Zealise Blog

Unlocking Leadership

“Management 2020: Leadership to unlock long-term growth.” That’s the title of a report issued earlier this month by The Commission on the Future of Management and Leadership, a commission formed by the All-party Parliamentary Group with the CMI to investigate how management and leadership in the UK will need to change by 2020 to deliver sustainable economic growth. It seems that productivity is a concern at higher level than we realise.

Maybe this shouldn’t be so surprising.  The report identifies a number of challenges but the standout one for me was that, “Time wasted by poor management could be costing the economy as much as £19bn a year.” Rectifying that would certainly do wonders for the national economy and help bring down the national debt! No wonder parliament is looking at this.

Now I don’t know whether it’s serendipity or something more significant but this coincided with my reading Kieran Hearty’s “How to Eat THE ELEPHANT in the Room: Digesting the Unspoken Truth.”  In any event, it seems to me that the answer to poor management is beautifully illuminated in a chart that Hearty presents, which I reproduce below with both admiration and gratitude.

The Secret of Personal and Organisational Alignment

It goes without saying that nobody wishes to do a bad job. Yet employee engagement surveys continue to show low levels of employee engagement with little or no sign of improvement despite all the efforts to remedy the problem.

And it is a problem because it is equally self-evident that disengaged people are very unlikely to be performing at or near their full potential. In more business-like terms this means that they are not as productive as they could/should be. Yet the fact nobody wants to do a bad job would suggest that there are other things that are preventing them from doing a better job. Is it possible that this due more to the way you manage your people than anything else?

The Essence of Employee Engagement: What it takes – and delivers

Employee engagement is a topical issue beyond just the HR community. Like many such issues, however, employee engagement means something different to different people.  This makes it fundamentally an umbrella term.  Even in the report on the subject, commissioned originally by Prime Minister Tony Blair, authors David MacLeod and Nita Clarke gave up trying to find a common definition after identifying more than fifty viable definitions. So instead they distilled it down to 4 fundamentals, which can be even more briefly summed up as:-

• Strong strategic narrative
• Engaging managers
• Employee voice
• Organisational integrity

Fundamental though these may be, you could argue that they are still fuzzy.  Certainly to get a clearer understanding of them you need to dive deeper.

Redundancy: When will they ever learn?

It was Bob Dylan who asked the question “When will they ever learn?” Unfortunately, when it comes to redundancy, it seems to still apply: certainly when it comes to large organisations and what you can only call their “readiness for redundancy” – the speed with which they resort to redundancy as a solution to problems.  

This cartoon that I commissioned for “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” remains relevant.

As long as you continue to manage people as costs, rather than as assets, redundancy will always remain an attractive option. Even if redundancy is not a “knee-jerk” reaction to bad performance it certainly can seem like it. At best it reflects badly on management and calls into question their ability – and therefore their right – to oversee a large organisation. Why?

It’s about people management – not talent management!

Can you spot the talent in this photograph?

 

Of course you can’t! It just portrays a group of people. Yet doesn't talent management fundamentally try to do the same thing? That is why the pervasive focus on talent management is such a potentially dangerous fad.  

People as Assets – A Practical Proposition

The challenge

Last week we looked at the statement “people are our greatest asset” and found that it was more than a cliché. The definition of assets substantiates the claim that employees are assets. Unfortunately, we also discovered that an “awful accounting mismatch”, actually reinforced by generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), perpetuates your accounting for people as costs rather than as assets, making you an inadvertent, and even involuntary, hypocrite whenever you refer to them as assets, simply because accounting for them as costs inevitably means managing them as such.

The remedy is simple. You have to start accounting for people as assets. Only then will you start managing them as such and so rectify the anomalies that this “accounting mismatch” creates. So our first challenge is to figure out what accounting for people as assets entails, before we embark on changing GAAP!

People as Assets – Fact or Fiction?

“People are our greatest/most important assets!”

How often have you heard that? It has become rather a cliché. But how much validity does the statement have? What does “people are our greatest assets” actually mean? Does it mean anything at all?  

To start to answer this you need a clear definition of what an asset is and then decide whether a person can be one.

Leadership made easy

The Crisis of our Times

As mentioned in my last blog, leadership appears to be one of the big issues of our times. Certainly laments for its lack, in both politics and business, as well as the plethora of writing on the subject in books, newspapers and magazines, suggest this.

It is possible, however, that this is simply the consequence of a world that has become too complicated, too fast-paced and too pressured – leaving us with a desperate need for new ways of surviving.  Our inability to cope with the demands of daily life has us looking for someone who can lead us out of the wilderness and reduce the stress; and the inability to find such people leaves us bemoaning a dearth of leadership, simply because we don’t know where else to look or what to blame.

Theodore Roosevelt’s words, “The leader leads and the boss drives,” hint at this. Stress comes from being driven beyond the point at which you are comfortable and the pressure of modern life suggests that we are being driven rather than led. Of course they also imply the solution: hence the quest for new leaders and ‘better’ leadership.

Unfortunately, while telling us the ‘what’ of the solution, Roosevelt’s words do not help much with the ‘how.’ Yet their simplicity suggests that it is not as difficult as it seems.  

How Management is Lobotomising Leadership

For decades now we have been hearing that command and control management is dead. If only! Reports of its demise have been both premature and greatly exaggerated. Not only has no replacement system yet been found but there has been little sign of one being identified, which means, at best, that it is suffering a lingering death. The truth, however, is that command and control is alive and well and flourishing as it always has, albeit in a different guise.

A spectacular own goal!

For a profession that vociferously proclaims its right to a place at the high table of management the HR profession is remarkably adept at undermining its own efforts! But even by their standards their latest own goal is spectacular!

It has just been announced that the CIPD – the body that represents the HR profession in the UK - has removed the issue of accounting for people as assets from their “Valuing Your Talent” project. With a commission called “Valuing your Talent” you would have to think that this negates the whole purpose and is throwing the baby out of the bath before the bathwater has even been run! What makes the whole debacle even more galling, however, is their reason for doing so.