Summing up

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One of my favourite quotes of all time if from King Lear, it is delivered by Edgar in Act 5 scene 3, “The weight of this sad time we must obey. Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

Since the very first moment I read it, almost 20 years ago, this quote has stayed in my head. There is something wonderfully true and sincere and just downright, well…right. And given the last few years, it seems that there is no time more apt.

The thing is that, when you get to the end of the year, the world of blogging is full of earnest blogs, by good people telling you how much they’ve achieved, how blessed they are and how much they’ve contributed.

I’m in awe, you’re all clearly amazing, you make me proud.

So, let me tell you my story…..this year hasn’t been amazing. But, compared to that of many people, it hasn’t been awful.

Like a lot of you, I’ve spent the year trying not to drown. Now admittedly, my water is shallower than most, but you can drown in an inch of water. Most of the UK, most of the world has been trying just to cope, and I admit to being no different to them. I haven’t changed the world, I haven’t added value, I haven’t had an amazing insight. I’ve survived. And in a way, I’m extremely proud to say so.

This year, I’ve let people down, I’ve not been at my kid’s special occasions, the concerts, the plays, the sports days as much as I would have liked. I’ve not been able to see my friends and I’ve pulled out of things at the last moment. I’ve been more of a traditional male than I would ever have thought, relying on my wife to keep things going when I couldn’t.

I’ve not looked after my health in the way that I should have done. I haven’t checked out those niggling health problems, I’ve drunk too much and I haven’t exercised when I could have done. I feel sleep deprived beyond compare.

At work, I’ve been secretive because I’ve had to be. I’ve not been able to include people in things that I’m doing for understandable reasons. Regardless, this has contradicted with everything that I believe and hold dear and has struck hard into my moral fibre and my personal resolve.

This year, I’ve felt more out of control than I have done for decades, I’ve depended on my survival instincts and my reflexes to keep me going. This hasn’t been a “roller coaster” of a year, it has been a “black ice drive” of a year. I’ve got through, that is all I can tell you.

I’m indebted to the loved ones that surround me, many of whom I have let down. The people who have accepted my indifference, my moods, my unreliable behaviour. I’m indebted to my teams who have been beyond compare in their loyalty and endeavour.

I’m indebted and apologetic to my family, the people I hold most closest and whose love I have abused. The times when I haven’t been present, the moments that I will never get to live again, the kisses that I never offered and the hugs that I didn’t feel I deserved.

I’m not looking for sympathy, I’m not looking for excuses. I’m just saying how it’s been, both for me and for a whole lot of people out there. When we are honest about how things are, then we can start to truly support one another.

Life isn’t a competition to demonstrate who is the happiest, it is a journey best accompanied by a dose of reality. That way, you truly enjoy the special moments when they come….however few and far between.

Customers can be wrong

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Is the customer ever wrong? That was a question that I posed to the wonderful Doug Shaw at the CIPD Conference in Social Media last year. I was being mischievous. Because the answer is, of course. Sometimes the customer IS wrong. Let me give you some examples.

I was out for dinner on Saturday night and when we went to order the waiter had a somewhat quizzical look in his eye. We were ordering from the menu, we were ordering perfectly good dishes, but he felt that there were better dishes on the menu that we could be eating. He recommended, we went with his recommendations and we had an amazing meal. For the record, that was Khan’s of Brixton….it doesn’t look much, but the food is amazing.  The thing was, he was trying to give us a better experience.

I’ve come across suppliers, in the past, who have turned work down because they didn’t feel it was their strong suit. I’ve complete respect for that. I’ve also come across suppliers who have tried to convince me that I wanted product A not product B. Not because product A was better, but because they couldn’t do product B. I’ve less respect for that.

I may have been wrong in both cases, but the honesty and the integrity of the supplier was the differentiating factor. And likewise, as an HR practitioner, sometimes you will come up against circumstances where the client or customer is wrong. They want to do one thing, you believe that another thing is right. If you have the best interests of the business and the client at heart, then you should feel free to challenge and free to try to guide them to a better solution. The old HR adage of, “I explain to them the risks and then I let them make the decision”, is an out dated, ill thought through, pile of steaming nonsense. That is not adding value in any shape or form.

Challenging a CEO, or senior manager, who has their mind set on one thing and influencing them to do something else is scary. It can be risky and in some organisations it can be dangerous. But be under no illusion, that it is right. Just choose how you approach it, choose how you do it and be prepared to be proved wrong. We all are sometimes.

Like suppliers, as an HR professional, you should be looking to build a long-term sustainable relationship. That means that a level of openness, honesty and challenge is always appropriate even if it isn’t always welcome. Customers aren’t always right, sometimes they need a little guidance. It can be hard work, it can be unforgiving, but it is one way to really add value to your business.

If you don’t believe me, watch this:

The focus of HR isn’t to be commercial: Day three of #cipd2012

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A time for some final conclusions from the CIPD conference, before I jump on the train and head back to the world of work, emails and slightly irate family members wondering why I’ve been living it up in Manchester. Living it up is probably too grandiose a term, but from the time of some of the text messages I received last night/this morning, there was a party going on…..somewhere.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the matter in hand. Or the matter that should be in hand, but strangely isn’t. And by that I mean, the standard of our profession.

It seems almost a lifetime ago now that I was watching Gary Hamel on stage as the opening keynote to the conference. Gary was inspirational he was challenging. he built on the opening address from Peter Cheese. They both talked of setting a high bar for the profession, of re-engineering our purpose for the future world of work. It was heady stuff and long overdue.

But so much of what I’ve seen and experienced since then has reminded me how far we have to go. Slipping back into our comfort zone of process and procedure, of task and activity, of compliance and control. I attended a session yesterday entitled, “Commercially focused HR Business Partners” partly because I wanted a laugh and partly because I’m kind of curious about why we are still having this particular conversation. I wrote about “Commercial HR” a while back for the kind people at XpertHR. You can find that series of posts here. I also had a great conversation with FlipChartRick about this and his experience of another session, “How can HR improve its influence with the Board” and he has written a post about it here.

The thing that strikes me most is this; we should be bringing something unique to our organisations, something that other departments can’t bring and which outsourcing can’t do more cheaply. At the session on Commercial HR, I asked a question of the speakers – whether the debate about commercial HR wasn’t actually defunct and redundant and shouldn’t we talk about values led and culture led HR instead? The general consensus was that yes it was….and then they went back to discussing “commercial HR”. You see, I don’t understand how anyone can get any joy out of work without being interested in the operation of their organisation, the purpose, intent and performance. It would be like driving a car without looking out of either the windscreen or in the mirrors. In order to be of any sort of use, you need to be commercially aware, but that isn’t the same as being commercially focussed.

As Rick points out in his post, “you don’t need to do the CFO’s job but you at least need to learn his language”. Correct. You don’t need to try to outdo the experts in the room, but you do need to understand the conversations that are going on and be able to contribute. However, our focus should not be commercial. It should be something else that brings something new to the table. Can you imagine how things might have been different in some of the companies that have recently encountered “credibility” issues if they had experienced a strong voice talking about the importance of values, culture, integrity and sustainability? What is they had experienced someone working with the senior team and coaching them on tackling their challenges in a different way? Both because they understood the business, the challenges but also because they brought a different angle, a different approach to solving them?

I don’t buy this constant banging on about being commercial. I’ve never been anything else and nor have the people who I’ve recruited into my team and have worked with. I get that there are HR professionals out there that aren’t and they will never be successful, but it isn’t and shouldn’t be the focus of our profession – it is a pre-requisite to being a good business person. Our higher purpose, our contribution should be something else. Our focus should be on performance through people and the culture, values and leadership of our organisations. Really, it should. Trust me.

The youth unemployment challenge: Day Two of #CIPD12

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I’ve written about unemployment, skills and training on a number of occasions – because it is an issue that is close to my heart and because it is an issue that is close to the heart of our economy and future competitiveness.  I was therefore, absolutely delighted to see it taking centre stage on day 2 of the CIPD Conference with a panel discussion involving Peter Cheese, CEO of the CIPD, Michael Davis, CEO of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, Anne Pickering, HR Director for O2, Toby Peyton-Jones Director of HR for Siemens UK & North West Europe and also Jo Swinson, Minister for Employment Relations and Consumer Affairs.

The debate was a good one and unsurprisingly a number of key themes and issues were highlighted. The current issues that we are experience in youth employment are structural and not cyclical. This is not an issue just driven by the current economic environment, but has been a long time coming as highlighted in this blog by Mervyn Dinnen, caused by a decline in entry-level jobs and a reduction in big one company towns.  Add to this the contradiction of employers requiring work experience and young job seekers’ inability to get that work experience and we have ourselves a problem.

The problems are long-term and structural and likewise the solutions will also be long-term and structural. O2 talked about their inability to actually predict the skill sets that will be required in the future because of the speed of change in technology, requiring them to focus on recruiting mindset and broad skills instead. Siemens, in a rather germanic way, talked about how they had mapped out future mega trends to help understand the markets that they would need to be growing in and therefore which future skills they would be needing.

And of course, there was talk of the education system, vocational training, the role of universities and work experience schemes.

It is probably here that there are more questions than answers. Clearly there is a need for reform, but as I’ve written before, we seem to be dancing around the edges and sending contradictory messages. Take this, all the panelists including Swinson were extolling the virtue of other routes into employment other than university. Agreed. But we don’t seem to act as if it is.

As I tweeted at the time, I struggle to understand why we happily loan someone £27k to study for a degree in Zoology, but we won’t loan a job seeker money to undertake unpaid work experience, workplace training or even to start their own business.  When Government funds workplace schemes they give the money to the employer and the job seeker has to apply for it. Almost as if we don’t trust them with the money in the way that we would someone going to University.

It also strikes me that we place the power with the organisation and not the job seeker. Would an alternative model be to provide the funding to the job seeker? Although it wouldn’t change the overall outcome it would change the ethos. If I think Tesco aren’t providing as good an opportunity as Asda or Lloyds as Barclays then I can take my money to the employer I think would train and educate me best.  Creating competition between employers as well as between job seekers. It would also potentially open up more opportunities with SMEs and other companies who may not have the resources and the structure to apply fo Government funding in the way that larger organisations can.

I’m sure there a thousand holes that can be picked in this argument at the moment and I need to reflect on it and work it through more. But it seems that we would have a better bet if we both empower the young unemployed to find work and challenge organisations to create it. Businesses are competitive by nature, shouldn’t we be making the most of that?