2) Training adds value……it just does.

3) If it doesn’t work, change the form.

4) Our influence is driven by our self importance.

5) You don’t need money, you need thanks.

6) Pretty pictures make you want to work for us.

7) The less we spend, the more we get back.

8) Managers are the biggest inhibitor of good management.

9) Your commitment is shown by your willingness to accept the staus quo. Until we say so.

10) Do as we say, not as we….write position papers, hold conferences and generally fail to act.

This post was slightly preempted by the wonderful Michael Carty. You can read his work here.

So which way do you go big shot? Come on….

1) The Facilities Director is arguing that we can improve the canteen facilities, subsidise lunch time food and introduce more healthy and nutritious options. Thus boosting morale.

2) The Finance Director is arguing that we should pay a one off bonus to all employees to thank them for their contribution. And increase their commitment.

3) The Operations Director wants to set up a recognition scheme, to share with front line staff, where great performance can be rewarded with vouchers and reinforced.

4) The Sales Director believes that a commission based scheme will drive performance of the field sales force and our bottom line.

5) The Communications Director believes that a big, free, Christmas party will bring people together, get them to talk, and make connections.

Motivation can’t be bought? Of course it can. Everything has a cost. Everything has a price. Theories are just that….they’re theories…but theories don’t get you anywhere.

So this is real.

So this is true.

So what do you do?

I had a particularly problematic conversation with Tesco Bank this weekend (Yeah…..I know….) when I was subject to two immortal lines,

“The problem is that you’ve been a customer with us for a long time”

“We can’t override the system”

I do have much left to die inside, but that is pretty much going to clean it up.

But it also really resonates in a “shoot me now” kind of a way.

How many times in the last month have you or your teams uttered:

“It would set a precedent”

“It isn’t as simple as that”

“I can’t do that”

“The system doesn’t work like that”

“The policy is….”

“You need to complete this form”

“Have a look at the process/policy”

“We can’t make an exception”

And how would it feel if you’d said:

“We completely see the need to make an exception here”

“Let us work out how to make this possible”

“Of course”

“We can work around this”

“I understand your specific needs”

“Let me sort out the paperwork for you”

“What is it you’d like to achieve and how can I help you?”

“You’re the most important person to us”

Then ask yourself two questions:

Which feels better to the person asking the question?

Which feels better to the person answering the question?

And as a supplementary:

Why do we make this so hard?

But in this seeming bliss there fall moments where the brain starts to stir, the neural pathways buzz. The moments that really make you think.

I’ve made a career of not doing what everyone else is doing. I’m obstinate. I get it. But I love a good idea.

It’s last Wednesday, I’m in Berlin. I’m in a collective workspace. There is a remarkably un-nervous presenter in front of me. And she introduces me to “Somewhere“.

And my brain starts to buzz.

“Work matters.

Find work that truly matters to you and your life will change. Forget about traditional recruitment and searching for a job. It’s time to find the people you should be working with.”

How about that for a vision?

I’m not here to do a sales pitch for Somewhere. I’m not being paid by them (although I admit they offered to buy me a coffee the next time I’m in Berlin….just for full disclosure). But it seems to me they’re on to something.

People want to work with people that they like. That is maybe more important than the skills that they have.

Because, in a world that is in constant change, where skills become obsolete in the blink of an eye, where yesterday’s giants are tomorrow’s victims. Is there another way to build commercially competitive teams?

Would it be different if we recruited people who cared for what we were doing rather than a traditional skills for currency transaction?

What if we hid our brands and exposed ourself for our values? Would people choose different companies? Different careers?

And where would you go, if you really had a choice?

I was wrong.

Don’t worry, I haven’t suddenly become a HCM groupie.

Far from it…..

I was wrong because NOTHING says past it more than the term “Employee Engagement”.

I recently tweeted that “every time I hear this term another part of me dies“…so you can imagine what writing about it does to me.

But sometimes I just can’t help myself. We all have our crosses to bear.

I have a confession. Never…..absolutely NEVER in my life have I woken up and thought….”I wish I was more engaged”. Moreover, I can guarantee that there is not a single employee within your organisation that has either.

Engagement doesn’t exist. Engagement is the sort of term a consultant would create. And then claim it was measurable and sell it at massively inflated amounts to a profession that was insecure and desperate to find some data to prove that they were both relevant and commercial.

I have no idea where they would find a profession like that. Do you?

Please. Let’s stop.

Let’s grow up.

Let’s be human.

For generations people worked for the same companies. They worked there because the organisations valued them, they treated them well, they gave them security, they gave them incentives to stay. But, they NEVER TALKED ABOUT ENGAGEMENT.

Engagement doesn’t replace a decent pension scheme, engagement doesn’t pay the mortgage on your house, engagement doesn’t provide job security.

Engagement is a term that we create to apologise for using people to generate profit.

We need to stop focussing on vacuous self-created concepts that are completely alien to the vast majority of human beings. We need to start talking about the things that matter to people. Real people.

Call me uncool, call me old-fashioned. Call me naïve.

I’m ok with that.

You aim for engaged employees…..I’ll do what’s right for my people and treat them like valued grown ups.

I think they deserve that.

You can’t reward poor performance. Of course……

But the thing is, it isn’t their poor performance. It’s yours.

Who recruited the person?

Who promoted the person?

Who trained the person?

Who rewarded the person?

As convenient as it is to say that individual poor performance just “happens”. It doesn’t. Organisations make poor performers. You make poor performers.

If HR is accountable for organisation performance, it is also accountable for individual performance.

Getting rid of poor performers is a quick and convenient way of papering over your organisational incompetence.

Papering over your incompetence.

You can’t reward poor performance? Too right.

How confident are you, that you’re earning what YOU deserve?

Finance, Marketing, Operations all have their moment. And funnily enough it is precisely because so many functions can see an overlap that HR shouldn’t report in to any of them.

Imagine the look on the CFO’s face when you talked about the costs of the employer branding campaign that projects the spirit of the EVP to the external market. Why bother right? Surely we can just chuck some ads on some websites?

The Marketing Director glazing over as we explain the need for benchmarking our broad banded salary scales to ensure that the overall compensation and benefits package remains competitive with our stated median position.  Crack the champagne…..who’s counting?

And of course the Operations Director would be more than sympathetic to the need to develop a longer term OD strategy to ensure the successful transformation of the business. As long as it can be delivered in….say the next twenty minutes?

As a profession we are different to the others, hence the reason we exist, but we are also have significant similarities. Hence the reason that so many areas think they can add their expertise. Which of course they can. Which, in turn, is of course the point.

Organisations are increasingly multi dimensional and complex. Successful organisations work with multi disciplinary teams that are focused on solutions and delivery, not on hierarchy and reporting. And successful HR people know that they should draw on the expertise of the various other departments that exist within the organisation.

But their uniqueness comes in being able to knit together the varying elements to deliver a successful organisation for all stakeholders, management, employees and shareholders.

Arguing that, to improve, HR should sit in Finance to be more commercial, Marketing to be more creative or Operations to be more…..operational is akin to arguing that you get a better service by making the waiters report to the chefs or improve the ground ability of the air force by making them report to the infantry.

The real agenda is recruiting and developing the right HR people, with the right mindset and the right ethos. But of course, that’s a whole other blog. And right now I need to go and have my regular chat with the CFO. He’s a lovely chap, and would be the first to tell you, that he wouldn’t want my job in a million years.

I’m a white middle class male and I may not actually deserve what I have achieved.

“Achieved” to successfully bring about or reach (a desired objective or result) by effort, skill, or courage….so that’s a joke in itself. What if it wasn’t through my effort, skill or courage. What if it was though the lottery of demographics, socio economics and genetics?

I’m not suggesting that anyone ever said, “lets give him the job because he’s a white male” or thought, “I should listen to him because he is a middle class, middle aged dude and he is bound to say something sensible”.

But what if it just happens….because of the way we are, the way we are brought up, the norms we are expected to adhere to?

I was sat in Berlin a few weeks ago, working as an assessor on an international development centre. Because it was a development centre and because, in HR, we have no imagination, there was a group exercise. When we came to the wash up and validation session, there was a debate about the scoring. My sense was that some of the candidates had been scored less highly than others because they’d said less. But they hadn’t contributed less. And they were disproportionately female.

One of the people I was observing had nodded, reaffirmed, encouraged, listened and supported. She didn’t say that much, but she had played an important role. Others suggested that as she hadn’t said anything, she couldn’t be rated highly for her contribution. These were skilled and experienced HR professionals.

And that is just one simple example.

I’ve learnt how to behave from my experience, I know how to position myself in a room, to hold myself to…..encourage, consider, control, direct. I can get my views heard and considered, not necessarily because I make sense, but because they make sense because they are coming from someone behaving in a way that makes us think that they must.

Does this help at interview? Sure. Does it help when you go for promotions? Of course. Does it mean that others have anything less to offer. Not at all.

I’m not sure I have any answers, I’m not sure I have even formulated the questions. The great thing about having a blog is that I don’t have to. This isn’t a text book, you’re not paying, I’m not Ulrich.

But it seems to me that the world of work is still heavily prejudiced towards certain ways of being, certain behaviours, certain mannerisms that are predominantly associated with the middle class, white guy like me. Which means that I might not be here because of what I do, but because of who I am.

And maybe, so are you.

Whilst working on the subject, of which we must not speak, which occupies most of my waking and sleeping hours, I’ll also be spending some time with someone who divides my world, our profession, more than most. Someone we could maybe describe as the Marmite of the HR world. Revered by many, loathed by others and the subject of more column inches than even the Rave Pony. I’ll be meeting and spending time with a certain Dave Ulrich.

I’ve been pretty open about the Ulrich model in the past. I firmly believe it has been responsible for down skilling the HR profession. I believe it has made building a career in HR harder than ever. The model has been snatched by the profession with the blind eagerness of an addled addict spying a wrap of crack down the back of a well worn and somewhat putrid smelling sofa.

I also don’t believe that you can blame Ulrich for this any more than you can blame Smith and Wesson for the ridiculous levels of gun deaths in the country that likes to consider itself the most advanced in the world. Yeah…I’m posting this after I’ve got through immigration.

But that isn’t it. The issue isn’t the model.

The issue is about power and control. And no model has, or will, deal with the issue that is at the heart of the problem.

We see the power tension in the EU, in the United Nations, in our health care system, local and central government.

In any organisation with central and devolved functions, with local and global functions will always have tensions. The thing about the Ulrich model is that it did nothing to tackle them and instead went a long way to creating significant additional issues by highlighting and emphasising them.

Centres of Excellence looked down on Business Partners. Business Partners looked down on Centres of Excellence. And everybody looked down on the Shared Service guys. If they could find them….somewhere between here and Bangalore.

The creation of an additional power struggle within an already fragile and uncertain profession was as welcome as the proverbial fart in a space suit. And as parts of the HR function set about fighting in and amongst themselves, in a comedic HR turf war. The people that really matter, the employees, the managers, the customers and consumers, became increasingly disenfranchised from the department that couldn’t even speak highly of themselves.

Confusing. Baffling. Conflicting. Debilitating.

I don’t think any “model” is going to work unless you can deal with this issue of power and control. Throwaway statements about collegiate working and cooperative solutions are excrement coated feathers in the breeze. Easy to throw out there, seemingly light and appealing, but ultimately stained, stinking and ineffective.

So let’s get this elephant on the table, this walrus on a rock, this ostrich egg on a giant sized egg cup. And let’s crack this thing once and for all. The power struggle within HR is all pervasive and crippling. No model that separates, that divides will work unless it deals with this, the very essence of our identity crisis:

Who has the power and who has the contol?

Job seeking is a pretty soulless process. Time consuming, expensive, depressing and often fruitless. But you have to keep going and you have to keep positive. Despite the stupid application forms you need to complete, the ridiculous processes that are created, despite the, oh so clever, questions you have to answer.

Because yes, that question that you wrote that you thought would sort the creative wheat from the non-creative chaff is being met at best with an eye-roll and at worst with utter contempt. As one job applicant said recently to me, “[it] makes me feel like I’m not being taken seriously as a hard-working student who wants to show my skills and talents”.

Seriously, have you looked at your recruitment process from the other side of the fence? Sure there may be more candidates than there are jobs, for now. But does that make the applicants less human? I’m not talking about candidate journey – there are recruitment bloggers out there who will cover the subject much better than me. I’m talking about common decency and respect.

If you ask a candidate to complete pages and pages of answers as part of their graduate application, don’t you think you should show them a little respect back? If you’re going to ask them question after question, then at least make them relevant to the applicants and respectful of the time, hard work and financial commitment that they have already put in just to be deemed worthy to complete your process.

We all need to make selection decisions, of course. But can the candidate see the relevance of it and do they feel that they are being judged on criteria that feel fair and transparent?

“Describe a unique experience you’ve had over the last year” (are you testing me on my descriptive abilities or the quality of my experiences?)

“Where would you like to be in 5 years time?” (geographically, existentially or financially?)

“Why do you want this job?” (because medical science rejected my body and a corporate career was all that was left open to me)

So yes, ask questions, pull your application processes together, design your assessment centres, do the do. But try to put yourself in the candidate’s position too. This probably won’t be the only job they’re applying for, they’ve seen hundreds of similar processes. Make it relevant, make it easy for them to shine and make it reflect well on you, both in the short-term and for your longer brand perception.

I still have all the rejection letters that I received, somewhere in a file….I’m not against grudge bearing….I know who you are…..