In the face of all the recessions since 1980, employment numbers have simply not bounced back to where there were previously. We need to face the fact that certain jobs are not coming back. Whether they have been sent overseas to cheaper workforces or they have been automated, some positions, most of them less skilled, are gone forever. But it’s not just jobs like cashiers and bank tellers that have been automated or manufacturing jobs that have gone overseas, it is lots and lots of middle level management positions at large companies that have disappeared as well. While this is not good for many Americans, it may be good for business.
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Expert Perspective - Organization Development
The Right Track
Expert Perspective - Organization Development
Is Talent Diversity a Business Strategy?
Expert Perspective from Grahall’s OmniMedia Editorial Board
Our editorial board mulled over a February 20, 2012 article written by Gail Johnson (Bombardier: Giving women wings)where she quotes Elisabeth Bussé, (director of leadership development and talent management at the Dorval, Que.-based organization, a division of Montreal’s Bombardier Inc. BBD.B-T) as saying: “Increasing diversity is a business strategy: We want our employees to be representative of the community in which we do business.”
Johnson adds: “Women have made up two-thirds of the recent growth in the Canadian work force, climbing from 35 per cent in the 1970s to 50 per cent in 2005…”
For most women in the business world, these are facts and sentiments they have heard before, for decades.
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Expert Perspective - Organization Development, Expert Perspective - Rewards
Boards’ New Mantra: Communicate
Expert Perspective by Grahall’s OmniMedia Editorial Board
Joann Lublin wrote a very interesting article for the Wall Street Journal recently, titled Season of Shareholder Angst: U.S. businesses are bracing for a noisy proxy-voting season this year, although we think the anxiety may be felt more fiercely by board members than by shareholders. In her article, Ms. Lublin covers a variety of topics weighing heavily on the minds of boards and shareholders alike, including say on pay, political contributions, succession planning, board elections and environmental concerns.
Say on pay has been in the headlines for years. It was a campaign issue in the 2008 presidential elections and we have been discussing this subject in our blogs for that long as well. The Dodd Frank Act mandated that all public filers hold “say on pay” votes in 2011, so this proxy season has companies scrambling to make recommendations to shareholders on the frequency of these votes.
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Expert Perspective - Organization Development
Executive Coaching: How to Make Great People Even Better
Expert Perspective From Grahall’s OmniMedia Editorial Board
Searching for interesting articles to discuss with the Editorial Board we came across one penned by Mark Jaffe last August (Freelancing ‘Til You Drop) where Jaffe writes: “When did every living executive get diagnosed as being in critical need of coaching?…. And how did all these dysfunctional leaders manage to fool so many people for so long? How were they able to last as much as fifteen minutes given the extreme darkness that surrounds them as they stumble cluelessly through their surrealistic dream worlds?”
Well as “President of Wyatt & Jaffe, [where] Mark Jaffe has been called one of the ‘World’s 100 Most Influential Headhunters’ by BusinessWeek magazine” we wonder if he might not hold a bias against coaching. Perhaps he is concerned if execs get coaching they will be less likely to be replaced, limiting searches. Or maybe he is concerned that execs need for coaching reflects poorly on recruiters who are expected to offer up the most effective execs to their clients.
Regardless, let’s take a more expansive look at coaching.
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Expert Perspective - Organization Development
Competency Models Must Support Creatively and Innovation (among other things)
Expert Perspective from Grahall’s OmniMedia Editorial Board
We enjoyed and for the most part agree with the recent blog in Forbes by Chunka Mui “Are the People in Your Organization Too Smart to be Creative?” It may seem incongruous that scholarly research “in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Jennifer Mueller, Jack Goncalo, and Dishan Kamdar found that open expression of creative ideas was negatively correlated with perceptions of leadership potential” while studies of CEO’s by PWC found that “…innovation was a key focal point.” IBM found that creativity was “…the most important leadership quality”.
What that shows is that CEO’s either 1) don’t know themselves or their biases very well, or 2) their definitions of creativity and innovation differ for themselves and their possible successors. CEOs may hold the belief that “my type of creativity and innovation is ‘good’ and yours is ‘bad’”. Let’s face it, it’s very hard to see oneself objectively, perhaps especially if you are a hard driving, effective CEO.
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Expert Perspective - Organization Development
Identifying Candidates Who Fit In With Your Company’s Culture
Expert Perspective from Grahall’s OmniMedia Editorial Board
We enjoyed reading and discussing Adam Bryant’s interview with Michael Lebowitz, founder and C.E.O. of Big Spaceship, (Hey, Rock Stars: Take Your Show Someplace Else in the January 30, 2011 issue of the New York Times.
Bryant quotes Lebowitz as saying: “Don’t hire jerks, no matter how talented… The second- or third- or fourth-best candidate who isn’t a jerk is going to ultimately provide way more value.”
We understand what he is saying: someone may be technically very highly qualified but if the individual’s personal or leadership style doesn’t fit with the company culture, then he or she likely will not be the best candidate.
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Expert Perspective - Organization Development
The New Year’s Resolutions HR Should Have Made (Note: there is still time!)
Expert Perspective from Grahall’s OmniMedia Editorial Board
Of course, we are technically three weeks into the New Year, but there is still time to take stock of your HR plans and consider what steps you can take to make the most of the opportunities for and dodge the threats to your valuable human resource assets.
We can’t predict the future and many would say there are plenty of unknowns about the employment market for 2011, but one thing is for sure, the US is slowly recovering. According to a January 14, 2011 article by Economics Writer Jeannine Averaa, published on Yahoo (Industrial production rises by most in 5 months) “Overall industrial activity has risen 11 percent since hitting its recession low in June 2009. But it is still 6 percent below its peak reached in September 2007.” The article continues, quoting Jeffrey Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, saying: “recent economic activity suggests the economic recovery is through its soft patch… [with] stronger growth this year, between 3.5 percent and 4 percent.”
Ron Scherer, staff writer for the CS Monitor writes in his January 7, 2011 article (Unemployment rate drops to 9.4 percent, but little cheer in jobless report) “The US economy finished 2010 with only lukewarm job gains [and]… the unemployment rate fell from 9.8 percent to 9.4 percent – its lowest level since May 2009, which partially reflects fewer people actively looking for work.”
Discouragement on the part of job seekers isn’t surprising since, according to the article: “From the start of the recession in December 2007 to its end in June 2009, the US economy lost between 6 million and 8 million jobs. In 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy gained only 700,000 jobs back after not adding any jobs in 2009.”
So what does economic recovery with stubborn unemployment mean for HR? Simply that your BEST employees remain key targets for recruiters. If you haven’t taken the necessary step yet to retain these individuals, you must get started, NOW. They first fundamental step in the process, which is often overlooked, is to determine which positions and which people are key to your company’s success. As we said on our blog When the Going Gets Tough Keep the Best From Going , first identify the key roles and those people who contribute most to the bottom line, then create the infrastructure that supports, develops, nurtures and appropriately compensates these individuals.
High unemployment coupled with the fact that many companies have had to rein in incentive program, raises, and bonuses in order to survive give recovering and growing companies the opportunity to upgrade talent without over spending. At the same time a company identifies its key positions, it must determine if the individuals holding those positions are top talent. If not, this jobs market can offer the chance to improve key talent in critical positions while controlling compensation and recruitment costs.
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Expert Perspective - Organization Development
Leading From the Top
Expert Perspective by Grahall’s OmniMedia Editorial Board
Rory Cellan-Jones’ November 14, 2010 article for the BBC (Can brain scans tell us who makes a good chief executive? Brain scans could reveal leadership ability) got our editorial board thinking about what we have seen as important characteristics of effective leaders. Cellan-Jones writes: “Neuroscientists and psychologists believe they can make a real contribution to our understanding of what makes leaders tick.” So until advanced technologies can scan a baby’s brain at birth and let us know if he or she will be a leader or a follower, here are a few things to consider:
1) Leadership is highly situational and cannot be defined in a limited way. Like an animate organism, a company goes through a lifecycle that bring changes. From start up to decline and all the steps in between, the company’s leaders will help to dictate continued success (or failure). The characteristics of the individual who will effectively lead a start-up differ from the characteristics of the individual who will effectively lead a mature organization. If the leader does not evolve and develop the skills necessary to address the company’s changing needs, the company will suffer.
2) Even within those broad strokes of life cycles, the culture of the company can dictate the characteristics necessary for a leader’s success. Take for example the New York Jets and the New England Patriots. Both are very successful, mature franchises, but their cultures and the style of their leaders (coaches and quarterbacks) could hardly be more different.
The danger, of course, in determining the characteristics of “good leaders” and applying that with advanced technologies to single out a privileged group of individuals is that it probably won’t work, in part for the reasons discussed above, and in part for two other very critical reasons.
There is a lot of luck associated with the identification and assent of leaders. Warren Buffet himself said that his success is fundamentally based on the time and place he was born and raised. Will the individual with the greatest potential for leadership always be identified? Absolutely not. And applying expensive technologies to help determine the best leaders will reinforce an already inequitable system.
Last but not least, the criteria used to identify leaders will be based on the group of leaders in place today. Will those characteristics be right for the rapidly evolving companies of tomorrow? Or will reinforcing the “status quo” of leadership characteristics impair the ability of companies to compete in the new and different economies we will face in the future?
As we said on our blog “In His Own Image: How Competency Models Compel Uniformity” recognizing and assessing important and unique talents and capabilities in potential leaders may be difficult for those whose personal and leadership styles provided the basis for existing competency models. But, competitive advantage does not come from leaving unrecognized leadership talent on the table.
Contact Grahall’s Omni Media Editorial Board at edie.kingston@grahall.com
Expert Perspective - Organization Development
Overcoming Fundamental Problems When Recruiting
Expert Perspective by Grahall’s OmniMedia Editorial Board
We couldn’t help but chuckle when we read in Joe Light’s November 15th article for the Wall Street Journal (Keeping ‘Overqualifieds’ on Board) that Sayed Sadjady, who leads PriceWaterhouseCooper’s talent management practice, hired “…some candidates, who would have secured high positions in a better economy, at lower levels instead. Now…the company is revisiting the compensation, positions and development opportunities of [these] employees to bring them in line with the improved market.”
Shame on you Sayed for hiring people at the “wrong“ compensation level. And no wonder his “…clients [have] become concerned about overqualified hires looking to move to higher-paid positions…”).
Too often companies make four fundamental errors when recruiting:
1) They waste scare resources.
2) They fail to hire workers who are as committed to the company as the company is to them.
3) They forget that not all employees need to be long-term employees.
4) They disregard the fact that “the workforce” has changed.
Smart companies know that compensation is neither the right magnet nor the right glue to attract and retain workers. Certainly it plays a part, but too often companies waste too much of their scarce resources – time and money – on workers who don’t boost competitive advantage. Those positions that move the organization toward its goals are considered mission critical or “competitive advantage” positions. With competitive advantage positions, it is important to look for the best candidates and, more often than not, spend more than the market’s average in compensation dollars.
As is perfectly illustrated in the challenges faced by companies who hired workers at too low a salary, companies fail to search for candidates who are both right for the company and vice versa. Based on our experience, a mutually rewarding outcome demands that the company hire candidates who are the best fit for the job. Those candidates likewise feel the company is the best fit for them.
Employees will continue with a company for as long as it feels “right” to them, and often not a moment longer. Employers will retain workers for as long as they provide value, and not a moment longer.
Because of this, it is more appropriate to consider whether job candidates can and will make a meaningful contribution during their tenure, rather than worry about what that tenure might be.
For the majority of companies, there is no longer a single “workforce”. There may be 10 or even 100 different workforces that are aligned like layers of an onion. A uniform planning, management, rewards system or communications program will not work in this complex environment.
In summary, organizations are made up of all types of “tissue,” and workers are akin to the specialized cells of these tissues. It is important for companies to think differently about how to recruit, motivate and retain these unique workers. It’s not easy and will likely require continual review and improvement to HR tools. But it is not only the way of the future, but the way of today.
Contact Grahall’s OmniMedia Editorial Board at edie.kingston@grahall.com
Expert Perspective - Organization Development
Great Corporate Governance Starts with Capable Directors
Expert Perspective from Grahall’s OmniMedia Editorial Board
Joanne Lublin’s article in the Wall Street Journal, Using a Board Seat as a Stepping Stone, quotes Susan Stautberg, co-founder of OnBoard Bootcamp as saying potential director candidates should “…downplay their usual aggressiveness during board interviews because a director must be a good listener…Boards value teamwork, diplomacy and collaboration as well.”
In our experience, the best directors are more like supreme court judges – good questioners first; good listeners second. Unfortunately, some Boards seem to be the embodiment of the proverbial “Three Wise Monkeys,” unwilling to recognize anything damaging or detrimental in the decisions and actions of management.
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