Roc - Blog

DO WOMEN MAKE BETTER MANAGERS ?

Les Hayman — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 07:34:22 +0000

I was recently asked during a press interview to describe the best boss that I had ever worked for.

It wasn’t hard to do, as during my time at Sun Microsystems, when asked to drive a global project for 6 months in the US, I had the opportunity to work for one of the most impressive executives that I have met in the last 45 years.

The fact that she was a woman, and her having moved on to greater roles over the last 20 years despite a serious bout with illness, made me wonder whether women actually make better managers than do men.

Christine Lagarde, French Finance Minister and someone tipped as a potential future Prime Minister, and one of the few really impressive politicians that I have met (see « Vive l’European Parliament » posted 20/09/2010), believes that women make better policians than men « … because they are not slaves to their libidos », which she believes made them « … more able to make more cool-headed judgements ». She told the US Network ABC « This Week » programme on October 11, 2010 that « … men’s sex drive, testosterone and egos impaired their decision making ability ».

Christine Lagarde at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 25, 2007. Copyright by World Economic Forum swiss-image.ch/Photo by Remy Steinegger

If this is true, and I have a lot of admiration for Lagarde and not much for most politicians I have met, who did tend to be male, does the same hold true for management roles ? And if it is true, why are there not more women in senior management positions ?

In the Top 300 European companies women make up only about 12% of board members (up from 10% in 2008), although Norway at 38% does skew the results somewhat. The latest Catalyst figures show that women only make up 11% of Fortune 1000 company board members, and that 25% of the Fortune 1000 still have no female board members at all.

3 women managers of successful wine chateaux (close friends of mine)

Professor Khalid Aziz, CEO of Aziz Corporation, a leadership development « maven » believes that women managers have a « … less short term outlook and are more holistic, big picture and reasonable ».

He lists his top-10 reasons why women make better bosses than men :

1. In a still sexist world, women have to be better than men to succeed.

2. Women tend to be less « bullet-headed » than men and prefer to understand the big picture before proceeding.

3. More adaptable to the needs to change

4. More willing to see other people’s point of view

5. Less bloody minded in conflict.

6. More holistic people managers, understanding the different influences on staff.

7. More willing to admit mistakes.

8. Better at collaboration.

9. More open to seeing their own failings.

10. Better team players.

I once asked a male CEO why there were no women on his board, and he told me that he would love to have some women on the board, but hadn’t been able to find any that were suitable. I therefore asked him what were the backgrounds and qualities that he was looking for in a female board member, and he listed a long string of qualities that most of his current male board members didn’t actually have.

I guess that he just wasn’t really looking hard enough.

BEING SERIOUS IS OVERRATED

Les Hayman — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 07:29:27 +0000

I have found that many people, particularly as they become more senior in their corporate life (or just get older), start to take life and themselves much too seriously, supposedly in line with their elevated status. They therefore tend to create an environment that only has focus on the seriousness of the tasks involved, and the important role that they actually play in achieving them. I once had a software developer describe his supervisor as “… someone who could suck the joy out of the room just by saying good morning”.

I have always believed that while it is critical that you are serious about the role you perform in life, whether as an individual contributor, an executive or in the community, you should never take yourself too seriously.

In business, it is important to regularly remind yourself that the only difference between a manager and the people being managed is the job description. I understand that there are differences in salaries and other elements like office space, remuneration, status and visibility, but one should never grow to believe that these differences include self importance.

For me a sales manager has no more importance in a company than the 10 salesmen in his team who collectively generate $ 20-30 million in revenues each year. In reality the role of the sales manager is mainly to support and serve the sales force by ensuring that he makes their role as easy to execute as possible, and to facilitate their success. This means that the manager has to spend his time as a coach and mentor to his people, but also has to spend time and effort removing barriers to their success and protecting them from internal politics and bureaucracy so that they can focus on selling.

I have therefore always believed that the critical measure of a great sales manager is that the vast majority of his sales team individually earn more than he does.

Ultimately, the only role of any manager, at any level, is to create an environment where people can be unbelievably successful (see “I live to work or I work to live” posted 5 July, 2010). Amongst other things, this means that work needs to be enjoyable. I don’t mean “entertaining” which is an objective of the manager (Michael Scott in the US version) in the TV series “The Office” , who at one point says “I guess the atmosphere that I’ve tried to create here is that I’m a friend first and a boss second, and probably an entertainer third”.

I don’t believe that the objective of any manager is to be a friend to his people, and one should not confuse “friendly” with “friendship”. Neither should a manager see his role as being one of “entertaining the troops”, but I do believe that it should be an objective to make it fun, and that to ensure that the lighter sides of life (and there are many) are regularly celebrated.

I understand that people will define fun in many different ways but, in a work context, I see fun as being able to work in an environment where people can succeed and be suitably rewarded, where their skills can be utilised and developed, where they can be challenged, where they can work with people they can trust and from whom they can learn, where they feel safe and valued, and very importantly where they can laugh often and loudly. People need to want to be at work as an integral and worthwhile part of their life, not just as a place that they have to go to so that they can make enough money to pay their bills.

Back in the early 1980s DEC Australia had a very basic company car policy, particularly when compared to other IT companies. Irrespective of your role, if it justified a company car, you could have either a Toyota Corona or a Mitsubishi Sigma, neither being cars that would have excited the boys of “Top Gear”.

One year I ran a sales competition that involved mounting a Rolls Royce hubcap on a plaque and calling it the “DEC luxury car scheme award, phase 1”. It was a great success and sales reps worked hard to earn the right to have it sit on their desk for a month, as not only did it signify their personal success, but at the same time it had a minor dig at the company. Despite its success I was asked to drop my plans for phase 2 the following year, which was planned to be a Rolls Royce steering wheel … I guess that we were just having too much fun.

Creating an environment that is always serious, that does not see the humour in life’s situations, that believes that laughter should be reserved for private rather than work time and that does not understand that all of life is meant to be fun, can never achieve the balance that makes the work environment a serious way to work and a fun place in which to do it, and therefore will not create an opportunity where people can succeed.

As Oscar Wilde said “Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow”.

FIFTH SECRET OF TIME MANAGEMENT

Les Hayman — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 06:29:40 +0000

You have to kill interruptions as much as possible.

The first step is to take control of emails.

It’s interesting that we have established rules and procedures for physical interruptions, for example if someone’s office door is closed, if they are obviously on a phone call or If they are in conversation with someone else, we are conditioned not to interrupt unless it is a serious emergency.

Email doesn’t work this way, and for many people is an immediate interruption, as too many people look at email as it hits their inbox and bleeps, whether on their desktop, laptop or hand-held.

The other problem with an email is that until you open it, you have no real understanding (beyond the alert and who was the sender) as to what priority level it may be, and therefore whether it actually warrants the interruption that it has created. We tend to give emails elevated levels of priority that go well beyond what they deserve. I believe that very few emails are sent with the belief that they will be handled instantaneously, but most people accord them that privilege.

Try this for test.

Send an email to a group of 6-8 subordinates or peers saying “Call me when you read this”. You will be surprised at how quickly you will get the return calls, despite the fact that no competent manager could ever assume that email is a way to get an instantaneous response. If it was time critical they would at the least have left a message on your voicemail.

The problem is that handling emails one by one is a terrible time waster.
What happens is that when something interesting happens you can receive at least 20 emails on the same topic, for example “Leo Apotheker being appointed CEO of HP”. At least if you group your emails, and only actually work your inbox just a few times a day rather than every time you are beeped, you can save yourself a lot of individual responses describing your surprise.

Secondly when you know that you have 100 emails to handle in just the 1 hour that you have scheduled, you tend to be much more succinct and bloody-minded about how you handle them than doing them one at a time. The key is to turn off the email bleepers, and schedule email time when it suits you to handle email rather than as though each email was a gift from above.

The second step in managing interruptions is to try and club physical interruptions together as well by letting people know when you will be readily interruptible. You can do this by regularly scheduling “open door” (green) time. In the same way that I suggested that you need to schedule private time (red time) for appointments with yourself (see “Second Secret of Time management” posted 30/9/2010), you should also schedule regular times when anyone can come in to interrupt you.

Whenever I was in home base, I would always try and schedule 2 regular 30 minute sessions per day when anyone could come in to my office for a chat or to ask or tell me something. The rules were that no-one could actually make an appointment during that time or close the door, and anyone could come in at any time no matter who was already in the room. It was not allowed to become an unscheduled meeting, just an ad-hoc chat session. I considered this to be a true open door policy, rather than just writing that you have one. Once people got to know that these times were available they started to schedule their time around my availability, seriously minimising my interruptions, but still leaving me easily approachable on any quick-fix topic.

Some executives I have worked with have even taken the additional step of not having chairs available in their office during these sessions, making those who drop in much more succinct and much keener to have their say and then depart.
As you may actually also have some free time during these open-door sessions, it’s also a good time to do some of those tasks that are graded as “C”s on your do-list, as these do need to get done some time and they can normally handle interruptions.

By the way, it doesn’t hurt to turn the mobile phone off occasionally as well.

Focus can have a great bearing on success, and the more you can control interruptions, whether physical or electronic, the more you can achieve it when needed.

SELL, SELL, SELL

Les Hayman — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 06:56:17 +0000

Nothing happens in this world until somebody sells something!

Which makes “selling” the noblest profession of them all !!
It may not officially be the oldest profession, but I doubt that even that could have existed without some sales effort.

I am not talking about the pressure selling of things that people don’t need and can’t really afford such as we have seen in the housing industry in the US most recently and which has brought the world to its economic knees. I am talking about the professional selling of products and services that can add value to people and organisations.

I was surprised when I first joined SAP to find that the Germans generally don’t actually hold any salesmen in high regard. The common term for a salesman is “Klinkenputzer” (door knob polisher), and salesmen are considered to dwell way down the bottom of the social scale with grave diggers and septic tank cleaners, and only just barely rank above serial killers.

In the same way that Ken Olsen, co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), believed that salesmen were really unnecessary, as he believed that they couldn’t do anything significantly more than could be achieved by mailing out the PDP-8 and PDP-11 handbooks, the German culture of engineering excellence tends to believe that “ … if you build it they will come …”. This is based on the fact that if people or organisations need things they will seek them out, and then you just need to demonstrate that you are the best available. It may work well when you are the only game in town, but starts to get shaky when you have serious competition and the market starts to look for more than just product excellence from its suppliers, such as industry knowledge, an understanding of its pain points and how to solve them, and a mutually beneficial business relationship that is based on more than just product price-performance ratios.

DEC, who drove the mini-computer revolution and dominated the market in the 70s and 80s, is no longer with us, and I have no doubt that part of their demise was because they never really overcame this basic lack of belief in the need for a skilled, professional, passionate, capable sales force. It did survive and prosper for a time based on the “let’s change the world” culture, and brilliant engineering, but faltered as competition flourished and the world started to change towards non-proprietary operating systems and networked workstations and PCs. (Building a multi-directional matrix organisation that strangled initiative and killed personal accountability didn’t help either, but that’s another story).

I remember an article in Fortune magazine in 1979 comparing DEC and Data General titled the “The Gentlemen versus the Upstarts”. It was interesting that both companies used this as marketing material, as they were equally proud of their labels. The problem is that gentlemen finish last and upstarts can eventually annoy everyone, so both are now resting with the Dodo.

The one serious survivor in our industry is IBM, who I believe have written the book on professional selling. When I first started playing with computers back in 1965 (See “My son is in typewriters” posted on July 08, 2010), the IT Industry was dominated by IBM and the “BUNCH” being Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell), all no longer with us. IBM, despite a serious hiccup in the 80s is still here and flourishing. Whilst they have always been towards the forefront of most technologies, they have rarely been at the leading edge, having been a fast follower in many instances rather than the initiator, and yet they have remained a force for over 60 years.

I have always believed that one of the major reasons for this has been their sales professionalism. Many companies paid significantly more, many companies had hungrier and more aggressive compensation plans and sales forces, but few have matched the skill and power of the IBM sales machine. I had the opportunity to experience this first hand in my 8 years at International Harvester in NZ and afterwards when competing with them in the late 70s and 80s (IBM was a partner rather than a competitor at SAP), and have always been impressed with their sales excellence, which I believe has been unmatched in the industry.

The major thing that IBM seems to have always understood, beyond the need for serious training programs and the protection of their culture, is that whilst being at the forefront of technology is important, true competitive edge lies in the quality of your people and the right to engage with the customer, elements that IBM have built into their corporate DNA over the last 60 years.

Outside of a small handful of the large global consulting companies IBM more than anyone has earned the right to engage at all the relevant senior levels in major companies around the world. Their sales teams are welcomed in board rooms because they are seen as serious value add and as business advisors, not necessarily because they have the latest “hot” products.

That’s what professional selling is all about.

FOURTH SECRET OF TIME MANAGEMENT

Les Hayman — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 06:51:47 +0000

H.H “Breaker “Morant (1864-1902) is credited with having said “Live every day as if it was your last, because one day you will be right.”

He was spot-on as on February 27, 1902, at the age of 38, he was executed after conviction for murder during the Second Boer War (1899-1902). He became an Australian folk hero (despite the fact that he was actually English), with a major movie about him having been made in 1980 and which is still considered a classic today.

I am sure however that his notoriety is not based on his advice on time management.

There is no question that his advice is sound, it’s just very hard for people to live their lives as though they really did believe that their life span was seriously limited without actually casting a dark veil over their existence. In actual fact we all tend to live a large part of our lives as though we were indestructible, which does help to explain the kamikaze style of driving one finds in most of Europe.

I believe that the more realistic advice is to live every day as if it was in the last week before going on holidays.

I am always amazed at how much can be achieved in just one week as people focus on finishing off all the things that have lain dormant on their to-do lists for months, just before they set off for their annual 4-6 weeks break (usually starting in August here).

For some, they could actually achieve most of their annual goals by coming in to work just for the latter part of the month of July.

I believe that this is driven mainly by the fact that most people seem to feel that they will not be able to relax completely on vacation if they still have items that have not been crossed off their list of outstanding tasks. The fear that somehow this list will then rob them of sleep with nightmares of things like business plans not written and performance reviews delayed.

Even more compelling seems to be the fear that coming back to all these, now even more delayed, tasks will mean that they will be already behind their work schedule on the first day that they come back from vacations, rather than allowing themselves to just get more and more behind over time as a natural part of their working life.

There seems to be a visible build-up both at work and at home, of making sure that that the time to vacation departure exhibits better planning, better focus, and significantly better use of time available to finish off outstanding tasks.
Imagine the amazing increases in productivity that could be gained if everyone worked like this every single week of the year.

I am therefore of the opinion that companies would be better served if instead of allowing a single 6 week vacation break, they forced their staff to actually take three lots of 2 weeks annual leave spread across the year, as at least that way they could guarantee at least 3 weeks of focussed activities per year rather than just the one.

THIRD SECRET OF SUCCESS

Les Hayman — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 06:53:45 +0000

Being able to update your resume (curriculum vitae) every year is an important part of success.

I am not suggesting that you update it and put it out on the street, just that you need to be able to update the contents every year, and that you should also set up a formal process, and allocate time, to make this happen. (See “Second Secret of Time Management” posted 30/9/2010).

You have to ask yourself “What do I know today that I didn’t know a year ago, what can I do today that I couldn’t do a year ago or what can I do measurably better today than I could do a year ago ?”

If you can’t answer positively to at least one part of this question, then you have not only just wasted a year of personal growth, but you have actually gone backwards, as those that you compete with may not have let the time pass so unproductively.

I am not just talking about competition as being the sole concern of those that are seeking to climb the corporate ladder, but I am including all elements of business, politics, study and life in general.
It is just as true for a corporate executive, a wine maker in Bordeaux or an MBA student, and it also holds true for retirees, despite their supposed non-compete status.

As the Rolling Stones say “And time waits for no one and it won’t wait for me”.

I also believe that you do need to do this personal review as a formal process, as just doing it whilst you drive to work, or navigate your tractor through the vines, makes it too easy to gloss over details and so delude yourself into believing that you have actually achieved a year of personal growth. A formal process implies that not only will you need to list these “upgrades” to your skills and/or knowledge, but that you will also be able to document evidence that these upgrades have actually occurred.

I find that it also helps to seek outside confirmation from for example peers, subordinates and superiors (in a work context), or partners and friends (in a personal context) that they have also seen visible evidence of these changes, and would be prepared to sign off (if asked) on the changes in your resume.

It’s also not enough just to list a promotion, as climbing a rung on the corporate ladder is not in itself a sure sign that you have actually advanced your skills or knowledge in the last 12 months, only that you have been chosen as the best of what is available in the selection process.

Some promotions are more an indication of the lack of skill of the promoters rather than a sure sign of skills in the one promoted. In the latter half of the 20th century, the IT industry grew massively each year, and became a breeding ground for promotions of the “most visibly able” rather than the “truly capable”, as in many companies the growth in the number of management positions to fill was greater than the growth in skilled candidates. It was only towards the end of the 1900’s that tough times showed that many had titles that far exceeded their true abilities, skills and experience to actually effectively fill the role.

These are generally the people who are first to go when culling processes start, and we should have learned by now that in this century the regular corporate cull has become a fact of life.
True learning and skills development, and putting this knowledge to use, is not only a key element in corporate life preservation, but is also what makes life more interesting and worthwhile.

The Olympic motto in Latin is “Citius, Altius, Fortius” which translates to “Higher, Faster, Stronger ”.
To this we should add “Acutulior” which means “cleverer”.

SECOND SECRET OF SUCCESS

Les Hayman — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 05:55:54 +0000

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” Alvin Toffler

I am often amazed that so many people seem to not understand that learning is a journey and not a destination.

You should never stop learning, whether it is for new skills or new ideas, and you need to be prepared to adjust both elements as the world changes around you. It is also important these days to differentiate between information and knowledge, and to understand that information may be interesting for conversations at dinner parties but little else if not applied, and that knowledge that is not translated to actions has little value, as knowing what to do is less important than actually doing what we know.

Too many people seem to believe that there are distinct stages in their lives, with very little overlap:

Ages 1-25 “Learning” phase (School and University)

25-65 “Doing” phase through working (25-55 in France … see “Vive l’avantage” posted 27 Sept 2010)

65-85+ “Resting” phase (for many the “TV watching” phase … see “Vive la France” posted 25 June 2010)

There is a pervasive attitude amongst many senior, well educated people that once they have graduated with their PhDs and MBAs that they are now past their learning phase and that from now on they will just absorb anything extra by osmosis as they just go about doing things. I have always seen early formal education mainly as a way to learn how to learn, and as acquiring a “hunting license” in the job market. However, just because you have a license to do something doesn’t actually mean that you will get the opportunity to actually do it, nor does it mean that you already have the skills to do it well. In most cases these skills need to be developed and honed over a lifetime before they can be well deployed. To become proficient, learning and practice must continue forever whether formal, on the job, through coaching and mentoring, reading and trying, and failing sometimes just to not get too overconfident. (See “First Secret of Success” posted on 16.09.2010).

This belief that they already know enough tends to be truer of people in management roles, as individual contributors, such as engineers, at least have an understanding that their science keeps changing with each new breakthrough in their field. Managers have to go through this same process of learning, as the science of management changes with the changing expectations of each generation. Management styles of “command and control” may have worked with my father’s generation, but already didn’t work with mine, and certainly don’t work with today’s generation who see a much more collaborative style of management with much more involvement in things like job definition and measurement. (See “Quality of Management for the Future” posted 02/09/2010).

It is our ability to continually redefine ourselves as the world changes around us at an ever more rapid rate that will define our ability to keep on succeeding.

As Charles Darwin so succinctly puts it “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

I have less problem convincing younger people of this, but am amazed at how many board members of major companies resist ongoing training, some even seeing this need for further learning as being a visible show of weakness to subordinates. It may be acceptable to have a noted university professor come in and talk to the board on some related subject as this can be seen more as an intellectual exercise rather than a learning one, but I have found significant resistance when I have suggested that a corporate board could do with some serious training on, for example, how to function effectively as a board.

At least I am fortunate that in my retirement I get to mix with lots of younger people. I could not imagine a more terrifying existence than having to spend all my time just with people my own age, as I have long believed that it’s what you learn after you know it all that really counts.

HR … WHAT’S HR GOT TO DO WITH INNOVATION? ISN’T THAT R&D?

Les Hayman — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 06:22:06 +0000

Why is it that when you talk about innovation most people can’t look beyond product innovation?

It’s a wonderful thing to have superior products, particularly if you can create products that people just love to have and to use, like Apple. My wife only got her first Apple product, an i-Phone, about 6 months ago and quickly followed up with an i-Mac. She is now very keen on the idea of an i-Pad.

Apart from the fact that I can’t play “Angry Birds“ I am quite happy with my Blackberry, which I see as being a reasonable competitor to the i-Phone.

I believe that what makes Apple unique is not just its product line as whilst I can accept that this is outstanding, I also understand that there are serious alternatives, and that under the law of averages I am sure that someone, fairly soon, will come up with another quantum leap in “hand-held magic”, and that this will become the newest god to the cognoscenti. I believe that what makes Apple so unique and competitive is that on top of their great products, they also seem to have a great culture, and it’s this culture that drives their innovation, and hence their superior products.

It’s interesting that even though Apple has been around since the 70’s it doesn’t seem to have developed the rigidity that long established companies tend to have, despite the changes in CEO over the years and despite their growth. They have somehow managed to retain a casual and free character, and resisted any real push for policies and procedures or dress codes or time sheets. As a result, they seem to have created a common desire, energy and enthusiasm to create great products and to beat and baffle their competition.

I believe that this ability to grow from start-up in 1976 to a company of about 35,000 permanent and 2,500 temporary staff and revenues of US $ 43 B in 2009, and yet retain this “maverick” culture after 35 years, is a rare and enviable achievement, and I believe that this ability to help create, protect and build culture is a critical role for HR to play, as it is a major driver of innovation.

I have always believed that innovation is not just about genius (hiring the brightest and the best), but more about “How we do things around here” (culture), and as Peter Drucker says “ … hard work over a long period of time … “ (see “The 3 great business lies” posted August 2, 2010).

I was once asked to help a senior software development manager who was having a problem with his team, which was made up of about 20 young “geniuses”, and who just weren’t delivering the goods. I was in his office listening to his complaints about his team’s lack of creativity, when one of his young team members interrupted us in an obviously high state of excitement. It seems that he had been up most of the night working on a technical roadblock that had been bothering the team for over a week. After I pushed his boss into accepting the interruption, this young man proceeded to describe his breakthrough with considerable pride. His boss heard him out, and then without missing a beat described his own solution, which he had come up with some days earlier, but had kept from the team to see what they could do. As the young man left the room, his boss turned to me and said “See that … no creativity”. I added “… and even less tomorrow”.

I have found that the further you move up the management structure, the less is management aware of the real culture of the company, and the more there is a belief that “… if you write it, so it shall be .. “, and hence a belief that as it is written in the published mission, vision and values statements it must be true. This is one of the reasons that companies sometimes struggle to execute a strategy, as the culture will oppose it, and for a company to be successful it must ensure that its culture, being its values and behaviours, are aligned to its strategy.

It is important to understand that culture is evolving and changing all the time. As the company grows, it will change. Every time new recruits come in to the company, they will bring their own behaviours and values with them, and will have some impact on the culture, even if only a little if the company culture is very strong. But if the company is going through significant growth, these changes can be dramatic. Culture will also be impacted by external conditions, like changes in legislation, competition or market conditions, and whilst some of these may be positive and some may be planned, a vast majority happen clandestinely, and out of sight and awareness of senior management.

This is where a strong HR department can play a critical and pivotal role by working with management to help identify and develop the patterns of behaviour and values that the company needs for it to be successful.

HR needs to be able to assess what is the true company culture, (for example, by noting what people do rather than what they say), to work with management to develop what they see as being the desired culture and the roadmap to move from one to the other, by determining the elements in the current culture that should be kept, and the elements that need to be changed.

This whole process of change is one of the key platforms for driving innovation, and HR organisations have a key role to play in its successful execution. This covers many areas that HR has traditionally been responsible for anyway such as stringent recruiting practices, induction programmes that ensure recruits understand the integrity of the company, being “What we believe is what we say is what we do”, and the values that the company holds to be true. Adding to this the management, protection and development of the required company culture should be a critical step for HR, and will bring HR closer to the CEO as it should be his priority as well.
I see this as being a key business “value-add” role for HR to deliver, and a significant step towards an HR organisation becoming a “Player”. ( see HR … Polite to Police to Partner to Player posted August 26, 2010).

SECOND SECRET OF TIME MANAGEMENT

Les Hayman — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:11:53 +0000

Diaries are meant to be an aid to help us all manage our time allocations but in most cases are rarely used in a way that actually helps people to really achieve this.

The problem is that most people use diaries mainly as a means of giving other people access to tying up the available time. For example, when I was working at SAP, by the time I had diarised the requirements of things like board meetings, executive meetings, regional reviews, country visits, budgeting sessions, sales meetings, direct report weekly one-on-ones, mentoring sessions, customer conferences and speaking engagements about 70% of my available time was already allocated by the time the year started. The 30% that was left was quickly eroded by ad-hoc meetings, emergencies and a myriad of other reasons why people just had to see me.

If one of the critical success factors of competent managers is to spend time planning and building the future, then there was not a lot of time available to do this. Most studies have shown that very few executives spend more than about 10% of their time planning, and actually spend most of their time in meetings, “fire fighting” and handling emails and correspondence.

So how is an executive meant to be able to find the time to plan and the time to actually complete the “A-level” items on his priority list (see First Secret of Time Management posted September 23, 2010)?

I have found that one key way to help achieve this is to make appointments with yourself, in the same way that you would make appointments for other people, and to treat these with the same level of priority and importance. You have to make sure that your assistant understands why this is important. I used to always tell my PAs that they had to give these times the same level of priority for non-disturbance as if I was with one of my direct reports doing a formal performance review, which meant that unless the building was burning down I did not want to be disturbed. My PA was not to say that “I was on my own”, as that is an immediate invitation for a knock on the door, only that “I couldn’t be disturbed” and to then either schedule an appointment or to take a message for me to call back when I was free.

These “private-times” need only be as little as an hour each, but it is important that you do not allow interruptions as these can destroy any creative train of thought, and planning requires both thought and creativity. If you don’t have a PA or are in an open-plan cubicle, book a meeting room or go and sit in the park, and turn off your portable. I have found that it is better to schedule these daily private-times early in the morning when your mind is fresh and there is also less chance of interruption. If you leave it to later in the day there is a good chance that circumstances will overtake you, and you will end up having to surrender them to address some “emergency”, but I also understand that this is not always possible. I always set these daily ones at 8.00-9,00 am each day, before most people came into the office, before the normal day’s frenzy had begun, and before most scheduled meetings. Travel permitting, I would try and schedule an hour per day, an extra 3 hour session per week, and also a day per month out of the office, giving me about 10 hours of uninterrupted, jealously-guarded, personal time per week. Not a great amount to take out of a 50+ hour working week, but precious and productive if used properly. You should also try and schedule these before you start looking at emails, as these have a way of taking over your attention and activities, and are also just another distraction from your focus on those tasks that are critical for your own role, its responsibilities and your own success.

I know of people who receive, and handle, over 200 emails per day, leaving very little time to actually do very much else, and who probably go home at night content in the thought that they have achieved a lot in their day.
The challenge is to be able to differentiate between the important and the urgent. The urgent will always be there, but if you don’t make time for the important, it just won’t get done.

It is important to remember that “When you are up to your arse in alligators, it is hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp”.

FIRST SECRET OF TIME MANAGEMENT

Les Hayman — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 06:24:27 +0000

Can anyone really manage time?

We all get allocated exactly the same amount, just 24 hours per day, and yet some people never seem to have enough time and always have a growing mountain of undone tasks, and others seem to be able to do an incredible amount in the same period, and rarely fall behind.

I believe that it is obvious that we can’t actually manage time per se, but we can all definitely manage the events that take up our time..

We have always been taught that to be successful, one of the first things that we should do regularly is to take our “To Do List” and categorize it by importance into A,B,C tasks, and that we should not do the Bs until all the As have been done and so on. I believe that in managing how to effectively use our time, this is definitely not the starting point.

The critical starting point is to look at whether the task should be on the “do list” in the first place and, particularly for those in management roles, whether it should be allocated to someone else or whether it should be done at all.

For example, over most of my working life, I had a basket on my desk marked “PRORITY” in very large letters.

Whenever I got a request from above or from a peer requiring significant work by me or my people, usually having to provide some mountain of statistics on my part of the organisation to someone in some vague part of the matrix, I would always ask myself whether, by completing this task, I would be adding serious value to the organisation. Would this task somehow enhance critical elements such as revenues, profits, competitiveness, customer or staff satisfaction? If the answer was a resounding “no” to all of them, I would place it in this priority basket strategically placed in a prominent position on my desk. If the requestor then stuck his head in my office to ask me where I was with his request, I would show him that it was in my priority pile and that I would get to it as soon as I could get out from under the mountain of other tasks that had even more priority. This would normally satisfy him long enough for his departure, usually pleased with the fact that his request was considered critical.

I would then ask myself the same questions as I had originally, as to what would be the value to the organisation if I now spent the time to complete this task. If the answer was still “none at all”, it would go back in the priority basket. If the request had come from my direct supervisor, or above, after about three requests or a serious demand, I would actually allocate the time to do it. However, most of the time, it simply just went away.

I am not advocating open anarchy in the corporate environment, but am just illustrating an example of what I mean about our ability and responsibility to “manage events”. I have found over the years, and particularly in a matrix-obsessed structure, that there are many people who justify their existence simply by asking others to provide multiple variations of metrics in the organisation. These can create an incredible amount of work for many, but do very little to actually deliver any benefit to anyone except for helping build the perceived importance of the requestor. I have found that many times these requests are just based on an incompetent’s need for some visible activity, and like a bad case of wind, will just pass with time.

The skill in effectively managing ones use of available time is in allocating priorities, but only after deciding whether the tasks should be done at all, and if so, then by whom.
Too many managers, particularly if vocationally brilliant, will pick up difficult tasks or problems from their subordinates, just to show the world that they still have the vocational skills.
This then creates a situation where the subordinate can now take management control by being able to ask his manager for progress reports, removes an important learning opportunity for the subordinate, and takes up time that the manager should be using to run his business. I once worked with a senior head of development, with responsibility for about 5000 people, who often took on the task of debugging a piece of software that one of the programmers had been struggling with, and he considered this as being a reasonable way to spend his time.

The best (and most amusing) book I have read on this subject was “Managing Management Time” written in about 1960 by William Oncken, Jr (1912-1988), and I have always recommended this book as one of the most illuminating on this subject. Even after 50 years, I still consider this book a must read for anyone in a management role.

The ultimate way to succeed is to do the critical things that focus on the business of effectively fulfilling the role and responsibilities of the position to which you have been appointed. This is very different from focussing on the busyness of completing a myriad of tasks, particularly if you should not be doing them anyway.

THE PROBLEM WITH COMPROMISE

Les Hayman — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I have always hated compromise!

I believe that the problem with compromise is that no-one really gets what they want and therefore no-one is really committed to the success of the compromise decision, and I find this to be as true in personal as well as in business life.

On a personal level, I have a belief that outside of politics and religion, it is very rare that two people can feel as strongly about any decision, and therefore whenever there is disagreement about something like where to go for the next holiday, what colour to paint the living room or what next car to buy, you should always ask each other how strongly you each really feel about this on a scale of 1-10. If you are really honest about the scoring, it is unusual for there to be a tie, and you should always go with the highest rating in the belief that that person will be the most committed to the success of the decision taken.

I am amazed at how many times I will strongly disagree with someone about something until I am asked to give my passionately stated position a score and, when I think about it honestly, realise that I may really only be say a 4 and don’t really have a strong position on the subject, as against having a strong propensity to having a position on the subject.

I believe that this is true of most people. We are taught through life to defend our position on most (if not all) subjects, so tend to be ready to defend every belief we have without really thinking through whether this is seriously important to us. I love it when this leads to serious debate and discussion over a dinner party for example, but it can be incredibly disruptive when you have family and friends who will disagree on everything as a matter of course.

I have found this to be particularly true of some friends the older that they get. I have one old friend from Australia, who moved to Spain about the same time we moved to France. Over the last 10 years he has become more and more strident about the fact that we chose France, and he has even called me an idiot for doing so, when Spain should have been a more obvious choice. I find this hard to cope with as the question of where I choose to live is definitely a 10 for me, but I doubt that where I should live should even rate as a 1 for him. When I point this out it just seems to get him angrier about why I chose France, particularly when I tell him that where he chooses to live doesn’t actually rate at all with me. I understand that he is just trying to justify his decision, but I don’t understand why we are having this disagreement at all, as I consider it irrelevant to our relationship.

I find it just as true in a business context, and I believe that much of it is the result of moving vocationally-brilliant, rather than people-brilliant individuals into management positions. Rather than let people get on and do what is important in the way that makes most sense to them, vocationally brilliant managers will often tend to try and come up with a better solution than their subordinate, and a better way of doing the task, as this will satisfy their vocational needs, and also show their subordinate how clever and innovative they still are, despite having been pushed into a management role.

I have always believed that a subordinate with a solution that I would have graded as being 70% right, will make a better go of it, than my riding over the top of him with my 80% approach. I will of course try to advise and counsel him, but will eventually let him know that I will support him in every way that I can, but that it’s his project, his decision, and his responsibility to make it work. If he is committed, and capable, I know that he will go out of his way to make a success of it, which I believe would not necessarily have been the case had I overridden him with my proposed solution, or had tried to talk him into a compromise approach, which would have meant that neither of us would have been fully committed, and I believe that commitment is key.

Scott McNealy at Sun Microsystems used to have a saying that “You can agree and commit, or you can disagree and commit, but you have to commit”, an expression that I have loved since I first heard it in 1989. I have sat through numerous meetings, even at global board levels, where everyone commits to a direction that has been forged over hours of argument and debate, only to be already discussing with cronies about how to get around, or away from, the decision on their way out of the meeting room. It’s one of the reasons that I hate meetings as a format for decision making. I have always preferred people to come to a meeting with the decisions for their business area already made, and then have to defend them to their peers. This at least gives you a clear understanding of ownership, and also removes the “hide-in-the-herd” reaction if things don’t quite pan out.

Meetings tend to be built on compromise, and I believe that this is the worst starting point for decision making. I believe that it is better for business success to give people the responsibility and the authority to make decisions needed for their business unit, and to build the culture in the organisation that encourages and supports this, and doesn’t punish people for making honest mistakes along the way.

In the long run, this approach yields much better results both in private and business life, than does any approach built on compromise.

I remain uncompromising on not making compromises!

QUALITY OF MANAGEMENT FOR THE FUTURE

Les Hayman — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:44:40 +0000

I believe that “People join companies, but leave managers”.

People will join a company in the belief that the image and reputation that it projects is what they are looking for in an employer, and as such somewhere that they can learn, develop and grow, be challenged, meet and work with great like-minded people, and have fun along the way.

The vast majority of people tend to leave a company because they have not been able to establish a credible working relationship with their immediate supervisor. It is rarely about money or working conditions. This seems reasonable, as your boss is the one who determines what you do, who you get to do it with, how you are measured, how you are rewarded, how you are developed and what opportunities are presented to you.

I therefore consider “Quality of Management” not only one of the critical elements for talent retention and development, but also the key element for business success.

One of the disappointments in my move to Europe in 2001 was that I have seen little evidence that European companies have created a culture of management as a profession. Management skill appears to be more of an add-on to vocational brilliance, rather than being viewed as an art, a science and an asset in its own right. The idea is that management skill is a “nice to have” rather than a mandatory part of an executive’s role.

I had a long series of interchanges with one executive who actually told me that managers were like horses, and that “ … in life you were either born a race horse or a draft horse, and race horses shouldn’t pull carts and draft horses shouldn’t run at Epsom … “. His belief was that any skilled, intelligent, well educated professional could become a manager, and that being intelligent he would work out what was needed to fill the role. Interesting thought, but I have always believed that the difference between a race horse that looked good, and one that could also win races, was how well you trained and prepared the horse for what was expected of him. (see Flogging a Dead Horse posted on July 2, 2010)

1. Furthermore the predominant European management style of “command and control” will not wash well with the next generation.

There are changed expectations that rather than a top down approach to management, the future will involve much more discussion, much more involvement, much more collaboration, much more personal involvement in role definition, much more peer review, and much more self managing teams, as well as possibly significantly less full time work.

2. Emergence of mega-corporations.

I also believe therefore that the nature of Corporations will also change dramatically, and as such so will the need for management needs and skills change with it.
Over the last decades, we have seen the emergence of mega-corporations. We have seen more mergers and acquisitions this century so far, than we saw in the entire 200 previous years of business history. Companies grew because they could, as capital was readily available in support, and from a belief that “bigger is better”, and in particular as a way to counter the competitive threat coming from countries like India and China.

I believe that the days of the mega-corporations may well be numbered. Under the current economic realities, companies are not prepared to keep hiring just to build hordes, whilst at the same time I see a changing attitude amongst young people today to the concept of fulltime employment, whatever the weekly working hours, or vacation plans.

3. The days of joining a company for life are long gone.

The days of joining a company for life are long gone, even with my own generation, and whilst my children’s peers still considered the idea of a career spanning maybe a handful of companies, I see that today’s youth can see careers that involve working for 20 or more companies in their work life. On top of this there is a rejection by many of the idea that they will be “allowed” to take 4 or 6 week’s vacation each year. They want to build a work life where for example, they work full time for 6 months and then trek in the Himalayas for 3 months, or work on an “awesome” project for say 2 years, but then spend a year back at university doing something interesting, or sailing round the world.

4. Coming growth of the independent professional.

I see therefore the coming growth of the independent professional, who chooses what he does and when he does it, and with/for whom, linked in to and visible to his potential hirers through specialist networks where his skills and experience can be vetted and proven, and where he can bid for and/or receive offers for roles that suit his skills and his personal requirements.

This is very much the way that movie studios work, bringing together the specific team that they need to make a particular film, which will then disband on its completion. The sequels will bring together some of the same people, but it is unlikely that they will ever reconstitute exactly the same crew as needs will have changed somewhat over the intervening time period.

I believe that many Companies have a long way to go to establish a culture of management as a profession for today. Their onward journey to be able to professionally manage the next generation may be just too great a distance for them to cover.

I was wondering whether anyone else had also seen this trend away from the concept of full-time employment and a move more towards something more like the film studio model.
I would be interested in your comments and input.

HR … POLITE TO POLICE TO PARTNER TO PLAYER

Les Hayman — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:04:47 +0000

Whenever I speak to a group of HR Professionals, I tend to start with the need for HR organisations to go through a process of change, and I call this transition “Polite to Police to Partner to Player”.

HR people have always tended to be the politest people in the company. You can go to them with any problem or issue, and they will always listen intently and politely. Most of the time they can’t actually help you solve the problem, but at least they won’t be checking their emails over their shoulder every time they get an alert of a new message in their inbox.

Some years ago someone decided that HR could also become the protectors of company policies and procedures. Suddenly HR people had to contend with policing for strayers from things like the official paths that covered the travel policy or relocation allowances. Whilst I was running HR at SAP, I tried to give as much of this away to the Finance department as I could get away with. This was not as big an issue as it sounds as generally Finance people love a policing function … it is actually one of the things that makes them want to go in to work in the mornings. It was not that I wanted my HR team to have less to do, but I didn’t want HR to be seen as a “nay-sayer” and a barrier to the business, and this was just one step of many.

Today HR organisations have been positioning themselves as Business Partners. The trend has been to move the administrative roles over to shared-service centres meaning that this frees up the HR professionals to focus on helping the business lines solve their human issues.

Note that I said “human issues” rather than “business issues”, as I have found very few HR people that have a reasonable grasp of the difference. When I ran HR at SAP, I arranged for some bright young HR professionals to do an MBA, based on my belief that this would give them a better understanding of what business issues actually meant. Unfortunately it worked too well. As soon as they finished their MBA they immediately, and successfully, sought roles outside of HR. I am sure that they must exist out there somewhere, but I have still to meet working HR professionals with an MBA.

I have a belief that the role of “Partner” for HR is a reasonable step but it is not enough. I see an HR Partner as being someone who helps to implement a business strategy that has been developed by others. I believe that HR has to become a Player. To me a Player is someone who plays an integral part in developing the strategy, rather than just helping to implement it.

HR should be playing a critical role in helping to develop any business strategy, and I am constantly amazed at the number of companies who seem to not understand that there must be a logical link between any business strategy and the company culture (sum of the behaviours). For example, it makes no sense to develop a strategy based on building a capable partnering strategy, when in the DNA of the organisation is a belief that the only font of knowledge exists with them alone, and that all partners are just lowly versions of themselves, rather than professional, capable, value-add “side-kicks”.

I define culture as “the way we do things around here” and if there is any area of business reality where HR can play a pivotal role, it is in helping line managers to build the culture, to help build required behaviour. If this definition is valid, then it is not hard for HR to become an integral part of helping to set strategic direction, to help channel behaviour and to make a serious contribution to adding measurable value to the business.
Everyone is always telling HR people that they “have to get a seat at the table”, but very few people can actually describe what this actually means. I doubt that most HR people could actually find this mythic table let alone get a seat.

The sooner that HR people can understand that there are “no HR problems” and only “business problems that HR can help managers to resolve”, and the sooner that they can help managers to understand that no one can develop an executable business strategy without understanding whether their people can meet the strategic needs, the sooner HR can sit down with the grownups.

MOVE THEM UP OR MOVE THEM OUT

Les Hayman — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 07:21:31 +0000

I have long believed that managers need to always have a “ladder” of their people graded from best to worst performer. This is not just to ensure visibility of the top performers, but also to ensure identification of those that need help. The problem is that most managers find it very easy to work with the people who are doing well, as that generally means easy contact and positive conversations, but find it hard to work with those that are struggling, as that involves some confrontation and considerable effort.

I am not saying that managers should stop having significant focus on their best people, but I am often amazed at how many people don’t actually understand that they are not performing to the expectation of their immediate supervisor until they have their annual performance review at the end of the year, generally too late for remedial actions to be taken.

I believe that the role of a manager is to personally work with whoever is on the bottom rung of the ladder and to focus on helping them to move up. This generally means that the manager will need to expend effort as it involves some coaching, some development and some hand-holding from the manager (and even others) for a while, but this is one of the things that managers are meant to do anyway, even though few actually do so. Once the manager realistically feels that his charge has now moved off the bottom rung, this will then uncover the next person that needs help, and the manager can now shift his focus and efforts to this one. In this way, a manager will develop a team that is continually improving.

Keeping the focus just on the top performers may be easier but doesn’t necessarily achieve much improvement in the team. Moving a hi-performing employee from 100-105% performance is not only harder, but also doesn’t deliver as much benefit to team success as does moving a struggler from say 70-90%. Too many managers leave people sitting on the bottom rung for too long, without remedial action being taken quickly enough and then it becomes too late to do anything to save them.

I have always believed that if you hire people for their strengths then you can’t remove them for their weaknesses until you have made significant effort to help them to overcome these. Only after you have expended this effort jointly, and they are still sitting on the bottom, can you now consider more critical action hence “Move them up or move them out”.

I believe that the same holds true if a manager has a team where all are great performers and are all achieving their goals. There are still significant benefits to be gained by focussing on “moving up” whoever is the least of the hi-performers and keeping the whole process alive.

By “move them out”, I mean initially looking at whether they can be moved out of their current role, and into a role where their strengths can be used to add value to the organisation. If the recruitment process that brought them in to the organisation was well run and stringent, then there is significant chance that they can still be valuable in a different role. Only as a last resort should they be terminated. A “hire ‘em fire ‘em” attitude is too expensive and disruptive to any organisation, and should never be allowed to become a way of compensating for bad management practices.

IT WAS GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME

Les Hayman — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 07:27:25 +0000

When I was appointed to the SAP Global Extended Board in 1999, my bosses at the time (the Global CEO and the Board Chairman) approved my title as “CEO Asia Pacific, Board Member SAP-AG”. This was based on the fact that no-one outside of Germany really knew what “Extended Board” meant, and they felt that anyway we had a 12 member Global Board and I was part of it.

When I took over the role of CEO Europe Middle East Africa in 2001, my secretary who was new to SAP, asked me what I wanted on my business cards. I handed her a copy of my Asia Pacific business card and told her to just change Asia Pacific to EMEA and so on … seemed like a simple solution.

That is until she went for printing advice to the PA of my predecessor, who immediately rushed to her boss to have this stopped. It appeared that in the previous 2 years (he and I had been appointed to the Extended Board at the same time), he had had “Member of the Extended Board” on his business cards as compared to “Member of the Board” which is what I had on mine. He seemed to be bothered that somehow my title seemed more senior than the one that he had used.

I pointed out that my business cards had been approved by both the Board Chairman and the CEO of SAP, but this was not acceptable to him, and he kept coming up with numerous reasons why I couldn’t have the cards the way that I had stipulated.

I kept pressing him for the real reason that he opposed it, and under my persistence eventually blurted out “Member of the Extended Board was good enough for me, so it should be good enough for you”.

An interesting thought.

I have come to believe that just as parents needs to believe that one of their responsibilities is to make things easier for their children, so managers need to believe that one of their responsibilities is to make things easier for their successors. It is totally wrong to believe that “What was good enough for me is good enough for who follows me”. It is actually critical for the growth and success of any organisation that everyone in a people responsible position has a strong belief that “What was good enough for me is definitely not good enough for my successors”.

For example I believe that a critical role for every manager is to build and grow the interdependencies across departments and geographies to ensure strong linkages for their team, and thus making the goals of their own team easier to achieve in the future. Another critical role is to grow the skills, knowledge and experiences of their managers and individual contributors so that their ability to perform gets easier every year. In other words, to keep growing their net worth.

I see that being given management responsibility for a team of people is akin to being given a garden to look after that you will ultimately have to pass on to someone else to care for.

You have choices to make.
You can just leave the “garden” alone and hope that nature takes its course, that rain and sunshine comes in the right quantities and at the right time, and that the weeds don’t strangle the flowers.
You could also choose to just do a little bit every once in a while, throw around a bit of manure, mow the grass when it gets really high and pull out the occasional and most obvious of weeds.
Or you could choose to really help to make this garden grow and flourish. You can encourage the best of the growth, add water and fertiliser as needed, weed out the parts that could strangle the good growth and add to the wealth of what exists.

Planting Spring Flowers

Flowers

Just believing that what is good enough now is what will be good enough in the future is unacceptable for a professional manager. Managers should be measured on whether they are net creators of talent for the organisation, whether their area of responsibility grows and develops in line with the changing needs of the organisation, and whether their team becomes more effective in meeting their goals year on year. In other words how well can a manager grow, develop and improve his “garden”, rather than believing that his role is to just keep it alive.

To stay with the gardening theme, I have come across too many managers who use the “mushroom approach” to people management. They keep their people in the dark and occasionally pour a bucket of manure over them.

THE THREE ENVELOPES

Les Hayman — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 07:28:58 +0000

Just after I was appointed to the role of IT Manager at International Harvester NZ about 40 years ago, a colleague told me a story that highlighted the tenuous nature of management roles.

It involved the removal of a CEO by his board after the company had delivered a number of years of unspectacular performance, and his replacement by a new, younger recruit from their industry.

On his last day, the departing CEO was clearing out his office when the replacement CEO arrived unexpectedly. After exchanging some mild pleasantries along the lines of “no hard feelings” and “it’s not personal”, the new CEO asked his predecessor whether he had any advice to share. The departing CEO handed him 3 numbered envelopes with the instructions that they should be opened in sequence if all else failed.

The new CEO threw himself into his new role. He visited the remotest parts of the company, listened to all opinions from every level of management, spent time with the engineers and on the shop floor, spoke to customers and suppliers, and after 12 months he felt that he had a real understanding of the company and the issues that it faced. His only problem was that he didn’t have a clear idea of what he had to do to bring the company back to competitive strength.

He then remembered the 3 envelopes in his desk drawer and opened the first one. It said “Blame your predecessor”.

He took the advice, and at the next board meeting told the board that after 12 months of in depth study he had come to the conclusion that his predecessor had been the problem, and that to save the company he would now have to go about changing everything that his predecessor had implemented during his tenure. This pleased the board as it supported their decision to remove the previous CEO, so they quickly allocated significant budget and resources to the CEO to effect the changes proposed.

Armed with this mandate, the CEO spent the next year changing every element of the company’s business processes both internally and externally. Unfortunately, even after all these changes, the company’s fortunes had not significantly improved.
Out came envelope number 2. It said “Reorganise”.

Armed with this new strategy, he reported at the next board meeting that now that they had totally changed the way the company worked, the current structure did not fit and that they would now have to go through a total global restructuring. Again the Board was thrilled that their CEO was so dynamic and once again voted him significant budget and resources to effect the changes.

After another 12 months of turmoil, and when things had still not improved, he opened the final envelope. It said “Prepare 3 envelopes”.

I recently saw a report from Price Waterhouse that said that the average tenure of a gobal CEO today is about 2.7 years. This means that few CEOs today are ever really tested, as they don’t serve long enough in the role to actually have to live with their decisions, directions and implementations.
I guess that just like art imitating life and vice versa, we have now reached a point in the business world where life actually imitates humour.

THE 3 GREAT BUSINESS LIES

Les Hayman — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 08:00:02 +0000

It is incredible that marketing organisations within companies spend such an incredible amount of time
developing a company’s mission, vision and values statements and yet they all tend to come up with
basically the same things over and over again, generally covering their elevated commitment to
Customers, People and Innovation.

For example, taken directly from their web-sites …

“Ensuring a high level of satisfaction among our customers and partners is a core component of our business” Microsoft

“Dedication to every client’s success.” IBM Values

“It’s about investing in our employees and their futures. For it’s only when they realise their full potential that we can achieve our broader business goals” British Airways

“SAP is committed to recruiting and retaining top talent … we strive to allow individuals to
realize their full potential.” SAP Values

“Faced with multifaceted competition, Air France is innovating constantly, including a proactive human resources policy for development of individual and collective programs” Air France (my translation from the French).

“BP is progressive, responsible, innovative and performance driven. We push boundaries today and create tomorrow’s breakthroughs through our people and technology”
British Petroleum

And yet, whilst every company professes to be heavily focussed on these 3 lofty aspirations, generally these tend to be the 3 greatest lies in the business world, approximating to:

1. Our Customer is #1
2. Our People are our greatest asset
3. We are driven by innovation

I haven’t chosen the above companies to suggest that they are examples of those that are guilty of expressing values that they don’t believe in, just that they all express their commitment to the same high moral ground … not in itself a bad thing, but in many companies what they write is very different to the behaviour that they exhibit. Ultimately any company is just the sum of its behaviours, its culture or “the way we do things”, irrespective of what they put in print for our edification.

1. Our Customer is #1

Companies will always profess that their customers are the number 1 priority. I believe that in many companies “customer focus” would be lucky to make it into the top-10. The latest marketing “whimsy” is to have a goal “to delight customers” without any real understanding of what this would entail, and when just being able to meet basic customer expectations is already a tough but worthwhile task, and something most customers would consider a major advance.

I prefer Apple’s approach to defining their customer commitment which is “We are genuinely interested in solving customer problems, and we will not compromise our ethics or integrity in the name of profit”. Simple and achievable.

2. Our people are our greatest asset

When it comes to “Our people are our greatest asset”, over my 40+ years of corporate life I have seen only a handful of companies that truly try and live this. The majority seem to see people as being either “bums on seats” or, as one CEO I worked for who believed that people were just part of his business formulae that could be manipulated and used as any other physical asset, without any consideration for peoples’ personal aspirations and needs … so much for having a CEO with a mathematical rather than a business background. SAS, who were voted as the #1 company to work for by Fortune Magazine’s 2010 survey of employees globally, says it well “If you treat employees as if they make a difference, they will make a difference”.

3. Innovation

Innovation in most companies seems to be only based on their view of “genius”. The belief that if you hire bright, well educated people, that this will be enough as they will work out how to create something different or new. Genius is a critical ingredient but it is not enough. I prefer Peter Drucker’s view of innovation which is more based on “… hard work over a long period of time ..” and where the company culture (sum of behaviours) is conducive to driving change because it is part of a company’s DNA, rather than just a reaction to crises. This means that beyond just being based on genius, innovation needs to be built on things like how well you match company objectives with employees’ personal needs, whether you can build commitment and engagement, if you encourage people to take calculated risk, how you handle failure and whether you allow newly recruited bright young people to question things and drive change. Larry Page, co-founder of Google says “Through innovation and iteration, Google takes something that works well and improves upon it in unexpected ways” … hard work over a long period of time!

It’s a pity that so many companies can’t seem to realise that to be more successful they could start by focussing on turning into reality these 3 statements that they have already enunciated in their Vision, Mission and Values.

When it all boils down, committed customers, partners and staff are the only true competitive edge, and if given the environment, encouragement and opportunity to contribute, will drive the innovation needed for success.

CONGRATULATIONS … YOU’RE A HIGH POTENTIAL … HERE IS YOUR TATTOO

Les Hayman — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:37:37 +0000

Ever since Jack Welch told the world something along the lines of “ … look after the top 10% because they create the magic ..”, every company has put some effort into implementing a “High Potential” or “Top Talent” programme (Pesto effect ?), that attempts to recognize people that are not just top performers and achievers in the company, but also to identify those that have the potential to go further, to do more, maybe even to get to the top.

In most of the “HiPo” programmes that I have seen, this is akin to placing a brand on the forehead of the anointed. It is a title conferred on an individual that he will openly wear and parade brazenly in his work arena. Some companies even go as far as to have the title printed on the individual’s business cards and I have seen one company that handed out a lapel pin to the appointees.

How wrong can you get?

Firstly, as this honour is generally limited to about 2% of the employee population, managers now have to explain to the other 98% that they have lesser or limited or no (?) potential at all compared to the chosen 2%. Not an easy job for any manager, and incredibly de-motivating for those that have worked hard, and who have achieved the goals set for them. Managers must remember that whilst they may have for example 20% Top Performers of which only about 10% may be Hi Potential, there are still another 80% who keep the business going, and merit attention. When managers talk about “talent” it should cover all their people not just the few at the top.

The other issue is that you have now set expectations in this chosen 2% of “wunderkind” that something momentous is now due to happen to them, like an imminent promotion.

I worked with one company that had an employee population of about 60.000 and a manager population of about 6.000. Their employee turnover was relatively low at about 4%, so no more than about 240 managers would depart annually (both voluntary and involuntary). At 2%, HiPos numbered about 1.200, so it doesn’t take a mathematical genius to work out that even if the company was in high growth (which was pretty average for their industry), there were just not going to be enough management jobs opening up to meet these expectations. What was interesting was that the departure rate of HiPos was about treble that of general staff, so the HiPo programme, which had been specifically designed to retain the talent, was actually driving a lot of them away, because of unmet expectations that had been set in the minds of these smart, ambitious people. If you can’t meet these expectations, they will find someone else who can, and they do.

Managers cannot afford to turn the high potentials into a club of the chosen people.

I believe that this will make the programme have as many drawbacks as advantages.

Don’t misunderstand me … I am not saying that programmes that recognise hi potentials should not exist, I am just against their implementation as an exclusive club and the term “High Potential” becoming a title, with all its attendant expectations of what should happen to those branded as being superior.

I have always believed that what a manager should say to those that he does consider of high potential is along the following lines:

“I am delighted with your performance for the following reasons ….. (enunciate them). I believe that you have exhibited potential beyond your current role, and therefore in support of that I, as your manager, will ensure that you have the opportunity for personal development and growth while you are in my team, so that if a more senior/interesting/challenging/rewarding role should become available in the future somewhere in our organisation, you will be better prepared to be able to compete for it.”

No commitments beyond the fact that you as his manager are prepared to spend your own time, effort and energy to help him further his development in whatever direction you jointly decide is needed. This makes his development programme a personal one, jointly owned with his manager, rather than an obligation from the company, and enables the manager to allocate some measurable and challenging tasks/projects that will enable the individual to grow and develop and also to be tested.

As a responsible manager you will ensure that all your direct reports will be going through some training and development during the year anyway, as one of your critical goals is to improve the skills and value of all your people, so no-one has specifically been openly elevated above his peers.

The fact that you believe that you have some individuals in your organisation that merit development and investment beyond the norm can be advised upwards, but without fanfare, without the badges and without the attendant over setting of expectations.

People of high potential are a valuable resource and should be nurtured and developed and given every chance to progress, and Jack was right when he said that they can “ … create the magic …”.

It is just unfortunate that too many companies have rushed into their HiPo programmes, maybe because of the “Pesto Effect” driving HR to be able to tick another box, without any real understanding of their people and the land mines that they have sown for themselves.

HR … THE PESTO EFFECT

Les Hayman — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:47:26 +0000

A number of people have asked me to write of my experiences running a company internal HR department after 40 years in business roles. When I was first asked whether I would do this, rather than retiring, I felt that it was a bit like asking Attila the Hun to look after the Vestal Virgins. I have to admit that it was probably the hardest job that I ever had, the two years being both challenging and frustrating, and it changed and molded many of the views that I have about people and about management.
I have therefore decided to do a series of regular pieces on HR … this is the first one.

I’ve never had a lot of time for “camp followers”… people who seem to flit through a seemingly infinite list of momentary passions. For the manically fit it can move from tai-chi to yoga to step aerobics to spinning to whatever is the latest craze to come out of body obsessed California. It’s not the changes themselves that I object to, as I understand that it is important to not get bored with the latest exercise regime as one is then more likely to stick with it. What I do object to is the religious fervor with which every new “answer to life” is greeted, the passion that the adherents build, and that they then feel the need to convince everyone else around them that this is the answer to all things wonderful in life … at least for this week.

It’s not true just for the exercise nuts. I’ve seen it with friends who went through EST, gestalt therapy, past life regression, polarity and on and on towards some Nirvana like state just over the next emotional mountain.

I have also seen it with people in HR departments. In my 2 years as Global Head of HR at SAP I often wondered whether there was some sort of global consciousness that swept across the HR world with the speed of a pandemic, as there always seemed to be the latest passion that was sweeping through the HR Community as the answer to the people related ills in organisations.

I decided to call this the “Pesto Effect”.

Ten years ago no-one had heard of pesto, and then suddenly it was everywhere. You could go to any restaurant anywhere in the world and the odds were that pesto would be somewhere on the menu.
I even saw a hot dog seller in New York who had a sign saying “Mustard, Ketchup, Pesto”.

One of the bibles of the global HR community is the “Conference Board Report”. It publishes the latest information on what are the priorities that are being addressed by HR departments around the world supposedly gleaned from their vast legion of subscribers. During my tenure it seemed to follow a sequence along the lines of “Shared Services”, then “Succession Planning”, then “Engagement”, then “Talent Management”, with a new area of priority seeming to come to the top every year, this being considered the priority HR problem that needed immediate addressing.

I have often wondered, along the lines of the chicken and egg question, about what came first.

Did the Conference Board Report canvas all their subscribers and decide that this was the “priority de jour”, or did they decide that this would be the focus of their own research for a particular year, and let the Pesto effect sweep this around the world turning it into reality ?

It does seem surprising to me that there should be this common people need in most companies at about the same time. I would have expected that each company would have its own distinct issues based on its maturity, culture, management skills, market position and a 100 other pressures that should drive an HR organisation to focus on helping management solve issues that are specific to the business needs at the time, as a way of HR adding measurable value to the Company.

Until HR professionals start to understand that there are no such things as “HR problems”, only business problems that HR needs to help management to resolve, they will continue to be relegated to non strategic, non priority positions in their companies.

I find this disappointing as I believe that whilst “Our people are our greatest asset”, or similar worded clichés, appear in every corporate mission and vision statement, it is generally untrue, and I still believe that people are the only true, sustainable competitive advantage that a company can build.

Products and services can give short term market advantage, but can be copied or bettered in an ever shortening timeline. Having people in an organisation that are committed, engaged and passionate about their company is the true wealth in a company, and HR organizations have a pivotal role to play in this being achieved.

GYMNASTICS AND BUSINESS

Les Hayman — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:07:23 +0000

Some time ago I was surprised to learn that in gymnastics competitions at global levels such as the Olympics, achieving a “perfect score” for a perfectly executed routine in any of the disciplines, needs more than just the perfection of the routine itself.

The judges hold back a small percentage of the overall score in search of 3 extra elements. Whilst these in themselves are not a huge part of the overall score, for these world class athletes they can mean the difference between just a great score and actually winning the gold medal.

The 3 elements are Risk, Originality and Virtuosity.

Risk …The athletes generally train 8 hours per day, 7 days a week for 4 years to get to the Olympics after a lifetime of preparation. The judges want to see that they are prepared to take a calculated (not crazy) risk in their routine, to go for the Gold.

Originality … The judges are always on the lookout for something new in the routine.
For many years the “iron cross” on the rings was a part of every gymnast’s repertoire.
At the London Olympics in 1948, one of the competitors became the first person to do it upside down (inverted cross), and he would have received the bonus for originality. Since then it became a standard, and expected, part of every competitor’s routine, and does not attract any bonus points.

Virtuosity … The judges look for at least one element in every routine, whether it is a mount or a tumble or whatever, where they could consider that the athlete would be amongst the best in the world in that particular element, before they would award this bonus in the overall score.

It became quickly obvious to me that these 3 criteria are just as critical in the business world, and I have included an element of these in my performance reviews over the years.

Calculated risk is a critical element of business success not only at the organizational but also at the personal level, whether it is standing up to one’s boss, or speaking up for your beliefs against a generally popular decision, or choosing one particular direction from a vast choice and sticking with it to a successful conclusion, and I have always sought and encouraged this level of bravery. A manager has to ensure that he can have some “crazy” people in his team who are prepared to question things and thus drive change, if allowed. Too many people take the safer route, which involves keeping ones head below the parapet, not questioning decisions taken, joining any stampedes and keeping away from taking individual and measureable risks. I believe that this is one reason why so many companies have built cultures of continual meetings. The justification is usually that it drives greater involvement, but the reality is that it is generally done for covering ones tracks. If the resultant team outcome is successful, everyone can lay claim to the decision. If it is a failure everyone can blend back into the safety and anonymity of the herd.

Originality, not just in product or service innovations, but also in how and what we do to address business need, are today more critical than ever, especially the “how”. How we build successful and loyal relationships within our ecosystem of customers, partners and suppliers. How we establish ourselves as an integral part of the community. How we build commitment and engagement with our own staff. Some years ago, to gain some competitive advantage, it was just about enough to develop an innovative step change in your product. In the automotive sector, for example, it could then take your competitors years to be able to catch up. With today’s technologies, product advantage even with the patent madness we have created, can generally only be measured in months. The “how” you do things is much harder for your competitors to emulate. What we did yesterday to be successful will not work today, and what we do today will be unlikely to work tomorrow. If we don’t keep changing we become predictable, and being predictable makes us competitively vulnerable.

Virtuosity in the Olympic gymnastics involves the judges looking for athletes to be amongst the best in the world. This ability to hire the best in the world is significantly harder in a business context, as most companies tend to hire the best that is available to them at the time, and this will depend heavily on how they go about targeting the pool that they will get to choose from. I worked with one company that believed that they were hiring the brightest and the best that were keen to be part of changing the world. When we surveyed the previous year’s intake, we found that the majority of them had joined for safety reasons, which was exactly the public image portrayed by this company. We quickly had to separate the recruitment image from the overall global company image to try and appeal to the needed would-be world changers.

I have never expected people to be the best in the world, but I have always expected and believed that, irrespective of their role, they owed it to themselves to be the best that they could be.

MANAGING YOUR CAREER

Les Hayman — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 11:25:50 +0000

I have found that most people do very little to manage their own careers.

The majority of people seem to work their way through their jobs with varying degrees of skill and commitment, and wait for opportunities to present themselves, then pick the ones that they consider to be the best out of what is on offer. It is therefore no great surprise that many people seem to have much to complain about in their present role, whatever it is.

I believe that it is critical that you plan out your career much more proactively, by looking up in the organization at people that you admire, and at the roles that you seriously believe that you would want to have, and work a career and development plan that supports your ability to move along that trajectory. Of course it is mandatory that you have the required capabilities, or can develop them, so it helps to be personally honest in this assessment.
I have met a lot of people who could tell me that in the future they wanted to be a CEO for example, but who had little or no idea of the steps that they would need to take to get there, neither the upward movements needed nor the personal development plan to build the commensurate skills. These sort of career aspirations are just based on hope, and hope is never a strategy.

It is also critical that you find a good mentor. Most people wait (and hope) for the company to appoint one which I believe to be totally wrong. It is better to pick someone you admire and respect that is on your trajectory, and approach them directly. Very few senior executives are personally approached by younger people and asked to be their mentors. Most of them too wait for the system to appoint their mentees, and I am sure that both sides would prefer to make their own choices, rather than have someone in HR, for example, make these decisions for them.

To make this approach you must be well prepared and be able to articulate your case, your reasoning, and also, critically, why it would be important and beneficial to the mentor, as well as the benefits to the company. You should also have a plan of what you intend to do, and what you will need from the mentor. In other words you will need to sell yourself, and nothing makes a sale easier than being prepared and understanding the needs of the buyer (mentor), as well as a good understanding of the product (you).

I have also found that there are 3 Golden rules that are the starting point for at least managing the enjoyment and fulfillment of what you are doing, and therefore at least creating the potential for some success in your career. These are:

1. Never do a job you hate.
2. Never work for a boss you can’t respect.
3. Never work for a company you can’t be proud of.

I am constantly amazed by the number of people I come across who hate what they do, but do it anyway. If you do a job that you hate, there is a really good chance that you won’t do it well anyway, so it is unlikely that you will get moved out of it to something more interesting and exciting. It often boils down to money. People will tolerate a job they dislike because it pays more than what they would really like to do.
However, I believe that if you can do something that you really love, not only will it make your life more worthwhile, but if you do it really well, there is a good strong chance that the money and rewards will come anyway. I am particularly dismayed by the number of people I come across in management roles that would have preferred to have stayed in the role of an individual contributor, but moved into management to get more money, more influence, more prestige. I regularly have to spend time with companies that I work with, helping them to build dual career paths to overcome this lack of opportunity for great professionals.

I have been fortunate in my career over the last 40+ years to have worked for some outstanding managers, and I have not stuck very long in a role where my immediate supervisor was not someone that I could look up to and respect. From surveys done regularly, it appears that the vast majority of people change jobs because they haven’t been able to build a solid working relationship with their immediate boss. It is not surprising, as your immediate supervisor is the one who basically decides what you do, whom you do it with, how you are measured, how you are rewarded, how you are developed and what opportunities are presented to you. In other words they control your entire work future, so it makes no sense to stay with someone who sees that future as being very limited.

Lastly, you have to ask yourself whether you would readily try to entice people that you know, admire and respect to come and join the company that you work for, and whether you talk about your employer with enthusiasm and excitement to your friends and family. One of my personal tests was always whether I was prepared to wear my employer’s logo on my chest on one of the many T- and Polo shirts that IT companies love to hand out.

I recently noticed that Air France staff have stopped wearing name tags, and that this is now voluntary rather than mandatory. This suggests to me that many (if not most) are actually not very proud of their job nor their company. When I questioned one staff member about this, she told me that management had advised them that if people had complaints they could complain about the company and not the individuals. This appalls me as I have always believed that companies are really just the sum of their individuals. No wonder that it is such a lackluster company when it comes to customer service.
These days, if I need help from someone in Air France, I always seek out someone with a name tag.
At least I then have a reasonable chance of talking to someone who actually “does give a damn” about their job, their company and hopefully about me as a customer.

I LIVE TO WORK OR I WORK TO LIVE

Les Hayman — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 09:59:15 +0000

The great thing about being a Manager is that you only have one primary objective.
All you have to do is to create an environment where people can be unbelievably successful.
I understand that this is easier to say than to do, but it’s not a bad starting point.

To me one of the critical measurements of this has always been whether your people will get up on a freezing cold, wet Monday morning and say “Thank God the weekend is over, I can now spend another 5 days at work”.

I am not talking about work/life balance here…. I am talking about work being an integral part of life.

I have always been staggered by how many people fail to make this association. I find it hard to understand how many people have the attitude that they have to “work” 5 days per week so that they can “live” the other 2 days per week. This means that many people spend about 70% of their life doing something that they basically dislike so that they can then spend 30% of their life doing “fun” things … like watching TV ?

I will quite often ask people to list the 10 things that they love doing most in life, based on the premise that if they could spend the major part of their life doing these 10 things that this would make their life more enjoyable, more interesting and more fulfilling. It is very rare that people put “watching Television” down as one of their Top 10, and yet it is amazing how much time people actually spend in front of the Box. The trouble is that it is just too easy to drop down on a sofa in front of the TV after a “hard day’s work”, even if there is nothing worth watching, and anyway, it is critically important that we are up-to- date with the News …. much more acceptable an excuse than watching the 56th rerun of “Friends”, which will be on next anyway.

In most cases the Top 10 things that we actually love to do tend to take some time, effort and planning… it’s a lot easier to just plonk ourselves down on the sofa. There has to be something worthwhile due to come on at some time on at least one of the 500 channels that are available.

WRONG !!!

I have numerous Anglophone friends in France that have both French and English satellite TV, which theoretically should give them about 1000 channels to choose from, but in reality they actually have access to about 20 channels repeated 50 times, just in different languages.

Now that I live in France, I am fascinated by the National obsession with retirement. Even 25 year olds freshly out of university, and starting their first job seem to already have their eye on when they can retire.
So can one assume that retirement in France means that a whole new world will open up when this Valhalla-like point arrives. That it will herald a whole new period of creativity and learning , and catching up with all those things that full-time work kept one away from.

It appears not to be the case. Most retirees seem to spend their time in front of their TV or sitting outside their cottage watching the traffic go by. I once got into trouble by suggesting at a conference that France could solve all its Energy needs by hooking up the chins of retirees to the National Grid. That way we could at least get some benefit out of all those heads swiveling round as another Peugeot or Citroen went through the village at warp speed.

I understand that there are many people who have had little choice in what they have had to do in life, and I deeply sympathise with them. However I don’t sympathise with those people I come across more often that are well educated and intelligent enough to make choices in their lives, and do little but complain about their lot.
In these cases, my advice is that if you won’t change your job, at least change your attitude. This is, after all, something that you can control 100%.

FLOGGING A DEAD HORSE

Les Hayman — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 09:54:39 +0000

I have lived and worked in Europe for the last 9 years after more than 30 years working in the IT Sector in NZ, Australia, Singapore and the USA, and have worked with, for, and also been responsible for, hundreds of different Managers at varying levels of seniority in that time. I came to Europe with high expectations of what I would find from a Management skills perspective. I have to say that I have been extremely disappointed by not only the Management skills that I have found here, but also by the attitude that I have found towards building professional Management.

Europe has generally not built a culture of management as a profession, not built a culture where management skill is highly valued as critical a skill as vocational excellence, but has tended to build business cultures where management as a science, as an art, as a way of life is seen as just an add-on. In many cases, management excellence is only seen as a “nice to have” rather than as a mandatory set of skills in senior executives. There is a lot of discussion in Europe about “leadership” and this is often transposed and confused for “management”, but in most European countries, the objective is the discussion itself, rather than the desire to go beyond this alone … discussion means that you can sound knowledgeable without ever having to do something that can actually be measured. It means that the Academics can expound all their theories about Management, without ever having had to live them. I have had numerous arguments with Academics in most countries when I felt that their theories could not work in practice. They tended to believe that this was acceptable as my Management practices could not work in their theory anyway. The problem is that this “academic attitude” is also prevalent in much of the Business World.

When I first joined the SAP Extended Board in 1999, I was the then CEO/President of SAP Asia Pacific. We had worked very hard over the previous 5 years to ensure that at SAP APA we had implemented working Management Evaluation, assessment and development programmes in place for all levels of management, and I felt that this was something seriously absent in SAP on a Global basis. When I put a proposal in front of the Board to turn this Management Excellence@SAP Programme into a global reality, I had some interesting reactions from other Board members. One of the executives in particular told me that he felt that Managers were like horses, and that in life you were “…. either born a race horse or a draft horse, and race horses shouldn’t pull carts and draft horses shouldn’t run at Epsom”. His feeling was that any intelligent, well educated, skilled professional could become a manager, and that being intelligent, he would work out what he needed to do in his own time.

Interesting approach, but I have always believed that the difference between a race-horse that looked good, and was well bred, and a racehorse that could actually win races was how well that race horse was trained, and how well he had been prepared beforehand for what was expected of him.

The idea that you could leave a racehorse sitting in a field until race day when you threw a saddle and a jockey on his back, and then expected him to know what to do, and perform well, made as much sense as believing that you could just wake up one morning and play Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, having never actually learned to play a musical instrument. Moreover, whilst this brilliant-to-be Manager was acquiring his skills, what was happening to the people for whom he had been given responsibility?

Even after we had gone ahead (initially on a “skunk works”) with some enthusiasts from across the Company, and then successfully implemented the needed Management Development Programmes on a global basis, and had started to put some measurable value on Management as a skill, and as an asset, at SAP, I still would receive messages from this particular Executive with jokes about “flogging a dead horse”.

The belief that Europe will grow and develop as a major economic powerhouse that will be able to compete against the Americas and the Asians, appears to be more of a hope than a real strategy. I doubt that this will be possible until we all understand that skilled management and leadership is a critical starting point for success, that these don’t just happen because we wish them to, and that creating these skills involves more than just spending a few weeks at INSEAD and then handing out titles.

VIVE LA FRANCE

Les Hayman — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:27:06 +0000

The French Unions have called for National Strikes in response to the Government’s announcement that it will raise the official pensionable retirement age in France from 60 to 62.

This could be the first real test of the Sarkozy Government and its resolve to drive through needed reforms to ensure that France doesn’t implode economically. So far the Sarkozy Government and the Unions have been nervously circling each other without any real attempt to test the others “stomach” for an all out confrontation.

In Australia the qualifying pensionable age is 65 phasing to 67 by 2017, in Germany it has recently been raised from 65 to 67, in New Zealand it is 65 but with pressure to move to 67, as just some examples where there appears to at least be an acceptance that falling birth rates and ageing populations demand critical changes.

It is heavily supported by changing life expectancies, which in France have risen from an average for both sexes of 68 in 1950 to 80.7 in 2005 (Gilles Pison, Population and Societies 410, INED March 2005). At the same time, by comparison, Australia’s has similarly risen to 81.2, Germany to 79.4 and New Zealand to 81.2 (Figures from United Nations statistics (2005-2010).

It does appear that moving France’s retirement age to 62 is in reality a very minimal step considering the situation with retirement conditions in the rest of the world.

The notion that what is past is past and that this generation needs to ensure that we live up to our responsibilities rather than to just pass the problems on to the next generation does not appear to sit well with French Unionists. There is an attitude that as others have benefitted from easier conditions in the past, so now it is their turn to benefit in the same way, and to hell with the consequences… someone else can clean up the mess. I see this as being exactly the sort of selfish, “I’m all right Jacques” attitude that could flush this country down the gurgler.

It is obvious that we cannot continue with the excesses of the past, as these were totally unsustainable. The French Budget Deficit is estimated this year to be at least 5.6% of GDP, which is well beyond the EU ruling of less than 3%, and even higher than Greece (which has just crashed) at 3.7%. Even the UK, who have at least admitted that they are in a “parlous” state at 4.6%, have started to take measures to address the issues with an austerity budget, and serious clampdowns on public sector spending.

Strikes in France appear to be one of the main National Sports, and with France having been knocked out of the World Cup, there appears to be little else to satisfy the sporting hunger.

What I find most amazing is that in France only about 10% of all employees are actually Union members, whereas even Australia and New Zealand are over 20% (OECD Figures, from EIRO in France), so ultimately they represent only a very small percentage of the French population. It is therefore madness that in the past, successive French Governments have backed down on needed reforms whenever the Paris crowds took to the streets in opposition.

Most French people I know are hard working, responsible people who understand that France, like most other countries, has to rein in the excesses of the past, and that there will be a price that we will all, jointly have to pay.

The Sarkozy Team was voted into power in the belief that they would “have the balls” (quote from Christine Lagarde, French Minister of Finance in a BBC Interview 24^th June 2010) to execute these reforms that were needed to bring France back to economic health.

For the sake of my adopted country, I dearly hope that the French Voters and Christine Lagarde were right.

GROWING A NEW LEG

Les Hayman — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 20:12:57 +0000

I was in Belgrade, Serbia, recently to speak at a conference of Business people.

On the way in from the Airport to my hotel, I asked the young driver as to whether he felt that things had improved or worsened since my last trip to Belgrade a year earlier. He said that he felt that things had gotten worse, but that it was all going to be all right soon, as the Government had said that things would get better next year.

It seems that all around the world, people are waiting for the Economic Crisis to end, and for things to get better sometime next year.

I think that it is time that we stopped talking about this Financial Crisis as though it was something that was about to end, and started talking about the New Economic Reality instead, as I believe that this environment of economic restraint, of uncertainty and of regular market heaving surprises will be with us for a long time.

Companies (and individuals) who sit around waiting for things to get better are a lot like a man with one leg sitting around waiting for it to grow back … it just isn’t going to happen !

A man with one leg needs to get on with living. He can go out and get a prosthetic leg and get on with his life. It will not be the same as before, and he will need to make some adjustments, but it can still be a good and worthwhile life. In the same way, I believe that Companies need to get on and learn to live within the new Economic Environment in which we now find ourselves. It will not be the same as before, as obviously that was unsustainable, but it can still be a worthwhile existence.

Waiting for “the Government” or the “Central Bank” or some other external body to make the Business Environment better doesn’t make any more sense than the man with one leg waiting to develop lizard-like qualities so that he can regenerate a limb.

The success of the Companies and Organisations that we are part of depends totally on the ability to adjust our business models and our thinking to the new realities, and the sooner we can make these adjustments the more successful we will be.

If by some fluke of chance Governments and Central banks do work out some way of making things better for us all, we should just take this as an added bonus, rather than something that we were all depending on.

TEACHING OLD DOGS NEW TRICKS

Les Hayman — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 19:14:12 +0000

I have been regularly surprised about how many Managers I come across who believe that a valid Management approach is to look for people to do something wrong and then to help them correct it. I surmise that this satisfies two basic urges that these managers must have. The first one is that it gives them a chance to prove that they are more skilled than their subordinate, and therefore justify their elevated position, and secondly it gives them a chance to show that they have retained the Vocational skills that made them the brilliant “engineer” that they were in the first place. For many this helps to overcome the worry that being just a “manager” is not enough.

I have always believed that this is totally the wrong approach, and I am reminded of a friend of mine in New Zealand who went through a rather messy divorce. After the departure of his wife and son, he realized that he was rather lonely and decided that he should get a puppy to keep him company during the evenings and weekends.

Unfortunately the puppy got into the habit of peeing on the floor of his bedroom. Being a skilled “Engineer”, and seeing a problem that needed solving, he attacked this problem with incredible zeal. Every time that he found a puddle of pee, he would grab the puppy by the scruff of the neck, drag it into the bedroom, rub its nose in the pee, slap it on the rump with a piece of rolled up newspaper, and throw the puppy out of the window. ( he had a one story house so no need to call the SPCA). He could justify this approach by rationalizing that he had shown the puppy the problem (pee on the floor), had administered the resulting punishment (slap), and had shown the solution (do it outside).

After about 10 days of this the puppy started going into the bedroom, peeing on the floor and jumping out the window.

The problem with this approach to problem solving is that the puppy obviously understood the process. It was just trying to cut out the bits that it didn’t like …. It didn’t like having its nose rubbed in the pee nor being slapped with the newspaper.

People are no different.

When we make mistakes, none of us particularly like having our noses rubbed in it, neither do we like being punished for it.

As a result, when Managers take this approach to problem solving, the result is that people take the same approach as the puppy… they start to cut out the bits that they don’t like, such as being caught, reprimanded and punished, which means that mistakes often get hidden rather than being made visible and resolved jointly.

The way to train a newly acquired puppy to pee where you want it to, means that you have to dedicate at least the first weekend to training the puppy on what is expected. You do this by taking the puppy out to the required dog loo every 30 minutes or so, and waiting for the puppy to pee. When it does (and they do a lot), you praise it lavishly, and at the same time give it a command as it does the job. It will very quickly associate the praise and fuss with doing the job in the right way, in the right place, and very quickly the command (like “busy, busy, busy” which we use with our five dogs) becomes the suggestion to the dog that it is time it went outside and relieved itself. The early positive re-enforcement of the behavior that is required, quickly gets established as the pattern of behavior that should be followed.

In this respect, people are not very different.

You can achieve a lot more as a Manager by looking for your people to do something right, and then reinforcing that behavior with praise and reward, than by waiting for the mistakes. I understand that there are times when the mistakes need to be addressed, but if the culture of positive re-enforcement is the predominant one in the group, the need to occasionally address the problems becomes easier to deal with and has less negative impact on the group’s ability to work openly and well together.

Accelerated HCM Dashboards from ROC

Damian Williams — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Following last month’s webcast on Workforce Analytics, where attendees saw the power of Business Objects and the dashboards that organizations can implement in just a few weeks we thought you might be interested to see just what you can get from ROC’s Workforce Analytics team.

And the best thing…you can have one of these up and running for a fixed price in as little as 4 weeks.

Getting the best out of TVN OrgChart

Luke Marson — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In a recent blog I talked about getting the best out of TVN OrgChart to maximise customer satisfaction and to better meet their requirements. To find out how I recommended this is to be done, read my blog on the SAP Developers Network.

Making the most of HCM data visualisation

Luke Marson — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve seen a big increase in the use of SAP’s Talent Visualization by Nakisa (TVN) OrgChart tool by organisations to get their HCM data right. As you may know, HCM data is critical to a number of business and SAP processes and maintaining accurate and valid data integrity is essential if organisations are to get the best return on investment from their SAP ERP system. SAP functionality such as Payroll, Workflow, Self Service, Talent Management and Structural Authorizations are just some of the SAP processes that rely heavily on accurate HCM data. Stephen Burr’s previous blog talked about realising talent potential using Talent Management. You cannot manage talent if you don’t know where your talent is or if the data about them is wrong!

While Towers Watson have found that accuracy of data has become less of an issue with organisations over the last couple of years (14% 2009, up from 12% in 2008 and down from 18% in 2007), for those few organisations where this is still an issue a solution is required to identify inaccurate data. And of course once they have found that solution they need the processes in place to get that data corrected.

I’ve also seen OrgChart being used for business transformation. Business transformation involves re-engineering OM and HR processes to benefit the business and invoke change and change management throughout the organisation. OrgChart offers benefits here for the organisation because it enables elements of the transformation to be visualised as it is taking place.

I talked about similar items in my SAP Developers Network (SDN) blog (http://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/pub/wlg/16346) that is currently featured on the SDN Business Process Experts (BPX) Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) homepage (http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/bpx/erp). Here I looked at using OrgChart from a consultants view for the SAP community but the general principles can also be interpreted for SAP customers.

I think in summary it is important for organisations to look into visualising their data because it is one of the best ways to notice errors and inconsistencies within their HCM data – and this will help drive critical business processes to increase operational efficiency within organisations.

Getting the Best Future for Your Company

Stephen Burr — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Early May saw SAP release the latest “Enhancement Package” (EhP4); these packages are SAP’s way of deploying new software functionality to customers without disruption. Although there are notable improvements in the core HCM module, this enhancement package delivers major improvements in the area of Talent Management.

But in the current global downturn, is this important right now?

Firstly, I’d echo Damian William’s thoughts in the previous blog “Investing in the future” that continual progression of your organisation’s capability, by managing your talented employees, is key to your company’s growth. Les Hayman (ROC Chairman) has previously spoken about how almost every company, via corporate mission statements, tells us that their employees are key to their business. But how many act on this corporate statement? Talent Management is a process that helps deliver on that goal.

It is crucial to realise that Talent Management is a business process that I.T. can help enable. It is about joining up processes across recruiting, learning, performance management, succession planning and compensation management to ensure the right data is collated and available to key decision makers. SAP EhP4 ensures a common data model is used to ensure data is accessible to the right people at the right time using specific roles that are defined for each person in the talent management process; recruiter, learning administrator, managers, etc.

While technology can provide a mechanism to the business to achieve its aims, it needs the business to embrace the process as well as the corporate strategy to re-enforce that commitment.

Talent Management is about getting the best future for your company.

Investing in the future

Damian Williams — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Employers are not willing to let their talent suffer, according to the latest research from Ochre House. Some 67% of surveyed employers are planning on rewarding their top performers with a pay rise this year, despite the current economic climate.

With so many tales of redundancies, the concern would be that valuable employees are lost during the process. As we know, not every company has a robust talent management process in place. Successfully managing talent is vital to the future success of every organisation and it’s refreshing to see that managers are recognising the need to invest in their key players. Keeping staff motivated and secure will ensure that business will flourish and the future leaders are in place to steer the ship.

With reports of headcounts on the increase, it is clear to see that companies are investing in the present as well as the future.

Preparing for the upturn

Damian Williams — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Global leaders are taking care to avoid losing talented players during the current downturn in the market, according to research published by Deloitte. Not only do they understand the importance of talent management but they are also taking a proactive approach to hiring experienced leaders.

It’s refreshing to see talent management emerging as a serious strategic player. Taking a broad sweep approach to cutting budgets and jobs won’t benefit organisations in the future. Companies will be at risk if they don’t consider who will be there to drive their organisation forward. Proper planning and processes need to be in place to truly measure employee performance and ensure that top performers and future stars are not only being retained, but are also preparing for the upturn. Training budgets are often the first thing to go during collective company belt-tightening, but without training and investing in expanding employee skill sets – what state will businesses be in when the economy begins to boom once more?

The current climate gives companies the ideal opportunity to examine their procedures, identifying quality gaps and financial waste and invest in their employees.

Shared service centres: widening the skill gap

Damian Williams — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

According to a report in Personnel Today, over 56% of HR executives and CEOs believe that shared service centres are killing off the skills of our HR professionals, through lack of exposure to key working practices.

It’s a worrying thought that the next generation of HR professionals might be missing out on vital skills and experience, simply from a lack of exposure. The report expects this to lead to skill gaps further down the line.

I don’t believe for one minute that shared services is the sole cause of this; let’s not forget the many benefits it can bring, through streamlining resource and cost. But there’s clearly a balance to be struck between processes that are shipped out and those kept in-house, so that ‘core’ HR skills are passed on to future HR executives.

We are all aware that,HR faces the challenge of having to prove its value, especially in the current climate. However, HR should be viewed as a ‘business change’ function, rather than simply an admin department churning out expense claims and holiday forms. To help to make that move to establish itself as a legitimate decision-maker in the boardroom, managers need more time to invest in thinking strategically.

So, the time saved through the effective distribution of processes through shared services means that there is now more time available to strategise and start planning for the upturn.

It is crucial, though, that HR managers must also find the balance between utilising resources effectively through shared service centres and not letting the skill set of their colleagues suffer through lack of experience in HR admin and procedures.

Equality Bill, Diversity Management

Damian Williams — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Diversity management is one of the largest challenges organisations will face over the next decade. Making sure an organisation has a successful mix of staff from different genders, races, ages and ability levels is not only becoming a legal requirement but is also crucial to ensuring staff satisfaction and positive career outlook. Staff diversity also brings a varied skill set and a valuable range of experience to the company. Skilfully implemented diversity management can have a large impact on a company’s future competitive success. But what are the key challenges and opportunities and how can an organisation effectively tackle this highly complicated task?

The UK job market is constantly evolving thanks to the thriving EU-wide staff pool, increasing globalisation, a growth in outsourcing and the development of UK-based multinational companies. Alongside the cultural, racial and religious-based issues that must be considered with new staff coming into the country, ever-changing diversity legislation helps to keep managers on their toes.

Global workforce issues, discrimination, gender pay gaps, glass ceilings and providing appropriate opportunities and working environments for disabled staff, ensure the onus is on modern companies to develop extensive and well-planned diversity policies. Managers must then make sure their policies are implemented properly to avoid the various legal consequences.

The days of legislation driving diversity are fading. This year’s Equality Bill tasks public sector companies and their private sector partners to assess their diversity policies and get their houses in order. Attention must be paid to this new legislation to avoid possible employee litigation and hefty governmental fines. Companies are now scrambling to define their policies, establish effective audit procedures and manage their information to adhere to the new rules. Transparency is the key to the Equality Bill. Ensuring companies face up to their responsibilities and be seen doing so, can only bring benefit to the UK’s workforce as a whole.

Developing and adhering to diversity policies does not only benefit an organisation by protecting it from legal risk. Diversity can breed a thriving and profitable company whilst increasing its wellbeing and ambition. A positive atmosphere of equality and fair play, with opportunities clearly available for all, will make the organisation a pleasure to work in and attract new desirable talent. Motivated, fairly-treated staff are more likely to strive to be the best they can be, providing benefits to both the organisation and the individual.

But it’s easy to talk about diversity; implementing diversity policies can be more complicated, especially in larger companies. The execution of new diversity plans and their corresponding results can take some time to appear. For example, simply reporting a snapshot of the current employee makeup may reveal diversity issues but these can take over a year to fix from instigation to impact. Creating and rolling out procedures, assessing their current workforce and predicting future trends all have significant time and cost implications for managers and HR that cannot be overlooked. For this reason, it’s important that organisations start their diversity management as soon as possible.

A good diversity management plan should be quite straightforward and centre on the core topics of gender, race, disability, age and religion. The various issues emanating from each topic are complicated and far too extensive to be covered in one article. However, there are certain all-encompassing areas that can be addressed to put your organisation on the right path.

Firstly, putting the right systems and technology in place will help a company effectively manage diversity. The analysis of existing staff makeup, the tracking and projection of trends and most importantly the logging of documents, communications and other collateral relating to these actions can and should be implemented through an interlinked diversity system. Larger companies will find the size of their task comparative to the size of their organisation, and enlist the support and technology appropriate to their needs.

Secondly, put in place plans and systems for the whole recruitment process, such as advertising, short-listing, interviewing and selecting should be an initial step. Companies can start looking at their existing staff and implement systems for checking staff makeup to ensure that going forward, all groups are represented appropriately. The appraisal system of an organisation should be rigorously over-hauled if necessary. Fair and honest measurement, achievable objectives, appropriate promotion and remuneration should all be provided under an umbrella of accountability and transparency.

Internal harassment, grievance and disciplinary procedures are also of paramount importance to the company. All employees have the right to work in a pleasant environment, free from discrimination and bullying. The Disability Discrimination Act also forced companies to sit up and respond to any potential problems for disabled employees. Companies may think that they already comply well with these aspects of employment law – but is their workforce really able to cope in a sensitive and professional manner with a colleague undergoing gender transformation? Is the line management currently able to adapt to a new team member who needs completely bespoke training due to a physical disability?

There are also likely to be many other processes and actions to monitor and control that are specific to a particular organisation. It’s important that HR professionals pick apart all internal processes for their own organisations that could influence diversity and adjust their own plans and policies accordingly.

Another major part of organisational diversity is being as prepared as possible to counteract criticism. A core benefit of effective diversity management is the creation of clear and interlinked audit trails. Once implemented, these should then be able to help protect against alleged legal breaches whilst also improving the administrative burden of diversity management. Companies can then easily demonstrate their compliance with diversity and anti-discriminatory legislation. They will have access to appropriate and coherent documentation should an employee or union complaint reach a legal stage. The monitoring and recording of information relating to diversity should then become a simple, routine process and thus a way of life for an organisation.

The government’s Equality Bill was specifically designed to create a wave of diversity in public sector and their private sector suppliers. The Equality Bill was initially proposed to cover every company and organisation without discrimination, if you’ll excuse the pun. But with many private sector companies behind the public sector in their diversity management, the Bill was reduced in scope. But this certainly isn’t the end of legally imposed diversity in the private sector and private-sector companies should not sit back and wait for diversity management to be legally forced upon them, especially if they are trading with public sector organisations.

Future legislative changes will only increase the pressure on companies to put diversity on their boardroom agenda. While many organisations will groan, the ramifications of a diversity ‘wave’ can be highly positive. The implementation will be difficult for some but now is the time that savvy companies can take the initiative, dominate diversity and come out better-suited to the needs of our multicultural society and their own respective markets. With diversity being managed properly, we’ll be left with a better environment for the public and private sectors and of course, for employees.

Damian Williams is MD of ROC UK

The Equality Bill – Time to Sit Up and Take Notice

Damian Williams — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The Government’s Equality Bill, announced by Deputy Labour leader and Equalities Minister Harriet Harman in July, has been long anticipated by public sector organisations and long dreaded by many of them. While the anticipation of the Bill and the implications it has for the sector have been heavily discussed, it appears that it may have caught many unawares. Data is yet to be released on the sector’s compliance with the bill but with a spate of new employee litigation filed shortly after its reading, it sends a clear message to organisations that aren’t ready that they need to get ready soon.

The first major implication of the Bill is the impact it will have on the private sector. The government hopes to use it to bring both public organisations and their private sector suppliers into line on diversity management. From now on, companies bidding for contracts worth £160bn a year can actually lose work if their competitors have a better record on equality in the workplace. Likewise existing suppliers may find themselves playing catch-up to compete with dynamic and diverse equality-ready suppliers as a wave of diversity compliance sweeps public sector procurement.

To the unprepared, bringing an organisation in line with the bill could be a difficult task and is definitely more than a box ticking exercise. The Bill is a real legal minefield, providing many potential stumbling blocks for unsure HR departments. Complying will require a step change in the way some those dealing with HR issues operate in order to avoid being taken to the cleaners by legally-wronged or, of course, underhanded employees.

The Equality bill brings together over 100 separate pieces of legislation covering areas of race, sex, age, religion, disability and more. Basically anything about a worker (that doesn’t obviously prevent them from doing a job) that could be classed as discriminatory, features. Examples of this include: removing gags on discussion of pay to eliminate gender pay differences and promoting provision of employment and appropriate working environments for older people.

One could be fooled into thinking that the Bill was a completely negative thing for the sector but it shouldn’t be viewed like this. In many ways the Bill is an opportunity – why? Well to start with, it brings together a heap of disparate legislation meaning it is now much easier for organisations to get their heads around what they should be doing and recording regarding diversity. The Bill also paves the way for a diversity code of practice to aid compliance, so it may yet become even easier to comply with the tenets of the bill and get organisational diversity on track. It should also help well-prepared organisations avoid possible legal trouble in our increasingly litigious culture.

A central tenet of the Bill is in encouraging transparency in diversity management. The law now allows the Equality Commission to set-up investigative tribunals who can then request and assess appropriate documentation to support an organisation’s diversity claims or of course claims against them. A lack of clear documentation could lead to court orders and hefty fines. The Bill also provides ample ammunition for critics and lawyers to hit an organisation with. So to avoid being caught out the onus is really on being as prepared as humanly possible to counteract criticism.

What this means for an organisation is a need to record all pieces of important information that relate to diversity and highly detailed audit trails demonstrating compliance with the Bill. The Bill calls this the public sector’s ‘Equality Duty’ and puts pressure on organisations to attend to the key areas of gender pay, ethnic minority, disability and age representation and religion.

The trouble is that the audit trails needed to back up an organisation’s diversity credentials can quickly become highly complex and highly admin-intensive. Consider having to log all background details on recruitment ads, interviews and recruitment decisions, promotions, pay rises, bonuses, disciplinaries and grievances – understandably this can become a real bottomless pit for man-hours. Having the right systems and technology in place can help an organisation create clear and interlinked audit trails which can then mitigate against alleged breaches of the bill and of course remove some of the administrative burden.

Some important areas of diversity that organisations should think about straight away are: employment advertising, dealings with recruitment agencies, communications on appointments, disciplinary actions, documents pertaining to promotions, demotions, position applications and so on. There are likely to be many other processes and actions to log that are specific to a particular organisation. So it’s important that HR execs pick apart all internal processes for their own organisations that could influence diversity and adjust how they comply with the Bill accordingly. And it makes sense to do this sooner rather than later. Compliance requires a lot of forward thinking and planning and cannot be carried out in a piecemeal fashion. For example, simply reporting a snapshot of the current employee makeup may reveal diversity issues but these can take over a year to fix from instigation to impact. So waiting until the law comes into effect could leave organisations exposed for some time while they wait for revised policies to flow through.

Some commentators have derided the bill for the fact it will not be imposed upon the private sector. However it’s likely that disastrous and costly consequences of being shut-out of public sector procurement will have a large effect on private companies. With the FT reporting the public sector outsourcing has doubled over the last ten years to £80bn this year, there is an even larger onus on the sector to sit up and take notice. As a long term-view the government has signalled its hope that private organisations will actually start reporting on diversity in company accounts and that shareholders will start using this as important indicator of a company’s investment prospects.

For public sector organisations to be able to enforce diversity checks in their own procurement it is vital that they first get their own houses in order. While in the long term it may more efficient for a company to bring in an HR consultant to overhaul policies, there are avenues that can be looked at right away. Putting in place plans for the whole recruitment process, such as advertising, vetting, interviewing, selection should be an initial step. After this companies can start looking at their existing staff and implement systems for checking staff makeup to ensure that going forward, all groups are represented appropriately. Once these systems, whether developed in-house or bought-in, are in place the monitoring and analysis of pay deals, new employees, promotions and as a result compliance with the Bill should become much more simple. Indeed, once the appropriate policies are in place diversity management should become a way of life for an organisation.

While many organisations will have groaned at the announcement of the Equality Bill, in the end the ramifications for both the public and private sectors should be broadly positive. The shakeup will be painful for some but now is the time that savvy companies can take the initiative, dominate diversity and come out better suited to the needs of our multicultural society. Hopefully, after the shakeup, we’ll be left with a better environment for the public sector, private companies and, of course, for employees.

Damian Williams is MD of ROC UK

Talent Management: Nothing to do with employee benefits?

Damian Williams — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Talent management is the current buzzword in HR. Talent management is the identification, recruitment, development and deployment of a company's most capable employees. It is a strategy used by employers to improve the retention ratio of their best staff, increase employee loyalty and boost productivity.

Talent management is focused on growing the individual; concentrating on their training and development within the company, while ensuring there are always successors in place that are suitable for key positions should someone leave.

Benefits have an important role to play in talent management. They form an intrinsic part of the value proposition that organisations offer new and existing employees. Flexible benefits can be worth their weight in gold in the employee retention stakes. Research published by the Economist this year, called Talent Wars - The struggle for tomorrow's workforce, discovered that salaries and employee benefits still rank extremely highly in designing a new value proposition for tomorrow's workforce (56%), second only to providing for a better work-life balance through offering flexible working arrangements in terms of hours and place of work (62%).

Structuring a flexible employee benefits programme so staff can select the incentives that are pertinent to their lifestyle is a key weapon in the arsenal of talent management and the retention of star employees. When an organisation is attracting new talent and a candidate is deciding between several offers, it can boil down to what an organisation can offer them. Flexible employee benefits allow the employer to appeal to a diverse range of applicants, and attract good quality candidates.

The ability to mix and match benefits, from pensions and childcare, to holiday allowances and gym memberships, performs a key role in organisations' approach to attracting talent. What appears to be a benefit for one employee may be less important to another, for example, pensions are often less attractive to the younger workforce but become important later on in life.

Although talent management is a corporate level strategy and benefits are ultimately employee incentives, the two are inherently linked. The return on investing time and money in attracting, training, nurturing and retaining key players in the company is diminished if a flexible approach to benefits is not offered as well.

Damian Williams is MD of ROC UK