People development and the role of the Manager in the Future of Work

In my last post I touched upon the fact that there needs to be a constant reskilling of people in the future of work, and this also impacts the role of the manager much more than before

The critical role of the First Line Manager

While leadership development remains a criteria for most organizations, an often neglected but critical (if not more) area is the development of the first line manager. In most organizations individual from the front line are promoted to the supervisor/manager roles based on their skills and performance in their role, not on the basis of an assessment of their "people management" skills. However the latter is the most critical skill ! A great salesperson is not always a great sales manager

What skills do managers (of all levels) need to develop?

I'll focus this post on the area of talent development. In most performance management systems the individual's development needs arise from a discussion between an individual and their manager. However in the future of work, we say the onus is on the individual to drive their own development. So what role should a manager play?

The number one skill a manager needs to develop is the ability to assess where the individual is in their career journey and where they are headed. For that, a core skill is the ability to listen and have conversations with each and every employee on the team on a regular basis. That means the manager has to play both the part of a mentor and a coach.

What does that mean?

Being a mentor means showing the person a path forward and telling them what skills are needed to develop to go down that path. It means recognising the strengths of each individual and telling them "Look, you are great in this, and therefore you should focus on these possible career moves"

Being a coach means asking each individual questions about what motivates them at work, what is their own purpose in life and what path do they see for themselves. It helps the individual to come to their conclusions themselves.

So, why doesn't that happen more often?

It is incredibly hard for organizations to assess the above skills in people when it comes to promoting people to supervisory and managerial roles. There can be a virtuous cycle when by chance a current manager has these skills and therefore can recognize these skills in people to be promoted. Or in most cases, unfortunately, a vicious cycle when a person who doesn't have the above skills goes ahead and promotes someone based solely on performance.

What can organizations do?

Explicitly state that these people assessment and development skills should be the primary focus on deciding who takes on a frontline manager role.

Create an alternate career path for people who are great at their roles but might not want/be suitable for developing people. In 99% of companies the only way to grow in your career is the managerial route, which is why so many people are disengaged at work as their development is not a priority for their managers

Here's a great video by Julie Winkle Guilioni on what managers can do help people to own their career development

The search for India's emerging HR leaders - Are You In The List?

I have been invited to be part of the Jury for the search for India's emerging HR Leaders. 

People Matters in partnership with NHRDN, DDI and Harvard Business Publishing has launched "Are you in the List?", a platform for emerging HR managers in the age group of 26 to 35 years.

Participants will undergo a 5 stage process over a period of six months, wherein they will be judged on various competencies by industry veterans to identify the ‘Future 25’ potential HR Leaders.

My fellow jury members are luminaries from the HR fraternity like P. Dwarakanath, N.S Rajan, Elango R, S.Y. Siddiqui, Dr. Aquil Busrai, Sonali Roy Chowdhury, Rajesh Rai, Gautam Chainani and others. Richard Wellins of DDI brings the global perspective to the jury.

Currently at Stage 1 in the competition, more than 300 HR have applied by sending answers to a small online questionnaire which asks them to share their experience and achievements in the field of HR.You can nominate deserving HR professionals until the 18th of August. And if you are an HR leader in the age group, then you can self-nominate yourself too.

This will be followed by screening 100 applicants in Stage 2 who will undergo the Leadership Insight Inventory test which will be a quick test to assess the candidates' leadership orientation.

Stage 3 will see further screening to arrive at 50 participants who then undergo Leadership Assessment, which is a situational test, asking candidates to solve case studies.

35 candidates move to Stage 4 which is a video round where the panel will judge the videos made by participants to answer a common question presented.

Finally these candidates will be interviewed personally by the jury across three cities - Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore to arrive at the final 25 who make it to the list.

These 25 will then be recognized in an awards ceremony and personal interviews will be featured in People Matters.

The winners also get access to free HBR webinars and management courses. NHRD as the community partner also will provide a platform to connect with veterans and develop skills to be a leader.

What's Your Cause?

I attended a meet of HR professionals last week, and the topic being discussed there was attracting and retaining talented employees.

One of the speakers started sharing how difficult it was to retain and promote employees into leadership positions when they don't have "life experiences to lead"

I felt I had to interject then - "That's a fallacy, I think. In the armed forces we have 23 year olds leading large groups in a life and death situation. They don't need 'life experiences' to succeed in leadership roles."

Another speaker then said "But the army is a very hierarchical structure with strict discipline and tradition of following orders without question. That's the reason why, maybe..."

Then I added "Then take examples of activist organizations, like Non Governmental Organizations - people take leadership roles at a young age, do more with less and don't need hierarchical structures to do that"

What was common to both the examples I shared?

Both types of organizations have a larger cause that is always inspiring to the people in it. For the armed forces its a desire to save the country, the regiment, or the pride of the platoon. For the NGO it could be the fight to remove poverty, disease, illiteracy.

Why don't most organizations have inspiring causes?

Having an inspiring cause is IMHO one of the key components of employee engagement - and also customer engagement

Does your company articulate its vision in the form of a cause? Can you share it in the comments below?

What is OD?

No, I am not referring to overdose (wipe that smile off, you :-)) but the art and science of Organization Development.

OD is often confused with Training, and sometimes with business strategy. For me, it's all about building the capability of the organization when changes are made to human systems (think of team reorganization, or to intra team issues) or to non-human systems that interact with human systems (structure, job design, people processes).

To understand OD you could read books like Process Consultation Revisited by Edgar Schein or you could head over to the new blog, Learn OD by Gurprriet Siingh, OD leader at a large Indian conglomerate.

The purpose of the blog is to help and educate young OD professionals or other HR professionals who want to get to understand what is Organization Development and what are the skills needed to be successful here. Take a look at some of the posts from the blog and I am sure there are lots more of such useful posts yet to come.

• Capabilities of an OD Professional 
• What's that? 

So go ahead. Learn. Connect.

HR and Business Strategy

Image by sakura love via Flickr

On the SuccessFactors Blog Mick Collins asks if HR and the Business are on the same page? I believe that HR has to have two continuing conversations - with the leaders of the business and with the employees. The first conversation has to be to understand how business, its strategy and tactics are evolving in response to external reality. The second conversation is to understand how people would respond to any strategic or tactical changes in structure, systems and processes. If for example the business' core competency is operational excellence then all the HR processes - from recruiting to performance management to succession planning to talent development has to be designed keeping that as a the fulcrum.
Here's the excerpt from the blog post:

One particular question asked “What do you consider to be the three biggest HR challenges being faced by your organization today?” At the top of that list was ensuring that employees remain engaged and productive, followed by retaining key talent, and developing leaders.
In my mind, the first “business of HR” response came in fourth: aligning people strategies to business objectives.
It reminded me of a conversation I had when running a marketing function. My manager would (rhetorically) ask me, “What should be marketing’s #1 metric?” The answer: revenue. Every other marketing metric and activity, from building brand awareness to identifying leads, is a contributor to the function’s overall goal: to generate revenue for the business.
In much the same way, HR’s biggest challenge should be helping the business design, deliver, and execute on its strategy, in order to achieve its goals. Every other challenge (hiring, retaining, engaging employees, etc) should flow from that.

Business benefits of Enterprise 2.0 #e20

If you're still not convinced why organizations should use social technologies within, then you should read this. A study done by the Aberdeen Group that's up at the Socialtext blog: Embrace Social Software and Improve Business Performance

The report surveyed 300 enterprises, and broke them down into three categories based on the maturity and sophistication of their social software adoption (best-in-class, industry average and laggard). I encourage anyone considering the benefits of social software to read the entire report, but here’s a few highlights:

1. Companies that widely harnessed social software (best-in-class) took on average 11 hours to bring a response team together for a key business threat, while industry average companies took 113 hours and laggards 105.
2. Best in class companies took five months to complete key strategic projects, while industry average companies took 8 months and laggards a staggering 14 months.
3. Best-in-class companies saw a 36 percent decrease in time to enact key business changes based on customer feedback, while laggards experienced a 17 percent increase.

So what's stopping your organization to embrace social tools and change into an Organization 2.0 ?

Thoughts on the future of Human Resources

Image by Will Lion via Flickr[Originally written 4 years ago ]

Some years ago I was talking to a HR regional manager who works in the non-alcoholic beverage industry. He was bemoaning the fact that finding great sales people was becoming more and more difficult at the fronline level. It was tough to imagine that, as most sales organizations had been on an expansion spree. It seemed like he would have more of a talent pool to hire people from. He disagreed, saying "Sales folks who have worked in the consumer facing industry which is cyclical, is what I am looking for. These kinds of people are tough to find!". Talk about specialization.

As the HR and Recruiting function evolves and complexity creeps in, HR professionals struggle to make sense of this new age, and though they welcome it , find themselves awfully short. The old assumptions hold true and yet, the contexts seem to have changed. The skills that they have built up over the last few decades as Personnel became HR , seem to have lost their potency.

HR will need to open up its silos and soak in skills from other functions, specially those skills of Sales and Marketing functions. This will be a natural corollary of viewing employees and senior management. This will also mean that to succeed Recruiters and other HR people will need to change their mindset.

An "internal service provider" mindset will only reinforce the current perspective of the function. A "partner" approach however, also needs inernal strength to sometimes say "no" to a client, or to specify what one wants from them, to be successful. A lot of us have made successful transitions to that state, however, more as individuals than by any process.

Why is there such a need and challenge on HR and recruitment ?

The people who are their raison d'etre, prospective employees as well as hiring managers, are getting more demanding. They demand more in less time. They demand better service and without the frills. Faster turn-around times.

Organizations and senior management want them to contain costs, track metrics regarding employee productivity, morale and come to conclusions as to what they need to change/ do better so that they can control not just the bottom-line but also increase the top-line. They want better people to do the jobs recruited at less 'total cost of hiring', they want their best people to stay put and the bottom ones to leave with a minimum of fuss.

And increasingly, the organization's customers want to know about HR policies and how they impact quality of work, because it is becoming increasingly difficult to choose vendors.
What does HR in such a scenario [and these are getting more and more complex and demanding everyday] do? What path must it tread, what roles must it play, what skills must it gather to excel all these demands and satisfy them?

HR needs to structure itself differently, to move from the current functional silos of recruitment, compensation and performance management, training, employee and employee relations to a new paradigm of focusing on projects which are purposes. HR people no longer can make choices about whether they will be 'generalists' or 'specialists' in organizations. They have to be both.

HR's learning curve has to take into account not just today but tomorrow while keeping an eye on what yesterday has left behind. It has to focus on processes, customers, employees and discontinuous change. The question they constantly need to ask themselves is "what if all the knowledge and skills I hold becomes redundant tomorrow? What then?" and build a mindset in their organization where everybody asks this question about themselves.

HR has already been an reluctant adopter of technology and now it has to show how to leverage that technology, not just save time and money.

HR careers will soon become specialized and super specialized. HR vendors will need to offer services like "How to make an FMCG company which is focused on female products a learning organization"
Internally also Recruiting and HR will keep on specializing according to industry based knowledge.
Specialized HR people will work within organizations and yet will be part-free agents advising competition too, as they find a balance between what the job demands and what satisfies their inner strengths.

HR departments will lose many of the administrative work, as employees will take it into their hands and the corporate intranet rids them of standardized processes. They will soon be able to draft their own salary heads, leave structure and keep abreast of legal trends [all the work that HR does today!]

It's going to be an age of change and lots of HR professionals would themselves find the chasm a difficult one to cross.

Why Growing Talent is Better than Hiring it

Dan and Chip Heath in their Fast Company column ask Does Top-notch Employee Talent Transfer to Other Jobs? and point to a research that shows that best talent is context dependent than independent of the organization. Which makes the point that HR's job focus should shift from hiring talent to developing it. Interestingly they point to HUL's reputation as a leadership academy to explain the company's continued success in India.

Some excerpts from the article

In his new book, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance, Groysberg studies a group of professionals renowned for the portability of their talent -- Wall Street research analysts. Analysts are a hybrid of researchers and pundits; they study public companies and write recommendations about whether to buy or sell their stocks.

So what happened? Groysberg reports, "Star equity analysts who switched employers paid a high price for jumping ship. Overall, their job performance plunged sharply and continued to suffer for at least five years after moving to a new firm." Worse, switching firms doubled the chance that an analyst would fall off the rankings entirely (32% versus 16%).

So talent is not, in fact, perfectly portable, even in a job that is one of the most independent around (except for, perhaps, janitors and NFL placekickers).

What gives? Wall Streeters mistakenly see analysts as solo stars, but in reality, Groysberg found that even the best analysts depend heavily on an array of resources inside their firms. They rely on junior analysts who do their number crunching, other analysts who give them feedback, and salespeople who promote their ideas to clients. Not to mention the systems and culture within the firm.

There was one fascinating exception to these findings, a group of people who didn't suffer the lag in performance after transferring: women. Groysberg contends that the alpha-male culture on Wall Street, which never fully embraces women, forces them to compensate by beefing up their external networks, which are more portable. (Either that, or women are superior. Take your pick.)

So what do these findings mean for the world outside of Wall Street? Should we conclude that there's no such thing as different innate levels of talent? Of course not. The Baldwin brothers alone are enough to refute that. But the only way to take control of your firm's talent pool is to create it yourself. (And you should definitely get your child on the Wall Street-analyst career track. A job that entails writing persuasive essays on trucking firms must surely be the world's most preposterous route to a seven-figure salary.)

For instance, Hindustan Unilever, the Indian subsidiary of the consumer goods giant, has developed a reputation as a talent factory. How? Its senior managers are expected to spend 30% to 40% of their time grooming leaders. And executives usually change roles every two to three years so that they learn different aspects of the business. These investments may seem costly, but they have helped HUL become a $4.4 billion company, which reported 5.4% net profit growth at the end of 2009 -- and the envy of other companies worldwide.

When you own the talent factory, you've created a permanent competitive advantage. So if one of your stars leaves, you can simply wish him the best of luck on his new bus. And then grow another star to take his place.

3 of the 6 fundamental shifts in the way we work

I have highlighted issues around Innovation, Talent and Passion that  John Hagel and John Seely Brown blog about the 6 fundamental shifts in the Way We Work in HBR Blogs

The collaboration curve supplants the experience curve. We may, for the first time, have an opportunity to turn diminishing returns performance improvement into increasing returns.
As it becomes increasingly possible to scale the number of connections and interactions between participants in a given environment, however, a new kind of performance curve is emerging: the collaboration curve. This is characterized by increasing returns: the more participants — and interactions between those participants — you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement accelerates.

The collaboration curve helps explain the rise of network-centric efforts ranging from open source software development to "crowdsourcing" to "creation spaces." In nearly all of these group efforts, rapid leaps in performance improvement arise as participants get better faster by working with others. The evidence for the collaboration curve is still admittedly fragmentary, but one place to look for it is in the online game World of Warcraft.

In part, the paradox arises because executives tend to focus on talent acquisition and retention, but do not invest much time on talent development throughout the firm. When they think about talent development, they spend time designing training programs rather than re-thinking the work environment to accelerate talent development. If they took on-the-job talent development seriously, they would reassess all aspects of the firm - strategy, operations, organization and information technology platforms - to find ways to foster even more rapid talent development.

Passion is everything. Management can only do so much. All of us are responsible at a personal level, too — for reintegrating our passion into our profession. What is passion? More than simple satisfaction, passion is when people discover the work that motivates them to achieve their potential by seeking extreme performance improvement. Their job becomes more than a mode of income.

Yet our survey in the 2009 Shift Index showed that passion levels are low across all US industries. In most of them there are fewer than 20 percent of employees that say they are passionate about their work--and no industries have more than 25% that say so. Furthermore, passion levels are inversely related to the size of the employer: the larger the company, the lower the passion levels.

Why is passion so important? Because it drives a questing disposition that is essential to employee performance as they react to the inevitable unexpected challenges today's work environment presents. It also drives more connection. Our Shift Index found that passionate workers participate much more actively in knowledge flows that are the new key to value creation. If you can help make your employees more passionate, you can create value in today's economy.

Human Capital Management goes Mobile

Aberdeen Group in a survey (which you can access by clicking on that link)  has found that progressive organizations are looking at leveraging the cell phone for HR processes. According to their survey

Best-in-Class companies are 26% more likely than all other organizations to use mobile tools to facilitate HCM processes and workflows

Best-in-Class companies 65% of employees at companies using mobility tools for HCM rated themselves as "highly engaged" - versus 57% at organizations without mobile HCM

Best-in-Class companies 45% of employees at companies using mobility tools for HCM received ratings of "exceeds expectations" on their last performance review - versus 37% at organizations without mobile HCM

As workplaces become more and more flexible and distributed - moving closer physically to the customer/clients - and the "corporate" headquarters comes under intense scrutiny of the cost-conscious CFO, more and more work and processes will be delivered via the mobile and newer gadgets like the netbooks and the tablets (like iPads - which are hybrids between phones and netbooks!)

Already some businesses provide platforms for Business to Employee communication using text messages in India. With 3G we'll see a lot more multimedia content and two-way communication enter the business conversation.

Change Management is Changing the Stories People Tell

Abhishek Mittal in his blog poston employment branding asks What Is Your Company’s Story? and urges people to think about stories when they think about change.

I believe that the internal conversations about the company is what guides this image – the dialogue employees have with one another – the vocabulary people use when discussing internal issues.

Focus on the stories people tell internally about your company. Think what needs to be done to “change” the stories to your company’s advantage.

I think Abhishek hits the nail on the head. Stories are pointers to the values and norms that are at play in organizational culture - and if one wants to change these values and norms - one has to focus not on changing the stories (because that's not possible) but in creating compelling new stories and enabling employees to share these new stories.

The Open Organization - Open Book Management

In a recent conversation with a CEO of firm - he mentioned that his organization practices Open book management - and that he often wonders how and why more and more organizations don't adopt the same practice. Having never heard of the specifics of open management I asked him where I could learn more about it. Is it something similar to the transparency that Ricardo Semler talks in Maverick, or what Tony Hseih talks in Delivering Happiness. The CEO then told me that Open-book management focuses on financial transparency. According to Wikipedia:

The basis of open-book management is that the information received by employees should not only help them do their jobs effectively, but help them understand how the company is doing as a whole (Kidwell & Scherer, 2001). According to Case, "a company performs best when its people see themselves as partners in the business rather than as hired hands" (Case,1998 as cited in Pascarella, 1998). The technique is to give employees all relevant financial information about the company so they can make better decisions as workers. This information includes, but is not limited to, revenue, profit, cost of goods, cash flow and expenses.

Stack and Case conceptualize open-book principles in similar ways.

Stack uses three basic principles in his management practice called, The Great Game of Business

His basic rules for open-book management are:

* Know and teach the rules: every employee should be given the measures of business success and taught to understand them
* Follow the Action & Keep Score: Every employee should be expected and enabled to use their knowledge to improve performance
* Provide a Stake in the Outcome: Every employee should have a direct stake in the company's success-and in the risk of failure.

(1992).

Similarly, in 1995, Case made sense of open-book with three main points:

* The company should share finances as well as critical data with all employees
* Employers are challenged to move the numbers in a direction that improves the company
* Employees share in company prosperity

In a company fully employing Open-Book Management employees at all levels are very knowledgeable about how their job fits into the financial plan for the company. However taking a company from "normal" to open is not as easy as just sharing financial statements with employees. The true success of open-book management is when companies allow numbers come bottom-up (as opposed to traditional top-down management)(Johnson, 1992 as cited in Aggarwal & Simkins, 2001). While employees need to be trained to understand income statements and balance sheets; open-book's true triumphs are when employees understand the numbers to a level that they are able to report predictions to upper-management (Stack, 1992). In order to motivate employees to strive for change, Open-Book Management focuses on a "Critical Number". The number is different for every company but it is a number that represents a prime indicator of profitability or break-even point. Discovering this Critical Number is a key component of creating an open-book company.

So how ready is your organization to embrace Open Book Management?

Why not?

Personally, I think something like this will actually take the pressure off leadership to "meet the numbers" and give everyone a line of sight to how their job is linked to a larger purpose.

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• It's More Than Just Opening the Books (boss.blogs.nytimes.com)

Is Stopping Performance Apparaisals Better?

My twitter friend @beastoftraal shared this article (you should read the full article)
Annual Job Review Is 'Total Baloney,' Expert Says An excerpt given below:

Don't get me wrong: Reviewing performance is good; it should happen every day. But employees need evaluations they can believe, not the fraudulent ones they receive. They need evaluations that are dictated by need, not a date on the calendar. They need evaluations that make them strive to improve, not pretend they are perfect.

In fact, if firms did nothing else but just kill off this process they'd immediately be better off. When it comes to performance reviews, there's no question that nothing is better than something. That's how bad they are. The mission of this book is to put corporate executives on notice that they have created a monster. With the help of performance reviews, they've built a corporate culture where bullshit, not straight talk, is the communication etiquette of choice. The result is a managerial mess that they better deal with, and fast.

One of the biggest issues with performance management process is that only one end is shown rigor in. Performance appraisals are linked to pay increases and the "normalization" process across employees can (and does) result in unfairness.

The biggest reason? There is little of the normalization during goal setting time across departments and businesses - and people are measured for different things in the same group.

But the biggest reason is that managers are not adept at giving performance feedback - on an ongoing basis. As someone asked: "Would Roger Federer be a better player if his coach conducted an annual performance appraisal?"

Performance improvement feedback has to be immediately and managers need to judge what is keeping employees from improving - skill or will - and then focus on addressing the root cause and not the symptom.

How differently do tomorrow's workforce and today's leadership think?

A new study by IBM: Millennials And The New Corporate Leaders - Social Responsibility Is Essential shows how differently tomorrow's workforce (people who are currently students) thinks about larger issues than today's CEOs. Read the full post, it's insightful to note the differences as well as the similarities

Among the nine leadership traits CEOs and students could choose from, students placed a higher emphasis on only two leadership qualities - global thinking and a focus on sustainability. Students were 46 percent more likely than CEOs to view global thinking as a top leadership quality. And they were 35 percent more likely to include sustainability in the top three."
Beliefs about globalization and sustainability were even more defining. We found students were much more concerned with these issues than CEOs, and most importantly, saw them as inherently connected."
...
Based on their comments, it was clear that students view globalization and sustainability as intertwined themes. They believe that a global citizen has responsibilities to others in the world, and that an emphasis on sustainability makes one better appreciate the impact of globalization.

"Students' views were stronger than CEOs on every one of the ten questions relating to these topics, and, as their comments made clear, called for bold and immediate action. They spoke about a new relationship among societies and business, economies and governments, and the need for a new definition of 'value' on what they see as a shared planet."

When asked for the top three factors that will impact organizations, 23 percent of CEOs mentioned globalization and 21 percent environmental issues, ranking them number 6 and 7 among their top issues.
For students, globalization was the highest ranked issue, voted on by 55 percent. Environmental issues were voted on by 42 percent of students and ranked fourth.

Employee Satisfaction

John Baldoni writes about the malaise of low employee satisfaction in this article Managing Employee Satisfaction in the Workplace - BusinessWeek and comes up with some important steps organizations and managers can do to address it:

Solutions are not easy. Yes, recognition and incentive programs work, but too often such programs address symptoms rather than the root causes of worker dissatisfaction. They serve as proverbial Band-Aids for deep-seated malaise. If work has little meaning, incentivized solutions are ends unto themselves, not means to an end: a more fulfilling workplace. Making work meaningful is no simple matter and frankly is beyond the responsibility of most managers. After all, businesses hire managers to get the work done, not make work enjoyable.

Finding purpose in work is an individual pursuit, but in my experience I have found good examples of how managers do create higher levels of buy-in and thereby do make the work experience more tolerable. Here are some suggestions.

Address the situation. The worst thing managers who suspect worker dissatisfaction can do is to ignore it, although that is the time-honored tradition. Avoiding the topic does not make it go way. Find ways to raise the issue at staff meetings. The blunt approach—"So what's wrong?"—may not work. People will likely clam up. But if you are clever and talk about the issue and perhaps voice your own dissatisfaction with the situation, you may have better luck. Make it safe for employees to talk about workplace dissatisfiers. Often they are simple things: input into scheduling, flexibility in work hours, or even something employees can make happen themselves, such as cleaner break rooms.

Encourage alternatives. Find ways you can improve the situations. Take the lead in addressing employee complaints. Over the longer term, the best way is to let workers figure things out for themselves. Challenge employees to come up with ideas for making improvements, either in job design or in job process. Look for ways to remove the drudge factor in favor of the value add. Replace make-work projects with make-it-work projects.

Show outcomes. Relate what your team does to what the company does. Say you work in purchasing: Find ways to link your striving for best-value, best-cost suppliers with improved-quality products. Make the link between improved quality and customer satisfaction. Such things would not have happened if purchasing had not done its job. Some companies introduce employees to customers when possible. Then employees see their products or services in use. That's a great way to encourage meaning in the workplace.

Putting meaning into work is not a managerial responsibility; it falls to the employee to find work that matters to him or herself. And when employees sign on to do a job, they have a responsibility to perform it. Yes, in times of scarcity, as we are enduring now, compensation may be less competitive and opportunities for advancement less available, but workers must do the jobs employers pay them to do. Obvious, yes, but as studies show, many employees remain disgruntled.

Simply acknowledging trouble in the workplace is a good first step. It creates an atmosphere of honesty. There is always a risk that people will reveal too much dissatisfaction, but when the manager makes it safe to offer up concerns and provides avenues of redress, workers can feel they are part of a solution rather than part of a problem. And maybe that's all that can happen in the short term. If so, acknowledge it and make the best of it. There are far too many people out of work who would readily switch places with you or your employees.

What motivates us?

On twitter @beastoftraal brought this video to my notice. This was based on @DanielPink's thoughts (which is now in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us) which I have blogged about earlier, but the video is great and deserves to be posted and shared as much as possible!

Why Businesses should embrace Communities by Luis Suarez

Luis (@elsua) recently left a comment on my blog post Use Cases for Talent and Employee Communities - and I think it deserves to be given prominence as a blog post on its own :-)

I will surely be blogging plenty more about it on my blog, when things quiet down a bit after this week's business trip, but just wanted to venture a couple of thoughts on the relevance of this blog post:

- Communities are the major drivers of social software adoption, both inside and outside of the firewall, so every single social computing strategy should always be accompanied by a community building program to get the most out of it all.
- Communities have been there in existence for millions of years, and in the business world for several decades and if there is anything they have help companies with all along is talent retention and reduction of attrition rates. It's that sense of belonging, of ownership, of connecting with fellow peers that helps communities become so important and crucial in today's world and as such
- Social software tools are tremendously relevant in this context, because they help those relationships to flourish and nurture themselves much easier, faster and more meaningful than with traditional tools like email. If there is anything out there that social software is good for is social capital, and that's at the heart of what makes communities healthy and mature at the same time: that people have an opportunity to help build and sustain personal business relationships through those communities.

But like I said, I will be blogging more about this in its due time; perhaps some time next week, when I get back to the normal swing of things … Thanks again for the lovely blog post! Great read!

We'll be looking forward to more of Luis' thoughts on how businesses can leverage communities - to connect with current and future employees and also with customers, prospects and partners.

Managing People - The toughest job?

Is managing people the toughest job in the world?

Some people might disagree - saying things like managing finances is tough. Or managing disasters is tougher. Or something else.

Here are my reasons why I think managing people is tough (if not the toughest job in the world!)

1. People (you bosses and your subordinates!) expect you to be a mindreader and understand what they want
2. Whenever you take a decision for your team there are sure to be at least some people who are unhappy about it
3. When people have to give good news they'll do that directly - but when it's bad news its you who have to deliver that.
4. You never know when you are right. Decisions are taken and whether they are right or wrong is only in hindsight.

What do you think? What's the toughest job in the world, according to you?

If you agree what are the other reasons you'd add to the list :) ?

On Management And the Consulting Myth?

Is Management Consultancy a Swindle? So claims an ex-consultant whose book "The Management Myth" is apparently a stinging indictment of MBAs, Management Gurus, B-Schools and Consultancies.

Check some of the thoughts and experiences here:

 Within a few months of the interview in New York, I was suited up and billed out at a rate of about a third of a million pounds per year (only a fraction of which landed in my pocket in those first years). I soon discovered that my lack of a proper business education was no disadvantage on the job, which turned out to be more interesting and enlightening than I expected. I would eventually leave the business in 1999 to work full-time as a writer, but during the previous decade, I would advise French businessmen on how to succeed in Germany; tell Americans what to do in Eastern Europe; show the Spanish how to become more like the Americans.

I eventually came to understand that it is possible to construct a Whale chart for just about any business anywhere. It makes no difference whether the business is inherently good or bad, well-managed or in the hands of chimpanzees.

In its best moments, management consulting is a recognition of the quantitative nature of our reality – of the fact, too easily overlooked by innumerate arts graduates, that a hard look at the numbers can explain much of the structure of the world around us.

Among human beings, it turns out, the perception of expertise, however unfounded, can sometimes be used to good purpose. As the shamans who poison chickens and the soothsayers who read entrails have long demonstrated, sometimes it is more important to build a consensus around a good decision than to make the best possible decision; sometimes it is more useful to believe that a decision is sanctioned by a higher authority than to acknowledge that it rests on mere conjecture; and sometimes it is better to make a truly random choice than to continue to follow the predictable inclinations of one's established prejudices. Consultants, following in the footsteps of their pagan forebears, understand that they must adopt the holy mien of a priestly caste. 

The most important of the all-too-human functions of shaman-consultants is to sanctify and communicate opinion. Like ministers of information, consultants condense the message, smooth out the dissonances, unify the rhetoric, and then repeat and amplify it ad nauseam through the client's rank and file.

When you put forward the fiction that management is an exercise in calculus, you tend to assume that integrity is a cost of doing business rather than its foundation. When you stipulate that management is the province of experts, you lose sight of the fact that organising fruitful co-operation among human beings is principally a matter of building trust. And you forget the most elemental truth of political philosophy, that in any system that does not have the features of transparency and accountability, no one trusts anyone. 

Seems like one of those books that are in the lines of Consulting Demons and Dangerous Company. And also Mintzberg's book Managers Not MBAs.

I personally agree that Management is a craft not a science. It is context dependent and unlike an MBBS/MD/CA/CFA does not involve "knowing stuff" and doing it.

Secrecy

Consultant Ninja has an interesting post comparing the way other professions are open and share knowledge compared to consulting:

As he says:

• Conclusions are never shared outside the client
• Books & articles are filled with bland platitudes
• Clients rarely share decks from prior work from previous consultancies
• Internal Knowledge management systems are universally pathetic

In short, the management consulting industry has no means of independently evaluating and rigorously defending logic & analysis.

Well, there are a couple if interesting comments there, and I agree with the one that says that Consulting is a profession.

There is no body of knowledge that a consultant needs to understand and practice to be called a consultant, unlike say a Doctor, Chartered Accountant or Project Manager. There are no universally accepted certifications too.

In fact even management is not a profession by these standards :-)