ‘war’ as companies ‘fought’ to attract the "talent" they needed. Even with the economic downturn the demand for good people remains and, arguably, has even grown.

Yet, despite this, little seems to have been done to mitigate this need or alleviate the problem. In fact in many ways actions taken by ‘Management’ could be said to have made the problem worse.  Certainly that appears to be the case when the HR Director of a leading international recruitment firm writes about the “War on Talent.” More than merely an ironic spin on McKinsey’s article, this is a not-so-subtle indictment of the manner in which organisations misuse and abuse what they themselves often call their greatest asset. Certainly you need to give more than a little consideration to what the lady says, because she should know. After all, hers is a multi-industry perspective rather than a single organisation one. 

Employees as assets

It is ironic – and not a little frustrating! How often have you heard a colleague or senior executive say, “Our people are our greatest asset”? And they are not being facetious or hypocritical when they say it. Yet they never treat their people as assets and their people certainly don’t feel like assets. And that is a problem.

Why? Because feelings shape perceptions and perceptions shape behaviour. Consequently if you want to create employee engagement – if you want your people to show more interest in what they do and how they do it  – you have to make them feel like assets.

Don't be a blind follower!

The HR news this week has hardly been encouraging, and brings to mind rather forcibly the adage “If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:13-14 Holy Bible: New International Version)

It all started with the news that the British parliament has passed a bill that allows employers to offer shares to employees in exchange for giving up some employment rights. The mind boggles; not least because the same day another report stated that 93% of employees would “definitely consider leaving their current employment.” While the report does not appear directly to link the two, it attributes a huge decline in employee satisfaction to “a culture of fear.” In such a climate, even if 93% did not want to leave, you can hardly envisage employees rushing to give up their statutory rights, can you?

Collaboration, Collective Intelligence & Employee Engagement

Do you ever give collaboration any conscious thought? I hope so, because it is integral to virtually everything you do, and certainly a key aspect of any leadership role. After all, collaboration literally means “working together” and no organisation can exist unless people work together. So you could define management as “the art or science of enabling people to collaborate more effectively.”

Actually this definition of management may be more powerful and profound than you realise, for it makes people paramount: it makes them the centre and the circumference of management and reinforces the fact that, as a leader, managing people is the most important aspect of your job. It is powerful because it exposes something you possibly never consciously recognise: that your people are your brand! Your

Employee Engagement & the Holy Grail

What do happiness and employee engagement have in common?

Actually it may be more than you think. In fact it is quite possible that they are different facets of the same thing. Let me explain before you start thinking that I have totally lost my marbles.

Happiness is an emotional state. As such you can argue that it is conditional, circumstantial and transitory – and possibly even transcendental. Certainly it varies in intensity and over time. It is also very personal and thus unique to the individual. It is therefore virtually impossible to qualify, quantify, or to contain. Ultimately it is simply an undefinable state of well-being; feeling good about life and your place in it at a particular moment or over a specific period.

That can make it elusive. However, it gets more complicated: because it is intensely personal something that may be one person’s delight may be another’s nightmare. This makes it impossible to have a standard formula for happiness or to deliver it on a mass scale.

Employee engagement is the same. It also an emotional state, subject to fluctuations while being difficult to qualify and quantify. This variableness may also be the result of events and circumstances

Reap the Benefits of Employee Ownership

“There is clear and unambiguous evidence to show that employee ownership, particularly when combined with meaningful employee participation, brings tangible economic benefits for companies. But these gains are not just important to individual businesses, they have a direct impact on the UK’s economic recovery.” Employee Ownership Association Impact Report March 2013

Nothing new there then! We have all known all along that employee ownership is the best way to build employee engagement and transform business results, and thus to improve the national economy. Nevertheless these words from the latest Employee Ownership Association report provide further evidence.

Of course you might say, “Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?” However, the evidence comes from the on-going Field Fisher Waterhouse comparison of the Employee Owned Index (EOI) with the FTSE All-Share Index. Illustrated by the chart below this shows that, although the EOI only grew at 3.4% compared to the All-Share Index’s 3.7% this past quarter - hardly surprising considering the stock market's record trading in the past few months – it has outperformed the latter over the past ten years by an average of 10%.

In fact interest in employee ownership is growing to such an extent that

The Semantics Say It All!

You may – and most likely do – use it unthinkingly. It is such a little word; seemingly innocent, innocuous and insignificant. Just three letters long!

Yet, it can be profoundly significant.

In fact, if you were to think about it more deeply you might recognise the intention behind the word as a primary cause of conflict: for toddlers and tyrants alike, every race and culture and possibly every species of creation from aardvark to zebra.  At all levels: individual, family and community; personal and organisational; micro and macro.

So can you guess what the word is?

The Tyranny of the Task!

Have you had a bad customer experience recently? Unfortunately the answer is most likely yes. And more than likely your frustration has been caused by someone’s rigid adherence to rules, even when the rules don’t appear to make sense. All too often the person serving will even agree, but say they are powerless to do anything about it “because those are the rules and that is the way things are!” 

Hopefully such experiences make you more alert to ensuring that your organisation does not operate with a radical, rigid and almost religious reliance on rules. They do prompt you to talk to your people and find out if they ever feel that way, don’t they? You can never expect to provide an exemplary customer experience if you don’t.

However, rigid reliance on rules has a near cousin that also impacts negatively on your organisational effectiveness, and thus on your service and ultimately your customers’ experience. You could call this “the tyranny of the task.” Let me give you an example. 

Lies, damned lies, statistics ... and accounts?

You are probably familiar with the quote about the three classes of lies – “lies, damned lies and statistics.” But I recently had reason to question whether accounts might not constitute a fourth category (or at least a special subset of statistics.) 

Why would I say that? After all it is a strange thing for an accountant to say and it certainly doesn’t come easy. My faith, however, has been called into question by some analysis I did.

Dabbling in that dangerous activity called thinking, I found myself unable to reconcile the current near-record levels of unemployment with the fact that:

• More people than ever before are in employment; and
• Stocks are trading higher than they were before the financial crisis, which means they are pretty close to, if not at, an all-time high.

Will RISES prevent a fall?

After writing about values for the past few weeks, it seems only appropriate to pause to consider the new values-based direction that Barclays Bank is taking.

The new CEO has apparently decided that 5 values should be at the centre of the business. These are respect, integrity, service, excellence and stewardship (RISES). (Now I have no idea whether Barclays is using this mnemonic or not, but having come up with it I cannot help thinking it would be brilliant if they are, because it would mean without any effort at all they could now claim their logo is a phoenix and not an eagle!) But, jokes aside, the values themselves seem reasonable.

In fact they are just the values you would expect from a bank. They seem so obvious that you have to ask yourself how they managed to move so far away from them in the first place. So encouraging though this is, there are aspects that still give cause for concern.