IPM national president
Recently I came across an article (on the internet at CBSNews.com, written by Jeff Haden in the name of “Moneywatch”) in which five super challenges to leadership were explored. If HR practitioners do not have to meet these challenges themselves, they will be called upon from time to time to help employees understand the issues. Indeed, HR people may find themselves between a rock and a hard place, or to be more realistic, between many rocks and many hard places.
I share these five challenges with you to stimulate your thinking, but I am not intending to offer suggestions as to how they should be met. Jeff Haden did so in his article, but I think we all understand that there is no simple formula; circumstances very seldom replicate exactly what has happened before, and people are all different.
The first challenge is: You know things that you can’t share with employees. You know of retrenchment plans, for example, or, other issues that have been discussed confidentially in executive meetings. You want to be open, transparent and trustworthy with people who look to you to represent their best interests, but you have an executive obligation.
The second challenge is: Balancing standards against financial considerations, in other words: dollars vs ethics. This also involves fairness, of course. I’m not sure whether people ever completely lose their childlike attitude to fairness. You know, it’s only really fair if I get more. Dealing with fairness when two people are involved is not quite the same as dealing with individual fairness set against fairness to a group. That, it seems to me, is much more difficult for people to grasp. Here is a difficult one: A superstar offends and a policy has to be enforced. Later I will talk about individualism and the group and how times have changed.
Then fourthly, where do you go when you have different versions of the truth? — “He said, he said.”
This is resolved by sticking to facts, but once a person has told a lie, it is unlikely that the truth will be found out without calling witnesses and gathering evidence. This is usually a huge cost in time, though the issue at stake may be relatively trivial.
The final challenge is that the employee seeking guidance is way ahead of you, and you have little that is tangible to offer.
This is increasingly likely as there are so few barriers to access to information these days. I read the other day that Stanford University offered an online course in aerodynamics, expecting about 75 000 registrations. They got 800 000. All sorts of people found sufficient interest in the subject to register, and they were not engineers. In fact, the person who scored the highest marks in the assessment was an American housewife and mother of four children. It is not so long ago that she, and many others like her, would never had the opportunity to do any further studying, or any studying at all.
Another person, perhaps you on the basis of your experience, may have identified 20 fine challenges, or even more, and not just five.
As we develop a better understanding of the value of human capital and learn not so much to sweat the asset, but develop it as a far better way to improve talent and productivity, we should be considering the social changes that characterise our time.
A well-known public speaker-cum-business guru suggested recently that consumers are no longer impressed by legacy. If this is true – and he quoted a survey to substantiate the claim – companies are wasting their time telling consumers about the longevity of either their company or their product. The fact that a company has been in business for 50 years may be of no value any longer.
Those of us who are older may appreciate this more if we think about many brands which were once commonplace which have disappeared altogether. If this is true, we may also wonder what corporate tradition and corporate culture mean to younger employees who are likely going to seek another job within months.
I am one of the older generations of loyalists, who believe that a CV containing many different positions is suspect. It used to be so – but not any more. To some people, a migration from one job to another represents progress and ambition and is to be commended. It is a positive rather than a negative recommendation of the candidate.
Impatience for progress (or is it impatience for material possession and wealth?) is a distinct feature of the times. Some of us find this difficult to reconcile, because we knew that we had to be patient and that advancement came after years of experience and proof that one was capable. As employers, we have to weigh up the values of experience and loyalty, which sometimes include inflexibility and a narrow path, against youthful exuberance, ambition, restlessness and, in some cases, at least, creativity and innovation.
Whether the assertion that legacy has no value any more is true or not, what is beyond question is the fact that most societies have moved towards individualism. The rates of such movement are clearly different, for some cultural communities have retained greater family unity than others, but the trend is clear. Consider, for example, the relative insignificance of clubs and secret societies in recent decades. In many ways, people are encouraged to find strength within themselves and not to look to a group for support.
Technological progress has had a great deal to do with this. The computer is a selfish piece of equipment, occupying the mind without reference to anyone else. And, as I have mentioned before, a thirst for knowledge is easily satisfied online. It is little wonder, therefore, that people are generally far more self-absorbed than they used to be.
This being the case, we must reconsider how to engage in team-building. The number of people who perform better in a group is declining compared to those who prefer to do it themselves. The trick, surely, is to harness the positives of individualism and give every person the encouragement to progress on a path which offers meaning for him or her, and to devise a methodology to ensure that this causes no impediment to anyone else, and, at the same time, serves as inspiration to others. Now that’s a challenge, isn’t it?
A challenge, I suggest, which is easier to meet by someone who enjoys the benefit of being a member of an organisation such as the IPM. This benefit is not just a warm feeling of togetherness, but an opportunity of exposure to knowledge and insights from experts and peers. No matter how much we may deny the value of collectivism as we occupy our places in the modern world, knowledge is not an inanimate thing. It is dynamic and always has a context; otherwise, it is just a collection of facts without any understanding of their value.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the pinnacle of collectivism, an opportunity to learn and to share. The IPM has been meeting annually for 58 years and the fact that this event continues to draw so many practitioners is not related to the exciting venue alone. We have much to do as HR practitioners in the South African context. We may not be in the business of creating jobs, but we can play a significant part in retaining them by improving skills and talents. Poor productivity is a challenge for management and requires techniques that change work-related mind-sets and promote happiness and contentment in the working environment.