A fine balance

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Being a working parent is tough. I don’t need to explain that to anyone with kids.

Being a single working parent. Well, it takes tough to a new level.

My experience of the last week has shown me just how tough that is. I’m lucky, my wife is in hospital and this is only temporary. I’m lucky that my job allows me a level of flexibility. I’m also lucky that I have an incredibly supportive and understanding employer. I’m not so sure, that many employers are.

“Dad, I’ve lost my tie”

“We really need to prioritize this search, I’m uncomfortable with how we’re progressing”

“Someone has stolen my PE kit. I need a new one or I’ll get detention”

“Can you give me your views on this document? By tomorrow am”

“Dad, we’re making scones tomorrow. We do have the ingredients don’t we?”

“We’ve just received a grievance. How do you want to play it?”

“Can you help out at scouts tomorrow night? We’re short on leaders”

“I need you to dial into a conference call at midday”

“Dad….have you fed the guinea pigs?”

We have guinea pigs?????

The conflicting pulls and demands, the geographical disparity of events. The constant feeling of being behind. The guilt that comes from feeling that you are achieving everything, but none of it properly. The fatigue.

The moment you look in the fridge and realise there is nothing to eat.

So I know that people who live in circumstances like this have a better chance of setting up support systems to help them. I also know that if I was doing this permanently, I’d have to choose to make certain sacrifices to ensure balance.

But that is the point. As organisations, when we talk about being family friendly, we know what we mean, but do we know what people actually need? If I had a pound for every manager that over the length of my career had talked about “intermittent absence” or “loss of concentration” related to family concerns.

If organisations are focussed on output rather than input. If they are truly about finding and nurturing the best talent. If we genuinely see people as our greatest asset. Then some of them are going to be in family situations that make work hard.

That doesn’t mean they’re slacking, it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to work, it doesn’t mean that they don’t value or respect you as an employer. It just means that they are constantly balancing and weighing up conflicting commitments.

Lets put it this way, if you had the choice between completing that “important” report or making sure that your kids were picked up on time and not left standing in front of the school, what would you choose?

Most of us, if we could, would choose both.

Seeing things differently

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For those of us that work in HR, being kept in the dark is nothing new. Only last week, in Hamburg, I really was in the dark……for the best part of a day.  When I look at a meeting agenda and it includes the phrase, “experiential session” that is normally sufficient to get me reaching for the Blackberry and the “urgent” email that requires my immediate attention for, well about as along as the session is going to last. But on this occasion, there was no escape.

The experience was created by Dialogue in the Dark, a social enterprise which brings together the sighted and the visually impaired and essentially turns the tables. For several hours, you are immersed in darkness and complete tasks and everyday routines with the guidance of visually impaired coaches. As they say of themselves, “Blind people are the “sighted” ones in this environment and can demonstrate their capabilities better than their sighted colleagues” and I can tell you, in my case that was absolutely the truth!

As I say, I’m not always the keenest on interventions like this, to quote someone far cleverer than I, “team building is for suckers” but as it goes, this experience was really something out of the ordinary and after a weekend of reflection, here are the things that I’m still mulling over.

Listening is hard when there is so much “noise” – So we all say we know the value of listening rather than talking (ok….well apart from you at the back, but if you see me after class we can pick that up one on one).  But when you really NEED to listen, you become aware of how much noise there is and most of it is coming from humans. We talk too much, we make too many statements, we don’t ask enough and we don’t really listen.

Trusting people is tough – This isn’t about trusting people in business, this is about trusting people with your wellbeing. We didn’t get to see or meet the coaches before we were working with them (as a visually impaired person wouldn’t get to see you or I before we offer to help them). They could have led me into walls, tripped me up or got me to pour boiling hot water over myself (yes, we made coffee in the dark) from an initial position of wanting to just do it all myself, I had to let go.

Touching reassures – When you are in the dark, when you can’t see an inch in front of you, when you don’t know which way to turn or where to go, feeling a gentle hand on your arm means the world. Am I being metaphorical? Yes and no. Touching is not wrong, just be careful.

We’re not hitting home – Or alternatively, we send too many half packets of data and rely on the receiver to decode. At one point, one of my fellow delegates informed me that there was a step ahead. As I took an exaggerated comic step up, I learned to my expense that it was a step down….thankfully my face broke the fall. He was trying to help, the information was sent with the right intention, just not the right content.

You can nudge as well as stride – In the collaborative tasks there were two types of leaders, the striders and the nudgers. The thing about striders is that they assume you’ll follow and when they realise you aren’t, they are too far ahead to make amends. Nudgers may seem to lack the dynamism, but they bring everyone home together.

Did I really get all of that out of one day? Well I guess with these things, you always have the lingering thoughts, they just sometimes need to be brought to the fore.  Dialogue in the Dark was really different, it was really valuable and perhaps most exultingly they are working withschools and children as well as adults. It doesn’t exist in the UK at the moment, lets hope someone is farsighted enough to change that soon.

*I apologise unreservedly for that last line…..

Creating growth

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My friend Rick over at Flip Chart Fairytales wrote a post recently bemoaning (or at least questioning) the lack of creativity in business. Pulling together a number of commentators he makes, as you’d expect, some great points and the comments are equally as good. But, I read the post with a certain sense of despair.

“Creativity has always been a long hard slog, slowed down by corporate obstacles, spiked by saboteurs and smothered by indifference. But I’m not sure this is any worse now than it has ever been.”

So why the despair?

First is the sadly common mistake of mixing the terms innovation, entrepreneurialism and creativity. I’d argue these are very different skills and very different mindsets.

There is a pervasive “old world” business approach and mindset to the blog. A lot of the comments refer to creativity taking place in small start-ups that are later bought by the corporate giants and therefore the lack of creativity in those corporations, and hence a passive outsourcing of thinking.

I’ll come back to that point later.

However, most depressing is a focus on a very limited segment of the economy. And here it brings me great pleasure to introduce to you, the creative industries. That’s right, there are business out there that have as their core, as their raison d’etre, a creative purpose. Film making, gaming, television, design and yes….publishing, to name but a few. We, in Britain, are incredibly lucky to have a ridiculously healthy creative industry. And it isn’t small, the creative industries in their entirety are as big, if not bigger, than the financial services sector. We have the biggest creative industry in Europe and, pound for pound, probably the world.

More so, this is an industry that is growing and growing, despite the current economic climate.

Is there a lack of creativity in UK plc? No. Really, no.

Rick and those that commented are talking about one or two specific sectors of the economy, they are confusing entrepreneurial flair and innovation with genuine creativity. The UK economy is thriving with creativity, but it is lacking the focus and investment that other, less profitable and, dare I say it, less future proof industries receive. If Government is serious about growth then it could do far worse than focus on the creative industries as the keystone of recovery.

Now, to come back to the point about passive outsourcing. Business is changing, the face and structure of business is in an evolutionary stage. Small businesses, sole traders, bedroom ventures are all bursting with innovation and entrepreneurial endeavour. Many of them are niche, many of them don’t grow, many of them don’t want to grow and ultimately some of them do sell out to corporate monoliths, before then going on to their next endeavour. Is there anything wrong with that? I honestly don’t think so. That is at the heart of entrepreneurialism.

So, to answer Rick’s question, “Is there a creativity crisis?” No. Are our established corporations designed for entrepreneurial flair and innovation? Also no.

But the two questions are not the same.

Our creative industries are thriving, they are full of truly creative people, not bureaucrats, working to make world-class products and develop leading edge content. They may be quiet, they may sometimes be unseen, but they are an economic force to be reckoned with.

Overlook them at your peril.

The inside track

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So we talk a lot about ethics in HR and recruitment, and rightly so.  Ethical behaviour should be at our core in business, whatever area we work in (whether it is, or isn’t, is another matter). At the same time, we’ve heard a lot recently about social mobility, the way in which connections at work and in industry can be used to help people with the right contacts progress more quickly than others. It goes without saying, that doesn’t seem fair.

But a couple of questions have been running through my head recently and I wanted to test them out. Those of us who are connected with others, either through formal or informal networks, will often come up against others asking about or applying for opportunities that we may have within our organisations, or for third party recruiters, that we are working on. What are the ethics that apply here?

If someone you knew, a friend or acquaintance, applied for a role. What would be the appropriate thing to do?

Do you accept that they are just another candidate and let the best person win.  Is it ever acceptable to help them understand the role and the organisation more than other candidates? I’m not talking about giving them a heads up on specific interview questions, or giving them privileged information that would provide them with a significant advantage, or even giving them a job just because you know them. But is it ok to coach them on the areas that they might be asked about, or the subjects that they might specifically want to think about or mention? Does it make a difference whether you are personally part of the recruitment process yourself?

I’ve had people from my team apply for jobs in the past and I’ve spent significant time coaching them for the selection process. I’ve talked to them about the approach they might want to take and the issues that they might want to address.  I’ve seen that as part of helping them develop and progress their careers within the organisation, but in reality it could be seen as giving them an unnatural advantage. Somehow, because they were internal, this seemed to be deemed acceptable.

Does it really matter whether they are an internal or an external candidate? If you could give someone you knew and valued the inside track, would you do so? And is that ok?

Should we be seen to be whiter than white or, as I expect, are there shades of grey?