Zealise Blog

Talent Wars or Talent Waste?

Are people’s capabilities diminishing? Our own observations would suggest otherwise. Likewise science would probably point to the opposite. So why has talk of the “War for Talent” come to the fore over the past 15 years? How can there be a shortage of talent in a world that has more people than ever before?

Something has to be wrong somewhere.

The root of the problem lies in the implicit distinction between talent and people. You can’t actually separate the two. Think of it like this: if your car runs out of fuel the only way you can get it restarted is to refuel. So why do we view 'talent' differently? If you have a shortage of talent the only way you can alleviate that lack is to develop new talent. I am sure you will agree that seems pretty obvious. Yet many people still don’t ‘get it.’ Unfortunately management seem to top the list. They still seem to remain adamant that it is something you go out and buy.

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

3D Motivation!

Individual Objectives = Organisational Objectives

This simple equation encapsulates the essence of employee engagement. Doesn't it? After all isn’t that what you as a manager or business leader want? You want your employees to have objectives aligned with those of the organisation. And you want them to realise the success of the business and its survival depends on them achieving their objectives. Don't you?

This may possibly even be the biggest challenge you face. Unfortunately, trying to create this alignment all too often leads you down the track of thinking that you are responsible for motivating your people in order to create that effect. This is a track that can be a dead-end.

From the time of Aesop we have traditionally recognised two fundamental forms of motivation – the carrot and the stick. Even now these underpin all marketing efforts, only in modern parlance they are called ‘toward motivation’ and ‘away motivation’ respectively.

Yet there is a 3^rd motivational force that is not widely enough recognised or acknowledged.

In my book “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” I used this diagram to depict it. This looks at motivation from the perspective of the above equation. So instead of looking from an away or toward perspective it looks at it from the individual and organisational perspective. Thus you have individuals looking to fulfil needs and wants, while you have the organisation looking to stimulate such desires through traditional carrot and stick methods.  

However, individuals actually have a level that transcends needs and wants. For example think of a marathon runner. What makes them persist in heading out to train in all weathers and at all times of the day or night? There may be any number of terms for that, but I have called it devotion. (In the context of the individual and their relationship to the organisation, you may call it engagement.) Whatever it is it is both personal and innate to the individual.

This makes it very difficult for the organisation to try to address. What can you do to create devotion to the organisation? You have to find something that reaches the individual at an intrinsic rather than an extrinsic level.

That is why I am so excited by the research undertaken by social scientists and psychologists and championed by Daniel Pink. In highlighting autonomy, mastery and purpose as the primary, universal intrinsic motivators this work underscores precisely the points I was making in "Lean Organisations Need FAT People." Not only does my model of employee ownership embed the equation: Individual Objectives = Organisational Objectives through a sense of common purpose and shared values, but it also lays a solid foundation for greater autonomy and mastery.

If you are serious about business success you have to build employee engagement and this offers you the perfect recipe. It is motivation in 3D!

Beyond Motivation: The 3 key elements of 21st century management & how to embed them

For several weeks I have been involved in and following conversations on LinkedIn about motivating employees and accountability. Judging from the number of contributions these are hot topics and cause serious concern.

They also seem to be subjects that cause some confusion.

Personally, I find it very disturbing that there are people who continue to think that it is a manager’s responsibility to motivate his employees and so are looking for a magic formula to deliver this. I would have thought there was more than enough evidence that motivation is innate and therefore requires intrinsic rather extrinsic stimulation. Of course, this means a manager’s role is to inspire and enable rather than to motivate. Unfortunately the vestiges of old school management with its command and control style seem very hard to shake off.

It was therefore a great pleasure this morning to once again listen to Dan Pink. Man, he does talk sense!

Of course it is always easier to think someone yet is talking sense when what they say mirrors much of your own thinking. But Pink supports what he says with empirical evidence.

Thus when he says, “there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does” you have to listen. It is a real rallying call.

When he cites the 2009 London School of Economics study that “we find financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance” he demolishes the entire case for incentivising people and the performance related pay ethos that has done so much to destroy the economy. However, he does not leave it there: he also gives you the new scientific framework, which is built on three elements:-
•    Autonomy – the urge to direct our own lives;
•    Mastery – the desire to get better and better; and
•    Purpose – the desire to do what you do in the service of something bigger than yourself.

You shouldn’t find this at all surprising. After all, if you think about it, this is simply embracing more of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

And you don’t have to look very far to find out how to go about creating this. The framework that I have developed for employee ownership fills the gap identified in the illustration above from my book, "Lean Organisations Need FAT People." It offers all three in so far as:-
•    Employee ownership creates a greater link between your personal and organisational life and so encourages greater autonomy.
•    The goal of optimising your asset value to increase your stake in the business inspires you to better yourself and thus aligns the desire for personal mastery with the organisational equivalent – continuous improvement.
•    The stake in the organisation engenders a greater sense of what the business is all about and so creates the sense of purpose for the business and hence builds the shared values that embed the sense of purpose that delivers an enhanced customer experience.   

Can you not just imagine how this would transform your business and its performance and results? There is no magic formula but this could be the closest thing. So what are you waiting for?

Work-Life Integrity: A Matter of Timing!

In my last blog I revealed the new (to me) term of ‘work-life integrity.’ I described how it was an eureka term for me and my chagrin at having failed to coin the term myself and why I felt it was a godsend. There is no question that it fits perfectly with the message I have been broadcasting for the past few years. But, even so, its immediate value was as a replacement for the more widespread term ‘work-life balance.’

For me the term ‘work-life balance’ is a dangerous distortion that leads to quixotic quest that you could compare to looking for the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end. I explained why before and don’t need to repeat my justification here. However, I would like to expand on it.

You see, it is not that I don’t understand what drives the concept of work-life balance or why it has become so popular and widely pursued. It is just that – as I also said in “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” – I see it as “generating a kind of schizophrenia that is hardly conducive to greater productivity and the development of self-esteem and ownership.” To put it another way, I see the effort to create work-life balance as causing and perpetuating a never-ending conflict between your work life and your non-work life. Of course you want to keep to a balance, but by making it an issue you risk making it a source of stress and so more of an issue than it needs to be.

This source of potential stress naturally has its roots in the fact that the common element is time. And there is no getting away from it, because time is the common measure of human life. However, it is one that is fraught with difficulties and one which I suggest we should be looking to minimise.

First, however, I would draw your attention to this article “Why we have to go back to a 40 hour work week to keep our sanity.” There is a great deal of common sense here and little to which any reasonable person could take exception. I am sure that, like me, you will agree with most of it. And possibly not least because it provides a solid base for the whole ‘work-life balance’ proposition.

Yet this is where we come back to the whole time argument. Just stop for a moment to think. Where does this whole idea of a 40 hour week originate? As the author points out, it has its roots in the trade union endeavours to improve working conditions in the industrial era of the late 19th and early and mid 20th centuries. And that was a time when labour was largely mechanical and regimented. However, how appropriate is it in today’s world?

Surely a key aspect of knowledge work is that it makes the difference between people starker? No two people will take the same time to perform the same task. So why on earth should you prescribe a standard 40 hour week? The most important thing has to be that the job gets done. So if your employee can do the job in 35 hours why expect him/her to “be a bum in the seat” for 40 hours? Of course the HR manual might decree it in accordance with the letter of appointment, but that doesn’t make the policy right. And the converse is equally true. They may do the job in 45 hours. So what does that matter, if they are happy and you don’t pay for those extra 5 hours?

If you think about it, the whole idea of measuring performance on the basis of hours spent is a habit – a legacy from a bygone age that may not always be appropriate. (Obviously it depends on the nature of the work.)  Yes, you may say, but you need something to have some sort of leverage over your employees. Only if you are steeped in the command and control style of traditional management, where trust is always an implicit issue.

The fact is if you replace the ‘work-life balance’ with a ‘work-life integrity’ mindset you can start to lift yourself out of the shackles of such historical thinking. Especially, when you take the next step and create that ‘work-life integrity’ through employee ownership that I described previously. This will:-

• Align employer and employee and make value of work the key focus of the employment contract; 
• Reduce or eliminate the potential for stress implicit in trying to balance work and life; 
• Make it the individual employee’s responsibility to sort out their own life and remove the unnecessary management burden that you suffer at present and so help reduce your stress levels and improve the quality of your life. 

This certainly seems better than “going back” to a 40 hour week as the article suggests. After all, when in history has mankind ever gone back? Besides, making people responsible for their own performance might just be the antidote to Parkinson's Law that "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." Which makes it the panacea for productivity you seem to have been pursuing forever! Doesn't it? So you will consider it, won't you?

Work-life Integrity! Now you are speaking my language!

Yes!!! Of course!! I cannot believe that I didn’t ever use this term myself.

For years I have been telling anyone who would listen how ridiculous the term “work-life balance” is and how misguided attempts to champion it are. I even wrote about this in my book “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” and included this picture to illustrate my point!

My aversion to the term was never because I did not recognise the need for people to have interests outside of their work, but simply because it creates an artificial degree of separation. As I wrote, “It makes work and life appear to be opposites, and since the opposite of life is death, it effectively makes work synonymous with death and reinforces the perception that work is a necessary evil that deprives one of (a) life. Thus it creates an attitude whereby work is something that, wherever possible, is to be avoided.” Certainly it makes work something that you have to endure rather than enjoy.

So I disparaged the term because of the segregation it created. Yet, I never recognised that the answer was ‘work-life integrity!’ Doh! How stupid! Yet it all became so obvious when I read this article recently. 

But there is no point in beating myself up for my failure to come up with this improved explanatory term. Instead I am grateful for this new insight which will make my message so much easier in future. I am grateful too that there are others out there who are also banging the drum. And I am even more grateful for the proof of that and the opportunity to share this article with you. I trust that you find it thought-provoking.

And more than that, I hope that it will help you to see that your current initiatives to promote work-life balance are possibly misdirected. After all, it is always more difficult to come up with effective solutions when your initial premises are wrong. Hopefully your new insight will help you move in the right direction. 

Although right now you are probably asking yourself, “What difference does it make? Whether I call it work-life balance or work-life integrity, it is still something that I have to instigate, instil and inspire in my employees. That has not been easy. And the change does not make it appear any easier.” 

But that is where you would be wrong.

It is actually dead simple. And the answer lies in employee ownership.

Think for a moment about employee ownership. It is widely considered to be the best method of engaging employees. Why? Surely it is because it does more than anything else to integrate a person’s work with their life.

That is why I can claim that, even though I never articulated it as such, work-life integrity is what has fuelled all my efforts for the past few years. Furthermore it underpins my whole model of greater employee engagement through employee ownership and is what inspired my whole new employee ownership model.

More significantly though, my model offers universal employee ownership. And because it makes all employees owners it not only offer something no other employee ownership model does, it also offers ‘organisational integrity’! And that is a term and a concept I have been promoting!

The real secret to creating employee engagement

Are you giving enough?

Now I am sure you are thinking to yourself, "What kind of question is that?" And of course it is rather ambiguous and open to interpretation, so let me throw a little more light on it and hopefully give you some food for thought. Who knows; it might even change the way you act. And if it does I have little doubt you will get results that astound you.

It is tough being a manager or business leader at the best of times. And I am sure you will agree, these are not the best of times. And as a result you are likely to be under greater pressure to deliver results. Everything takes more effort and you have to run harder and work longer hours. Your energy, your effort and your expertise are all being stretched and as a result you are likely to feel that you are giving a great deal. However, that is expenditure not giving. And sometimes we tend to get the two confused - even though they are massively different.

Giving in its purest form is a spontaneous outpouring; an expression of something from deep inside of you that gives pleasure without necessarily expecting anything in return. On the other hand expenditure always demands a quid pro quo; something in return - usually of equal or greater value. It can certainly bring you pleasure but it is by no means the same for giving is about bestowing pleasure to others.

So what? Well just think for a moment about how much more satisfying the latter is. Expenditure invariably suffers from the law of diminishing returns, whereas giving never does when the gift is appreciated. Think about how you feel about your work. I'll wager you aren't as engaged as you could be. Yet how different it would be if you felt you were making a difference and your effort was appreciated.

Now just pause a moment and ask yourself if your employees aren't feeling the same way? The odds certainly are strong that they are. And if so, what are you doing as their leader to change this. Once again my friend Steve Roesler is offering you the perfect recipe to do so.

Can it really be as easy as asking for help?

Yes, because by asking your people for help, you move them off the expenditure treadmill and onto the giving treadmill. You remove the sense of obligation and pressure and so enable them to feel good about what they are doing. In the process you also create the employee engagement that otherwise seems to you like such a daunting, nearly impossible goal.

You could say it is like the old cliché of selling them instead of telling them. However it is even better than that, because here you are not even doing the selling. Your people are actually sell themselves. They simply buy into something that makes them feel good about what they do and in the process become naturally more engaged - as long as you don't forget to say thank you!

And the real beauty is that it entails less effort than anything else you are doing. There is no expenditure! You are simply giving. And that creates a virtuous circle. 

A key principle of employee engagement

In the past week nearly everywhere you turned you will have seen, read or heard tributes to Steve Jobs. What a testament to a remarkable life.

Amongst the many lessons that people claimed to have learned from him, one that resonated most with me was the idea that you need to "work on principle." I really like that idea. Why? Because we learn that to be a leader you have to be a visionary because it is your vision that inspires and creates the shared values on which great things are built. You will not get any argument from me on that. I would add, however, that in order to have a vision you have to have clear, sacrosanct principles.

Yet it is so much more profound than that. One definition of principle is an original source, and principle is the primary source for vision and the creation of values. Thus it is part of who you are. It is inviolate and integral to everything you do. This is what inspires. This is what attracts and what values are built on.

Think of your own experience for a moment. If you work without inspiration your work is a grind. Thus you can very reasonably say that work without principle is slavery - no matter how much you are paid.

So what principle drives you?

For me it is that people matter.  This is what has driven me for the past few years.

You could say that this is the principle of employee engagement. You see, there are so many different definitions of employee engagement that it is practically impossible to agree a standard definition. Thus the term itself becomes an umbrella. That is a problem because it is open to so many interpretations that success becomes a moving target. But "People matter!" is a concept that cuts through all that and as such is the principle that provides the uniting theme.

The power of principle is not in words. It is in ideas.  And of course it is personal. But for me it all boils down to the fact that no-one - not even a Steve Jobs - could achieve anything on their own. Taken to its logical extension that means organisational success is the result of aggregated personal success. Or, as I prefer to say - the more successful people an organisation has, the more successful it will be!

This has important implications for employee engagement.

If you distil employee engagement to a theme of "Getting people to offer more of their capability and potential willingly" as David McLeod and Nita Clarke do in their Employee Engagement Task Force report, then you can simplify it even further to say it is the same thing as personal fulfilment. In other words an engaged employee is a personally fulfilled person. This makes it imperative that you find a way to align personal capabilities and organisational needs. If you don't do this you will never have a truly lean organisation because you will always have wasted human potential.

However, it goes deeper even than that. It means that every one of your people has a value to your organisation. It is therefore important that you recognise that value and account for it. Only when you do this will you be able to partner with them effectively to optimise their potential and ensure that their lives are not unfulfilled and therefore wasted.  Enhance their value and their self-worth and you will create the win-win that makes life better for all.

That is why people matter. If you are serious about success, then it has to be a principle that you work on and that inspires you too.

How to Build Sustainable Success

Sustainability. That's a word that you hear a lot these days. On most occasions it is used in an environmental context.  As in "sustainable = green." But it is so much more.

Do you ever think about it from an organisational perspective?

As a business leader sustainability should pervade everything you do. After all you are not immortal, but your organisation could be. And you are responsible for enabling that. 

Of course that is the big difference between corporations and individuals. Companies have a distinct and separate legal persona that enables them to continue your work long after you have clocked off for the last time. Which means that it is one of your key responsibilities to ensure that you don't jeopardise that and instead leave a lasting legacy that builds sustainable success. And - paradoxically - the key way to do that is through your people.

That is one reason why talent management is an increasingly important subject. The "war for talent" has resurfaced as one of the biggest challenges you face and thus the biggest threat to your efforts to be more sustainable.  You need to be very, very careful, however, that you don't side-tracked into thinking of talent management as something distinct from the people who possess the talent. Hopefully, this diagram from my book "Lean Organisations Need FAT People" will help you avoid making such a fundamental error. Let me explain how.

 
Talent has to be identified. When it is some training is required to turn it into ability. Exercise ability and you build experience whereupon it becomes a skill. Skill on its own is great, but it still requires more. You need to create opportunities to put that skill to use and - equally important but too often overlooked - you need to remove the barriers that prevent it being used. When you do that the person takes full responsibility for what they are doing; they become independent and take ownership for what they deliver. This in turns brings greater enjoyment and enables the person to start fulfilling their potential. And isn't that what you want from your people?

After all, an organisation with people who are fulfilling their potential is much more likely to fulfil its own. It certainly will be more successful and that success will be more sustainable.

You could say this gives you a simple recipe for creating employee engagement. However, this is where you need to come back to the total person. It may sound like the oldest cliché in the book, but you need to remember that:

1. Every person has some talent;
2. Their talent is required for them to do their job, and the more you develop that talent the better they will do their job;
3. An organisation requires the seamless linking of all those talents to operate effectively.

Thus no organisation can operate at anything like its full potential unless each and every individual is using their talents properly. And unless they do, its sustainability will always be at risk.

So, if you want to build a lasting legacy and ensure the sustainability of your organisation, you have to recognise and foster the partnership between the individual and the organisation. 

The great thing is that if you do, you will create a shared purpose that embeds sustainability into the organisation and thus - since, to be viable, the business must have a useful purpose in the first place - you will be helping the greater cause of sustainability as well!

Do you have organisational integrity?

Just in case you are wondering, 'organisational integrity' is the collective form of personal integrity. It transcends strategic alignment and occurs when an organisation lives up to its professed values and actually 'walks the talk.'

Unfortunately very few organisations seem to have it. Let me give you an example.

I have been helping a friend to set up a new change management training company. We duly registered the company and embarked upon opening a bank account. After all you cannot do anything else in business without a bank account (although being asked if we had a website suggests banks think differently!) The experience, however, has been an adventure in itself.

Now I am sure everyone has their own "Believe It or Not" experience or other horror story to tell of dealings with banks, so I will not bore you with the sorry details of ours. Suffice to say that after nearly 3 weeks we seemed to be no nearer to opening the account than when we began. Yet, even in the most technically advanced period in history, the bank seems to think it is good service to take up to 21 days for this. Unfortunately opening ours will exceed even that tortoise-like estimate!

So, with a list of issues, I thought it might help to tell someone about our problems. Perhaps I should know better by now, but my naivety knows no bounds and as a consultant I have to believe that organisations are striving to do better. And they need customer feedback to do so.

I was encouraged in this by the bank's website, which amongst other similar claims, stated, "Give us the opportunity to put things right. If you are dissatisfied with any part of our service, it's important that you let us know." Further on it added, "Our commitment to you … is to provide you with excellent customer service. However, we realise that occasionally we may fail to meet your expectations. To help you, we want to deal with any concerns or suggestions you may have as quickly as possible. So, if there is something we are not doing as well as you would want or expect, please tell us." Naturally this reinforced my good intentions and I duly phoned.

After some delays navigating the automated response which offered no appropriate category, the system finally got annoyed enough to put me through to a live "customer services representative." This young lass was unable to deal with my complaint because I could not give her an account number. I explained that this inability was substantially what I was complaining about, but the irony was completely wasted on her. So I was obliged to hang up before saying something most inappropriate for the recording!

Clearly service is something this bank does not offer to anyone who is not yet a customer. Strange that, as we chose it because of its awards for being the best business bank, but we can only hope that things will get better once we have surmounted the barriers to achieving that favoured status.

This experience typifies what I mean by a lack of organisational integrity. It is something that actually goes beyond a lack of strategic alignment and corrodes the very essence of the organisation and its viability. The actions clearly do not conform to the stated intention and there is a values gap.  A "rules are rules" mentality clearly drives operations and no-one is encouraged to use their initiative or consider what the customer really wants.

This is precisely the attitude that I am fighting and why I passionately believe the Zealise solution is vital. The employee ownership model it creates offers an unparalleled way to create the employee engagement essential to break down this kind of unrecognised, ingrained behaviour. More than that, it is the only way I know to build and sustain the kind or organisational integrity essential for sustained business success.

In the words of the old song, "If you want it, here it is. Come and get it!"