Category Archives: reward and recognition

The title, given that this post is written in response to an external blog post (Ian Gee’s very thought-provoking “Sentiment isn’t just for Sympathy Cards!”), is somewhat cheeky, but I hope that I can go on to demonstrate that an IT-based response to the ‘softness’ of HR issues can – and perhaps inevitably will – trigger an HR-related reaction that can’t help but wonder about the ‘hardness’ of IT solutions.

Ian, on the basis of his profile, has a long and successful track record in the corporate sphere, focusing largely on OD: he knows, we can safely assume, whereof he speaks. As he acknowledges, there are really two issues at play in the area he is currently addressing. The superficial problem – to use the wrong adjective, I admit, but to call it ‘the presenting problem’ would be to potentially confuse management speak with psychologists’ jargon – is how to gauge opinion, feeling and atmosphere amongst the human resources (or ‘people’, as we refer to them outside the office). But there is an underlying problem: the opinions and thoughts that most need to be swayed are those of the occupants of the C Suite, for whom measurement is a matter of firmness, definitiveness and bottom lines. They are not a group of individuals much moved by ‘data’ such as “We have had some informal feedback to the effect that …”

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Sharlyn Lauby, HR BartenderAs part of the ASK Newsletter, Q2, we are starting a series of interviews with key voices from the worlds of organisational effectiveness, HR and L&D. (If you’re not a subscriber, visit the Newsletter page at our website to access all the articles from Issue 1, or to be added to our mailing list.)

As part of the first issue, we’re delighted to host a Q&A session with Sharlyn Lauby, author and editor of the HR Bartender blog.

In her own words, “an HR pro turned consultant”, Sharlyn created the blog so that “people would have a friendly place to discuss workplace issues”. We’re privileged to have the opportunity to pull up a bar-stool and seek the HR Bartender’s counsel.

Q1 In your recent blog posting, Knowing When To Retire a Theory, you talk about the need to remain open to updating or replacing conventional wisdom. How open do you think most organisations are to this issue, and how might more of them be helped to become so?

I believe organizations are very open to it. Over the past few years, companies have been forced to re-evaluate their status quo whether it was driven by the global economy or business competition. But this can’t be a forced activity. Questioning conventional wisdom needs to be a business standard. And people who can raise the question in a thoughtful way will be very valuable. Challenging the status quo cannot mean turning the building upside down every time.

It really comes down to permitting a culture where the conversation will be embraced. And giving individuals the tools to have the conversation in a productive way. I think companies are open to it. I don’t necessarily think that companies are open to the destruction that can occur at the same time.

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The editors of People Management know a good pull quote when they see one. In a sector of trade publishing more prone than most to ‘attention grabbers’ that leave the reader with a sense that someone nearby will shortly be waving their Buzzword Bingo card aloft and shouting ‘House!’, the following certainly attracted our eyeballs:

Hiding behind your desk in a suit isn’t the answer anymore.”

The speaker is Ricardo Semler, CEO of Brazilian company Semco. People Management describe him as ‘the forgotten business guru’, which seems an odd appellation for a man whose organisation continues to thrive and grow. And the attention that he does receive has tended to focus far more heavily on his divergence from ‘conventional wisdom’ than the success that he has achieved. There’s a ‘why?’ begging to be asked.

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A week ago, there was an auspicious alignment of two of the most influential black Americans: Barack Obama was inaugurated for a second time (if electing a black President was historic, how should we describe his re-election?) on Martin Luther King Day, a public holiday in the USA.

These two men have done more, at least in the public eye, to drive forward the equality agenda in the US then any others. Of course, they have had allies and collaborators, antecedents and ancestors, but in terms of leaving a footprint on the society in which they lived and served they have no equals.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.

While I could spend time analysing and commenting on the political nature of their struggles I am struck by something more universal that connects both men – an underlying belief in the potential of all: a shared belief that we should all be judged not by who we are but by what we do. And the belief that equality is, fundamentally, a statement of the potential of all of us to succeed in whatever field of endeavour we chose and that we should be free to pursue this success without hindrance from others based on bias or stereotype.

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The lyrics, as I suspect you’re aware, are from a Radiohead song. If you know it, you’ll know how it continues.

Comfortable, not drinking too much
Regular exercise at the gym 3 days a week
Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries”

You’ll probably also be aware that it is far from a comforting listen, intoned as it is by a computerised voice (although not, as some have assumed, by Stephen Hawking). Compiled as a litany of phrases that author Thom Yorke saw as epitomising the time – the 1990s – he has also described the recording as being conducted in a feeling of hysterical anxiety. One commentator described it as “penetrating surgery on pseudo-meaningful corporations lifestyles”, but I can’t help but wonder if one of the words in a quote by Yorke about the song is more telling.

When Yorke commented that “I see it as the ultimate dissociation with the lyrics and your responsibilty for it. See it as something between a statement and an experiment”, it was the word responsibility that leapt out at me. Essentially a song about wellbeing in its broadest sense, its unsettling chill comes from its cataloguing of the bland ways in which the notion was not so much promoted as sold to us. To me, part of the lyrical cold front comes from the way that the lyric posits wellbeing not just as something that is a personal responsibility but also as something that a failure to achieve is entirely a personal fault:

Now self-employed
Concerned (but powerless)
An empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism)”

It was a song that I immediately thought of when a colleague sent me a copy of a Gallup Business Journal article about a recent Gallup poll that showed not just that wellbeing levels among work team members are strongly inter-connected, but that the wellbeing of supervisors impacts increasingly on their reports over time. Misery, it seems, might like company, but company might do better without its unsolicited affections.

I’m not entirely sure why this should come as a surprise: how did the fact that dissatisfied, unengaged, disgruntled people might make the most inspiring backdrop to your day become something labelled as news? And we might ask the same question about the impact of working for a cheerless, anti-social or ill-tempered manager. Perhaps our instant associations for the word ‘wellbeing’ are partly to blame? When the government announced it was going to survey national happiness back in 2010, I was both suspicious and cynical. My first thought was the remade version of The Rise and Fall of Reggie Perrin:

… the critics may have bestowed only mixed blessings, but I’ve loved the updating of hopeless, incompetent Doc Morrissey in the original series to ‘The Wellness Person’ – a character so wet that even the most absorbent kitchen towel would surely struggle.”

Jollier than Radiohead it may have been, but wellbeing was still the stuff of platitudes delivered by someone remote from the reality of those in dire need of it. We weren’t entirely in the realm of scented candles and essential oils – in relation to which I always have to remind myself that the adjective ‘essential’ has two meanings. But we were in a fantasy kingdom where strangers dispense a flimsy leaflet with the satisfied flourish of a fairy waiving a wand: laughing at the wand and the tutu might, under the circumstances, be the greater part of any therapeutic effect.

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If you read fiction, you’ll be familiar – whether you realise it or not – with the idea of point-of-view. (And if you watch TV, films or theatre, you might not: the concept doesn’t work the same way.) You can describe it as being something like ‘the angle from which the story is told’ (although Wikipedia does a pretty good job of explaining it if you want to spend a few minutes reading more).

In a first-person narrative, we see the plot, the action and the other characters as the narrator does: essentially the reader must interpret the narrator’s reliability as a raconteur and try to be aware of what they don’t see or hear – of what they can’t know. And there is no guarantee that a third-person narrator (He said, she did, they heard and so on) is necessarily any more reliable. So far, so much like real life – to a degree. But our human love of stories should not blind us to one frequent element of fiction – the omniscient narrator who can relay the thoughts and feelings of every character, seemingly at will and certainly when it’s convenient. Ah, if only reality were as plausible.

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Lonely at the topThere was a duologue between Tessa Jowell, shadow cabinet member for London and for The Olympics, and Michael White, political editor, in Saturdays’ edition of The Guardian that was in different ways entertaining, depressing and eye-opening.

One of Tessa Jowell’s answers in particular gave an insight into the process that should have made pretty dismal reading for any of us who count ourselves among the governed rather than the governing:

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The first thing to point out with Terry Leahy’s book is that the title is a fib. If this is Management in 10 Words (buy online from Tesco), there are many thousands of words still to be removed from the book till he reaches his target. Nor would the loss of a fair few of them be that great a tragedy: while he has plainly grasped the trope of the leader as storyteller, the more sceptical members of his audience – the ones that a man looking for growth would need to win over – might be looking for a greater variety of narrative arc than ‘I had an insight, they were sceptical, I persisted, we tried it, we learned as we went along and it was a huge success’. Admittedly, I simplify a little, but then simplification is part of Sir Terry’s advice. And you can damage your fingers if you keep simplifying with a double-edged sword.

The second thing this reader wanted to point out was that the lessons I drew from it – although ‘saw in it’ would be more accurate – didn’t always seem to be the ones that I was being encouraged to. The 10 Words in the title are those chosen as chapter headings, adopting the single noun approach so beloved a decade or so ago by window dressers. This approach – in which café windows are typically etched with the like of ‘eat’, ‘relax’ and ‘friends’ – always reminds me of a wonderful spoof presented by a cider tent at a food festival that gently enticed visitors to ‘blather’, ‘scratch’, ‘belch’ and ‘fart’, so the immediate impact was unfortunate. The list also seemed like an incongruous stew where ‘values words’ like truth, loyalty and courage rubbed shoulders with MBA Flash Card words like ‘values’ itself, ‘lean’ and ‘balance’. Leahy’s book is a very English one in many ways, but I hadn’t anticipated it to be – in an unspoken homage to Humphrey Littleton – a case of One Book In The Style Of Another: under its very 21st century bonnet with its talk of values and emotional appeal and so on, I felt like the more concrete reasons for Tesco’s success were being smuggled out under the cover of lightly worded prose that skates the surface of business cliché at many a juncture.

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If Peter Drucker’s estate received a pound every time someone quotes his words “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, the proceeds would probably fund a truly VIP mausoleum – or possibly a well-financed charitable foundation. Indeed, 2012 is a year in which several clichés have flown home to roost. Whether we attribute the phrase “With power comes great responsibility” to Franklin D Roosevelt or Spiderman (it seems the former inspired the latter and your choice is down to personal preference), the relationship between the two has certainly been generating its fair share of the headlines recently.

While the kneejerk reaction is to cry that we are living in a shameless era, it’s worth pausing to reflect that the opposite is largely true: 2012 has actually been a year of bad behaviour or material failure being exposed. We would not be living in the era of Leveson, Hackgate, G4S, Libor scandals, money laundering and the rest if errant behaviour were continuing to go entirely unreprimanded. But even with that modestly cheering reflection, the lack of feelgood factor is hardly a surprise. Feelgood has been about as commonplace as sunshine.

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