organisation

Fast news is bad business

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When I was starting off in business, we didn’t know a lot about what other organisations were doing. Of course there were newspapers, there were magazines and there were conferences, but the speed at which we learnt what was going on was…slow. You might get the odd piece about the biggest brands of the day (at the time in HR management that was Marks and Spencer), but for most organisations in most sectors, in order to understand what someone else was doing, you had to give them a call.

Fast news and the impact of the internet and social channels on our personal attitudes and opinions is well researched and it would be surprising if this didn’t replicate itself in the world of business as well. Of course, the widespread access to data and information has many benefits as business leaders, we have more evidence available to us at the touch of a button than ever before. But at the same time, I wonder whether it can be a driver of poor corporate decision making and ultimately bad business too? Does the fast spread of corporate news and opinions lead to pressure in the boardroom to make decisions that previously we would have taken much longer to make?

There are two examples that spring to mind, the first relates to the corporate response to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. The world was rightly shocked by the events and many people felt personally compelled to make statements, take action and show support. Almost overnight companies replicated those personal actions, but the speed at which they did that led to many being called out for hypocrisy. How much of this was due to the speed of decision making, the need to respond publicly as other brands took to the world stage with their positions? What actions would the organisations have taken if social media didn’t exist and they could have taken the time to reflect on the right course of action based on their organisation?

The second example comes on the back of the pandemic and the almost exhausting debate about whether office based workers should return to their places of work. Corporate after corporate came out in 2020 and 2021 with big bold statements about “working from anywhere”, that this was all about “trusting their workforces” and that this was the “future of work”. In order to get cut through in the noisy post pandemic debate, proclamations became bigger and bolder each time (whilst they sold off real estate or withdrew from leases – but that’s another story) in a reflection of the “war for talent”. They hadn’t conducted any analysis or research, they just parroted what others were doing in the corporate panic. That so many of them are now going back on the original stated position tells you all you need to know about the way in which this decision was made.

Of course, the internet, social media and fast news aren’t going away so what does that mean for the leadership of organisations? It means we need to have a clearer North Star for our organisational culture, it means those of us in HR need to be stronger in ensuring that decisions (no matter what the external pressure) are aligned with that North Star and it means we need to go slower on things that will be harder to unravel if they go wrong – just like any other major business decision. Fast news can be really bad business, sometimes we need to close our eyes and our ears and ask ourselves what we think is the right answer, instead of asking what others are doing. Sure we might not be first, but we need to ask whether we’d rather be slow and right or repent at leisure.

D&I isn’t dead, it just smells funny

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The desire to make workplaces more diverse and inclusive has been going on for at least as long as I’ve been in a job. As a Personnel Officer, one of my early tasks was completing diversity returns to the Government, I’m not sure they ever achieved anything but the intention was there. I remember the IPM (as it was then) snowflake campaign, remember that? And I’ve seen the law change, develop and progress over the years. Are things better now than when I started in work? Yes. Are they as good as they need to be? No.

And throughout the majority of my career it is fair to say the broad consensus, in the UK at least, has been that fairer, more equal workplaces are a good thing. I think that still remains the case to this very day. If you asked ten people whether they thought selection, progression, and promotion should be based on ability and past performance, or whether it should be based on gender, race or some other characteristic I’m pretty certain they’d all say the former. And yet over recent years it has sometimes felt like one of the most divisive debates in the world of work. So divisive, that most people don’t want to write or talk about it.

Look across the pond and you can see this playing out in the proclamations being made by the incoming administration. Is this really one of the most important issues for the leader of any nation to address? Probably not, but then it really isn’t about that it is about throwing some proverbial red meat to supporters in the artificial culture wars. But on the other side of this argument, in the opposition trenches, there are people equally to blame; people making similarly ridiculous proclamations but without the established power. The people that declare that your personal behaviours and beliefs are not enough, the people that have denied large sections of the population a voice in the name of redressing historical unfairness, the people that make others feel scared to think, feel something different or to ask questions, the people who actively seek to divide rather than to unite.

And this is the nonsense that detracts from the real work that is happening in the vast majority of organisations across the UK, where people are still trying to create better, more inclusive and diverse workplaces because it makes good business sense and because it is the right thing to do for our communities. These are the hard yards that make a bigger difference than the soundbites or statements, the icons or the indices. Whatever the campaigners on either side say, do you think it will result in fewer women being employed or promoted? That it will setback our understanding of supporting neurodiversity in the workplace? That it will mean that we see fewer black and asian executives?

D&I isn’t dead, although there are parts of the current approach that definitely do smell funny. And that happens when the agenda steps into social engineering and unfocused activism rather than being about driving better business outcomes, driving organisational performance and customer satisfaction and moving slowly, but steadily closer to a meritocracy for all.

Stay in the pack

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I remember the advice careers advice my father gave to me many years ago, “make sure you perform well enough so you don’t stand out, but not so well you get given additional work for no reward”. Whilst it might have been a little tongue in cheek, the underlying message of, “stay in the pack” was clear. It wasn’t advice that I took to heart, he worked in an entirely different occupation in an entirely different time period, the sentiment behind it stuck in my mind – the fear of standing out.

Whilst not necessarily articulated in the same way, that fear runs through much of society and through organisations. Not just in terms of how we individually navigate the world, but how we do so organisationally too. I wonder how many corporate decisions each week are taken with exactly the same logic in mind? Stay in the pack, don’t be an outlier, don’t stand out.

This isn’t by any means critically judging those decisions, it is easy to see why when you look at how the court of public opinion judges those that don’t.

Make a loss – you’re poorly run. Make amazing profits – you should be taxed more.

Make a statement on a social topic – you’re woke. Don’t make a statement – you’re corporate drones.

And when societal moments like BLM or the post pandemic return arrive, the pack moves at pace like a herd of wildebeest on the plain and no organisation wants to be left behind in the jaws of the predator. Decisions are made, not on the best needs of the organisation, their workforce, or their communities – they’re made on not wanting to be outside of the pack. To not stand out.

There are many examples throughout corporate history and even over the last few years where organisations have got it wrong and individual leaders are blamed, called out and see their careers suffer thereafter. Sometimes it is causes long lasting damage to the brand and their commercial success. No wonder, sticking with the group is so appealing and embedded across corporate life.

Like so many other topics, it feels like this needs a long more thoughtful discussion than it will ever get. What do we want organisations to stand for? What topics do we want them to have an opinion on? Is it ok just to stick to the knitting? What matters most? But until that time, and I wouldn’t hold your breath, expect more conformity, more anodyne statements and God help anyone who gets it wrong.

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.