organisation

Let the lawmakers make law

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I hesitated before writing this post, there are some topics that I’ve seen over the years tend to draw the wrong kind of audience, the ones that want winners and losers, the ones that want to blame and point fingers, the ones that – no matter how many caveats or waivers you include – want to read hidden meaning into the words that you write. But on the flip side, there are more people in the world that want to reflect, consider and discuss than there are those that want to provoke.

So perhaps unsurprisingly, for a UK audience, my thoughts are on the Supreme Court ruling in the last week on the legal definition of a “woman”. But, (and here come the waivers) I don’t want to talk about the decision, the opposing arguments, the rights or the wrongs. I want to talk about the role of leadership and organisations and how they organise themselves for their employees and customers in a broader ecosystem.

One of our primary responsibilities is to act within the law. Over the thirty years I’ve been running businesses I’ve seen a whole host of legal decisions, some that I’ve agreed with, some that I haven’t. But that doesn’t really matter, because my role is not to make law, but to run my business. The simple fact is that the ruling last week has brought clarity on an area that was previously driven by opinion and belief (often in conflict with others) and so any leader should welcome that clarity, even if they may not personally agree with it.

Organisations get into trouble when they are led not by the law but the beliefs of a few senior people and I’ve written before about the dangers of business moving into social policy. My guess is that some organisations who’ve been doing that will be left scratching their heads at the ruling and trying to figure out how they reconcile the approach that they’ve previously taken, based on some half complete advice, with the direction they’ve just been given, based on the law.

Of course there will be those that don’t agree with the judgment, like there will be those that don’t agree with the outcomes of elections, referendums or the actions of government or the authorities. But ultimately, the reason we have these mechanisms in our society is to make these decisions for us and to give us the clarity to operate within the parameters we are set. In the same way there is no point in calling the electorate stupid for voting for a different outcome than the one you want, there is no point in suggesting the Supreme Court judges made a poor decision unless you have the knowledge, understanding, means and wherewithal to challenge the technical legal points. We should remember, that the judges were faced with a specific question, not given an open opportunity to opine.

The politicisation of business over the last decade or so hasn’t, in my opinion, been a positive step forward. There are very few founder led businesses who can essentially do their bidding, the rest of us should focus on our stakeholders, customers, shareholders and employees and knuckle down to deliver. If we’d been doing that, rather than making statements, the ruling of the Supreme Court would have been significantly less sensational, regardless of the decision they landed on. And we would have spent more time, focusing on those things that we truly had under our control – which is what we all need to do right now.

It isn’t a game of two halves

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I’ve written before about my dislike for sporting analogies in business. I’d argue that hiring ex sports people to come and speak to your management teams is the prime example of leadership development as a placebo. Very few are prepared or experienced enough to make the translation of their knowledge into the world of work, mainly because very few have lived in that world. Think of it the other way around, how many of you would suggest drafting in a CEO to speak to your favourite sporting team on the eve of their most important contest? If the knowledge and experience was that transferable, it would make absolute sense. And yet it doesn’t, because it isn’t.

Most sporting contests have a clear beginning, middle and end. Whether it is a triathlon, a football game, the pole vault, sailing around the world, or ice skating. There is a defined structure to it that includes a start, an end and an expected period of time. If you have a shocking race, match, tournament or competition, you get to go again at the next one and in most cases the slate is entirely wiped clean when you do so. You get to train, research and perfect your performance in a non-competition environment before you enter the live environment and perfect any set pieces, moves or manoeuvres time and time again.

By contrast, business never stops and is always live. As a business leader your practice is pretty much wholly in the live environment and your mistakes aren’t mostly behind closed doors but in front of the people that you will come in and be with every day of the working week – time and time again. You don’t get to go again, unless you leave the organisation – but even then your reputation will often follow you – and there is no resetting of the time, the score or the points.

My intention isn’t to make a qualitative assessment of one against the other, merely to say that they’re different and require different approaches, a different mindset and a different focus. Sport can learn from business as business can learn from sport but neither is a panacea for the other. But recognising the differences can also help us focus on the things that we need to do better as leaders.

If we recognise we are always on, then we need to recognise that people will see us falter and fall and we need to embrace that as a strength not a weakness. If we recognise that every day is the real thing, that there is no rehearsal, then we can forgive ourselves when we aren’t our best, learn from it and move on. And if we recognise that there is no beginning or end, we can view our leadership as a journey rather than a competition – one that will have highs and lows and many bits in between.

In praise of personnel

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I started working in the profession in 1996, the year that saw Take That split and the airing of the last episode of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air – although I don’t remember either of these things in much detail, I admit I had to look them up. AOL was also named the most popular website of the year, for the c.20 million people that had access to the Internet, but behind the scenes a little known company called Google was indexing the web – but it wouldn’t have it’s own domain until the following year.

At work, I wrote out memos that were typed by a typing pool and deliver by hand in the internal mail system. And I was called a Personnel Services Officer, worked in Personnel – and I provided services to the personnel.

Nearly 30 years later, the world and the world of work has changed considerably. I’m writing this on technology that I couldn’t envisage would exist, to share on platforms that weren’t in existence. So much has changed and yes the fundamentals of how we come together to get things done – an activity also known as work – hasn’t changed that much at all. These days, whilst I don’t go by the title of Director of Personnel, I have stuck to the HR description and frankly, I’ve got no desire to change it.

A quick search in Linkedin will deliver you a cacophony of job titles for people doing the same and similar jobs. There are trends, counter trends, justification for changes (normally something about being more strategic – but we all know, calling yourself a “thought leader” doesn’t make you one). And all of these tiles and descriptions are on one hand fine, but also beg a fundamental question;

Who is a job title for?

Is it for the individual, so that it represents what they want to be seen as or how they want others to feel about them? Or, is it for everyone else so they understand what that person does, what they’re responsible for and when they might be helpful or when to get them involved?

If our jobs as leaders and people professionals is to make organisations simpler, easier to navigate, more effective and efficient, then using simple and straightforward language might not be a bad place to start. Job titles, department and function names are how people make sense of the organisation, they’re a universally recognised shorthand that help us to get things done. Where do I go, who do I speak to in order to carry out the task that I need to get done?

Marathon bars didn’t get tastier because they were called Snickers, Twitter didn’t become a better place because it was named X, The Independent didn’t get better editorially as The i, and we all know Hermes didn’t stop chucking parcels over hedges with it became Evri. In some ways, names and job titles don’t matter at all but in other ways they absolutely do.

Ok, so maybe Personnel was a little bit dated but people knew what it was and what it did. And sometimes, that has greater value to organisational performance than any rebrand simply to assuage the egos of the job holders. That’s something would could all do with a little bit more.

The big admin blob that drains us all

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I was struck the other day by a post that Tim Baker shared on Linkedin suggesting that one in three HR professionals in the UK were considering leaving the profession, with 41% suggesting unnecessary admin as one of the causes. Now, of course, the company behind the research has a solution and….surprise, surprise…that happens to be exactly what they do as a company. But despite my loathing of this kind of “research”, (so much so that I’ll share link above to Tim because he’s worth connecting with, but I won’t share any links to the company, because…it is very average), yes, despite all of this, it did get me thinking.

I wouldn’t mind betting if you asked 100 random employees what they thought of HR in their organisation, one of the things the majority would raise is the unnecessary paperwork, the bureaucracy, the processes that seem both endless and pointless. And I wouldn’t mind betting if you spoke to 100 random HR professionals and asked them what they liked least about their jobs, they’d say the unnecessary paperwork, the bureaucracy and the processes that nobody seems to follow and so are endless and pointless.

So what on earth is going on? Who is responsible and simply, why can’t this all stop? As someone who has raged against process most of my career, to the understandable frustration and eye rolling of my colleagues, and who has (sometimes successfully but mostly unsuccessfully) tried to reduce it, I’ve got a few theories:

  1. The power of one – Every form that’s created or process that is added is only looked at as a singular piece of work, not in the entirety of the experience. So every time something is added, it seems eminently reasonable in isolation. But lumped together with everything else, the whole thing becomes an unmanageable blob.
  2. The lack of measures – I don’t know of any organisations, although they might exist, where there is a firm rule on the amount of admin that any one person is expected to do and therefore a finite limit. Why does this matter? Because if you had a firm rule and you were at the limit, then to add something in, you’d need to take something out.
  3. The fear of lawyers – Well, it isn’t really the lawyers, they’re generally an amiable bunch, it is the over regulation and imposition of onerous burdens of proof on the employment relationship that means that the simplest way to defend against anything is to document it to within an inch of it’s life. Although, I’m told by those on the inside that law companies are the worst for following any kind of process – surely what’s good for the goose is good for the gander?
  4. The calibre of the profession – If you’ve only ever worked in process heavy, admin focused HR functions then how can you be expected to know that anything else is possible? And anyone who suggests it can must be mad, bad or ready for retirement! But where are the creative thinkers coming through the profession who want to shape a completely different future of work? Oh yes, they’re working from home and on Teams meetings all day…adding value.
  5. The belief in a silver bullet – The very average research was carried out by a company that sells tech solutions. As long as I’ve worked in the profession we’ve been told that tech is going to be the answer, most recently AI. Systemising or automating rubbish doesn’t stop it being rubbish, it just makes it expensive rubbish that likely disappoints.

HR teams say they want to be more strategic and less admin focused, yet they are the ones that create the admin in the first place. Businesses say they want their HR teams to be more strategic and less admin focused, but they rarely hold them to the account. Managers say they want to be able to get on with their jobs, but they don’t want to take the responsibility for making decisions. Sometimes it seems to me we all want the same things, but maybe it suits us all better the way that it is.