One Minute HR Consultant

One would be hard pressed to find an organization not impacted by the current state of affairs, which include calls for or against financial regulatory reform, restricted access to capital for SMB(s), and a flurry of legislation and executive orders impacting how we  conduct operations and relate to  our employees. 

Perhaps your organization is being impacted by one of these factors, but an assumption is that a combination of these factors is having an impact on  your company.  It is during these times that ambiguity increases despite well-intentioned efforts to prevent otherwise.  One of the things that we as leaders need to focus our efforts (both individually and collectively) is on continuous communication and feedback. 

The danger of organizational ambiguity can have profound impacts, which  contribute to the factors mentioned earlier and taken together result in organizational politics.  Organizational politics itself manifests within our employees in the form of  stress, intentional and unintentional discrimination, and at the extreme, turnover. 

Thus feedback should consider multiple formats addressing areas to include employee performance, organizational direction-visioning, and business goals.  Your key objective as a leader is to maintain or improve performance so that your organization maintains or ideally improves effectiveness and its ability to  accomplish its organizational objectives.  Presented below are three ways to enhance feedback and create an open-feedback culture that ideally will increase morale, diminish the impact of organizational politics, and contribute to increased profitability, readiness, and affiliation with organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs):

1.  Ensure employees have access to relevant information regarding their performance.  This includes, but certainly not limited to individual efforts within the context of accomplishing organization, unit, division and department objectives.  With this access, senor leaders, managers, and supervisors should encourage open dialogue on not only the importance of the job, but how an employee’s job performance can improve at the individual level and mapping the linkage to organizational performance. 

2.  Provide informal and formal feedback outside of performance appraisal interviews.  As I persistently state within blogs, lectures, round tables, etc. is that performance discussions should not be limited to appraisal feedback sessions.  When you, as a leader, take the time to discuss employees’ performance in settings outside of performance appraisal review sessions and interviews, you are increasing trust-building and decreasing the impact of perceived organizational politics.  

3.  Discuss importance of job performance, teamwork, and feedback as it relates to desired OCB.  Integrate what your organization stands for as often as possible.  Your goal is to impact the subconscious work efforts of employees to align their behavior with organizational goals – that is always the number one objective.  Once your employees understand how their work behavior/performance outcome contributes to the organization’s ability to accomplish its objective, you have again decreased ambiguity and set a clear standard of performance. 

In the end, you, as a leader, must exercise the behavior and activities associated with transformational leadership during difficult times.  These are difficult times at some level and through your consideration of employees’ perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes as it relates to their job, job performance, job accomplishment, and job security, you will go a long way in enhancing organizational performance through increased productivity  and morale while at the same time create an atmosphere conducive to feedback, information sharing, and building trust.

If one thing that both our current events and socioconomic conditions has taught us is that for all our contingency planning, we are normally only prepared for high probability, high impact scenarios.  Who could have predicted the economic downturn and the severe loss of jobs that we began to experience as early as 2007? 

But the bigger question is how prepared were you and your organization for the conditions we now find ourselves faced?  Many reacted fairly quickly through various tactics that included hiring “freezes”, carefully orchestrated down-sizing, furloughs, etc.   Perhaps the biggest lesson we learned as HR business professionals is that we are not immune to ensuring we have an effective, proactive risk management plan in place to decrease the impact of the unknown, while also ensuring we are prepared for events that have a high probability of occurring.  I am not going to get into probability or statistics, but the point is this: We must ensure that our HR risk management planning and implementation processes are vibrant and continuously adjusted minimizing the impact of unforeseen, high-risk, high-impact events.  Furthermore our HR risk management planning must effectively integrate with the overarching organizational risk management plan – a key component therein.

Yet risk management is not just for unforeseen ”disasters”, your risk management plan should also incorporate the optimistic – it is often the optimistic, macro events that leave your organization exposed – causing lost opportunities, decreased market share, or customer turnover.  Furthermore, we as HR business professionals must ensure that our risk management plan compliments our organizational threats and opportunities and not the reverse.  Here are some examples for you to consider – remember our task is to think (and act on) of the human capital-human resource impact from an organizational strategic perspective. 

1.  Impact of increased demand: Is your organization poised for an increase in demand or are all your plans considering a flat-line/zero-growth scenario forecast for the next few years?  How will your organization respond to additional manpower required to respond to increased demand?  Is the workforce trained and equipped to handle additional demand?   

2.  Impact of emergent competitor cutting into market share:  A hidden competitor emerges quickly with a product that has increased functionality or a well-rounded, responsive service offering.  You and your organization must respond.  From a human capital-workforce planning perspective what plan do you have in place?

3.  Business organization decides to divest or invest business unit/line of business:  Senior leadership is continuously asking (whether you are in the room or not): “Is this the business we should be in?” Or, “Is this a business we should consider?”  What is your plan for both scenarios?  What are the costs, change management, risk of failure for a proposed merger?  What is the downside and upside of executing a divestment/exit plan?   

4.  Brand Introduction/New Product Development (Early Green light):  There are times when acceleration of a product or a service offering/introduction may be required (See Point #2).   What contingencies does your strategic human capital-human resource risk management plan have in place for such a scenario?  We all know the reasons for accelerated introduction, but how many of us are really prepared?  Some questions to ask in formulating your HR risk management plan: Do we have the required skills on-hand (skill-set inventory)?  What changes/updates must be made within our recruiting efforts?  Is the workforce training and development plans sufficiently developed to ensure that the workforce within the line functions can support early introduction of the product/service offering?

5.  Increased/Decreased footprint in overseas/global market.  The joint venture migration is ahead of schedule, or on a not so optimistic note, there is a need to exit a market sooner than expected.  Have you engaged and developed an exit strategy that meets the organization’s accelerated growth plan or exit strategy?  Every time I think of this detail, I think back to Mr. T in Rocky 3 when he was asked what his back-up plan for beating Rocky was.  Mr. T famously replied, “Don’t need one.”  However, you do.  Ensure that you have considered and developed a plan for an increased or decreased presence in overseas/global markets.

These are just some of the business scenarios you should be thinking about when developing your HR risk management plan.  See, it’s easy to develop for contingencies when your contingencies fit in a neat box during a planned meeting that looks for highly probable-high impact scenarios.  But one thing our current business environment has taught us is that the only predictable event is the one for which we did not plan. 

Finally be strategic about your risk planning.  Ensure that your risk management plan has a top-down perspective and is not developed with what you hope happens or can best plan for from a functional perspective.  In other words, ensure that it aligns, but takes into consideration, that which is unseen/not forecast, or detours your organization for better or worse.  Your risk management plan should be proactive, supplement the organization’s risk management plan (supplementing line risk management planning where appropriate), and rigorously consider impact (both positive and negative).

As we move forward into the 21st century, we see leadership coming to the forefront once again. Much has changed, but much remains the same. True leaders may or may not be born (that’s an argument for a separate study), but traits are common in all great leaders. Some of the most common traits of great leaders are:

1) Humbleness
2) Courageous
3) Accessible
4) Decisive
5) Honorable
6) Committed
7) Focused
8) Thoughtful
9) Determined
10) Communicators

There are a couple of other traits that are desirable such as visionary and able to laugh at oneself, however, those are not necessary traits required in order to be a great leader. A great leader can be essential to a moment in time despite the setting rather in church, within government, or in the workplace.

Great leaders also are called upon at some of the most awkward moments – with leaders not so much picking the time, but the time picking the leader. Ask yourself as you go about your day – what would you do if you were called upon to lead? Let that soak in for a moment. The setting is not important- it can be the coach of the Little League baseball team, or it can be being selected as President of a small business; the question is what would you do? What do you think leadership is about? Reflect and think about all the leaders mentioned in this post and compare the leaders against the traits we mentioned. Observe some of the qualities found. Do you possess them? Or, do you believe the leadership is all about ego — thinking that if selected they will follow. Continue reading »

The day was sunny and bright, and I was relaxing on the porch of a close friend when I overheard a conversation by two contractors working on a property for a local landlord. 

“Ray doesn’t know business.  He doesn’t know the business I am trying to build.  He is one of those HR types that runs background checks and specializes in recruiting.  But he knows nothing about shipping, distribution, required freight costs and packaging.  Let’s not even talk about working with suppliers.” 

I nearly fell out of my chair and I looked at my friend who just stared at me as to say, “What is with you?”  Breaking the silence, I asked him, “Did you catch that?”  Returning my stare with a matter-of-fact smile, he stated, “Yeah, that’s the perception of HR on my job.” 

But for me it wasn’t that simple.  There stood two guys that had a vision of starting a company; the shingle based contracting business was only the beginning.  Yet even more surprising, they expressed an opinion of my passion and livelihood that is shared by perhaps many others – more than I (or we) probably like to admit. 

That casual comment has been on my mind now for almost two weeks with the words, “Ray doesn’t know the business” echoing in my head.  A statement so easily accepted by my friend that he barely even acknowledged that the statement had been made.  There I was with an undefined feeling that could only be described as a mixture of fury, embarrassment, and determination.  The question of ”What am I and my fellow HR professionals doing to change this perception?” looped in my conscience; loops in my conscience.    Continue reading »

Recently, I had a conversation with a group of business executives who were hired with the sole purpose of turning the business around.  As we discussed the range and perceived intensity of the problems and issues, I quickly discovered that a deep understanding of the root causes that revealed a turnaround was even required was missing.

For example, one executive stated that he needed skill development/technical training.  My questions to him were How much was the training going to cost?  What kind of training (specifically) was needed?  And, How did would he know that training being provided was effective?  In particular, what led him and the organization to come to the conclusion that  more training was needed:  Was it market position, defect rate, employee satisfaction feedback, customer satisfaction feedback, accident rates, or lost time?  Was it a combination of all of these measures – or did you even measure at all?

The second executive stated to me that he needed to have his particular SBU performance on par with the other SBU.  He also stated that because his product/service line was new that he was under much scrutiny.  My questions continued.  How do you know that the other SBU has it right? How is your SBU performing among industry competitors (locally, nationally, internationally)?  When do you know (or will you know?) you have gotten to where you need to be when two different markets are being served? Continue reading »

With the surge of interest in entrepreneurship, HR professionals are not immune nor exempt from feeling the “entrepreneurial bug” and desiring to pursue the goal (with accompanying joy and trails) of business ownership.  Many of you are thinking about starting your own contracting or consulting businesses, which is great.  However, before you put the “shingle” out, you must not only plan, but execute – to the hilt.  In developing your business plan, you will quickly notice that there is a wealth of information out there providing advice on how to start your new business.  Upon further research and study, you will also note common themes such as developing a business plan, marketing your services, defining your niche, etc.  However, there are many skills and activities-tasks that are rarely discussed, but are critical to your business.  I am going to share FIVE of these activities and skills with you right now that if not followed will put your business in jeopardy, before it even starts – to earn money. Continue reading »