Zealise Blog

Aaarghh! It's enough to drive you nuts!

Chocolate-box pretty! That was our garden when the cherry tree blossomed: the symbol of summer finally arrived. Then last year – nada! Absolutely nothing! We called our local garden guru to ask what could have happened, and he explained that there had been a virus doing the rounds and a number of cherry trees had just died off. Ours apparently was simply another sad statistic.

He warned, however, that it would be under a tree-preservation order and that we would need town council permission to cut it down. That’s right – we need council permission to cut down and replace a dead tree!

Like good citizens we duly phoned the council to explain the position and request permission and were told we had to make the request in writing. We eventually got around to this about a year later when we realised it was almost cherry-blossom time again! (Oh, how time flies!) This week, several weeks later, we received the response in the mail.

So far, so good. But what do you think it said?

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

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.

Are you making the same mistake?

As a leader it is very easy to try to create a process or a system that will prevent something happening again in the future when you encounter behaviour that you disagree with or disapprove of. Often, however, this can be a disproportionate response. The problem is that when you do you invariably add further complexity. And complexity nearly always invokes the law of unintended consequences, not least because it makes your original objectives more difficult to achieve.

We are currently witnessing an example of this with the European Parliament proposing a law that will restrict bankers’ bonuses to 100% of their salary.  The problem with this is that it is an emotional and possibly irrational solution to a perceived problem. (The emotion behind it is clearly evidenced by one of the bill’s leading architects who, when confronted with an argument that this might cause a banking brain drain, said that was fine because just as you wouldn’t want drug dealers in your neighbourhood, so you don’t want bankers.)

While this may be an extreme example, it is a classic case of misguided bureaucracy.