A colleague recently went to a conference event that had a number of business speakers of some experience. He told me that one of them spoke about an ever growing dependency on systems to solve business’s problems when it’s good people you really need. That lead to a question from the floor asking the speaker ‘what do you think of HR then?’ to which they replied ‘if they stick to what they are good at instead of blocking things, then they are ok’. This was from a senior and respected figure in industry.
The day after this conversation I was in a room at a meeting dealing with a difficult performance issue. I have often been expected to ‘manage people out’ as part of change exercises and have got used to the fact that lots of managers go to extreme lengths to get rid of people they don’t like instead of dealing with it properly. In this case I soon realised that the HR manager knew that this was not a performance issue but a personality clash. But he was sitting there trying to go through the process (and heading rapidly to a constructive dismissal case in my view) instead of sitting with the manager and saying ‘what you have asked us to do is unacceptable’
I reflected on the two conversations, and saw that they were the two ends of the same question. What are HR really there for? The business leader saying ‘HR blocked things’ could have worked with an HR person who regularly did what I’ve advocated above I.e telling them ‘you can’t do this’, and they didn’t like it. But they could also have been meaning an HR manager that worked to their own agenda. I’ve seen both and seen mixed results from both approaches.
HR as a voice of conscience:
I’ve often told of a manger I worked for who regularly sat his HR director down and said ‘tell me what I’m not wanting to hear?’. He knew he needed to know what was going on ‘people-wise’ even if it wasn’t his favourite topic. He knew that he had to pay attention to company values as much as he needed to understand potential employment law issues. His HR director was a voice of conscience, but a permissive one. You don’t listen to your conscience if you don’t want to. Does your HR manager have to force you to hear what you don’t want to hear? do you see that as part of their role? Or are they there just to wipe up your mess?
HR as a strategic partner:
How often have you heard that phrase? How often has it been true? I bet the former beats the latter. For HR to be a strategic partner their initiatives and business initiatives need to be seamless. I’ve recently been talking to one great HR manager who is looking to work with a merger team that sits within the business to test, trial, role out and prove a whole load of change tools and processes that the business is lacking. Not just rolling out some training to managers and seeing what happens, but actually working to make the change successful and that being the way the rest of the business says ‘I’d like some of that’. Not dancing to their own tune or just doing what business tells them, but working as a partner. It takes two to tango though, and you can only do that in a business that sees HR as a strategic partner.
And it genuinely does take Two to Tango. HR that dances to its own tune or doesn’t take moral high ground in the face of poor management behaviours does itself no favours. Likewise a business that takes HR out of a box each time they want someone to do the hard stuff and doesn’t engage with strategic HR initiatives deserves the HR team it gets.
I don’t tend to comment directly about change and change associated activity that is capturing the public eye. I’m not going to get specific today, but I have watched with interest the media coverage of a few recent industrial disputes in New Zealand. They have made me wonder what the management strategy has been, so here are a few do’s and dont’s of change and industrial relations.
Have a plan. As management you are the ones putting this forward. You have all the time to think things through, and by thinking things through I don’t just mean the change you want, but the way you will go about the process, the dialogue, the response to the workforce, risks, issues, dispute management etc. Your change should be strategic so make sure the planning is strategic too.
Make sure that your plan to manage the change is going to pass the test of law. If you have a significant change in working practice for example, you will know that it may not be well received or at best easily received. Think about what you are going to do if your proposals are rejected or if the workforce strike when preparing your plan. Your response is vital. If you are going to dismiss everyone, for example, then make sure it is legal. If you have to turn round your actions after a few days because the court or your lawyers tell you to then it does not bode well for your reputation or long term relations.
Manage ethically and morally as well as legally. I’ve written about this before, but the best currencies within and outside an organisation are respect and trust. People join you, go the extra mile, endorse you, invest in your shares etc when you have those currencies. The leave, do the minimum, bad mouth you and sell their stake when you don’t.
Winning isn’t everything. You are not running a theatre of war, and destroying your business by ‘doing all it takes to win’ in an industrial dispute makes no sense (scorched earth policies worked for the Romans but won’t for you). Remember that the ‘enemy’ are people that you need onside when the dispute is over. Don’t do things just to annoy them it just lengthens the dispute, makes people dig in and creates noise around your discussions. In very few cases does it ‘weaken their bargaining position’
Leave Macho in the boxing ring. Calls of ‘sack them all’, ‘lock them out’ ‘dock their pay’ as soon as your offer is rejected is macho posturing not a policy (see bullets 1, 2, 3, 4). If you can’t convince them with your reasoning and your offer, then you won’t convince them with a war of attrition (they will come back because they are broke and hungry but with what attitude? and who will pay in the longer term).
Don’t manage your dispute via the media. The media will come knocking if you are interesting. In most cases, you are management so the media will be expecting you to behave like good bosses and act accordingly. But they will be looking for when you don’t as that is much better news for them. So behave with dignity, act accordingly and portray yourself and the business honestly and in best light. The media are not your friends to be given juicy tidbits about the opposition. They will take your tidbits but not respect you for them (you are the management and should behave better) and nobody that reads it will think well of you for the leak (see bullet 3). The info will not weaken anyone’s bargaining position anyway.
Just because the union bad mouths you in the media, don’t bad mouth them (see bullet 6). Even on your Facebook page!
In my experience the best managers of industrial relations always remembered that there was another day, knew that they had to look people in the eye tomorrow, and that they were the custodian of the organisational brand and reputation.
How do you change the culture when the existing culture is one of optionality? This question has been exercising my mind recently and I thought I would share the thinking with you.
First of all, what is a culture of optionality? You might recognise the symptoms; initiatives are brought in by the organisation, people do the training, and then choose to not use the new system, follow the new approach, adhere to the new rules. Another symptom is that the organisation decides to buy all its services from one supplier, but people chose to ignore that because they prefer another supplier. Go on the training programme to ‘up-skill’ but don’t do the pre or post work? New software? Common platform? no thanks I will use my own!
To be a culture of optionality it cant just happen once though. It needs to happen every time the organisation roles something out. In addition, when you ask people they will say ‘Yes that is what happens around here’. To become cultural, it needs to be something that everyone knows about and the majority do, even if its a negative culture.
So how do you change a culture of optionality? If the problem is that everything is optional, then trying to roll out a new initiative to change the culture, becomes optional in itself!
I have asked for thoughts from people and even gone out to the twitter-verse. One thing that interested me is that a common response was ‘Trust and empowerment is the answer’. Think about it, how much more trust and empowerment can you have if people already feel empowered to do what they want anyway?But it did give me a reminder of prevalent thinking in the westernised world, which is also a clue why cultures of optionality exist everywhere and are growing in number.
Maybe we need to understand why cultures of optionality exist to understand what needs to be done to change the culture.
For everything to be optional means there are no consequences to not doing something or reward for doing something.
So the symptoms I mentioned are at the effect end of the cause and effect equation. If management does not apply a consequence to not doing anything e.g. still getting a good appraisal rating despite not following the system/process/training or there being no objective in the appraisal system that relates to using the system/process/training or still getting a good bonus despite etc etc then management is basically saying ‘that new thing is optional’. On the other side of the coin, if there is no reward the same thing happens e.g. keeping your bonus based on sales volume when you have declared that you want to focus on margins means that people will sell volume at low margin and the same applies to bringing in company values and using new system/processes etc. If you don’t connect reward to the new initiative then management is saying ‘this new thing is optional’.
To start the change from a culture of optionality to another culture requires the step of establishing expectations, setting boundaries and aligning job descriptions, appraisal systems and reward systems to match the culture you are looking for. And if needs be your performance management systems need to manage those who still refuse to be part of the culture.
Culture means ‘the way we do things around here’ and for something to be Cultural it means ‘the way we all do things around here’.
Don’t confuse a culture of trust and empowerment (which means we trust and empower you to operate within the boundaries and follow the systems, just as much as it means we trust and empower you to use your brain to make good decisions) with a culture of optionality.
Following on from my articles on how to set up your change bubble, I was asked by a leader ‘who is the most likely to burst the bubble when I’ve set it up?’
My answer to this is that the leader themselves is the biggest risk. When it comes to change, it comes down to good leadership to make it succeed and normally it’s a failure of leadership that makes it fail.
So what are your biggest risks?
1. Your own behaviors.
In organizations adopting values based cultures there are many ways to interpret the behaviors that could or should be associated with each value. For the leader this is a time where they have to be certain their natural approach fits with the ‘desired’ behaviors (so if you are thinking of following a model that suggest ‘we should all be Blue’ be very careful). Situations where your don’t match are a risk.
Even in systems changes the leader has to be careful to follow it to the letter (no special reports for the boss). If it’s right for the organisation it has to be right for you!
2. Attention.
I once worked with an organisation that was highly focused on product quality. Every day they would issue information on product failures, near misses and product issues. They ran an culture survey that said people were not engaged with the business so they set up an culture plan, issued it and told people it was important. Then for the next 50 weeks they talked about product quality. If you say something is important, you launch a project and then you don’t mention it much, don’t be surprised if people think that you don’t think it is important. You can burst the bubble if you stop paying attention to the change for any lengthy period of time. It will survive a day, a couple of days, maybe a week, but a few weeks? A few weeks is a long time in change, so you are best to have daily attention until its embedded, working, delivering what you said it would. You need to give it your attention.
3 Giving Way
If you work in any organisation of any scale, you have to deal with politics of some sort. Things tend to happen because senior people ‘make suggestions’. Leaders are particularly susceptible to ‘suggestions’. In fact if staff were as susceptible to ‘suggestions’ from above as leaders are you wouldn’t have to go to a lot of effort to make change happen, you would just ‘suggest it’. Maybe it’s because leaders rely on the hierarchy for promotion, for bonuses etc or maybe its because leaders need to believe that people above them are right to justify the fact that that they must be right (because they are the boss), but in many circumstances I often see leaders rolling over at a simple word from a more senior leader. So if someone ‘suggests’ that you ‘tone that culture stuff down’ or that ‘zzz is not really as important as yyy’ and you ‘take it on board’ and ‘ make a few changes’ then your bubble is at risk. Staff smell politics a mile away and they will know why you’ve given way and to them it means you didn’t believe in any of it.
A colleague of mine says ‘if it’s to be, it’s got to be me’ and when it comes to change and your change bubble this is certainly the case.
In my last blog I expanded my concept of a leader establishing a change bubble as part of their preparation for bringing about change in the organisation. The change bubble concept focuses on the leader themselves rather than the more widely understood need for planning and preparing of the change itself. In this blog I will talk about the last two layers of the change bubble, both of which are 100% about the leader themselves. We are talking about Resilience and Respect:
Layer 3 of the bubble is Resilience. When leading change a manager will draw heavily on their reserves of resilience so they need to think about what they may face and how they will handle it and most importantly can they handle it.
The first question to ask yourself is ‘Can you cope with resistance and adversity?’ Lets say that you think the change is good and your people say ‘its about time’ and everything is going hunky dory within your sphere of influence. But the change attracts attention to your division. You were flying under the radar but people talk. It gets to other managers looking at you and lets assume they don’t like it. If they go to your boss and he is onside that may keep them at bay for a while, but its likely they will then come to you, or to your system interfaces with theirs or to the data they manage for you.
Are you ready for new and unusual ways of proving that what you are doing is not right?
How will you handle those conversations? You cant tell them that their way is ‘for the dinosaurs’ and they should change (even if you think thats true), your change is doing that already.
Can you convince them to cut you some slack?
Can you negotiate a win win?
Do you know what they need from you that can be bartered? Can you hold back 1, or two or 3 managers who want you to back off?
Can you hold out for what is right or do you tend to give way to more senior or older peers by habit?
Corporate life is full of politics (if you don’t know that, you need to learn it soon) and part of the politics is the possibility of making others look bad. Your change could revolutionise ‘the way we do things around here’ but that won’t appeal to all your peers and superiors. So have a think about those outside your division, how they could react and how you will handle that reaction. Resilience is partly your own strength of will and ability to hang in when challenge comes. However it is also about being prepared for what could come your way and knowing how you will handle it.
Layer 4 is Respect. In this layer we are talking about the respect that you will need to have to make this change happen.The initial question is whether your people respect you now? Fundamentally if you have not got the respect of your people before you announce the change you are on an uphill battle. Being honest with yourself is a good start here and managing the change in a way that gains you new respect will be vital. But what about once the change is underway? What many managers forget is that during times of change they are even more under the spotlight than ever. Their people will want to see that the manager believes before they commit fully. Who is going to stick their neck out if the boss isn’t.
In preparing your change bubble, the last layer is to think about you and what this change means for your modus operandi.
A question I often ask my clients is ‘Are you prepared to be the first to change?’
Often the manager themselves becomes the weakest link in culture change as many of them think that the change is about those below them and not about them. It can mean that their habits, practices and behaviours are not truly aligned to the change that they are asking for.
Are you able to look at what changes you need to make personally to make the organisational change happen?
What behaviours do you have that may re-enforce the old ways?
What tools/methods/approaches etc do you need to drop to let the new ones thrive?
What about your favourite reports and bits of info, do they fit in?
How do you interact with people, and is that congruent with the new behaviours?
What about your weaknesses? Are you prepared to work on them as part of the change.
Gaining and maintaining respect can often come from being the change that you want the organisation to be and from showing everyone that you can do it (so they can too).
In these blogs Ive given you a simple introduction to my concept of the change bubble for leaders and given you some thoughts on a few things that you might want to think about. Please contact me if you’d like to work on your bubble for your change
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