HR

Angry white males

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The angry white male is everywhere.

They’re on the forum where you posted that innocuous comment.
They’re in the meeting where you can’t get airtime.
They’re in the queue telling everyone else how to stand.
They’re in the hotel lobby making sure they know “who they are”.
They’re even writing this blog.

The angry white male is everything that holds us back from our potential, they sit on our shoulder with the threat of, at any point, pointing out their superiority and our inadequacies. They lurk on social channels expressing their views and goading you to reveal the smallest part of yourself that they can then judge.

The angry white male is the reason we don’t debate and discuss the things that we need to. They are the reason that curious inquisition is met with an indignant retort. They stand as the single business reason for the curtailment of creativity and innovation.

The angry white male stands between you and your best self, from your potential. They want to hold you back to remain in “front”, to keep you down, so they can stay “above”. To keep things “in order”, their order.

But the thing about angry white males is, you don’t beat them by trying to be more like them. You beat them by ignoring them, by marginalizing them, by going on regardless. You beat them by remaining true to yourself, to your thoughts, to your beliefs and to your dreams.

Nobody creates the rules, other than you. No-one decides what is acceptable, other than you. Nobody has the right to judge your idea as good or bad or to determine how you should or shouldn’t present your thoughts and feelings. No-one has that power.

The angry white male lives inside all of us, to a greater or lesser extent. They come out when we hinder rather than help, when we tell rather than ask, when we judge rather than consider.

The angry white male is everywhere.

But they needn’t be.

Structural madness

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I used to work in an organisation that liked to restructure on a regular basis. The joke was that you could tell which day of the week it was based on whether there was an announcement about some sort of change. If you stayed in the organisation long enough, you got to see all the things that were undone, redone. It was a kind of cyclical musical chairs, but without the music, or a winner.

The more I learn about business and organisational performance, the more I realise that restructures mostly don’t improve either. And if there is any improvement, it is normally only marginal compared to the uncertainty, insecurity and disruption that are caused.

Most reorganisations fall into four categories:

  1. A new leader arrives and determines that they want to do things differently
  2. Something is not happening that the organisation wants to happen
  3. There is a need to reduce the cost base of the organisation
  4. Somebody leaves or there is an organic reorganisation of work and responsibilities

I’d go as far as to say that only the last of these makes any real sense at all.

The first is normally driven by the need of a new leader to stamp their authority, to have things working “their way” and to make people realise that there is a new regime in place. Now this “may” be true, but other than make things work from their perspective, will it really drive any meaningful shift in performance? The counter argument is that it probably won’t hurt – but then is that really a meaningful basis for any management intervention?

The second is where we enter the territories of madness….if you want something to happen that isn’t happening, if people aren’t talking, if there isn’t cross selling, if you don’t have the lead generation that you want. A structural change is not going to make these things happen. Nor will it get you liked, loved or adored.  A behavioural change, on the other hand, just might. People don’t do things differently because they’re organised in a different way, they do it because they understand things in a different way – they change their hearts and heads, not their seat.

As for three, there are the rare occasions when people are sat around in a business not doing anything. But in most cases, they’re carrying out the tasks that the organisation has historically deemed necessary. Wholesale structural changes to take out cost rarely work, without a subsequent change to the business operation or model. And if you’ve got an individual who is a problem? Deal with them, not the poor suckers around them.

A few years ago, I was talking to a successful leader of a business area who was referring to a competitor announcing another restructure. “I don’t think we’ve structurally changed things since the 70s” they told me. When I asked them how they’d accommodated all the changes and developments in the world and in their industry they answered, “we talk about it, work out what we need to do and get on with it”.

Hard to put it simpler than that.

The future of work is human

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If I had to list four things that bring out my inner geek, they’d be:

Work
Technology
Psychology
Education

I can’t remember the dates of any historical events, my knowledge of sports and sporting prowess is limited and if you want to know what stocks and shares to invest in…..buy the ones I’ve just sold. But give me any of these four topics and I’ll talk, ignorantly but passionately, for hours.

Each in its own right is a things that stirs the proverbial loins, but what about the point where all four intersect? Is there a relationship between them?

We know that technology is changing the way in which our children interact with the world. It is also starting to change the way in which they learn and work at school. So what is going to be the impact on the world of work when these young people get to employable age? Is technology changing the way our brains work and function and what do we need to think about in how we design work, teams and organisations?

Are we already starting to see the impact of the way that we use technology on our behaviour in the workplace? Our choices, decision-making, attention, concentration, speed of communication?

Late last year the CIPD started a piece of work to explore the future of work from a variety of different angles. The aim being to move the debate on from the normal, often predictable themes and to take a different approach. There are a number of work streams and groups exploring all sorts of angles, you can read more about it here.

As part of this, I want to look at these questions. To go beyond the “robotisation” arguments and look at the relationship between human performance and technology from a psychological and behavioural perspective, the good, bad and indifferent.

And this is where I need your help.

If you’d like to be part of this work, or if you know someone who you think might be, then I’d love to hear from you. Ideally I’d like to pull together a group of people from a range of backgrounds to exchange ideas, thoughts and theories with the view to presenting the findings at a “Big Tent” event in October.

There is no specified time commitment, geography is unimportant and I haven’t even worked out the process (yet). I just want to bring together curious, passionate, thoughtful people to help explore the themes and ideas. So if that sounds like you, if this piques your interest, then get in contact and lets see where the conversation takes us.

Technology, analytics, data, life – start from the beginning

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I’ve just got back from the HRTechFest in Washington. Last time I went to one of these, I wrote this about Technology being HR’s biggest asset. I still think it is – so take a look.

This time, I was struck this time about the commonality of a lot of the themes that people were talking about inside and outside of the sessions. I heard a lot about:

Transparency – the increasing expectation from employees that they can see the workings of an organisation beyond their own personal experience. Whether that is of compensation, decision-making structures, or promotion opportunities – to name but a few.
Customisation – no single person is the same and we therefore need to create employee experiences that recognise the different choices that individual employees will want to take at different stages of their lives and careers.
Experimentation – we need to be more comfortable with being less perfect and in trying things out to see how and if they work. Whether it is data, technology or traditional interventions, we need to love and embrace the pilot.
Analysis – data, data everywhere….and we need to start using it sensibly. Almost every presentation or conversation I had talked about the data underpinning decisions, but used it in a practical and sensible way – not for show, but for real, purposeful thinking.

But the biggest thing that I realised was that the companies talking about this were drawn from right across the board. The likes of Twitter and Hulu and Google and Hootsuite were rubbing shoulders with the likes of Barclays, Cimpress, NBC and health and education providers.

The challenges and themes were the same, but the routes to the mountains were different. And I think this is a factor that we sometimes overlook. If you want to develop transparency of compensation, then you’re going to take a different route in a company which has been in existence for less than 10 years and has a couple of hundred of employee to one that has thousands of employees and a lot with a length of tenure two or three times longer than the other company.

Our skill is in understanding our organisational starting place and identifying the path to take. That’s a significant part of what we bring to the table. Sometimes change is fast, sometimes change is slow. Sometimes things aren’t achievable right now because a whole load of other things need to be done first. And that’s ok.

We all need to aspire to be better, we all want our organisations to change and develop, to create better working environments for our employees and better workplaces for society. To do that we need to constantly take a step forward from the place that we started. Recognising the challenge is as important as recognising the goal. That way, we make long-term sustainable change. The sort that really, really makes a difference.