leadership

You can’t hurry love. And you can’t measure it either.

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Most of us are familiar with the Drucker assertion, “what gets measured gets managed”. It is a rare year in my business life when this isn’t rolled out at some point or other in a conversation about how to improve some area of performance. It goes without saying that measurement is a hugely important part of delivering a change in performance, but it isn’t the only important part.

The risk of adherence to statements like this is that there is an inherent acceptance that if you can’t measure it, it can’t be managed and therefore isn’t important to focus on. This is particularly problematic when we start to look at the management of people in the workplace and the push for HR analytics. I should say, before we go on, that I’m a big fan of using data to better understand people’s experience of work and the workplace and I’m a fan of using it to better understand the way in which we can improve performance at work. But I don’t believe that everything important for leaders to focus on can and should be measured.

If we are looking to lose weight, run a marathon or swim the channel then measurement and performance data becomes important. I need to know the weight that I’m starting at, I need to know the target that I want to achieve and when. I need to measure the amount of calories that I’m taking in and those that I’m expending and it probably helps if I check my progress as I go along. But what if you want to know how much you’re loved?

Is it how many presents you’re given or their value? How long or often you hold hands? How many times you think about that person during the day? Or how many times they think about you? For anyone with two or more children, answer the question which one you love the most. In the vast majority of cases I’m sure you’d say that you love them all equally, but I wouldn’t mind betting that on quantifiable measures there would be differences. I’m not doubting that you do love them the same by the way, the point is more that measurement is incapable of dealing with the complexity of some areas.

Why is this important? Well it matters when we start to talk about topics such as culture and employee experience. It matters because there are two potential traps that we can fall into – firstly that we say that it can’t be measured and therefore isn’t important, secondly to avoid this first argument we create meaningless measures (the organisational equivalent of the number of times you hold hands) that drive the wrong behaviour.

There are whole load of really important things in our workplaces that can’t properly be measured but they can be managed. The answer is not to look for one, two or three killer measures but instead recognise that there are a myriad of tell tale signs that might help you understand how you’re doing. As human beings we’re hugely adept at processing enormous amounts of small data points and drawing sense of them, we should be encouraging that in leaders as much as a focus on data and measurement.

If you’re working in a crap culture, you probably know it even if you can’t measure it. Just like if you’re in love.

We need to stand for something more

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Cast your mind back to April 2020, let’s be more specific, 2 April 2020. You might not remember what you were doing, I’m not sure I do, but I guarantee that even amongst the steeliest of you there was a growing sense of anxiety. In the UK we were in lockdown, lockdown 1. It was, and I think this is the absolutely perfect application of the word, discombobulating. And whilst I don’t know what you were doing that day, I can have a bet on what you were doing that evening at around 8pm and I reckon I’ll have a 1 in 2 chance of getting it right.

2 April 2020 was the first clap for key workers, in recognition of the “healthcare workers, emergency services, armed services, delivery drivers, people who work in shops, teachers, waste collectors, manufacturers, postal workers, cleaners, vets and engineers”, who were keeping the country going as many of us were confined to our houses. As the founder of the movement in the UK wrote at the time, “tonight we will show our appreciation again! For ALL that go out to work so that we can stay in!”

Fast forward less than 18 months and we are in a situation where mile long queues are forming outside of petrol stations, with many limiting the supply and many others closed. And whilst there is absolutely enough fuel to go around, whilst there is no need for panic, it has become a complete and utter free for all. Meanwhile the warnings are growing that the individual actions of many of us are likely to put those very people that we clapped for at risk of being unable to get to fulfil their essential roles in society.

It didn’t take long for us to forget.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written over the last year or so, then you’ve either a sucker for punishment or you’ll have noted that this is becoming something of a familiar refrain, but I’m not one to let a good argument go. The moment the worst of the pandemic was seemingly passed, we collectively dropped all focus on those essential workers and went back to our fetishisation of the white collar knowledge worker. From the mainstream press to our professional bodies, we dropped them like an embarrassing fat friend and are once again pretending that the only people that exist in our economy work in multi-storey offices in Central London or cool converted warehouses on the outskirts. And quite frankly, the HR profession missed a fundamental opportunity to shift the debate about good and meaningful work, because they were caught up in the rainbows and unicorns and blinded by vested self-interest.

Work, and therefore by definition organisations, has a fundamental role to play in the fabric of society. That stretches beyond our own employee base and our workforce, it stretches into the role and influence that we can play in shaping our communities and making a better and fairer world for all. To give an environmental parallel, when you’re making decisions as an organisation you’re not just interested in the physical environment directly around your workplaces, but you take a broader global view. So why when it comes to society do we think our obligations stop at funding a local football team and painting a school?

So, I hear you ask, what the hell do petrol queues and HR practices have in common? As I’ve written before, it is the increasing, pernicious presence of neo-liberalism in our workplaces, driven by the desire for HR departments and leadership teams to be popular rather than thoughtful, to serve rather than lead. It is the very same logic that leads a person wants to work from wherever they want and to fill up multiple jerry cans of petrol with little or no concern for others. They are putting their needs and their desires beyond those of society. And we, in our desperate search to be wanted, are willingly facilitating that shift.

We have to stand for something bigger and better than just giving people what they think they want. We have to believe that we can play a more important role than just appeasing the short term needs of our employees. We should do better, we must do better. But the track record of the last 18 months suggests we have a long long way to go.

I screwed up (again)

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As the events of the last couple of days of Cummingsate have shown us, it doesn’t matter how clever, how senior, how powerful one becomes, we are all capable of getting stuff wrong. Watching the press conference, and putting aside for one moment the reason for it, I had some personal sympathy as journalist after journalist lined up to ask him ostensibly the same question, picking over the details again and again.

The sympathy came because, in my own small way, I was also recovering from getting something pretty badly wrong and figuring out how to set best to articulate it in writing. To be clear, this is in no way a commentary on the Dominic Cummings situation – I’ll leave that to those that are better qualified – more a note to self and maybe to others.

  1. You have to take it on the chin – The first and most important thing about getting things wrong is that you have to own it. The immediate desire is to try to explain and rationalise and whilst that is absolutely critical too (see below), you have to start from a position of accepting your sub optimal outcome.
  2. Differentiate between the what and the who – It is very easy to start an inner self narrative, “I screwed up because I’m useless” or “I’m just no good at these things”. At the moment you’re dealing with a thing – whether that is a conversation, a piece of work, an event doesn’t really matter. It is too easy to generically attribute blame to some fundamental personality fault and it doesn’t help you learn.
  3. Try not to over steer – Trying to get perspective quickly is important and there are people around you that can help – but you have to choose wisely. Some will lead you not to follow numbers 1 and 2 above. They’ll tell you that you’re wonderful and the other person/people are idiots or they’ll tell you you’re an idiot and they could have done it so much better – “I’m not sure I would have handled it like that”. Helpful.
  4. Get analytical with it – In order to feel better, to learn and to improve you need to start getting analytical. What exactly went wrong? What was the timeline? If you could go back and do-over, which bit would you change, how and why? What would the impact of that amendment been to the end result? How do you know? Contrary to popular practice and belief, this isn’t best done with cold sweats at 4am, but in the light of day with a steady mind.
  5. Move on – Once you’ve been through this process, you need to let it go. Take the learning, remember the feelings and emotions, but contextualise them as a power to take you forward, not to take you back. “I don’t want to ever feel like that again, so to avoid that I’m going to do xx”. Of course others will risk drag you back, depending on the context, but that takes you back to number 1. Own it, acknowledge it, learn from it, move on from it.

Not a bad process to follow if one of your team or colleague gets something wrong either. You know, it happens to us all. Right?

If not now, then when?

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People will have a range of views on the HR profession, I’m ok with that. It may not surprise you to know that I don’t come to work to either fulfil or disprove a myriad of perceptions of my worth or usefulness.  It may surprise people to know that the reason I do come to work is to steer the organisation that employs me at the time to do the right thing for the people it employs.

Obviously if you take this to the macro level, profitable organisations can invest back in the workforce, successful organisations ensure they have capital investment, commercial organisations ensure they can see and instigate the opportunities that lead to success and profitability – and so the cycle continues.

But that’s not the reason I get out of bed in the morning, the reason I do is to try to create the place to work that my colleagues want to be in. Even if that will inevitably involve some bitching and moaning along the way – you can’t please all the people all of the time…

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen a rise in calls for “HR to step forward”, or how strong HR is needed more than ever. The clarion call of a crisis, once again being used to throw the profession into the light. Remember 2007?

Whilst it starts with obvious decisions about furloughing, protection of wages, short term working, redundancies, protection of health, safety and wellbeing, managing remote workers and resource and contingency planning. It extends to issues such as executive reward, dividends, culture, engagement and productivity and post crisis recovery. There is no doubt that there is a lot for us to navigate.

The cynic in me wants to ask why it requires a global pandemic for the profession to find some backbone and step into the role that it should be playing every day? Why it requires something of such magnitude to bring a focus on the contribution that we make? But I guess beggars can’t be choosers, and as a collective we have been beggars for far too long.

We have seen and will continue to see some shocking examples of bad HR practice through this event, we need to hold these organisations and decision makers to account. But if we genuinely want to learn and grow from this, we also need to celebrate those organisations that are doing the right thing, protecting their employees and stepping up and into the right leadership space.

Because frankly, if not now then when?