Talent Anarchy

Management: The Unnecessary Evil

2010-08-16T14:01:00.000-07:00

Jason-

Thanks for the post on “Life without Management,” and glad to hear that you took a little family time. We have been squeezing in some weekend trips as summer winds down and those have kept us pretty busy as well. I have been thinking a lot about your post and I agree that accountability is a big part of the equation here, but I have decided that I am going to hold fast to my original argument. Management is an unnecessary evil.

In thinking about this issue, I keep going back to something Clay Shirky said (disclaimer: I have a huge professional crush on Clay Shirky).
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Management does not want accountability because then it loses the power advantage, and the hard truth of this whole thing is that we still have a philosophy of management based on power.

There is a great deal of talk about the new leadership and leadership 2.0 and yadda, yadda, yadda…you and I both know there are some of those folks out there and some of those organizations out there, but I think they are the exception to the rule. You do not have the recent financial debacle with real leadership and individual accountability…you also do not have Enrons or the recent outcomes we have seen from BP and Toyota. Hell, with real leadership and individual accountability Congress would get a little work done.

Academics and consultants talk about it like it is the reality but it is not. The business world is dominated by managers who believe in power over, rather than power with. There is no room or reward for personal accountability until management goes away.

Life without Management

2010-08-10T04:19:00.000-07:00

Joe,

I am sorry for the radio silence lately. Thankfully, I got to take a time off to spend with the family. I'm now back in the saddle and ready for action.

Thank you for the tasty post last week where you posed the question: What about, rather than fixing management, we do away with it? It is a great question and it seems to be an idea that resonated with a number of people.

As I've thought about the notion of eliminating the role of people supervisors, I realized that by doing that, we'd do away with a number of other things that we know and love:

Performance Appraisals. There would be no one to administer them. No loss here because I can't seem to find any real evidence that they work.
Management Development Programs. Perhaps now we can re-task our training folks to develop individuals on interpersonal and influence skills.
Management Meetings and Retreats. No more golf outings or long days trying to stay awake in a hotel conference room.
Strained one-on-one Meetings. Instead, we can meet when we have a reason to meet.

Imagine all of this recaptured time and energy. I have to admit, it does sound appealing.

I think that there is one major problem with this concept. If we do away with management, each employee must become more personally accountable for their own performance. And, from what I'm seeing these days, if there's one thing we like less than management, it's being held accountable. BP didn't admit any responsibility for the oil spill until they had no other options and no one left to blame. In politics, it seems that the strategy for any situation is always deny any wrong doing and blame the other party. Being held accountable or (gasp) accepting accountability is treated like the plague.

In fact, if each individual chose to be more individually accountable, we might help minimize our current management crisis (if we don't eliminate the profession). Individually accountable employees help their managers to be successful by owning their own results and experience. Individually accountable managers embrace their impact on others and realize that their job is to facilitate others' success.

Maybe instead of a management issue, we have an accountability issue.

-Jason

You Are Not The Boss of Me!

2010-07-28T07:31:00.000-07:00

Jason-

Good stuff on dealing with a bad manager. Bad managers is probably a topic that we could spend a lot of time on and our Bad Managers Suck series could probably go on for a very, very long time. I think that a big part of the reason that things like The Office and Dilbert resonate with so many folks is that as ridiculous as they often are, they are also hit very close to home especially regarding our relationship with supervisors. There are a lot of things that contribute to bad management and we could spend a lot of time and energy cracking that issue open, but what about this…

Why don’t we just get rid of it? Why don’t we do away with management as a title, as a role, as a philosophy, as a source of so much unnecessary drama? In our manifesto we tell leaders to "get out of the way"...maybe they should really get out of the way?

What would happen if did some real “re-engineering” and let all managers go? We could of course allow them to apply for other open positions within the company, we’re not complete a-holes! Would things grind to a halt? I kind of doubt it. I am sure that there would be some initial confusion, but there would also be a lot less management related dysfunction.

What would a world without management look like?

What if “the organization” became a network of self-organized teams?

What if we went to an organization and took everyone that was in a supervisory role and we changed their role from supervision to resource coordination…they would have no authority over anyone but were responsible for helping the team that they were assigned to coordinate with other teams and access to the tools that they needed to be successful…whether it be budget, training, equipment, policy change, etc. Their purpose was solely to coordinate and make available resources and support for the department or team that they were assigned to.

What about, rather than fixing management, we do away with it?
-joe

6 Ways to Handle a Bad Manager

2010-07-23T04:38:00.000-07:00

Joe,

As we've been talking about bad management behavior over the past couple of weeks, a question was raised by one of our readers, Chris Fleek, that I will paraphrase as this: "What do you do if you have a bad manager?" He was specifically asking how you get a bad manager to read a blog post like those we've been writing lately in hopes that you can improve their behavior without getting yourself fired. There are thousands if not millions of people all around the world who work for bad managers and who feel hopeless that change will come. So, I thought perhaps I'd brainstorm a list of things you might do if you find yourself in this situation.

Below is a list of things you can do if you find yourself working for a bad manager. Not every approach is going to work for every situation, but hopefully there's something here that might help.

Call out the bad behavior. Depending on your manager, just being courageous enough to bring up the behavior to her can result in some change. Despite what we like to think, most of the time our manager isn't trying to make our life miserable, she is just clueless. Help her out by sharing with her how her action had a negative impact on you. Example: "The other day, when you did X, it caused some issues for me. I'm sure you didn't mean for this to happen, but when you do that, it causes Y and Z to take place, which is really frustrating . . ."
Clarify expectations. Sadly, most managers have no freaking clue how to set goals or manage performance. That means that we have to help them along with this. It's important to ask your manager specific questions about his expectations of you. Ask questions like:

What do I need to do this year to be considered a top performer?
What are the most important things that I need to accomplish this year?
What things am I not doing today, that I should be doing to ensure you see me as one of your top people?
What am I doing today that's not what you'd like me to be doing?

Model the behavior you'd like to see. Ghandi said that "We must be the change we wish to see" so another way to help your bad manager is to show him how it's done, particularly if you are a manager of people yourself. Do the thing that you think is right and then share that with your manager and explain why you did it. You don't have to suggest they try it. If your way gets results, she will pay attention and just might try some of what you are doing. This approach doesn't always work because many bad managers are not great learners, but it does work well in cases where you have a younger or newer manager who maybe just isn't that skilled at managing.
Ask questions. Sometimes, asking a non-threatening question to seek further clarification on a decision or action can lead you into a productive conversation with your manager. Generally speaking, managers do have reasons for what they do, but they aren't always good reasons. Making them explain their reasons can help improve their decision making. Example: "The other day, you did X. I have been asked by a few others why you would make that decision and I wasn't sure how to explain it. Can you share with me why you chose X as opposed to another option?"
Be a squeeky wheel. If nothing else seems to work and there's a particular behavior from your boss that must change, bring it up frequently and pointedly to reinforce how important the issue is. If there are others on your team who share the same concern, have them squeek as well. This means sending emails with questions/comments. Raising it in any one on one meetings you have with your manager. It could mean leaving it on voice mail if you are getting the silent treatment. Make the issue one that your manager can't avoid. If you create enough discomfort, there will be motivation to change. Note: in order for this approach to work, you have to be a top performer who's delivering the goods. If you aren't pulling your weight on the team, the manager will fix the squeeky wheel by replacing it.
Quit. Sometimes, it's best to move on. The reality is that most bad managers aren't going to change unless their managers make it important for them to do so. And sadly, bad management is an epidemic. So, you may need to move on and find a better manager to work for. If you chose this path, invest time in thinking about how you will interview potential new managers to determine if they are the kind of person you want to work for.

Good luck out there!

Jason

Bad Managers Suck - Chapter 4

2010-07-13T04:06:00.000-07:00

Jason-

Enjoyed the “Chapter 3” post, and I especially like the four things that courageous managers do…I think those things are overlapping and go pretty well together.

My inspiration for this post comes from a comment on your post by Chris Fleek:

This is a good series of articles - well done Jason. The question is, will the managers who need to read these articles the most see them? And how can an employee tactfully direct their manager to them?

Good question. Really good question. It often seems that it is the folks most needing some additional insight, awareness and development that are the least likely to seek it out.

The sucky management practice I’d like to shed the light on in this post is “Expertise.” I am not speaking here of any actual kind of technical expertise that could be of real value, but rather the belief that you do not need to be actively learning and seeking out new ideas, models, examples and candid feedback.

A couple of my favorite quotes speak to this well:

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
-Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. This principle is, contempt prior to examination.”
-William Paley, Anglo-Israel

It seems to me that if you are serious about a body of work (whether it is management, farming or pottery), you have be committed to being a student of that work…for as long as you do it. When you stop being a student of your work, you stop learning about your work (and yourself in relation to your work) and then things start to get stagnant and dysfunctional.

A big part of this as a manager, is seeking out honest, candid feedback about yourself. This is probably one of the Jedi mind tricks for great managers and it requires a fair amount of courage and humility...which is probably why it tends to be fairly rare.
-joe

Bad Managers Suck - Chapter 3

2010-07-08T04:17:00.000-07:00

Joe,

I have to admit, it's a little depressing how easily these posts are to write. There is a lot of bad manager behavior out there to write about. So far, we've written about:

The next bad manager behavior I'd like to highlight is one of the most common: Being a wuss.

Wuss may not be a technical term used in most of our formal management training programs, but I can't find a better word to describe this kind of behavior by managers. Here's short list of the kinds of things you might be doing that would qualify you for the wuss list.

Not confronting bad behavior by a direct report or another employee for fear of how he/she will react.
Unwillingness to step up and fight for a promotion or raise for your best and most talented employees.
Putting off actions to get rid of employees who shouldn't be on your team due to bad performance or, worse, a bad attitude.
Throwing one of your staff under the bus when things go wrong rather than taking the blame on yourself.
Blocking your direct reports from building relationships with people higher up in the organization for fear of what they might say.
Inability to hold people accountable for what they committed to do or are responsible for

Each of these behaviors reveals a lack of courage. Managers need to be fiercely committed to their people and demonstrate that commitment through their actions.

In my experience, great managers are courageous. They do these things really well.

Great managers reward high performance handsomely. They go to bat for their best people by fighting for promotions, bonuses and opportunities for them.
Great managers confront bad performance immediately. There is nothing more demoralizing than to work with an incompetent, unmotivated, slacker who isn't getting it done. The quickest way to lose the confidence of your team is to allow these slackers to exist within the team. Have the courage to hold these individuals accountable to the level of performance you expect. You have to let them know that they either step up or step off the bus. And you have to mean it. Great managers have a zero tolerance policy for low performance.
Great manager eradicate bad attitudes from their teams. The only thing worse than a poor performer is a person with a bad attitude. They are poisonous and destructive. One bad attitude can destroy a team. They need to go, even if it requires you as the manager to go out on a limb to get it done. If you've ever been in this situation, you know that your team will be really grateful once the person is gone. As uncomfortable as the process of getting them out might make you, I can assure you that they are making the people around them daily about ten times less comfortable. Get 'em out.
Great managers will take a bullet for their people. If you are encouraging growth and development of your team, they are going to take some risks. Some of these risks will backfire and there will be failures along the way. When this happens, courageous managers take on the responsibility for the failure themselves rather than passing that to their people. When the call comes from a higher up in the organization with the message, "What the #@&! are you guys doing over there?" you have the opportunity to both protect your person and get feedback on what went wrong. This sends the message to your team that it's okay to take risks and fail. This doesn't mean that you don't then debrief with your team on what went wrong and treat it as a learning experience. It just means that you make sure that these failures don't derail the individual's career.

Managing requires a backbone and some guts. If you can't look a person in the eye and tell them that they aren't cutting it, then you shouldn't be in management. If you can't make the decision to let someone go, you shouldn't be in management. Management isn't only about these tough conversations, but if you don't or can't take these issues on, none of the rest matters. Don't be a wuss.

Jason

Bad Managers Suck - Chapter 2

2010-07-02T10:46:00.000-07:00

Jason-

Bad managers…a favorite topic of mine. I got spoiled early in life by spending four years in the Marine Corps where not all, but most of the leaders I worked with were very good and a couple were off the charts amazing. I have not since seen a work environment that has as favorable a good vs. bad management ratio.

I have seen my fair share of the silent treatment that you mentioned and another one that I see frequently is the illusion of interest.

Managers who want to appear to be interested in what you have to say, but they actually could care less. For example, the manager who comes to visit with you about a pending change to “get your feedback,” but the decision has already been made. Or the manager who solicits input, but then explains away or disagrees with everything that is offered up, never really considering or exploring any options.

I personally am in favor of banning those managers from society, but that is probably going to be viewed by some as extreme.

The actual solution is probably a bigger piece of work. I think this is actually one of many symptoms of an underlying problem, and that is that we are still using a 20th century approach to management in the 21st century world of business, which is very, very different.

How we create value has changed, how we communicate has changed, how we organize resources has changed, but very little has changed about our understanding of and approach to management. There are some exceptions, certainly, but you and I both see a lot of command and control, manager as parent type of organizations.

Most managers are not truly interested in the ideas and perspectives of their employees because they have somewhere along the line bought into the belief that being management means that they know best.

Managers rarely know what is best. They might know the inside scoop from the board room and they might know the latest budget numbers, but they rarely know what is best. It is almost impossible for managers to know what is best because they are further removed from the front line products and employees.

If you are any good at hiring people, you will end up with a team that together knows far more than you do. This is just reality and you should not pick a fight with it or pretend other wise.

Managers that are not willing and able to really tap into and value the perspectives, ideas and questions of their employees will eventually quit getting any of them and that is horribly wasteful.

-joe

Bad Managers Suck - Chapter 1

2010-06-30T04:14:00.000-07:00

Joe,

As I was reading through the Manifesto again recently, one page in particular spoke to me. It was in the chapter of the Manifesto intended for leaders. For whatever reason, this statement jumped off the page:

GET OUT OF THE WAY. People want to kick ass. You just need to let them.

It's been a while since we trained our cross-hairs on bad management, so I thought we could exchange some thoughts here on our "favorite" bad management practices. Let's shine a light on these practices so that the Talent Anarchist's of the world can rise up and crush them. We must demand better from ourselves and our leaders.

Bad Management Practice #1: The Silent Treatment

It seems that almost every day, I hear another story about how an individual never hears much from their manager. For some, this means that the manager literally doesn't talk them . . . at all. Sadly, this isn't as rare as it should be. In most cases, it's that the manager doesn't talk to the employee about anything that really matters. No information about what's going on. No information about decisions being made. And absolutely no feedback about what's expected of them or how they are doing towards meeting those expectations.

There are probably a lot of reasons that this happens. We promote the wrong people into management. Tenure in a job is not a qualification to manage people. We also do a very poor job of training our managers to manage. Learning to communicate with others doesn't happen from listening to a trainer for 60 minutes or reading a book. Those things might give us some tools, but you have to practice. Actually doing it and learning from the experience is the only great way to learn these skills.

The silent treatment is not cool and it's not okay. If you are a manager, you need to sit down with your people regularly (at least once every 2 weeks). If you are not a manager, but you have one and he/she sucks at communicating, you should demand a regular meeting. The meeting should have an agenda with at least these four agenda items:

Stuff the manager knows that the individual should probably know about (Call it Team Updates)
Stuff the individual knows that the manager should probably know about (Call it Progress Updates)
Feedback on how the individual is performing relative to the manager's expectations.
Q&A (Space in the discussion to bring up whatever is most important.)

This won't necessarily cure a manager who is giving the silent treatment, but it's a step in the right direction.

What is your "favorite" bad management practice?

-Jason

Social Capital

2010-06-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

Making Space for the Truth

2010-06-10T21:47:00.000-07:00

Jason-

A follow-up to my last post.

So here is the dilemma…

Organizations (like any social group) require a certain amount of conformity. There are certain rules and policies and norms (implicit and explicit) that you need to follow in order to have membership. The more conformist an organization is, the less it is able to utilize the intangible assets that it has access to…things like the curiosity, creativity, ideas, questions, experiences, perspectives, diversity, passion, etc. that live within its workforce. These things make people stand out and so in a more conformist environment they tend to stay buried.

So.

If an organization wants to minimize conformity in order to harness its intangibles and maximize its ability to learn, adapt, innovate and evolve, how does it do that? Here are some thoughts.

Look for and expect dissent. If you are talking about anything of substance and there is not some disagreement, you should be very concerned. As General Patton said; “If everyone is thinking the same thing, someone is not thinking at all.” This can be a significant blind spot when we are in a position of leadership though, because we start out thinking pretty highly of our own ideas and when everyone around us agrees with them, who are we to see that as problematic?

Teach people how to disagree respectfully. Talk about this starting in the interview process, include it in job descriptions and in performance evaluations, provide training and feedback. Make it a normal and central part of the culture.

Create and support a different kind of leadership. A big part of why this is a problem to begin with is that we have a way of leadership/management that is largely built on being right and owning the truth. This stands in the way of candid conversation, challenging assumptions, and questioning decisions...all of which can be incredibly valuable for an organization.

Crush politics at every chance. The validity, value and necessity of organizational politics are greatly overrated. We have organizational politics to the extent that we do because that is what we tolerate. Be less tolerant. Organizational politics come at great cost as employees end up with truncated identities and trade their passion and ideals in for the rules to the game.

I think the "how do we do it?" question probably has a lot of different answers, but I think that these are a good start.

-joe

Put that Freak Flag Away!

2010-06-08T20:02:00.000-07:00

Jason-

Organizations are conformist by nature. Some organizations are really conformist and some not so much, but there is always some degree of conformity...that is true of any social group actually. Conformity is the cost of membership.

Too much conformity can be really, really bad and you can see examples of this ranging from Enron to Nazi Germany. Too much conformity has always been problematic, but conformity in general has become more costly to organizations because of the changes in how we do work and how we create value.

When an organization was just trying to make as many widgets as quickly and cheaply as possible, conformity seemed pretty appealing. When my role as an employee was simply to paint as many of those widgets as I could as quickly and cheaply as possible...my supervisor might not have cared about much else. My supervisor might not have cared about my ideas or questions or other skill sets. Painting. Uniformity. Quickly. Cheaply. That is likely what my supervisor would have cared about.

But today much is different.

Quick and cheap and uniform are opportunities for competitive advantage for almost nobody today. Unfortunately, our way of leadership has not changed in any significant way to reflect the transformation in how we create value today.

Conformity, which had some real benefits 50 years ago is increasingly costly and even dangerous for organizations. Conformity makes it hard to innovate, hard to learn and hard to change and evolve as an organization. It is becoming important to organizations that their employees are able to bring their whole self to work, because their ideas, perspectives, assumptions, questions, etc. are now valuable materials.

I shared a few thoughts about this transformation in Whole People Build Whole Organizations and The Whole Truth. In your post you pointed to a few ways organizations make it hard for us to "bring our whole self to work;" avoiding conflict, not promoting weirdos and companies still thinking they are in control.

I agree with the three things on your list and I think that at their core, each of these things can be boiled down to not understanding the dynamics and the value of difference. I think that difference (or diversity) is likely the most poorly understood thing in the world of business today. It also, in my humble opinion, explains one of the statements toward the end of your post:

"This isn't an issue of self-confidence or even being comfortable in your own skin. I feel relatively far along in both of those areas and yet I consciously pack away parts of my true self when I head into the office every day."

Your self-confidence might be fine and you might love your own skin. But you know, as everyone else knows, that standing out can be costly. Unfortunately most of us tend to see difference as a threatening or negative thing rather than a valuable thing (especially in the organizational context)...conversely, most of us spend a lot of time, and a lot of energy trying to fit in. The more we work to fit in, the less authentic we are as we have to truncate our true identities to look, talk, walk, dress, smell and think the way everyone else does.

So, what do we do about it? I will tackle that in another post.

-joe

Bringing Yourself to Work

2010-06-07T19:08:00.000-07:00

Joe,

Do you bring your full self to work? This is a question that I know we are both very interested in because the answer to this question is so often "no" for some many of us, and yet the reasons underlying this answer are so complicated.

I've been meaning to write a post on this subject for some time, but hadn't committed to do it until I saw Trish McFarlane's clever post this weekend titled Embrace the Real You which detailed her journey to the eventual purchase of a minivan. Her post talked about the fact that she had get comfortable with who she was before she could give up her sports car and replace it with a minivan.

I think that you and I would probably both agree that an ideal workplace would be one where people could bring their full self to work. I also think we'd probably both agree that this type of workplace is an idealized pipe dream that doesn't actually exist. Therein lies the problem. Why is it that workplaces require us to edit, censor and limit what parts of our self we bring along when we show up each day?

One of the things that makes this so utterly complicated is that we, as human beings, are rarely quite sure of what our true self looks like. As Trish outlines in her post, her reluctance with buying a mininvan came from an internal struggle to embrace who she really is. Since this is a common struggle and since we are constantly evolving and changing as people, it could be very difficult for anyone to decide what version of themselves is the real and authentic self that they'd want to showcase to the world if they had such an opportunity. But, let's put this aside for the time being and talk about what might be going on at work that prevents us from being ourself when we go there.

Here are a few observations about what I see going on in companies that are contributing to this problem.

We fear conflict. This is why we are trained never to talk about politics, religion or sports at work. These discussions inevitably lead to disagreement and debate, so we are told to just flat out avoid the topic at all cost. So, if you are deeply religious, political or a sports fanatic, keep that to yourself because that would just make others uncomfortable if you talk about this part of yourself.
We don't promote weirdos. Intentionally or not, most corporate cultures have strong immune systems that weed out those who are different. In a law firm, it's the person with pink hair who's the weirdo. At a creative ad firm, it might be the person who wears a suit to work. If you want to get promoted, you need to fit in. If you stick out, it's probably going to cost you.
Companies still think they are in control. For the past fifty or sixty years, conditions within the US workforce have enabled a situation where companies have been able to get away with doing what was in their best interest, often at the expense of their employees. The result is an expectation that to have a job at company A, you must figure out how to fit in at company A--to become a company A man or woman. But, if you decide to move to company B, you need to learn a whole new way of being (talking, dressing, acting, etc.) in order to fit in there. So, the message to employees has long been this: it's not who you are that matters, it's how well you can adapt and fit in at our company that really counts.

This isn't an issue of self-confidence or even being comfortable in your own skin. I feel relatively far along in both of those areas and yet I consciously pack away parts of my true self when I head into the office every day.

Do you share my concern on this issue? If so, what you see being the leading culprits in why this exists? And, the million dollar question, what do we do about it?

Looking forward to your thoughts.

Jason

Building the right kind of Container

2010-06-06T18:58:00.000-07:00

Jason-

Thanks for the great list on increasing our capacity to work with and through conflict. Good stuff and very actionable. There is only one thing that I would add to this list and it is really a pretty common theme in our work and in our ongoing discussions. I think that the nature of our relationships is probably a large variable in the capacity for those relationships to withstand and actually benefit from some conflict and tension.

One thing that every single one of us can do, regardless of our role or title, regardless of our education or amount of experience is make a greater effort to develop and maintain real and resilient relationships…relationships strong enough to tolerate a bit of conflict. We have talked a fair amount about social capital in this space and I think that it is a dead horse worth beating.

Conflict, tension, and dissent are not bad things necessarily…in fact they can be very good things. They can be a sign that people are awake, paying attention and actually give a shit about something. They can be a sign that people are willing to be honest…which unfortunately is not terribly common in my experience.

If you want the benefit of that honesty and those different perspectives, you have to create the right kind of container. If you cannot create that container, then conflict is likely to break things pretty quickly. Your list is a great way to go about building that container, as is an overall focus on building strong relationships.

-joe

Let's Get Conflicted

2010-06-01T03:24:00.000-07:00

Joe,

As was reflecting on our conversation about conflict and how the fear of conflict is severely damaging our organizations, I was reminded that this isn't just a work issue. We generally steer away from the difficult conversations in every aspect of our lives. Couples don't talk about money. Parents struggle to talk to their kids about sex. We even have a tough time telling our friends that something they are doing might be damaging to them or others. Any conversation that might lead to conflict or discomfort, we generally avoid. But yet, each of these conversations is really important and avoiding them could lead to disaster.

So, what do we do?

I'm certainly no expert on this topic as I suffer from the same natural instincts as every other human being. But, I think that when we specifically talk about being a leader in an organization, there are certain things we can do to build our organizations capacity for constructive conflict.

1. Be the model. As a leader, the most important tool we have is our own actions and behaviors. We must demonstrate what it looks like to give tough feedback or to confront a situation, even when your push back is likely to be viewed unfavorably. This means finding the courage to have these conversations and pushing through the inevitable desire to avoid them when it comes. For our direct reports, just giving them good feedback on a regular basis is a great place to start (this means the good and, more importantly, the bad).

2. Become a student of conflict. Role modeling conflict is best if you are skilled at it. In order to become good at it, it's important to study and practice. Pick up the books Crucial Confrontations and Fierce Conversations as a starting point. Also, study conflict resolution tactics. There are tools that help make conflict much more manageable. With these tools in hand, it's much less intimidating to have the tough conversations.

3. Teach conflict skills. Once you've become proficient, it's important to share the knowledge with others. Create book groups or trainings for your direct reports or peers. Write up cheat sheets. Anything you can do to get others familiar with the tools for constructive conflict. The more confident we are that we can handle conflict positively, the less likely we are to run from it.

4. Make conflict cool. Most organizations take their behavioral lead from the senior leaders, so if they are willing and able to engage in conflict situations, then others will as well. If they handle them well, that sets a great tone for everyone else. But, the converse is true as well. This means that we need to work on the executives within our organization to first get them to embrace conflict as a positive part of business. Then, to engage in becoming better at conflict. This is no easy task. Depending on where the conflict avoidance tendencies of an organization are today, the place to start might be by sharing articles and case studies from other organizations that support the case that constructive conflict is important. If you already have this kind of buy in, then find ways to both train senior leaders in constructive conflict techniques through corporate meetings, articles, etc.

5. Create conflict practice. The organizations who handle conflict the best have created ways to practice it. They create low-stakes situations where people are forced into conflict. This might mean meetings where people are divided into groups and asked to argue different sides of an important issue. It could mean asking direct reports to create a "role play" scenario where they act out a situation where tough feedback is being shared. Humans learn by doing, so the best way to effectively teach constructive conflict is by getting them into situations where they have to actually do it.

These are the kinds of things I'm working on to bring more constructive conflict to my organization. Are there other approaches you have found to be successful?

Jason

Can you handle the truth?

2010-05-25T12:44:00.000-07:00

Jason-

Really, really good post. I think this is an issue at the root of many challenges that organizations and leaders face.

You posed two questions for me...

1.) Does my experience align with yours regarding the desire of most folks to avoid conflict (even at great cost)?

Yes. Emphatically yes. In some of the workshops that I do inside of organizations we spend time considering the culture...we actually examine specific aspects of the organizations culture, assign them a grade and then talk about opportunities for improvement. People seem to enjoy doing this and have no problem identifying specific things that the organization or senior leaders can do better. Then we move on to talk about individual opportunities to contribute to a better organizational culture and the entire conversation dries up. I start to hear things like:

"You just dont rock the boat around here...if you do there will be blowback."
"Change starts at the top, how am I going to make something happen."
"I just do my job and keep my head down."

I do not know if real change ever starts at the top, but there are a whole host of reasons that people have (regardless of their title) about why the environment is not quite right for them to speak out or to take some ownership for organizational culture.

2.) What must we do to solve this problem?

Probably several answers to this question, depending on who "we" is. But I think that the big answer is that we must strive to build organizational culture and organizational leadership that values and rewards personal courage and risk taking. This is a really big shift, as we currently have a way of leadership that defaults to defense of the hierarchy and the status quo. This always compromises truth...which compromises everything else.

You probably have some additional and more specific answers relevant to your role inside the machine. I think that I have to be very intentional about holding myself accountable on this issue, because as an external consultant I can fall into the same trap of focusing on what others want to hear rather than the whole truth. I have gotten much better at having candid (and often times very difficult) conversations with organizational leaders about my observations, but I know that when I first began work as a consultant I did not do a very good job of this.

Again, I think you have touched on a really important topic here and I would love to hear a bit more from your perspective about solutions...are there things that you do to develop the comfort and skill in your direct reports for handling conflict?
-joe

The Crisis of Conflict Avoidance

2010-05-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

Joe,

Twice recently I've run into situations where I've had conversations with people where they relayed to me how they weren't comfortable having open discussions with others at work. One person was in a situation where she was miserable at work, but was choosing not to have the tough conversation with her boss that could lead to improvements. When I asked her why, she shared with me a list of assumptions she was making:

She thought that it didn't matter if she talked to her boss because she didn't think anything could be done.
Because her issue is primarily with the behavior of a co-worker, she felt that bringing up her concerns would come across as petty.
She felt like it was an issue that she should probably be able to resolve on her own (even though she'd been failing to deal with it for 2 years)
She thought that raising these complaints my jeopardize her job

The issues this woman were experiencing weren't easy ones to resolve. But, they could be resolved with the help of her management. However, because her management weren't aware of the extent of the issue, they weren't taking any action to resolve it. By choosing silence, she had become part of the problem. Her solution: go look for another job. The irony of the situation was that her primary fear in bringing the issues up to her boss was that it might impact her job security (although she had not evidence to support that fear), so instead of taking that risk, she was just going to find a new job. It seems crazy, but I think it happens a lot.

My experience tells me that this issue is plaguing our businesses and workplaces. People are, for one reason or another, choosing silence and misery over courage and change. It is another reminder for me of how fearful human nature is of change. It also reminds me of how harmful it can be to people when you have a workplace that punishes those who have the courage to speak up.

As organizations talk about talent management, they often find themselves focused on systems and ratings, assessments and succession plans. But, the best designed system in the world cannot effectively set talent free in the absence of open, authentic conversations that will regularly dip into uncomfortable areas of conflict.

Just last week, I sat in a room with several HR leaders from various larger employers in the area to discuss developing leadership. As further evidence of this lack of open conversation, this group identified conflict management skills as the single biggest gap amongst their future leaders. Even more concerning was that the discussion in this group revealed that it wasn't just these leaders who were conflict incapable (or worse, avoidant), but that it was really the culture that reinforced unproductive harmony over productive conflict.

This is a crisis. So, I pose to you these two questions:

Does your experience align with mine on this issue?
What must we do to solve this problem?

I look forward to your thoughts.

-Jason

HRevolution - The Beginning

2010-05-12T03:31:00.000-07:00

Joe,

First let me say that you were missed in Chicago. For me personally, I was trapped in my own personal purgatory of explaining where the hell you were over and over again. Not sure why people like you so much . . . clearly, they've never visited your garage. But I digress.

HRevolution was an experience, that's for sure. There has been a lot said about the conference, so I'll try not to rehash the experience, but rather try to share what I took away from the event. While I certainly brought my Talent Anarchist game to this gathering, I found myself coming more from the perspective of the corporate HR leader in the conversations, trying to provide the perspective of a person who was living in the work on a day to day basis.

As others have said, the participant base came from all corners of the HR world--vendors, consultants, bloggers, speakers, publishers, and even a few practitioners. The value of the experience for me came from the connections and conversations I was able to share with these bright, passionate people. But, a connection is simply a beginning, it's what happens next that truly matters. Here are my prevailing thoughts as I left the event:

Ideas are cheap. Everyone has ideas. They are everywhere. What differentiates the best from the rest is execution--taking those ideas and turning them into results.
If HRevolution is truly about evolving the discipline of HR, we have to find a way to engage more practicing HR leaders in the conversation. It has to continue to evolve from a gathering of social media savvy HR folks to an event that promotes ideas that serve as the foundation for a new reality in the work of HR.
Talking does not equal change. HR transformation isn't going to happen in blogs or unconferences. It will happen when a new kind of leader and practitioner emerges who execute their role in a different way that creates breakthrough results for our organizations.
Social capital and influence are, in my opinion, at the center of what top performing HR people need. I worry that some of the practitioners at the conference are spending too much time blogging and engaging in the twittersphere at the expense of building and developing the relationships they need in their organization to take their game to the next level.

So, while I completely agree with you that Curiosity, Critical Thinking and Courage are critical to participating in this (r)evoution, the list isn't complete. I have a couple others to add.

Accountability: Leadership means giving away credit when things go right and accepting more than you share of the blame when things go wrong. In HR, it's amplified by 100 times. There was a lot of discussion about what HR should and shouldn't take responsibility for. If you want to be a revolutionary HR pro, take responsibility for it all, even if you only influence a small part of the result. We have to completely stop this blame assignment game and just step up. Yep, management may be "who" is supposed to be growing and developing people. If they aren't, raise your hand and take responsiblity for it. Then, go make it better.
Execution: I've already mentioned this point. Ideas by themselves don't do anything. You have to be able to turn those ideas into results. Trish and Ben, the founders of HRevolution, are great examples of execution. They could have stopped at the discussion of this idea, but they didn't. Two unconferences later, they have started a movement. Another example--I have heard and read a lot of criticism by attendees about there not being more HR practitioners at HRevolution. If they really feel that way, then when this event roles around next time, they will work hard to get the other HR leaders from their network to attend. The vendors who came might even pay for some of their HR clients to be there next time. We have to stop our complaining and realize that we own the solution if we'd just step up and do it.
Influence/Political Skill: The stark reality that most of us in corporate leadership aren't prepared for as we get promoted to larger roles is that our effectiveness becomes less and less about what we do and more about what we can influence others to do. HR leaders must become students of human behavior and political systems. We have to understand how things get done, who the players are and how those players make decisions. We need to be able to navigate in the shark tank without being eaten. This means studying things like power, sales techniques and social capital. Start here.

Thank you to HRevolution and the planning committee. It was a remarkable event and I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to participate. It has definitely stoked the fire for me. Up with the revolution!

Jason

HRevolution 2011 in my garage?

2010-05-10T20:17:00.000-07:00

Jason-

I hope that you had a miserable time in Chicago this weekend, I was home with the kids and watched about 47,000 hours of Curious George. Being a grown-up can be downright brutal at times.

The HR blogosphere (which, fortunately for me, happens to be just around the corner from my house) has been abuzz about a couple of things the past few days. Lots of folks talking (and whispering and tweeting and blogging and screaming) about HRevolution and about China Gorman leaving SHRM, and about what these things might mean to the future of this work.

I do not know China Gorman, but some people that I respect think pretty highly of her and I did see her doing a good job of providing a face for SHRM where it did not really have one. It clearly reflects well on her that so many folks are disappointed to see her go, but part of what I hear in this conversation is concern about the role and direction of SHRM.

In the noisy, “pay attention to me” intersection of HR and social media, SHRM is the easiest target in the world for anyone that wants to find a large credible “friend” or a large credible “enemy.” I think that people who are legitimately about moving this work forward know that SHRM is not the problem or the solution, but contains elements of both as it is a reflection of the craft, and not its creator. I like to throw a stone or two at SHRM from time to time myself. It is fun, easy and safe, especially since the people at SHRM have real jobs and are not likely to have the time to pay any attention to me. I also enjoy being invited (and paid) to speak at SHRM events local, regional and national and the interwebs are chock-full of hypocrites like myself.

We love to throw stones at large institutions, but large institutions (SHRM, the auto industry, congress, Big Bacon) are a product of what we did (and what we did not do) yesterday. Stop worrying about what SHRM is doing. Change your organization, tell your story and help someone else change their organization. If you do these things, you will be moving the profession forward in a very real way.

I personally do not have an organization so I am probably just going to lie down. Talking about change wears me out.

And then there is HRevolution. This was kind of hard to miss because the people that were there spent all last week talking about it on Twitter and on their blogs and in their sleep, they talked about it all weekend, and they are still talking about it right now…as far as I can tell, they are really an annoying bunch of self-obsessed, self-promoting jerk offs and I am filled with rage, bitterness and jealousy that I was not able to spend the day with them on Saturday. I am going on record right now saying that I will be at HRevolution 2011 if I have to host it in my garage and provide the play doh myself.

Since I was not there, my perspective on this unconference is probably the most insightful one and you are all welcome for my insightfulness. And my humor. And my good looks. I would also like to take this opportunity to make it clear that this is technically an unpost on an unblog. I do not know what HRevolution was like and obviously cannot speak to its value, but I do know there was a lot of sharp folks there that are very passionate about this work. But in the spirit of evolution (and revolution) there are a few traits that I believe are becoming increasingly important to those wanting to help create the future of this body of work.

Curiosity: I think that we need to ask more question and do a better job of seeking out information from different places. Questions are powerful and can determine the direction of our growth. Are we asking good questions, big open-ended questions? It can be easy to talk about all of the stuff that we do know, but to wonder about the stuff that we do not yet know is different. Are we looking outside of our networks and our profession for new ideas, new archetypes, new models, new language?

Critical Thinking: Social media is a tricky thing because if we are not careful we can use it to just replace the old talking heads with new more hip talking heads with iphones. Are we using our new tools and new connectivity to distribute power? Are we putting more power in the hands of the practitioner? Are we developing greater discernment? HR has been very susceptible to fads, so called “best practices” and shiny new metrics…even those measuring nothing that matters. Are we getting better at making the decisions that are right for our organizations?

Courage: If you want to help create tomorrow you have to be willing to walk out to the very edge of today and that can be a scary place to be. I would imagine that this topic showed up at HRevolution either formally or informally because I know that there were a lot of smart folks there with a lot of knowledge and expertise. And when you know your stuff it eventually becomes a question of courage. Are you willing to tell the truth and help your organization to tell the truth?

Maybe we can dig into these themes a bit more of the next week or two, I know that you will have some interesting perspectives as an internal practitioner.

-joe

Getting Messy in HR

2010-05-05T06:51:00.000-07:00

Joe,

You were absolutely right in your last post to call out courage as a critical marker of the progress we are seeing in HR. The courageous are leading the way.

There is one more thing that I'd like to add to this discussion. It occurred to me as I was having an email conversation with a friend of mine about a project we are undertaking together. Here's a snapshot of how the conversation went:

My Friend: "It's good to have you back in the game on this thing."

Me: "It's good to be back in the game. Let's go make a mess and get something started."

My Friend: "I've been a slow learner, but I've come to realize that I need to make more messes. I now know that not everyone is going to like me all the time, and so I need to be willing to get more messy. Plus, what good is amassing this political capital if I'm not going to use it once in a while? It's not worth anything anywhere else."

Progress is messy. Change is messy. Revolutions don't happen in orderly, comfortable ways. Most of the time, we have to let go of the old ways of doing things before the new way emerges. We have no guaranty of success when we start, so we have to put ourselves in a tough position sometimes. Talking about the future, about change, makes people around you uncomfortable and when people get uncomfortable, they begin to resist. I'll say it again, progress is messy.

You know what's not messy?

Status quo
Complacency
Irrelevance

All very orderly and predictable. All very widely embraced by those around us because it allows them to stay in their comfortable existence without interference.

So, this is another reason why an event like HRevolution is so important. It's an "unconference" so it's bound to break many of the rules we've come to expect for conferences. It will allow for conversation and even encourage discourse. It should press us into discussions that feel unsafe and wildly uncomfortable. It's built around creating social capital and furthering ideas, not selling products. It might just make us change our views on things.

It's going to be messy. That might be the best lesson we can learn from this experience. Less order, more chaos. This is HR for the future.

Let's go make a mess.

-Jason

Rally 'round the Family

2010-05-04T12:13:00.000-07:00

Jason-

Nice post and good points.

I completely agree and feel that it is important from time to time to remind ourselves and each other why we do this stuff. We poke and prod and stomp and shout because we love this body of work and we love its potential to change the world. If it were not for that love we would not care and we would find something else to stomp and shout about.

I am going to add one more thing to your list...

Courage. I see more and more evidence that there are courageous people stepping up to move our flag forward. I see more and more:

people that are not willing to wait until someone in charge of something will decide how things are supposed to be done
people that are less interested in what worked yesterday
people that are less interested in asking for permission
people that are quite happy to go make stuff up

Case in point, HRevolution 2010

I am not saying that it takes any courage or us to attend or participate in this event, but I do think it takes some courage to make something like this happen. Truth be told, there are about eleventy wazillion of us that have been complaining about the shortcomings of traditional conferences. Almost all of us eleventy wazillion talented complainers did nothing more than complain. A few people actually did something. They decided to try something different.

I think it will prove to be extremely valuable to this profession that there are people now having different kinds of conversations about different kinds of things, and they are doing it online and they are doing it with different kinds of events.

I think that this is significant not only to our profession, but also to business in general. I think that we continue to get evidence that the courage to do what needs to be done is often lacking and that courage just might be showing up in the craft of Human Resources.

See you in Chicago.
-joe

In Defense of HR

2010-05-03T04:00:00.000-07:00

Joe,

Since we do work that flies under the heading of "Human Resources," we've always treated HR like family. Because we love our family, we are typically overly critical of them. We want our family to do well, so we dish out the feedback and share ways that our family members can get better. And, like most families, we don't tell those closest to use that we love them enough. That brings me to the reason for my post.

Human Resources, as a profession, is evolving. We started out from a disadvantaged position from our very creation and have been clawing our way to respectability ever since. In many places, HR is still clinging to past at their own expense, but I also see a lot going on within HR that makes me really proud. And, if I was a business school graduate coming into the corporate world today, I don't think you could find a more exciting place to start your career than in HR. Here's why.

Self-awareness. We teach leaders all the time that self-awareness is the foundation of leadership. If this is true, then HR should be developing great leadership skills. I don't think that there's another profession out there that spends as much time talking about what it means to be in it's own profession than HR. We know how we are viewed (there's seemingly a new survey punching us in the face with it every week). We know that we need to get better because our business peers don't seem to have any problem telling us when we suck. There's a lot out there about where our gaps are and how we need to get better. And, I think that HR has largely embraced this feedback. What we do with it is the key.
Commitment to Development. I am floored every day by how many blogs exist out there that are written by smart HR professionals who are sharing their war stories and lessons learned with the whole world. We spend a lot of time not only talking about our own profession, but also sharing information and taking in information to try and get better at it. This sharing and learning dynamic is closing the HR skill gap quickly.
Momentum. While some may argue that HR hasn't changed all that much in the past 20 years, I think they need to take a closer look. In HR, we didn't need a change, we needed a revolution. We need a complete paradigm shift from viewing ourselves as managing the personnel side of the business, to leading the strategy of the organization. A revolution doesn't happen overnight, it's starts with a few courageous visionaries and a groundswell starts from there. There's a lot of evidence that this is taking place within HR. If you peek in on the conversations between HR pros on Twitter, you feel the movement. You also see gatherings like HRevolution beginning to happen where the purpose of the event is to bring those on the fringe together to weave the social fabric required for a revolution (I'm proud to say that we are involved in this event).

We aren't always the nicest when it comes to our HR family. We poke and prod, we challenge, and we criticize. So, today I want to be very clear. HR, we love you. We believe in you. We know that you are up to the enormous challenges we are called to meet. That's why we are so tough on you.

Okay, now let's get off our asses and go make it happen. There's work to do.

-Jason

How will they connect?

2010-04-27T05:05:00.000-07:00

Jason-

We are very much in agreement regarding the power of social media…and you raise a wonderful question regarding the future implications of the rapid integration of these tools into our personal and professional lives.

I think that, truth be told, we do no fully understand the current impact of these tools on us , let alone the impact on our children, but here are some thoughts, and I think that these are also relevant to HR and the evolving organization.

Increased significance of weak ties: I can still only manage a relatively small number of close relationships or strong ties, but social media allows me to develop, maintain and manage many more weak ties than before. Twitter and Facebook are great examples of this. Not only are these tools valuable in creating and/or maintaining those weak ties, it also makes it easier for me to benefit from those weak ties…because those weak ties are consistently sharing information. So, the size of my weak ties network has grown drastically and the role that the weak ties play in my life has also grown drastically.

Professional asset: For some folks and some professions this is nothing new, but on a broader scale social capital is increasingly becoming viewed as a significant professional asset. You are a good example of this. It is going become more important to their professional success that our children are able to build and maintain a vibrant network, and that they are able to demonstrate the value of that network to prospective employers or collaborators.

Specialized tools: Our children will be able to be much more intentional about seeking out specific new components to add to their network…when they want to find specific people or specific kinds of people to start relationships with they will easily be able to find them and we already have made progress in this direction.

More self directed personal/professional opportunity outside of organizations: I think that we will continue to see individuals able to do more things, find more things and create more things without the involvement of traditional organizations. Not sure that organizations are going to go away, but their role will continue to change and I think we will see a gradual increase in the number of us that are self-employed and involved in a variety of projects with a variety of other people.

What else do you see changing?

-joe

Why Ignoring Social Media is Stupid

2010-04-21T04:05:00.000-07:00

Joe,

You nicely summed up what I feel is at the core of the discussion about how social media is changing how people interact. So, to take it further, how exactly do these social media tools impact relationships and ultimately, the creation of social capital. Here's a few of the most important ways I've experienced:

Social media is a tool that facilitates the creation and maintenance of relationships, it is not the relationship itself. It's when people mistake their social media connections as relationships that we start getting into trouble.
Social media facilitates connections. By my definition, a connection is someone who you have come into contact with in some meaningful way. Once we are connected to someone, we know how to reach them and we would have at least enough knowledge about the other person to facilitate the beginning of a more substantial relationship. Connections in other words are loose acquaintances.
We know from the work of Mark Granovetter and others that acquaintances are our source of social influence and power. Because our acquaintances (or weak ties) represent access to information and resources that we wouldn't know about through our closest relationships, the more acquaintances we have, the more powerful our social capital. Social media makes it easier than ever before to stay connected with these weak ties, thus making it easier to build our social capital and influence.
Social media makes it easier to maintain relationships with larger numbers of connections. While Dunbar's number suggests that we can only maintain relationships with 150 people at any given time, the tools of social media make that process easier than in the past. While it seems that social media may not make Dunbar's number any larger, I would argue that it does make it possible to seamlessly change which people we have in our 150 over time. Social media gives us the ability to stay connected to people so that we know where to find them when we need them, even if we haven't actively maintained a more substantial relationship with them in the meantime. Social media keeps the connection in tact.

So, while social media can't BE the relationship, I think that it represents incredibly powerful tools for planting, growing and harvesting social capital. By ignoring these tools, you are choosing to be less influential, less powerful and less relevant. I assume we are in agreement on this point.

So, how is social media going to impact our children in terms of how they will connect with and build relationships with others as they come of age?

-Jason

Social Technology: Best/Worst Thing Ever?

2010-04-14T06:23:00.000-07:00

Jason, I hope that you are enjoying the shift in weather. Spring is a favorite season of mine, it always feels like a fresh start on things…especially after this winter.

On to the business at hand.

Thanks for your post teeing up social technology…there is so much noise about this issue out there. I guess I have a paradoxical view regarding social technology, I think that social technology is very underrated and very overrated. That works for me, because as you like to remind me, I am a consultant and I do not have to make sense!

Getting on LinkedIn is not going to build social capital for you. But you can use LinkedIn to more effectively build social capital. Getting on Twitter is not going to build social capital for you. But you can use Twitter to more effectively build social capital. Having 17,374,981 “friends” on Facebook does not mean that you actually have any social capital. I guess I view the rapidly evolving world of social technology as similar in nature to steroids. Steroids alone will not make you a great athlete. You still have to be a really talented to play professional sports, but steroids can make you even better (although there is clearly a number of bad aspects to using steroids, so not a perfect analogy).

I think that new social technologies are absolutely changing the way that we interact, and some of those changes are good and some of them are bad. You and I as friends, as collaborators and as business partners communicate with each other in a variety of ways. But the vast majority of our really important and serious conversations still happen face to face. We use texting, e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and this blog to complement an already very real relationship. That is a wonderful thing. But when social technology is used to replace, avoid or simply create the perception of a real relationship it is bad news…whether we are talking about a 1:1 relationship or the relationship between an organization and its workforce or its customers.

So, I think that the most important question that is not being asked is what kind of relationships do we want to have? As employees, as employers, as HR leaders, as business leaders, as citizens, parents, friends, neighbors, consumers…what do we want those relationships to be like?

I look forward to digging into this further.

-joe

Is technology killing social capital?

2010-04-12T04:25:00.000-07:00

Joe,

I have found myself recently chatting with several people who seem to be making the argument that social networks, text/instant messaging, and the internet in general are diminishing the relationships between people. To be fair, the people making the argument are generally Gen X or older and are people who pride themselves in networking the old-fashioned way, face to face and eyeball to eyeball. So, they could just be resisting change or maybe they are on to something.

While I think it's very short-sighted to suggest that technology is ruining relationships, I do think it's an interesting topic to consider how it is changing the relationships and connectedness between people. So, I'd like to propose that we discuss this issue in our next several posts. Here are some of the questions that I'm interested in discussing:

How has the advent of social networks, email, and texting changed the way we connect and interact with others?
What are the differences between being connected and having a relationship?
How is technology impacting the way children and young adults are connecting to one another and what is the long term impact of that?
How does the difference between connection and relationship play into the creation of social capital?

Clearly, a major shift is underway in how we interact with one another. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on exactly what's going on and how we can both make sense of it and embrace it.

-Jason

Empowerment is Overrated

2010-04-05T06:24:00.000-07:00

Jason-

“Empower” is increasingly becoming one of those words that tends to make me a little twitchy, but interesting post nonetheless.

I agree that personal responsibility is an important part of this conversation. I subscribe to the framework Kurt Lewin laid out nearly 100 years ago:

B = f(P,E)

Behavior is a function of both the person and the environment.

When we say that we need to “empower” employees I start to twitch because it seems to me that we are saying that the environment is fine or acceptable and employees just need to deal with it and "step up"...and I think that is a fundamentally flawed place to start from. I think that the organizational environment is almost always dysfunctional and that should always be our first obligation.

I think that we almost always overlook this, accepting our organizational environment as the default context. And I think that in HR this underlying belief shows up in our actions and words all the time. For example, you said:

"As we discussed personal accountability of the employee, your comments quickly turned to how the organization bears the responsibility for making it "safe" to confront bad management. That's a bit like choosing not to play a game unless you are certain you will win before you decide to play. There isn't much accountability or responsibility in that equation on the employee's side. The reality is that any environment where it's "safe" to confront bad management probably has pretty decent management already."

I disagree with pretty much every single word in this paragraph.

Choosing not to play a game unless you are certain you will win is actually something very, very different than what I am talking about. I am talking about having some rules in place that apply to all the players. If the game is rigged there is not much point in playing it, and it is bit ridiculous for you to think that you will "empower" me to do so. Choosing not to play the game unless you are certain about the outcome is actually what management (and at times HR) has a tendency to do when they punish or exclude truth-tellers. And when we say that places where it is safe to tell the truth have "pretty decent management" we are setting the bar really, really low for decent management.

The presence of truth-telling is not an indication of good management, it is simply an indication of an organization that actually values the truth and wants to create the opportunity for management to learn and improve.

I think that we should be advocates for personal responsibility for all employees and especially for senior leaders because they have a disproportionate influence on the working environment of others.

I think that if HR is going to break this cycle you are talking about, it is far less about “empowering” employees than it is about getting ridiculous bullshit (see organizational politics, HR policy, bad management, etc.) out of their way so that they can be honest with each other and with their supervisors, so that they can apply some common sense to their work.

-joe

HR and Empowerment

2010-04-01T03:40:00.000-07:00

Joe,

We have a spent a fair amount of time here discussing how HR can transform itself to be the business leader we are called to be. And, in your last post, you touched on a topic where I think HR needs a change of perspective.

As we discussed personal accountability of the employee, your comments quickly turned to how the organization bears the responsibility for making it "safe" to confront bad management. That's a bit like choosing not to play a game unless you are certain you will win before you decide to play. There isn't much accountability or responsibility in that equation on the employee's side. The reality is that any environment where it's "safe" to confront bad management probably has pretty decent management already. We, as employees, will get the management we tolerate. Granted, you can't always confront a bad management situation in a way that doesn't jeopardize your job, but you also have the ability to take your career into your own hands and get the hell out of dodge at that point. At the end of the day, the employee always holds the cards on whether they decide to leave, show up and not do much, or show up and kick ass.

Here's where I get to the role of HR in this whole equation. HR, when it comes to employees, seems to have taken the approach that their job is to solve employee and manager problems for them. We in HR have decided that great customer service means fostering bad management and lack of accountability across the board by solving these problems for managers and employees. This makes our managers and employees happy in the short term, but it perpetuates the problem long term. In more HR departments, if you have a problem with your manager, HR will hear you out but probably tell you that we really can't do anything. If a manager has an employee with an attitude problem, we will go talk to the employee for them. How is this cycle ever going to change if we continue to step in whenever things get a little sticky?

Human resources needs to change their approach. We need to adopt an approach of teaching and empowering others to solve their own problems. We can facilitate the process and help lead them to the outcome they are looking for. Take the example above, if I have an employee who has an issue with a manager, I should be first helping them to understand clearly what the real issue is. Then, I help them explore what they might be contributing to the problem themselves. Finally, I coach them on some approaches they might take to tackling the situation on their own with the manager. If they are successful, I now have an employee that is empowered to help their manager manage. The same approach would be equally as effective with the manager with the punchline being that the manager ends up empowered with the tools to handle her own employee without HR jumping in the middle.

This is how the change happens, one person at a time. But, if HR doesn't both encourage and expect personal accountability and responsibility from employees and managers, we will continue to see the same thing: employees complaining about how bad managers are ruining their lives and managers complaining about employees who don't get it. It's up to us to break the cycle.

-Jason

Morals Schmorals

2010-03-30T04:23:00.000-07:00

Jason-

I think I did not do a very good job of making my points in my last post. Most business leaders today prioritize short-term tangible benefit over long-term excellence...there are a variety of things that drive that. Most business leaders today don’t really get human capital practices so they stick to the other stuff...there are probably a variety fo things that drive that as well. The fact that many of these practices are long-term and challenging to actually measure (among other issues) become the justification for “leaders” to not fully invest.

Every single airline in this country knows what Southwest does to be successful and how it does it. Every single airline in this country continues to go a different way and continues to underperform Southwest. It is just much simpler to focus on being as profitable as possible today than it is to build an amazing organization.

But certainly you are right, there is more to the story.

You mention personal accountability and amen. Personal accountability should always be a part of the conversation, but it goes hand in hand with the organizations role in supporting that behavior. If we want employees to confront bad management then we have to make it safe to do so. This is a topic where it is common for organizations to have a big doing-saying gap. Almost every company out there says it wants people to speak up, it wants employees to tell the truth, and in almost every company the employees know that the truth is a bit more complicated. Organizations that truly want employees to be awake, alive and accountable can have it...that is our natural state as human beings. But most companies do no want that, as it requires a much different style of leadership.

You also mention the morality of work that truly matters and again amen...and give me a break. Maybe I am a bit extra cynical this morning, but if business and business leadership had a real sense of the “right” way, you and I would probably be unemployed, hungry and on the street. Any institution that exists solely for the purpose of profit, that privatizes profits and socializes costs is morally challenged from the start. Business has historically been forced to do the right things...against its will. The funny thing is that most of the right things that business has been forced to do have been beneficial to business in the long-term, and again I point back to my two original points. Business is not naturally oriented towards the long-term, that requires courageous, competent leadership and that my friend is a rare thing.

That is what I think.

-joe

Allowing Bad Behavior

2010-03-29T04:42:00.000-07:00

Joe,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts regarding my big question related to why so many companies seem to be doing so many bad things yet reaping good rewards.

You make good points relative to the delayed impact of human capital practices like training and leadership and certainly it's difficult to find causal relationships between those practices and organizational outcomes. But, I don't think that's enough of an explanation for me. When we are pressed for an answer on this question, it can't be that our best response is that:

It won't pay off for a long time (and you may not ever know that it does) and
You probably can't measure it if or when it does.

That doesn't mean that these aren't important issues to be aware of, it just means that there has to be more to the story.

The more I think about this issue, there are a couple of dimensions to this question that maybe we aren't considering on the surface.

Personal accountability of the employee seems to have disappeared in this discussion. I think that as employees, like in many areas of our lives, we've been happy to hand over the responsibility for our happiness and satisfaction to someone else--in this case, our employer. One of the reasons that bad management persists, in my opinion, is because we lack courage to confront it. I know that this may be easier said than done, but at some point, we have to take responsibility for shaping how we want to be treated at work.
People increasingly expect to do work that matters, that has purpose. So, perhaps what we are talking about is not simply a business issue, but a moral issue. Clearly, there are multiple different ways to achieve productivity at work. But maybe there's an emerging moral responsibility on the part of organizations to create workplaces where people can both do work with purpose and that allow people to grow and flourish as individuals. So, maybe what we tend to discuss isn't necessarily the "best" way, but the "right" way.

What do you think?

Jason

Breaking Down Bad Behavior

2010-03-24T11:12:00.000-07:00

Jason-

You raise an important question. Here is at least part of the answer, from my perspective…

Part of what makes the work that we do complex are some really key disconnects that are often interrelated and overlapping:

The Temporal Disconnect In Human Capital work there can be a great deal of time between cause and effect. If I don’t treat my employees very well, it may be a long time before that leads to anything noticeable and tangible (turnover, etc.). If I slash our training/development budget it may be a long time before the impact of that shows up in a noticeable and tangible way…although the monetary savings can be plugged into my financials almost immediately.

The Causal Disconnect There are certainly consultants and authors out there that would lead you to think otherwise, but it is largely impossible to measure and demonstrate in an exact way the monetary value of what we talk about. We can often show correlation, but correlation and causation are different things. When it comes to this work, business cases are largely theoretical in nature and the business leader that does not want to do this stuff or does not understand this stuff can find an easy way out. It is easier and safer to make decisions involving tangible, physical assets. Making real investments in human capital requires some actual courage and leadership because it cannot be captured in a formula or an equation.

There are other variables that contribute as well, but I think that these two dynamics play a big role. It is not unlike the fact that a lot of us smoke, drink too much, do not exercise regularly, do not get enough sleep and do not have a healthy, balanced diet. We all know the basics of being healthy, yet many of us make contrary decisions on a daily basis. We even spend billions of dollars on fad diets, magic pills, and cosmetic surgery even though we know that we simply need to stop smoking, eat a little bit less and a little bit better and exercise a little bit on a consistent basis.

I used to smoke even though I knew how bad it could be for me. I could enjoy a cigarette today (which was easier and simpler than quitting), while the potential cost was something that existed way out in the future. Most business leaders care about a very short window of time. Squeezing short-term value out of a system is much easier and safer than investing in long-term value…unfortunately it can doom the organization in the long-term. And this is part of why the corporate life span is still not terribly long.

I think that most business leaders know what they should do to create a thriving and vibrant organization, there are examples out there and we write a lot of articles about them. Unfortunately, many leaders continue to make contrary decisions on a daily basis because their priority is maximizing profit today.

-joe

Bad behavior, good results

2010-03-21T11:57:00.000-07:00

Joe,

I recently went back and re-read The Talent Anarchist's Manifesto again as I do from time to time. I'm really proud of our work on the Manifesto and it resonates with me to my soul. I feel when I read it like I'm reading the immutable laws of business success.

But there's a question that lingers in the back of my mind that I just can't shake. So, I put this to you and anyone else who might have the answer.

How is it that there are so many companies who are doing so many things nearly opposite of what we describe in the Manifesto, and yet they seem to be very financially successful?

I'm a bit perplexed.

Jason

Avoiding the disconnect...

2010-03-18T10:12:00.001-07:00

Jason-

Nice post on HR finger pointing and good examples…though I have recently made a vow to avoid and / or ignore all conversations involving the phrase “seat at the table.”

…but other than that, its all good.

I wonder if this does not link back around to our conversations about social capital. I think that finger pointing happens a lot less when people (or teams or departments) are actually in relationship and view each other as partners or collaborators.

When we are disconnected from someone and something is not working out the way we would like it too, I think it is almost a natural reflex to assume that “they” are the problem.

Are there some things that the HR manager or emerging HR leader can do to reach out and develop those relationships in a proactive way? ...even if those non-HR folks are terribly interested in doing so?

-joe

Hey HR, Less Finger Pointing

2010-03-16T04:44:00.000-07:00

Joe,

We have both railed on this blog at time about why human resources isn't living up to it's potential to be a leader for business. One of the key problems, I think, is the type of questions HR is asking. I think that if HR pros would change the questions we ask, we could transform HR.

Example 1:

Question being asked:

Why doesn't HR have a seat at the table at my company?

Questions you should be asking:

What can I do to earn a seat at the table?
What am I doing that is keeping me from the table?
What relationships do I lack that might be critical to being viewed as an executive leader?

Example 2:

Question being asked:

Why won't managers follow the rules?

Questions you should be asking:

What about these rules might be difficult for managers?
How can we make it easier for the manager to comply?
What reasons might our managers have for not following these rules?
What are we doing in HR that might make it harder for managers to follow these rules?

I'm sure you see a trend. HR needs to spend much less time worrying about why others do what they do and focus instead on their own role and accountabilities. HR needs to start thinking about what they can do rather than pointing fingers at everyone else. By simply changing the questions being asked, we can change our whole approach.

Jason

Jason Seiden Named Honorary Talent Anarchist

2010-03-15T03:54:00.000-07:00

Joe,

I know that it was with great admiration and respect you nominated Jason Seiden as an honorary Talent Anarchist. Clearly, this is a designation that we take very seriously since we have not until now even considered bestowing that designation on anyone. However, having read your nomination and considering what I know about Jason, I concur with your nomination.

On behalf of Talent Anarchy, in recognition of his excellent work in promoting disorder and exciting revolt to achieve the unleashing of talent, I'd like to name Jason Seiden as honorary Talent Anarchist. For those not initiated into his work, I would simply offer of his blog and the fact that he has written these two books, How to Self-Destruct and Super Staying Power as evidence that he exhibits true Talent Anarchist characteristics.

And, since he's now within the family, should he choose to accept this designation, I will begin our new relationship by disagreeing a little bit with the argument put forth in his blog post regarding Gen X that you mentioned in your nomination. I agree with the premise of the post and even the recommendations, but I felt as though Jason was suggesting that Gen X'ers don't make friends with anyone at work, and we know that not to be true. We, in Gen X, began a long tradition of tribalism when we were at home by ourselves after school in our early years. This has translated to work and we should embrace it. Even today, we are welcoming Jason in our own Talent Anarchy tribe as a leader. What I think is more correct to say about Gen X is that we don't humor fools well and we don't generally see the point in making friends with people we don't respect. To me, that's the real challenge for Gen X. Can we put aside our skepticism to find common ground so that we can form the relationships outside of our tribe that we need to be successful?

Congratulations to Jason Seiden, honorary Talent Anarchist!

Jason

Another round in the fairness fight…

2010-03-10T09:16:00.000-08:00

Jason-

Since there seems to be so much that we disagree on related to fairness, allow me to reply to your last post:

I do not think that we should let the organization be “run by employee perception,” I simply think that we need to be a bit more serious about making sure that the employee perception is a) sought out, b) understood, and c) sincerely considered as we make decisions. It can be very easy for us to sit in a room full of HR and OD people and determine what other people need or what other people need to do…but I think that this is a faulty practice. I would even suggest that this is a large contributor to why most organizational change initiatives do not succeed.

Anytime we are in favor of anything other than transparency, I have to wonder why. I know that it is easier that way. I know that there is research showing that pay transparency can contribute to negative outcomes…and the same thing can be said about an issue that I do a lot of work with, diversity. Increasing the diversity or the difference in a workplace can lead to increased conflict, increased turnover, and decreased productivity. But those outcomes are not about difference, they are about the organizational culture and about individual skills and behaviors. Pay transparency can certainly lead to some issues if leaders are not good at setting expectations and consistently communicating feedback on behavior. The problems are not about transparency, but rather they are about a lack of capacity and skill for an open and honest culture.

I also do not think this is as simple as saying that the organizations that do not do it right will find themselves out of business…most companies find themselves out of business eventually for one reason or another. The organizational lifespan is not terribly long and there are a lot of factors that contribute to this. I think that we actually need to consider some new standards for evaluating organizational performance. Profit (which is also not a good predictor of longevity) is often aggressively pursued in the short term at significant long term cost. Fairness is probably a good example of this.

Personally, I am not that interested in what employees are entitled to or what organizations are entitled to. I am interested in what people and organizations are capable of. That requires that the organization and the employer be open, honest and courageous. I don’t really think we can have real fairness (or perceived fairness) without this.
-joe
Fairness, part 1
Fairness, part 2
Fairness, part 3

Is Jason Seiden an Anarchist?

2010-03-08T09:02:00.000-08:00

For obvious reasons we take the word “anarchist” pretty seriously, and to us it basically means one who seriously challenges the existing rule, norms or customs. A lot of people do a lot of talking about things like radical change and revolution and transformation, but for most people it is just talk.

If you are only loudly challenging the things that are safe to challenge (bad managers suck! / bad companies suck! / bad customer service sucks!) you are not really serious about changing anything and you certainly are not an anarchist. Anarchists have to be willing to challenge institutions and in-groups from time to time…anarchist have to be willing to challenge one another and themselves from time to time as well. If you cannot do any of this you are simply championing new sacred cows.

I knew that Mr. Seiden had some anarchist tendencies after I read his first book, How to Self-Destruct, but I was reminded of those tendencies recently after reading a recent blog post. We proudly fly the Gen X flag here at Talent Anarchy and I know that Mr. Seiden is “one of us”, but this post called us Xers out on some of our own stuff. We have some issues with “bosses” and “organizations” and we might not be building the kinds of relationships that we need to because of some of our own assumptions and beliefs.

Its good stuff and a good reminder to me that we cannot just point out what other folks need to do differently, but we also need to take care of our own side of the street. Regardless of the issue, the opportunity or the problem…we all have a roll to play, and it is important to have truth-tellers and anarchist to remind us of that from time to time.

So. Might it be time to name our first honorary anarchist?

-joe

Take your fairness and . . .

2010-03-04T03:30:00.001-08:00

Joe,

I do love it when we find an issue where we can disagree.

First, let me start out by saying that it should be a primary concern for all businesses to ensure that nothing in their practices discriminates against any person on the basis of race, gender, race, ethnic origins, sexual orientation, disability, etc. The type of fairness I'm talking about is not in the realm of this type of illegal and unethical injustice. That being said, you raise some interesting ideas in your post.

The idea of employee perception trumping all is an important one. But, if you let your company be run by employee perception and become a slave to it, I think you will be in trouble quickly. It's important to understand the significance of employee perception and then work to use that to create positive results.

An approach like pay transparency might seem like a good idea in concept but is often a train wreck in actual practice for a variety of reasons. Companies like Lominger who have studied performance and development have shown that we as individuals have a very warped sense of our own abilities and performance. As you would expect, most individuals will rate their own skills and abilities much higher than others will. Naturally, we are biased. Based on this "perception" of our value, we make a determination of the fairness of our compensation (by extension also inflated). Granted, in a few rare companies out there, pay transparency might work well, but in most places, it adds fuel to a already very hot fire.

In my opinion, productive fairness is achieved through clarity of expectation and consistency of practice. While our systems of measurement for employee performance are certainly flawed and incomplete, that doesn't mean that we don't know what matters and aren't able to recognize those things. The key is to clearly define and make apparent those things that matter and reward those things consistently. In regards to how we reward those things, I agree with you that organizations should pay more attention to what matters to their employees and reward them in ways that matter most.

For me, it boils down to this. People are not entitled to be treated how they perceive they should be treated at all times. Employers are entitled to create cultures and environments that (unfairly or not) reward certain types of behaviors and performance over others. Employees are entitled to leave and find another job when they find themselves at a company where they feel the situation is unfair. Employers are entitled to reward the things they think matter and to suffer the consequences. This is the balance in the system. In order for these circumstances to have a positive effect for the organization, there has to be clarity around what's expected and how that will be rewarded.

Done right, this system will feel very fair to the people who are making things happen to drive the business forward and will feel unfair to those who aren't. Businesses who reward the wrong things will find themselves out of business. That seems fair to me.

-Jason

Dude, where's my fairness?

2010-03-02T21:19:00.000-08:00

Jason-

Welcome back, and good post on fairness. I say, let’s do it!

Just a few pesky HR blind spots I want to check before we implement...

1.) The employee perception trumps ours. Whether HR thinks this is a fair place to work or not is irrelevant compared to what the employee thinks. Whether you or I think fairness (which I would suggest is about a great deal more than money) matters or not, the perception of fairness matters a great deal. People tend to leave organizations that they do not see as being fair, and if we are serious in any real way about talent then we should not want people leaving our organization because of real or perceived issues related to fairness. If we are going to pay people based on their performance it is going to be important that we do so in a very transparent manner. I would expect pay data to be made available to all employees with each employees ready and able to answer any questions regarding that data.

2.) Talent and performance are not like sugar. When we convince ourselves that we can put human performance on a scale and weight it like sugar, we are playing make believe. One of the great organizational blind spots that HR still seems to be ignorant of or simply ignoring is this flawed belief that we are good at evaluating people. We are not. We talk about it like it is a science and we spend a lot of time, money and energy on fancy software and metrics and most of this is hocus pocus. We like to pretend it is not the case, but we are, for example, still better at hiring people that we think are like us than we are at hiring the best person for the job. Things like the fundamental attribution error, cognitive biases and the Pygmalion effect skew our judgements and evaluations of others. Real diversity training has very little to do with being nice to people and a great deal to do with understanding human nature and social dynamics in order to make more reality based decisions about other human beings. I am more likely to think highly of the employee that agrees with me and is wrong than I am of the employee that disagrees with me and is right. So, we will need to make sure that we have some solid and on-going diversity training that HR professionals and business managers are supportive of, so that they are better equipped to make accurate evaluations…which is what this is about, right?

3.) We should stop assuming that we know what matters most. It is not just about money. If you stop paying me I will probably stop coming to work…if I stop coming to work you will probably stop paying me. None of that has anything to do with incentive; those are simply the parameters of our relationship. Money is certainly a part of the equation, but for every study that says pay for performance is a powerful motivator, I can show you a study that says that it is problematic. In order to avoid getting sucked into the illusion of “best practices” this should be something that is driven by employees. Let employees develop and govern how your organization rewards performance.

So, if you are in support of:

-access to pay data for the entire organization for all employees

-enthusiastic support of real, practical diversity training for all employees

-an incentive program designed by and governed by employees

…then I believe we are in complete and total agreement.

It Just Isn't Fair

2010-03-02T03:31:00.000-08:00

Joe,

Greetings. I have returned from a ski weekend where the mountain helped charge my batteries and clear my mind. It was a fabulous weekend and it's time to get back to work. We've been on a bit of a hiatus here at the blog lately but I think it's time to get back to work on some interesting topics.

Just recently, an invitation came across my desk to attend an HR seminar regarding how to keep the workplace more fair and equitable for employees. The thing that struck me about the session description was that it was clearly assumed that fairness and equity should be a primary objective for HR professionals. This made my stomach turn. Here's why.

Generally, when we talk about fairness or equity in HR, it generally boils down to money. Our employees look at their paycheck and they make judgments about whether their pay is fair relative to what they know (or assume) about other's pay. HR departments seem to really struggle with this issue because they lose sight of the reason we compensate people. Quick definition of "fairness" from dictionary.com:

free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice
proper under the rules

Where HR should focus is on making sure that inappropriate or illegal bias and discrimination have no place in work policies and practices. However, it seems that in our attempts to remove these biases, we have become an impediment to allowing our businesses to invest in their best people.

Money is still the most powerful incentive in place for employees at work (don't believe me? stop paying someone at work today and see how long they keep coming back). We should use our money to invest in and reward the people who create the most value for our companies. This often doesn't look "fair" to everyone because two employees who HR might say are "equals" based on pay range and job grade, might be paid very differently because one of the people is brilliant with customers or great at coming up with new product ideas (thus being worth more to the company's bottom line).

The bottom line for me is this. HR should absolutely work towards driving discrimination out of company practices; that's a must. However, all things are never equal. Some people will always be more valuable to the organization than others. HR should spend far less time enforcing their own made up pay rules and far more time trying to help their organizations invest their money in the people who are making things happen. In fact, let's not stop with pay. It's okay to give your top performers privileges that others don't have. Not only will you keep more of your top performers around, but you might just create an incentive for some of your other employees to step up to greatness. It probably isn't fair, but can make all the difference.

-Jason

Rub your brain on this.

2010-02-16T07:11:00.000-08:00

We need your help!

We are currently in the process of refining our brand and developing a new brand image for Talent Anarchy.

Here's where the favor comes in. This is a link to a short ten question survey to provide us some feedback on a logo design we are considering. We would really appreciate it if you would take a couple of minutes to share some feedback with us through the survey.

Thank you in advance for your time and input.

jason and joe