HR

People strategies are unnecessary noise

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I have a confession to make. I hate “People Strategies” with a passion that comes close to my reaction to mushrooms, or people eating bananas anywhere close to me.

Yes, that bad.

The last couple of decades have seen the profession become obsessed with being strategic to the point that every student coming out of their CIPD training thinks that unless they’re doing something “strategic” they’re somehow falling behind their peers. The result of this is that across sectors, throughout organisations, hours and hours and spent and wasted on creating unnecessary presentations and documents outlining pointless stuff that no-one remembers and will never get done. Combine that with another pet peeve of mine, departmental mission statements and values, and you’ve probably identified one of the main reasons for a lack of productivity in the country.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been asked to develop people strategies in the past. The conversation usually goes something like this:

“We need a people strategy”

“To deliver what?”

“We want to be an employer of choice”

“For whom?”

“We need to attract and retain the best talent”

“What do you mean by best?”

To using a sporting analogy, it’s akin to saying “we want to win the cup” without understanding what the sport you’re playing is, when you want to win it and what resources you have at your disposal.

But let me be really clear, this doesn’t mean that I don’t think people aren’t an integral part of strategically driving the organisation forward, quite the opposite. I think they’re so integral that they shouldn’t be looked at in isolation of all the other elements of organisational strategy, they should be consider a fundamental part that’s discussed by everyone around the executive table rather than looked at by a particular team.

There is only one strategy, the organisational one. There is only one vision, the organisational one. And there is only one set of values, the organisational one.

Our job as leaders, regardless of where we work, is to help our teams to understand how the work that they do aligns to this, how they contribute to organisational success, to bring to life the vision in a way that makes that work feel valuable and to make sure that the values across the organisation are clear, coherent and lived every week.

Everything else is unnecessary noise.

It’s probably more complicated than that

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My mum used to have a t-shirt that read, “it’s probably more complicated than that”. As a guiding mantra when entering into a debate on anything in life we could all do worse than adopt this, yet at the same time there is an alluring pressure to make things simple. Above my desk, as I write this, I have a schematic of the cognitive bias codex as a reminder to myself of the complexity of the human brain. Of course it doesn’t stop me from falling into the traps, it just reminds me that I probably have.

We know that in times of stress and pressure we can rely more on our unconscious brain and that it can also be the place where some of the biases are held, to help make sense of information quickly and simply. And of course, most of us have lived through a period of sustained stress and pressure, so it is perhaps unexpected when we are so tired, so consumed with the pressures of life, so run down as a society that we want to make other things simpler.

Right. Wrong.

Good. Bad.

With. Against.

Fair. Unfair.

Politicians, media and campaigners understand this well. They’ve learnt the tricks of manipulation and use them freely. We call them out on it when they are suggesting something we disagree with, yet we lap it up when used on something that we agree with – the bandwagon effect. And at the same time our confirmation bias allows us to label “facts” as misinformation when they disagree with our argument, but accept “misinformation” as facts when they prove our case. And the funny thing is that most of us, if we take a little time to reflect, know this and can probably recognise when we have done this.

There was a lovely example of this recently with the launch of Threads in the battle between Facebook and Twitter. I watched as people moved across to the new platform and proclaimed how wonderful it was to find a platform where there was none of the hate or noise, a pure place like back in the early days. And then I watched as the same people, started to exhibit the same behaviours as they denounced on Twitter, sharing misinformation and biased political commentary. Of course, it isn’t the platform that makes the culture it is the people, what they were celebrating was the temporary loss of “the other lot”.

So what do we take from this? I don’t know. People are tired, we’ve been through (and are going through) a really difficult period in society. We all have a need to make things easier for ourselves and that might mean more judgment and less curiosity. We can’t stop that in society, but we can observe it in ourselves and our behaviour. And at the end of the day, it probably is more complicated than that – so maybe we don’t have to have an opinion right now or at all. Maybe that’s a start.

The talent you need is all around you

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Keen observers will know that I have a particular dislike for the made up, “Great Resignation”. I’d go as far to say that it put up a good challenge to “The War for Talent”, “The New Normal” and anything involving the word, “Disruption” to be the most vacuous phrase that has ever dribbled out of the side of a mouth. And whilst the context is different, the commonality between all of these soundbites is the lack of understanding and analysis that goes with their use. They’re just repeated mindlessly by the mindless.

There is no doubt that the labour market has been through a period of change. It was dormant for nearly two years, so it should come as no surprise that when it started up again it would behave in a less balanced way than before the pandemic. And there is no doubt that people have made different decisions over the last couple of years based on their experience during the pandemic period. That said, I have little time for anyone bemoaning the lack of talent.

Almost three quarters of a million young people are not in education, employment or training (NEET), around 350,000 people of working age with a disability are unemployed, single parents are twice as likely as unemployed as those in a couple, refugee unemployment rates are up to three times the national average, and only 25% of men and 20% of women leave the criminal justice system with any type of employment.

The idea that in all of these groups, in all these statistics there is a void of talent – well frankly it simply doesn’t add up. And whilst I know it is hard and I know it is unusual, as leaders of organisations we cannot overlook the opportunity that exists to create meaningful work for people and to mitigate the risk of the skills shortages we have created for ourselves through a lack of strategic workforce planning.

This isn’t about corporate responsibility, or employability programmes, whilst neither are among in and amongst themselves. This is about the search for talent and about the performance and productivity of our organisations. You can read more about it here.

Shape the future, don’t fixate on the past

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I turn 50 later this year. I know, I find it hard to believe too. It is an overused joke of mine that the pandemic stole my 40’s, back in 2020 I felt more mid 40’s still with loads of road ahead of me, by the end of restrictions the big 50 was really bearing down upon me and that road had become a narrow lane.

But this isn’t a post about the existential crisis of age, about wisdom, about loss or even about change. It is a post about the acceptance of reality.

The fact is I was born in 1973 and every 365 days based on our customs of time, I become a year older. The fact is that in 2020 a disease named Covid19 entered the UK and restrictions were put in place that limited our freedoms for the next couple of years. The fact is that in 2023, I will have lived 50 lots of those 365 days, including the period with the pandemic.

Nothing can, or will change that. Other than my early demise.

There are lots of things at work, in life, in society that we might not like. There will have been political decisions, promotions, events in the past that we will have disagreed with. But they are exactly that, events in the past. Rehearsing arguments about what could or should have been are completely pointless and require us to dispense energy on things we cannot change. What is worse, they distract from the conversations that we need to be having, what needs to be true in the future.

That is not to say that lessons from the past shouldn’t inform what we do in the future, those of us familiar with reflective practice will know the power of seeking to understand in order to power us going forward. For example, having lost time to the pandemic, I might seek to make sure that I maximise every day in my 50’s. Likewise, we can learn from errors of the past to inform our thinking in the future.

The imperative on all of us is to shape the future, not fixate on the past. Not only will that create a better world around us, it will also lead us to happier more productive lives.