organisation

Why are you here?

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Hey, happy Monday? Good weekend? Enjoy the sun? Ready to make a difference this week?

Why the hesitation?

If you’re not waking up this morning wanting to make a difference for your employees, then ask yourself a simple question, “Why are you here?”

To make money? There are better paying jobs than HR.

To make history? Go marry an emu, it’s a quicker route.

To make whoopee? No-one wants to screw the HR guy….well not in that way, anyway….

So why are you here and who are you here for?

Let me fast track the answer for you, I know it has been a sunny indulgent weekend.

Your employees.

You are here for your employees.

If you don’t understand that, if you can’t comprehend that, then let me know? I’ll be there to help you through.

If you don’t agree, if you can’t agree. Then tell me, who else do you serve?

The shareholders? Leave that to the Finance guys.

The customers? Marketing are all over it.

If in any way you’re convinced by this….and you really should be. Then, go make a difference for your people, today.

They and I will thank you for it.

Raising the bar

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I want to talk a little bit about performance, about achievement, about success. I want to talk a little bit about work, about education, about life. The reality is, that if I hit 0.0001% of the issues that I want to talk about, I’ll have done a good job. Because these things are complex, they are interlinked and intrinsically entwined with a myriad of other issues.

But everything starts somewhere.  So let us consider this the somewhere of starts.

We constantly talk about “raising the bar”. The phrase in itself, so well accepted that we seldom consider its meaning. We all need to raise the bar and then we ail have sorted all of the issues that we have in society. Once the bar is raised all will be well.

Children will be educated, the unemployed will become employed, families will become more functional and businesses more community  minded. The bar has been raised and thus we will respond with vim and vigour and our collective efforts will see us prevail.

The other day they raised the bar on childbirth, they also raised it on disco dancing, knitting and sky diving.  Overnight, I suddenly became so much better at all of these things.

It is amazing what a bar can do. Suddenly, my learning preferences, my intellectual capability, the source of information and the quality of my education increased exponentially. They were directly connected to the bar.

But, as you know, this is bullshit.

We can focus on outputs as much as we like, but unless we focus on the inputs as well, we’re just deluding ourselves. Success is measured by outputs, but is created by inputs. And yet bizarrely we so often want to drive the former by reducing the latter.

Performance isn’t driven by hard targets. Success isn’t created by defining KPIs. Raising the bar will deliver success as quickly as increasing the tempo will help me to dance better. Or a population target will help me to give birth.

Performance, success, organisational alignment are all complex issues. If you want a better organisation, if you want a better society, if we want a better world, we need to understand the systemic nature of our existence and ignore the simplicity of readily acceptable statements.

So as our educational system will not be redefined by measuring it in another way, your organisation will not improve because you’ve set a new bunch of KPIs. And you won’t lose weight just because you’ve bought a smaller pair of jeans.

And as for me….I think my birthing days are beyond me. But maybe….if we just raise that bar. Hell…..well, you never know……

Process this….

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It won’t come as a surprise to people who know me that I’m not keen on unnecessary process. I understand that there is a minimal need for it, but I can’t accept the need for process to drive practice. That for me is alien and wrong.

I had a particularly problematic conversation with Tesco Bank this weekend (Yeah…..I know….) when I was subject to two immortal lines,

“The problem is that you’ve been a customer with us for a long time”

“We can’t override the system”

I do have much left to die inside, but that is pretty much going to clean it up.

But it also really resonates in a “shoot me now” kind of a way.

How many times in the last month have you or your teams uttered:

“It would set a precedent”

“It isn’t as simple as that”

“I can’t do that”

“The system doesn’t work like that”

“The policy is….”

“You need to complete this form”

“Have a look at the process/policy”

“We can’t make an exception”

And how would it feel if you’d said:

“We completely see the need to make an exception here”

“Let us work out how to make this possible”

“Of course”

“We can work around this”

“I understand your specific needs”

“Let me sort out the paperwork for you”

“What is it you’d like to achieve and how can I help you?”

“You’re the most important person to us”

Then ask yourself two questions:

Which feels better to the person asking the question?

Which feels better to the person answering the question?

And as a supplementary:

Why do we make this so hard?

Power, control, HR and Ulrich

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As I write this, I’m heading off over the Atlantic. So I know it is normally de rigueur to mention the number of feet….but I’ve never been the most spatially aware and, let’s be honest, you really don’t care. It’s ok….we can be honest….we’re amongst friends.

Whilst working on the subject, of which we must not speak, which occupies most of my waking and sleeping hours, I’ll also be spending some time with someone who divides my world, our profession, more than most. Someone we could maybe describe as the Marmite of the HR world. Revered by many, loathed by others and the subject of more column inches than even the Rave Pony. I’ll be meeting and spending time with a certain Dave Ulrich.

I’ve been pretty open about the Ulrich model in the past. I firmly believe it has been responsible for down skilling the HR profession. I believe it has made building a career in HR harder than ever. The model has been snatched by the profession with the blind eagerness of an addled addict spying a wrap of crack down the back of a well worn and somewhat putrid smelling sofa.

I also don’t believe that you can blame Ulrich for this any more than you can blame Smith and Wesson for the ridiculous levels of gun deaths in the country that likes to consider itself the most advanced in the world. Yeah…I’m posting this after I’ve got through immigration.

But that isn’t it. The issue isn’t the model.

The issue is about power and control. And no model has, or will, deal with the issue that is at the heart of the problem.

We see the power tension in the EU, in the United Nations, in our health care system, local and central government.

In any organisation with central and devolved functions, with local and global functions will always have tensions. The thing about the Ulrich model is that it did nothing to tackle them and instead went a long way to creating significant additional issues by highlighting and emphasising them.

Centres of Excellence looked down on Business Partners. Business Partners looked down on Centres of Excellence. And everybody looked down on the Shared Service guys. If they could find them….somewhere between here and Bangalore.

The creation of an additional power struggle within an already fragile and uncertain profession was as welcome as the proverbial fart in a space suit. And as parts of the HR function set about fighting in and amongst themselves, in a comedic HR turf war. The people that really matter, the employees, the managers, the customers and consumers, became increasingly disenfranchised from the department that couldn’t even speak highly of themselves.

Confusing. Baffling. Conflicting. Debilitating.

I don’t think any “model” is going to work unless you can deal with this issue of power and control. Throwaway statements about collegiate working and cooperative solutions are excrement coated feathers in the breeze. Easy to throw out there, seemingly light and appealing, but ultimately stained, stinking and ineffective.

So let’s get this elephant on the table, this walrus on a rock, this ostrich egg on a giant sized egg cup. And let’s crack this thing once and for all. The power struggle within HR is all pervasive and crippling. No model that separates, that divides will work unless it deals with this, the very essence of our identity crisis:

Who has the power and who has the contol?