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 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.

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?

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.

Consistent Values: Key to Community Building

If values define your vision and your vision shapes the behaviour that builds the community that drives your organisation, you would have to agree that your values are key, wouldn’t you? Certainly the clearer, the more comprehensive and the more consistent your values are the stronger your community will be – and the more successful and the more sustainable your organisation will be as a result. Remember: “No community = no business.”

So how well are you doing at communicating and cementing yours?

One thing is for sure, you cannot do it properly if you are not consistent. And the problem is that very often businesses are sending out conflicting messages. Let me give you an example.

Earlier today I received an email with the headline, “We are helping businesses to thrive and survive in 2013. Can we