Performance

Disappointment and performance

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As a proud Welshman, I was hooked to the television on Saturday morning to watch the Welsh rugby team play France in the semi final of the Rugby World Cup. The Welsh were favourites after a series of strong performances in earlier games and it seemed that it was almost a matter of time until I was watching them in the final for the first time.

But with less than 20 minutes gone, their captain was controversially sent off and reduced to 14 men for over an hour, the effort was too much and they lost by a single point. Unsurprisingly, the post match analysis and the media focus was all on the sending off, the rights and the wrongs, the ins and the outs. In the words of the Coach Warren Gatland,

 “the destiny of having the opportunity was taken away from us”

In business I have seen so many people who feel the same way. Passed over for a promotion, working for someone who they don’t respect, not paid the amount they think they are worth, on the project that is going to the wall because it is being led by “that idiot”.

And that is the thing, it is always someone else’s fault. And often the one at fault is the guy in charge.

I’m not going to say that the world is without injustice. Sometimes bad things happen. But my point is that obsessing on these things just isn’t healthy. It doesn’t make you a better person, it doesn’t improve your performance it ultimately will not bring you success.

There are certain factors that you can control in your life, in your work, and there are others that you can’t. Focussing on and trying to control the things that are out of reach of your influence is a sure-fire way for a life of resentment and frustration.

The Welsh players can’t go back and change the decision that was made. But they can prepare for the third place play off and show the world why they are the team that everyone would wish to be in the final. And then they can go on to the Six Nations on a high and with a chance to show the world once again their abilities.  They need to accept that they didn’t lose because a player was sent off, they lost because they scored less points than the other team.

Likewise, you can’t go back and get that promotion, change your manager, increase your own pay or run that project. But you can focus on the next opportunity, the next chance to shine and you can prepare yourself to make the most of it.

Disappointment is natural, we all want to do well. But most of the time it is your fault when things go wrong. Accept that, work out what you’d differently and focus on improvement. It takes a bigger person to do and sure it will hurt at times, but I guarantee it will be ten times more effective than focusing on past failures and looking for someone to blame.

Unconscious immunity

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I can remember at some point in my childhood, my brother and I were having a pointless argument over a pointless topic in only the way that loving siblings can. I can’t remember the specifics, there were far too many brotherly tiffs to record them all, but I know that he was teasing me over something that I had tried to do and failed badly at. And my mother said,

“Those who never try, never fail”

Those who never try….never fail.  Ok so this was said as a rebuke to a 9-year-old evil tempered older brother. But some 30 years or so later I was sat in the US thinking about the future of HR and why we seem incapable as a profession of shaking off the shackles of mainstream perception and the words start to take on a separate but equally  valid meaning.

So many of us out there in the profession are seeking some sort of unconscious immunity.  If we say nothing outside of “the box”, then there is no chance that we will be ridiculed.  If we keep our counsel on subjects that are out of the strictly defined “people agenda” then we will never look stupid. If we don’t talk and stay silent, then we might not look stupid and might raise our credibility.

Of course, when you read this – like me – you’ll think this is a nonsense.  It makes no sense right?  Why would not saying something be more likely to improve your credibility than saying something? But then you are reading this from a rational objective and not an emotional one. And the way that we interact in business and express our views is, in my opinion, more based on the latter than the former.

Saying nothing is a seemingly sure bet.  If you say nothing, you will seldom be wrong. The view on the monthly financial report, the question on the marketing plan, the point on the supply chain strategy that just doesn’t sit right.  Raising them…..well you could be totally wrong and make yourself a laughing-stock. But not raising them………?

Don’t get me wrong, I can be guilty of this myself. Sitting in a meeting and thinking “that doesn’t make sense” but saying absolutely nothing. Not always, but sometimes. And I need to challenge myself to break this habit.  You don’t change anything by staying silent, you change by speaking out.

Very little grows in the shadows, it grows in the glare of the midday sun.  You put yourself out there and of course there is the risk that you may just get something wrong. But let he who is without asking a daft question, throw the first stone.  And you never know, once in a while, you might say something that really changes the game.

HCM A depressing blast from the past

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Nothing says “past it” than a term that I came across yesterday for the first time in a long while. Human Capital Management. The words in themselves are enough to make my stomach turn. I know that linguistically it isn’t a million miles away from Human Resource Management, but the latter is a broad church, where as HCM has connotations that I find really quite disturbing.

Whereas the origins of the term date back to economic theory, it has been hijacked by the over willing, over eager consultants as a means of trying to squeeze metrics and measurement into everything. Thus driving “economic value” of the “human capital”. I’m not against measurement per se, but I do think we are on a hiding to nothing with it.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”

True, but also not so.

Because in the end, we are dealing with people, not buttons or levers and therefore we have to understand that much of our measurement will be qualitative. The example given yesterday was recruitment. I know quite a bit about recruitment metrics, I wrestled with them for years. Measure time to fill? Ok that tells you something….but what do you really want to know? My guess is the questions are more,

– Are we easily attracting the right people?

– If not why not?

Does time to fill answer that? No,but it is harder to measure what we want to know and therefore we measure the process, because that is easier and as HR people we are happier in the process than in nebulous concepts.

The other piece that rankles with the whole issue of HCM is the view that labour costs are just that….costs. As I said yesterday in the conversation, flip it around and it becomes investment. As you could buy a very cheap computer system or a very expensive one, you can also have cheap or expensive labour. Without knowing the effectiveness or the performance of both, you know nothing (and measuring that is almost impossible). If the cheaper computer system is causing employees to be less productive or is crashing then the actually cost of it could be higher.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, humans are wonderfully unique and unpredictable. We should be embracing that and looking at a more humanistic approach to managing and understanding them, not trying to convert them into something they are nor – measurable assets.

For me that’s why HCM deserves to be confined to the garbage can of failed approaches to people management…if there is still any room left in there.

Fair pay, fair play

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I read this article at the weekend by Will Hutton talking about his work on public sector pay.  I had a meeting with Will a few weeks ago, alongside with a couple of other private sector HR people, to discuss the issues of fairness in pay and particularly the use of performance related pay in his work for the coalition government.

Unlike the comic stereotypes that get bandied around in the press, the general consensus was that the Government should not look to performance related pay as the silver bullet that would solve all of the ills.  And that is certainly shouldn’t be a replacement for a living wage.  At the end of the session I made the point that you couldn’t look at pay structures in isolation.  That pay only becomes a media topic, when people feel it doesn’t equate to worth.

There was hardly ever any discussion of Sir Terry Leahy’s remuneration, although it was of a magnitude that a cashier or shelf stacker would find hard to imagine, but what about Andy Hornby?   No-one would discuss the level of financial reward that Sir Alex Ferguson receives, but compare that to their reaction to Fabio Capello?

People will accept top people being paid good money, even in the public sector, if they can see it is justified

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Will’s comments really resonate with me.  Levels of pay in the public and private sector are sensitive issues, but only when they feel out of proportion to the experience of the end-user.  But of course that is easier to do in some circumstances than others, a Head Teacher’s pay could be linked to the performance of a school and that would be visible and arguable to the public. But would that be as easy for the Head of the Environment Agency?

Will’s conclusion is a bonus-malus system could and should be introduced for certain senior roles. It is brave thinking and likely to be hugely unpopular with those senior individuals and the management associations, but constructed properly it could go a long way to convincing a sceptical public that reward is earned. 

Every small business person knows that if they do well they get the benefits, but if they don’t it hits them directly in the pocket.  As a principle, that can’t be bad.