One Minute HR Consultant

One of the most persistent mistakes made by consultants and mid-level to senior leadership professionals is an inability to link abstract theoretical organizational interventions to concrete business activity and functions.  In working as a leadership and organizational development consultant and business practitioner for six years, and an HR professional for nearly 20 years, I have witnessed this first hand on more occasion than I care to admit. 

Allow me to present a story:  Once in a history not to distant, I was a supporting initiative project team leader and change management team member working on a fairly complex change management initiative.  This robust and aggressive inititiative involved the entire organization, its business units, core business functions, staff support functions,  and information systems.  Thus, in the organizational textbook sense of change management, it met the criteria of being both complex and essential to maintaining the advantage in the industry of which it was a part. 

The concept was Appreciative Inquiry (AI) and my core role during the exploration stages was to unearth practical utility prior to  implementation stages of supporting initiative projects.  The organizational leadership, rightfully, in my opinion, did not believe in abstract concepts unless empirical evidence supported cost and effort; in other words, could a quantitative and qualatative business case be built around workforce actions built into the operational and functional actions of employees. 

The resistance to the concept initially came from my inability to link AI (in this case) into observable actions.  And here is an important point: Professionals with whom I work usually have very little issue or challenge in developing and linking abstract entities and theoretical management concepts during the strategy planning and visioning phases.  However, there is a tendency to “fake it,” or at least hope someone will not notice when it comes to relating the concept to observable actions that can be empirically measured and assessed.  As it related to my experience,  the impression formed that AI was another fuzzy management concept with no practical utility.  It became a concept in which one accentuated the positive to perhaps reach states of the ideal working environment.  Bright (2009) states that a one-sided reception of AI hinders its organizational employment potential stating, “I am concerned that an understanding of Appreciate Inquiry as simply ‘a focus on the positive’ undermines its full potential to create sustainable change in organizations . . . researchers have helped us understand that organizations are most vibrant and alive when they embrace the tensions of the human condition” (p. 2).  My point quoting bring is that this can apply to most abstract organizational intervention (i.e. emotional intelligence, cognitive diversity, etc.)

Specific to my case, I felt that AI was more than just emotional and abstract strategic entity and intervention merely to be integrated with selected management methodologies such as performance management and its accompanying tools.  As related to AI, Bright (2009) points out the operational components of AI stating that AI “. . . refers to an increase in the value of capital. Operational appreciation usually refers to the value of financial assets.”  This was my intuitive “aha” moment that allowed the concept to gain traction.  When I approached AI from both connotations (the philosophical and operational), I not only received the necessary buy-in, I received support in the infamous stakeholder meetings in which every dollar toward project and their teams has to be accounted.  To put this in a tangible perspective, what I did was capture the ideal in theory and the practical in “real world” and linked those to the core functions, tasks, and outcomes to be achieved by the workforce – related to readiness, brand equity, profitability, and organizational citizenship.  As a result (and understand I am compressing for space sake), the mind-set shifted from “we are broken” to “we have done this before and we can do it again . . . even better . . . within the context we need to move forward.”  Again, this was intuitive at the time and have I had the benefit of additional experience and sound research, the learning curve may have not been so steep.

The lesson here: Abstract entities and notions must make sense from a business and organizational perspective.  My personal experiences tell me that until you link the concept to the concrete (what is real for the stakeholders, clients, workforce, etc.), organizational interventions, especially among senior level leaders, are merely theoretical rhetoric, which captivate scholars and consultants at the moment.  It is important to know the business and the concept. 

Further Reading/References:

Bright, D. (2009). Appreciative inquiry and positive organizational scholarship: A  philosophy of practice for turbulent times. OD Practitioner, 41(2), 2-7.

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).

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 »

When respected and known HR consultant/blogger/speaker, Jon Ingham recently wrote about the “Future of HR (more proactive support function or real driver of competitive advantage)” in his HCM blog, I immediately thought to myself – Jon makes some good points – very good points.  However (not but) there are some things that HR is doing right (Note: Jon’s argument is not about what we are doing “wrong” or “right” as you will see, but instead formulates an argument of the (or what) role HR must play and how it must contribute to competitive advantage to be viewed as a key business “player” within organizations – thus my post is more of an inspiration vice a rebuttal).

In addition to what we are getting right, there are businesses that KNOW that a key differentiator from a good business (or a business at all) to a great business is to recognize, embrace, and implement key effective HR practices – that directly contribute to the bottom line.

Furthermore, businesses both large and small, make it point to focus on the bottom-line contributions that HR brings.  HR Magazine (September 2006) states that “Small businesses that invest in formal employee selection, management and retention strategies see direct, quantifiable results on the bottom line.” This insightful article concludes with a powerful quote by Christopher Collins, associate professor at Cornell University and conductor of the study: “. . . we’ve proven that specific human resources strategies have a meaningful, and statistically significant impact on small business financial performance.”

One of my favorite works, “The HR Scorecard” (Becker, Huselid, Ulrich) – the almost timeless classic – unearth findings still relevant today, seven years after its publication.  This formal study provided a framework for companies to implement bottom line HR strategies by highlighting the studied companies financial performance (those that got it right and those that didn’t), making the case for implementing the right mix and relevant HR strategies, which have proven to play an invaluable role in their financial success. Continue reading »

Having been a member of the Twitter community now for nine months, I started to keep a notebook on the different styles of “tweeting,” and the many personalities behind the tweets.  Suffice it to say, that I came up with a unscientific method of matching twitter and leadership styles.  Here are a few humorous conclusions that one can derive from your twitter updates and what it says about your leadership style/personality.

Note:  This is just a humorous look on my unscientific approach; however, please take the time to realize that being an effective leader does not mean you follow any set pattern of leadership or some preconceived notion of someone’s notion of being an effective leader.  Effective leaders are found with varying personalities and traits.  They possess a keen sense of who they are and are aware of their strengths and weakness, maximizing the former and supplementing the latter.

Auto-follows on keywords/Auto Tweets:

Strength:  Someone that values automation and one time effort to gain leverage.  Once system in place and/or value discovered, it is likely that you don’t want to reinvent the wheel.  In addition, you are extremely well-organized (there is a word for that), and you are also very methodical.  You will quickly move-on from one project to the next and likely are very good at starting businesses, setting a system, and moving on to the next project/phase.  Likely considered a very efficient leader who makes decisions in an effective manner.

Weakness:  Details make your eyes glaze and sometimes you are too quick to delegate.  Because you often have more than one project/program/concept going, those working on supporting initiatives are often confused as to just what is your priority. Continue reading »