Latest posting James O’Brien asked: Which is the better manager, the one who stops and listens to you, or the one that gets results?

• RoseMarie Loft: The one that does both, depending on the priorities of the situation.

• Mara Thorne: Agreed, they’re not mutually exclusive. If your boss is approachable and listens to you and values you, you are more likely to go the extra mile for them, which means that the results are likely to follow.

• Dean Bennett: You can’t get results if you don’t stop, if you don’t listen and if you aren’t focused on getting results. It takes all three. I find it very interesting how we tend towards the dualistic thinking of either/or, (what American business consultant, author and lecturer Jim Collins refers to as “the tyranny of the Or”), rather than looking at how we can combine things in ways to get new results – in behaviours as well as other areas.

• Lorraine Hall: The one who stops and listens will empower you to achieve results.

• Wendy Cox: Both. A good manager should recognise when there is a “fire-fighting” situation and so it’s necessary to command and control. If this is regular practice, though, the manager effectively works solo, discounts anyone else’s opinions and ideas, avoids change and having to explain actions and becomes an isolated expert with no team to support their work. When that happens, the organisation should be worried.

• Andrew Greaves: By listening to others a manager benefits from the skills of others, is less likely to make mistakes and is more in touch with their workforce. However, I’ve known some great managers who probably spread themselves a little too thinly to listen to others as much as they would like. In those cases, entrusting some soft skill tasks to others – such as making time to listen – can work really well. If there’s a skilled “people person” in the senior management team, I’d suggest there’s a case for giving them a role as listening post on behalf of the organisation’s leaders.

• For more on this discussion, go to linkd.in/listenresults

Other popular discussions: Is it too hard to sack under-performing staff? linkd.in/underperform

Are eccentrics a welcome part of office life? linkd.in/crazyboss

Comments [0] Recent postings

The issue that prompted most comments online was the reported threat by chief treasury secretary Danny Alexander to appeal directly to employees affected by the reform of public-sector pensions, thus going over the heads of union leaders.

Some of your comments:

• Chris T: As someone who has worked a total of nine years in the public sector and 31 in the private, I feel well qualified to observe that there aren’t significant differences in pay in the middle of such organisations. But there are differences in pace and security. The private sector has a greater sense of urgency and the imperative to survive market conditions is keenly felt. The sense of entitlement to index-linked, defined-benefit, final salary pension plans that prevails in the public sector is no longer appropriate. A lot of people realise this and the government is right to appeal directly to them.

• Tony O: I am a public-sector worker and a member of a union. However, I just do not see a 22 per cent vote in favour of strike action in a turnout of less than 30 per cent as anything like a mandate. Maybe union leaders need to be bypassed if they plan on pressing ahead. Don’t low turnouts tend to suggest that people really aren’t that passionate about the subject?

• Paul M: I am a civil servant, working in a small office with three others. All of us have changed our minds so many times over the past week or so as to whether we will strike on 30 November. I voted against the strike and want to go into work. But we have been told that if we attend work, we can be moved to fill the post of a striking worker. If we fail to do so, then disciplinary action will be taken. I’m happy to do my job, but not that of someone else on strike. The only solution is to stay out. It seems to me that both management and the four of us are shooting ourselves in our combined feet!

• Mara Thorne: I’ve been a trustee of private-sector final salary pension schemes in two companies. In the last one, when staff were faced with the choice of paying more to keep the scheme going, keeping contributions the same in return for lower accruals, or leaving the scheme, nobody left, and only half a dozen people froze their contribution rate. Everybody else understood the value of the final salary pension, took a deep breath and paid more in. Contributions went up over a period of six years from 4 per cent to 7 per cent of salary. In the end, the scheme closed anyway. As trustees, we argued for staff to be given the choice to pay in even more to keep it going, but the company didn’t give us the option. That’s the reality these days. It’s tough for everybody.

For the original news story and more comments on it: bit.ly/unionbypass

Comments [0]

Defining the case for investing in skills is one of the core functions of HR professionals. That’s true whether one works at the level of a business unit, an organisation, an industry or in a national policy role. A number of articles in this issue highlight just how challenging this process can be – even for the most capable.

One reason is, of course, logistical complexity – which applies to many business situations, but is most dramatically illustrated in a major infrastructure project such as London’s new Crossrail link. Some 70,000 people will be employed throughout the supply chain at some stage, involving a wide range of engineering and construction trades. Crossrail has even teamed up with the Skills Funding Agency to set up a new academy to prepare skilled tradespeople for working underground.

In another respect, the Crossrail project is relatively simple because it has a fixed budget and timetable. The cost/benefit sums get more complicated when the impact of investing in skills also depends on future market prices and government policy. Firms in the offshore wind power industry know they will need more skilled workers, but cannot make sensible investment decisions until questions about the national power strategy, investment incentives, connection costs to the National Grid, and guaranteed minimum power prices are resolved.

At least, in both of these industries, it’s relatively straightforward to scope out most of the skills that will be needed ­– to achieve quality standards, meet safety legislation, and to compete with best-in-class globally. These provide a helpful framework to focus action. But in fast-changing and knowledge-intensive industries, and in management and leadership roles, skills are yet more difficult to map and evaluate.

Reading Jerry Connor’s article on learning agility, I’m struck by a different sort of challenge. At the leading edge of L&D, it’s not only a matter of being clear about what’s necessary – in this case, to reduce the haemorrhaging of talent from the top leadership pipeline ­– but also what’s possible. Developing the sort of “disruptive” techniques used by Cadbury and Bridge to stimulate mindset shifts and prepare managers for working at ever-greater levels of complexity, requires a deep psychological understanding of the potential of human beings to change and grow.

This experience and insight is too often absent from organisations. If it were more common, leadership programmes would be producing more rounded and resilient leaders. Come to think of it, we might also see a lot more quiet rooms provided in workplaces. So much of our working day is focused on the relentless stuff that needs to be done now. Having a peaceful space to go and think in, from time to time, can increase our capacity to be more self-aware and to see the bigger picture. Those are skills every organisation should consider a worthwhile investment.

Straight talking
We all know what can happen when a manager and employee avoid talking about the tensions between them. How many tribunal cases could have been avoided if problems had been discussed frankly at an early stage? Critics of business secretary Vince Cable’s proposal to introduce “protected conversations” into law are missing the point. The sad fact is that protected conversations wouldn’t be necessary if performance management was more effective. But often it isn’t. Cable’s idea may help to focus more attention and support where it’s needed.

Festive fare
Tidings of comfort and joy will arrive for thousands of agency workers on 24 December, when they become the first tranche to have 12 weeks working under the new regulations – and thus entitled to the same pay and conditions as permanent workers. If you’re having a company Christmas do this year, the serving staff could be among them.

Comments [0] One of the themes of this year’s conference has been trust – how to regain it, in some cases, and how to build it in others. As CIPD president Gill Rider said in her opening address to the conference on Tuesday, there is a crisis of trust in leadership which is almost as huge as the more tangible economic challenges organisations face. Whether it is politicians, bankers or even the media, many people at the top of organisations have slipped in the public estimation and it could take some time and effort before they are once again held in high regard.

But allied to this, HR has more specific challenge – how to get and keep the trust of their staff. Wednesday morning saw a fascinating insight from Jane Beine of John Lewis, whose partnership model represents a much-admired example of a trusted employer brand. (Indeed, they will be a case study in forthcoming CIPD research). The retailer had to make 3,300 posts redundant in its three-year restructuring programme, yet employee surveys showed that faith in leaders actually went up during this period – a sign that staff trusted the communication they received from leaders, especially when it came to looking after workers through redeployment.

Marks and Spencer HR director Tanith Dodge was another speaker who touched on the subject yesterday. For her, admitting mistakes rather than brushing them under the carpet was a central plank of being trusted – by employees and customers alike. She referred to the media furore in 2009 over the company’s pricing of bras, which saw women charged more for larger sizes. The openness of the company’s response to that criticism – which included an advert admitting that the company “boobed” – went down well with staff.

“You’ve got to really demonstrate that you live the values, that leaders walk, talk and embed them,” said Dodge. If the leadership is open “that’s how you build employee trust,” she said.

Finally, Marshall Ayoade of Vodafone Global Enterprise touched on another variety of trust in his session on flexible working. He said that much of the resistance to flexibility came from managers who needed to see their staff to be sure they were actually working – a culture of ‘presenteeism’ that he wanted to dispel.

Where everybody trusts each other in the workplace, things run more smoothly – bosses don’t have to spend so much time micro-managing their staff, leaders have faith in their reports to deliver and we don’t waste energy checking up on each other. And that’s the sort of workplace we’d all like to work in.Comments [1]

Yesterday, we saw a model of leadership being demonstrated at this conference that is likely, as the 21st century goes on, to kick most of the egotistical autocrats into oblivion – but if you weren't concentrating, you might have missed it.

Everyone knows that Terry Leahy turned Tesco into one of the UK's most successful businesses despite having a famously low-profile personality. What stood out during Leahy's opening plenary presentation was his clarity and the force of his belief in two things: Tesco's values, and its people.

For the man who was arguably Britain's most successful-ever chief executive until he retired in March, the goal of good leadership is to inspire trust and confidence. Most people, he said, are not naturally confident. They need inspiring and encouraging. "That's mainly all I did – make the people in the organisation feel better about themselves and able to take on new challenges," he said.

A still more forceful statement of these enabling principles came from the second ceo of the day – masterclass speaker William Rogers of commercial radio operator UKRD, which leapt to national attention when employees voted it Sunday Times Best Company to Work For 2011.

Rogers is even less the charismatic leader than Leahy. In fact, he started out as an insurance broker. But he has a passionate belief in the need for a values-based approach to business, and an impressive commercial track record of growth in a very competitive market to back it up.

Rogers brought in external facilitators to involve all staff in an exercise "to distill down what they most wanted in their working environment". The only stipulation: express it in single words, and no more than six. The values that emerged were: honest, open, fair, fun, professional, unconventional.

Since then, he said, "everything we do is filtered through these values". Each one of them, he emphasised, has its tough commercial side as well as its supportive people side. For example, everyone in the company has a day's training a year in how to initiate "courageous conversations" with colleagues – including their boss, if necessary – to sort out problems.

Leaders "have to be a walking, talking ambassador for the culture and values of the business," said Rogers. He and Leahy are ambassadors extraordinary for an approach to business that brings out the leader in every employee.

Comments [0] It’s hard to think of an individual who has influenced my life – in a practical and an aesthetic sense – more than Steve Jobs. Every day I speak, check email or browse the web on my iPhone, my MacBook laptop, or both. I might also listen to music or a podcast on my iPod. In the office we depend on the Mac operating system to view our creative work on PM at its best, and there’s an iPad on hand to check the magazine’s iPad app. And an iPad of my own is the Christmas present I hope for most.

Little wonder then, that many millions of Apple users felt almost a personal sense of loss at the passing of the company’s co-founder and creative genius. Since Steve Jobs’ death, an enormous amount has been written about his impact – on technology, design, business and culture. For a change, it hasn’t seemed like hyperbole to hear someone of our own time compared not only to the greatest business leaders of any age, but also to John Ruskin, William Morris, and even Leonardo da Vinci.

But Jobs was also a controversial character. Few could have been unmoved by the excerpts replayed from his address to students graduating from Stanford University in 2005, in which he spoke of the importance of learning from one’s failures, rejecting received wisdom, and listening to one’s “inner voice”. Alongside this strong sense of values went a fierce self-belief. Stories are legion of his autocratic management style. At Apple, things were done his way or not at all.

Yet by all accounts, Apple’s employees are as loyal and enthusiastic as its consumers. This is perhaps troubling to a school of thought in HR that sees distributed leadership, empowerment, collaboration and bottom-up creativity as the key to competitive advantage. Naturally, it’s more complicated than that. The four enablers of employee engagement identified in the first MacLeod report (see our cover feature) are empowerment, voice, leadership and integrity. We can surmise that Steve Jobs was so strong on leadership and integrity that this more than made up for the relatively weak sense of empowerment and employee voice at Apple.

By coincidence, another article in this issue – from no other than Apple’s arch-rival, Microsoft – throws helpful light on this topic. Reporting on major research, it identifies five different types of organisation “best placed to thrive in uncertain times”. One of these is the “People first” model, where supporting the needs of the workforce is paramount. Another is “Follow me”, where change is signalled by boardroom action.

Perhaps part of the legacy of Steve Jobs is to remind us that there are different routes to engagement, and different styles of leadership can achieve outstanding success in different contexts. HR professionals need to question all received wisdoms, and cultivate an intense curiosity – and Jobs would have been delighted to hear it.Comments [0]

If nothing else, the News of the World debacle highlights the difficulties HR can face when it comes to influencing business culture

If you think HR has kept a low profile in the unravelling News International scandal, then consider this. At some point it is quite possible that an HR director will be required, under oath and in front of TV cameras, to answer questions from Lord Justice Leveson’s committee of inquiry into the extent of illegal phone hacking at the now-defunct News of the World.

Compared with the great political drama of last week’s inquisition of media moguls, former police chiefs and former newspaper editors by MPs, this may appear to be a sideshow. But it will go to the heart of whether there was a cover-up within News International, and also of a vexed question often asked much more widely: to what extent should and can HR professionals influence the culture of an organisation, and challenge colleagues when it goes off the rails?
 
Back in 2007, when the News of the World’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, and investigator Glen Mulcaire were jailed for phone hacking, Daniel Cloke was group HR director of News International (he moved to Vodafone as HR director in January 2011). He was also a member of the company’s internal inquiry in 2007, set up to see if there was any evidence of illegal practice by other journalists on the paper. The inquiry team also included the paper’s then editor, plus News International’s executive chairman and its head of legal affairs, and was supported by an external law firm, Harbottle & Lewis.

The internal inquiry looked at 2,500 staff emails and concluded there was no evidence of wider malpractice. Then, just over a month ago, some of the emails from the 2007 inquiry were passed by Harbottle & Lewis to police, who came to a very different conclusion. From this, the subsequent scandal has quickly unfurled.

It may be surmised that senior executives on the internal inquiry would have been unlikely to read the emails themselves – unless worrying examples had been brought to their attention. No doubt the police investigation and the Leveson inquiry will delve deeper. The more interesting question is: how hard were they looking?

Whether or not any of these executives knew about wider phone hacking, they most certainly did know that the corporate culture on the News of the World was ruthlessly dedicated to success, and intolerant of anyone questioning that ethos. If even prime ministers and police chiefs behaved obsequiously to Rupert Murdoch and his top management team, one can only imagine how difficult it would be for anyone inside the company to raise matters of conscience.

By preventing the BSkyB takeover, this scandal has already seriously damaged the Murdoch empire. That should underline the importance, in any organisation, of creating a culture in which integrity is valued, and senior executives feel able to speak truth to power.

Comments [0]

Tired of bashing your head against the glass ceiling and beating the same old diversity drum? Well, spare a thought for a bunch of Italian women who were reportedly bounced out of their jobs recently when their employer, a small engineering company, had to make a third of its 30-strong workforce redundant.

The firm, according to The Guardian, decided to hold on to its 12 male employees, and make the 13 redundancies from among its 18 female employees, on the grounds that the women could spend more time with their families, and weren’t the main bread winners anyway.

That sort of thing couldn’t happen here, you think?

The most recent statistics indicate that sex discrimination still accounts for the highest number of discrimination claims lodged with employment tribunals. Admittedly there is an incentive for employees to go down this route as awards for successful discrimination claims are uncapped, unlike those for unfair dismissal. But maybe there’s still plenty of inequality in the workplace just waiting to be challenged.

A story we ran recently about Wal-Mart successfully blocking an equal pay/sex discrimination claim class action from a million female employees, got a record number of hits on our website. Maybe it was our sub-head that attracted visitors: ‘Decision will prevent similar class actions against large firms’. Sighs of relief spreading from here way across the Atlantic?

Probably not. The HR community knows it cannot afford to be complacent. A few months back, chairman of commodities firm Glencore (stock market flotation value £36bn) Simon Murray was reported as justifying his reluctance for boardroom quotas, or even hiring young women, on the grounds that, “I know they’re going to get pregnant and … go off for nine months.”

He thought this made women “not so ambitious in business as men because … they like bringing up their children and all sorts of other things”. 

Lord Davies, author of the Women on Boards report, called the comments “unforgiveable” and about 30 years out of date. Murray later said he was “100 per cent committed to equal opportunities in the boardroom and across a company’s structure”. Now where have I heard that one before?

There are going to be more equality cases going through the tribunal system for HR people to defend until those holding the corporate purse strings catch up with the direction that the rest of us are heading in.

Comments [4]

Social media has had a strong presence at SHRM this week, with questions tweeted to speakers in real time, tweet-ups, and iPads and other hi-tech kit giveaways at most exposition stands.

Yet managing social media and working out how to control what employers say on it about their company has also been a big issue for delegates.

In a social network ‘boot camp’ session, Carrie Corbin, Associate Director of Talent Attraction at AT&T and Jessica Miller-Merrell, Chief Executive at Xceptional HR, told HR professionals not to be afraid of it and not to restrict access to it during work hours. Of course, restricting access is almost impossible now that so many people have smart phones. Highlighting this, Miller-Merrell said people had been going on Facebook during a new starter induction session to say how great a company was. Meanwhile Corbin told of the benefits of Twitter for producing positive PR by having ‘tweet ambassadors’ on your staff.

On the flip side, social networks can help union members organize against an employer. But HR professionals here seem to be of the opinion that it can be used as a barometer to gauge the mood of employees, which can feed into healthy employee relations.
 
Twitter is even driving a radio station specifically for HR practitioners called DrivethruHR, which discusses the hot topics that come up on the social network. And it’s not the first in the US either.

Social media has also been recommended as a way to recruit and promote your employer brand. But Jessica Miller-Merrell warned against sole use of social media for recruiting, saying that the majority of people who tweet are caucasian (white) and not everyone has access to the internet. A good point - and potentially applicable in the UK.
Something both women agreed on was that social media should not be used to background check your staff.

But Kathy Hutson, HR director of the National Security Agency, struck a different tone, saying she had warned yo
ung people she had spoken to to ‘remember once you put something into the cyber space it never goes away’. She also highlighted the security risk that NSA workers who share too much on social networks can pose.

It’s no surprise that an intelligence agency HR lead has a very different take to the HR head of a telecoms company.
Yet one of the main speakers, Arianna Huffington, had a slightly surprising message. She told delegates to ‘remember to unplug from the internet and step back to recharge and sleep’. Perhaps an unexpected message from someone who makes their living from online news that is supported by social networks.

I have been unexpectedly ‘unplugged’ during my time in Las Vegas as my smart phone has refused to accept any US network. I have felt utterly cut off and left out without instant mobile access to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. After hearing so many conference speakers on the subject, I can’t wait to get back online.

Comments [0]

THIS BLOG HAS MOVED TO A NEW ADDRESS:
http://blog.peoplemanagement.co.uk/2011/06/americas-love-for-hr-is-infectious/

The SHRM conference in Las Vegas is big, bold and inspiring, writes Claire Churchard

For someone who had never been to the US before, travelling 5,000 miles to pitch up in the furnace of Las Vegas for what feels like the biggest HR show on earth is a bit of a culture shock...

To continue reading, go to:
http://blog.peoplemanagement.co.uk/2011/06/americas-love-for-hr-is-infectious/

Comments [0]