Partnership HR: New Norms for Effective Recruitment, Performance, and Training of Today's Workforce

Praise for Partnership HR “Provides an essential set of tools and concepts for building the selforganizing, self-monitoring, self-managing, and self-amplifying work culture needed for survival in today’s global economy. Buchen instructs HR to take the lead in researching, identifying, and justifying changes necessary to assemble, train, and empower a global workforce for a cross-cultural global reality.” —Albert J. Cacace, MBA, PMP; PMI South Florida Chapter, board of directors; founder and president, the MultiMedia Republic; executive producer, Rewind PBS

“A timely contribution to the fields of human resources and management leadership, focusing on issues of recruitment, performance evaluation, and training. The book addresses meaningful perspectives for human resources professionals and institutional leaders to consider as challenges for understanding the new multitasking talent needed in the twenty-first century.” —José A. Quiles, faculty mentor for higher education leadership, Walden University; former provost/VP for academic affairs, Kean University

PARTNERSHIP

HR NEW NORMS FOR EFFECTIVE RECRUITMENT, PERFORMANCE, AND TRAINING OF TODAY’S WORKFORCE

Irving H. Buchen, PhD

DAVIES-BLACK PUBLISHING MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA

Published by Davies-Black Publishing, a division of CPP, Inc., 1055 Joaquin Road, 2nd Floor, Mountain View, CA 94043; 800-624-1765. Special discounts on bulk quantities of Davies-Black books are available to corporations, professional associations, and other organizations. For details, contact the Director of Marketing and Sales at Davies-Black Publishing: 650-691-9123; fax 650-623-9271. Copyright 2007 by Irving H. Buchen. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or media or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and MBTI are trademarks or registered trademarks of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Trust in the United States and other countries. CPI 260, Strong Interest Inventory, and Davies-Black and its colophon are registered trademarks and CPI is a trademark of CPP, Inc. Visit the Davies-Black Publishing Web site at www.daviesblack.com. 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Buchen, Irving H. Partnership HR : new norms for effective recruitment, performance, and training of today’s workforce / Irving H. Buchen.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN: 978-0-89106-214-1 (hardcover) 1. Personnel management. 2. Corporate culture. I. Title. HF5549.B8734 2007 658.3—dc22 2007007434 FIRST EDITION First printing 2007

To my dear wife, Devora, and all our grandchildren— Benjamin and Daniel Buchen Mikaela and Lexi Gilbert Jack and Kylie Buchen Devon and Kiera Swanson Zachary and Nicholas Swanson

CONTENTS

Introduction ix About the Author xiii

part one | New HR and Workforce Partnerships 1 1 Workforce Centrality and Corporate Self-Definition 5 2 Partnerships with Research 15 3 The HR–Tech Interface 25 4 HR Support of Emerging Manager-Leaders 35 5 Workforce Innovation and Company Culture 43 6 HR’s Alliance with Simulation 55

part two | Redefinition of the HR Mission 65 7 Orientation and Hiring Practices 69 8 The Challenge of Job Satisfaction 87

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9 Strategies for Retention 101 10 Reexamination of Work and Its Relationships 117

part three | Perspectives on Evaluation and Training 131 11 Evaluation of People, Training, and Teams 133 12 A New Handbook for Training 149 13 Goals and Roles of Managers and Leaders 165

part four | The Future of HR 181 14 Future HR Operations and HPT Professionals 183 15 Demographics and the Future of HRM 197 Conclusion 205 Index 211

INTRODUCTION

Sometimes the most tried, tested, and trusted artifact can provide a breakthrough. For example, consider that old warhorse, the job description, and especially its last line: “And all other duties as may be assigned.” This catchall phrase has often been used to silence the objection “But that’s not in my job description!” and to send the complainer grumbling away from the boss’s desk. But of late that game of gotcha has been invoked more frequently, more significantly, and by more people than ever before. The discrepancies between the official and the unofficial job description have finally emerged as a serious issue. The basic response has typically been to review and update job descriptions to make them more current and more nearly accurate. But that is a temporary fix; the day after the revision gets approved, new adjustments are likely to be required. And the day after that, still more, and so on ad infinitum. This kind of tail chasing does not end or answer the continued complaints of discrepancy. In fact, ix

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complaints increase because the gaps become more visible, more dramatic, and more widespread. The new truth is that work is no longer describable in final or definitive form. It is unfinished, open-ended, and protean. Discrepancies between stated and actual performance expectations—far from being resisted, bandaged over, and obscured—need to be accepted and even welcomed as the new work norm. Indeed, given that new reality, the most significant adjustment to the traditional job description would be to bring the last line to the front: “Do whatever it takes to get the job done.” That would at least honor what is really going on. Also, adding the same concept to every item on the list of duties would at last begin to bridge present, past, and future job profiles. But this new work pattern also has raised questions about what may be lacking from or amiss about a number of other HR operations. Three areas emerge as in need of review and revision: recruitment, performance evaluation, and training. With respect to recruitment, the most obvious point is that we are not always truthful. The job description does not square with what the job really is or requires. But HR duplicity does not stop there. It is perpetuated and even reinforced by the cheerleading orientation sessions for new hires. In fact, problems of retention frequently begin the day the job actually starts. Newcomers who have been led down the garden path as candidates often lament their failure to ask a number of questions during the original interviews. The entire recruiting process becomes a sort of information shell game, instead of the first stage of talent retention that it should be. Then, too, the performance evaluation process needs a reality check. Annual reviews are clearly inadequate. Stretch goals mandate frequent performance reviews—every three months, if not more often. But evaluation must not be one-sided or top-down, either. It must be mutual and two-way. Employees should be empowered to maintain and share an updated version of their job profile with their supervisor. That serves as the current version of the job description developed by those who know the job best. The task of the supervi-

Introduction

sor is big-picture coaching: identifying and updating the current goals of the division and the company so that alignment with each employee profile can be negotiated. Sometimes goal changes unknowingly cross over and require role changes. If so, what kind of training would be required to assume such new roles? What would be the joint training recommendations of employee and supervisor, and how would they then be factored into subsequent evaluation and salary? In addition to specific and focused training that addresses and ideally ensures the future of each job, organizations need generic training across the board for all. The goal is to best equip employees at all levels to know and master protean change in general and the way the company has shaped its change management vision, mission, and culture to remain competitive and profitable in particular. In fact, because so many orientations of new hires are so problematic, and the need for truth telling and the big picture to ensure talent retention is so critical, a strong case can be made for turning orientation over to the training specialists. Certainly, sessions on the company’s views of crossover, transition, and stretch goals would be a more bracing and challenging way of saying “Welcome to our world and reality” than trotting out the company’s stars. This book is devoted to the detailed analysis of all these factors and the various ways cutting-edge companies and cultures have implemented the required changes. It is designed to be a success manual for HR at all levels. Throughout, what also will be described is the total transformation of the workforce. Successful companies have found new ways of doing whatever it takes to get the job done, and in the process they encourage the emergence of a new breed of workers, managers, and leaders. Those new job profiles benchmark the future of HR. What all this adds up to is the centrality of human resources as a way of examining companies, measuring them, and turning them around. The biggest mistake modern business ever made was outsourcing or reducing HR to token levels to save money. All that did was throw the baby out with the bathwater.

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Welcome though it may be, the notion of human capital as equal to financial capital and other resources means little if it does not reach down and change basic company relationships and conversations. In the final analysis, God is in the details. We need to restore and rebuild HR. Indeed, the final section of this book outlines what a reconstituted HR might be like and how the job of every supervisor would be that of HR manager, and that of every CEO and senior staffer would be to build and sustain work cultures that are empowering, open-ended, and permanently unfinished.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Irving H. Buchen, PhD, serves on the doctoral business faculty at Capella University and is associate vice president for IMPAC University. Previously, he was a professor and academic administrator at Cal State, the University of Wisconsin, and Penn State. He also has served as a management consultant, trainer, and executive coach in the United States and abroad for numerous corporations including CITGO, Bankers Trust, and American Can Company. He received his PhD degree from Johns Hopkins University. Buchen is the author of six books, and his nearly 200 articles have appeared in The Futurist, Foresight, Executive Excellence, Chief Learning Officer, and Training Management, among other publications. He also writes a monthly column, “Reflections,” for the online journal Training Prism.

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New HR and Workforce Partnerships

Two opposing yet intertwined forces currently dominate all organizational operations: external outsourcing and internal reconfiguration. Productivity and competition drive both. The rationale is simple and compelling: outsourcing occurs when the organization can find outside ways to accomplish key internal functions at lower costs without compromising quality or productivity. Too much outsourcing, however, disrupts the remaining workforce and breaks its bond with the organization, which must find ways to work with its people that restore their effectiveness. Otherwise, the triple savings of outsourcing—in reduced operational expenses, salaries, and benefits—are washed out by the overwhelming cost of the breakdown of core functions that cannot be outsourced. The practice of outsourcing has proceeded through three stages. The first was the appearance of niche firms— 1

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specialists on the periphery that by virtue of price, speed, and expertise could lure away internal operations. Because their chosen offering was all that they did—it was their core business—they could be better at it than those who also had to do other things. For example, many HR functions of payroll, benefits, and even background checks have been parceled out to firms that do a better job at lower cost. The second wave was a logical extension of the first, but its impact was enormous. Not just job functions but jobs themselves were exported. In this case, competition was still the driver, but now the arena was the global economy and its electronic partner, the Internet. Call, reservation, and technical centers were exported abroad to provide customer service, especially in English-speaking or Commonwealth countries. Telephone costs were minuscule compared to the salary savings. Computer technicians in India signed contracts to develop software that tutors American youngsters in math. And the list goes on. The third wave grew from an increasing need to provide guidance to companies contemplating outsourcing. Specialized consultants and firms surfaced. They offered one-stop service. They not only advised and guided companies on which outsourcing opportunities were most reliable and least costly but also managed technical agreements and contracts. Indeed, a new HR specialty has emerged, that of HRO—human resource outsourcing. More about that important development later. While all these shifts were going on, jobs were eliminated or combined, divisions totally disappeared or survived in skeleton form, and companies shrank in size and numbers. Frequently, the announcements that preceded or accompanied downsizing hailed a happy and necessary form of refocusing on the core business and restoration of profitability. But it also generated some unhappy trade-offs—some unforeseen—the principal and most serious one being the loss of company loyalty. The survival of the company seemed more important than that of its employees. Often, with perverse logic and sequence, the cost savings of reduction in force were followed by scandalous salary increases at executive levels. Those let go as well as those who survived adopted a new

New HR and Workforce Partnerships

and protective ethic of “numero uno”—of looking out for what was best for them, not the company. That in turn led to the major HR problem of talent retention. Valued employees would suddenly jump ship for a better or more secure job, especially if they sensed another wave of downsizing in the works. Executive search firms cruised the job market for talent, talking to people who were more open to new opportunities than ever before. Talent acquisition was also affected. Prospective candidates were more cautious about applying for a job that might later be outsourced or disappear. They also became more savvy about company cycles and were reluctant to consider applying to firms still working their way through to stability and downsizing options. But as Toynbee claimed, “The greater the challenge, the greater the response.” Those who remained were resourceful. Although still embracing the new necessity of looking out for themselves, they found ways to survive. In particular, they tied their job performance to company survival and even growth. They sought to become not only valued but indispensable. Although that story is the general subject of this book, what is clear is that the overall response to outsourcing and downsizing included insourcing and partnering. Survivors found new lifelines and formed new alliances based on a new perception not only of their common need but also of their common creativity. The pursuit of survival opened new doors to internal reconfiguration. Not only did the survivors change their jobs; in the process they also changed the way the company was structured. HR provides a strong case in point. Although stripped of many of its key functions, its professionals found ways to survive and adapt that dramatically illustrate the pattern of creative insourcing. The most obvious first stage was to acknowledge the handwriting on the wall. There was no way to challenge or deny the benefits of downsizing and outsourcing. Indeed, many HR professionals adapted to those trends by acquiring the expertise of and serving as in-house HRO consultants. But what propelled HR back into the driver’s seat was talent acquisition and retention. That also required two new or closer partnerships—internally with middle managers and trainers and externally with executive search firms,

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especially those with a global range. But the partnerships did not stop there. The driving force of productivity had to become an HR cause backed up by documentation. New relationships with data tracking and measuring systems had to be formed and advocated. The science of metrics became the new language of HR and shaped employee work profiles. Another partnership involved advocating innovation as the new norm of productivity. Although each of these new alliances will be discussed in detail, HR’s most important commitment was to both advocate for the remaining inhouse workers and argue for their new centrality. Indeed, the extent to which HR accepted that vision determined its own centrality and future mission.

C H A P T E R

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WORKFORCE CENTRALITY AND CORPORATE SELF-DEFINITION

The workforce has emerged as the make-or-break factor of company survival and growth. In many ways, recognition of this development has been reluctant, even grudging. The insistence on preserving indispensability of leadership both at the top and at the middle has minimized or obscured the new prominence of the rank and file. After all, CEOs have faces, personalities, and belief systems that can be described, admired, and regarded with awe. Not so the masses; even middle managers are too numerous to be the specific objects of hero worship. And so CEOs and senior staff could go about setting dramatic goals, and managers and supervisors could be charged with moving matters along—but in the final analysis it was still in the hands of the workforce to make it happen. And it did. Year after year productivity gains were posted. The workforce routinely did whatever was required to get the job done. They stretched to meet the changing goals. Even the constant emphasis on alignment is a direct outgrowth of workforce importance. Never before was the issue of synchronizing job goals with 5

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company goals so critical. But now top-down designating of future objectives required bottom-up coincidence. It could not happen otherwise.

WORKFORCE CENTRALITY AND CORPORATE IDENTITY One way to test the centrality of the workforce is to see how significantly it contributes to corporate identity. For example, instead of the typical company vision and mission statements (which are apt to be so generic and generalized that their owner cannot be identified), imagine the separate composition of an HR version: a vision statement that identifies and upholds company-wide performance goals, and a mission statement that spells out implementation in the form of preferential workforce profiles. Combining and applying the two would sum up and guide some of the most critical functions of the company: recruitment would be more precise, retention more customized, performance evaluation more targeted, training more preferentially focused, and alignment of goals and roles ongoing. Above all, the outside and the inside would be of a piece. Internal divisional knowledge would shape external company image. No longer window dressing, such HR vision and mission statements would sum up corporate self-definition in terms of workforce centrality. But all this is easier said than done. What would those valued performance goals and preferential work profiles look like? Does such a preferred performance database exist? It does—but not in overt, explicit, or usable form. And that takes us to the subtlest obstacle of all, which also masks the most promise. The obstacle is made up of two problems. First, preferential work profiles do exist, but they are not generally articulated. Second, these unarticulated versions are on the divisional level— and imprisoned there. Supervisors are interested only in their own units. Their job descriptions are totally and exclusively inward facing. They are not concerned with crossovers or promotions. Then,

Workforce Centrality and Corporate Self-Definition

too, they know what they need now, and not what they will need later. Their focus is on finding a round peg for a round hole. Supervisors rarely talk across divisions about each other’s job specs. They assume that their tasks are so operationally distinct that any general exchange of views would be wasteful, academic, or obvious. But that assumption is generally untested. Seldom if ever is there any structuring of cross-divisional conversations about workforce goals and behaviors. To be sure, a vice president may bring supervisors together to address new goals or targets. But then each unit is given its marching orders and off they go on their separate ways. Even when the new goal stresses interoperability, little or no attention is paid to the compatibility of workforce behaviors and values. And then, when mismatches occur, people fall into the blame game. How shortsighted is that? Here, then, is the multiple dilemma. General workforce qualities are divisionally known but not articulated across the board. They are available but not aggregated; precise but not generic. The challenge thus involves at least a three-stage process: 1. Identify shared performance standards and goals across the board, and then come up with a work profile designed to accomplish those goals. The profile would be compiled division by division, and it would consist of what is common to all the job descriptions in each unit. 2. Review all divisional performance standards and preferential profiles and distill and compile the generic traits that all supervisors commonly value. This would be the task of HR. 3. Share the composite with all supervisors and divisions. In effect, such common company-wide performance goals and preferential work profiles now would constitute the vision and mission statements of the workforce. They would also serve as the preferred profile to guide all hiring activities, retention efforts, evaluation sessions, training recommendations, and overall alignment.

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Although the way to launch and facilitate each stage will vary according to the culture of the company, the emerging performance standards and profile are remarkably uniform. The composite vision and mission statements that follow are drawn from consulting experiences with a number of different companies in different industries.

A Composite HR Vision Of the numerous proposals, five performance goals or standards goals emerged as shared across the company. The negotiation process required that proposals satisfy and survive three tests in the process of developing consensus: the goals had to be common horizontally to all divisions; vertically summative and thus company-wide; and interoperable or reinforcing of each other. The issue of prioritizing was put aside as unnecessarily contentious and left to the discretion of each division. But what was allowed to stand was the notion that performance goals and standards were to be envisioned as two sides of the same coin. That is, the objectives chosen had to specify the workforce quality necessary to meet those goals. Ends and means were to be one and the same from the outset. Here, then, are the visionary goals, briefly annotated.

Purpose The entire company and all its people must be possessed by a common sense of purpose. Staying focused and on task is not enough. Nothing is to be undertaken mechanically. All employees must be able to explain not only what they are doing but also why. Work knowledge has to attain the status of self-knowledge. Purpose drives performance. Vision must be an integral and operational part of individual and divisional work and task definition if company self-definition is to attain a comprehensive common purpose.

Power Purpose requires participatory power. Nothing changes and improves without the power to do so. Initiative has to become not just available but distributed and delivered company-wide. All employees must become CEO of their own work. Participatory self-management must become company culture. Every job profile must be reconfigured not solely as a description but

Workforce Centrality and Corporate Self-Definition

as an invitation to manage and also to change that job. Every job is to be endowed with a future whose realization is also the task of the current jobholder.

Future-Driven Orientation Purpose and power mean little without foreknowledge. Sights have to be raised on a daily basis. All choices in the present must involve positioning. All employees must be in charge of the future version of their own jobs, and what it will take to preserve those jobs. When anticipatory management is joined to participatory management, vision and mission become one.

Holistic Integration The big picture—the company version of vision—must cascade throughout the company, animating and vivifying everything down to the smallest detail. How all things work—and work together—must be made transparent. Mere displays of multiple linkages on organization charts are not enough. How productivity, profitability, preservation of market share, and customer satisfaction interrelate to achieve common purpose must be documented and shared. Leaders and managers need to have regular conversations on interoperable relationships and how all is perceived as a total unit. System dynamics must be adopted as the official company-wide language.

Knowledge Training and Learning Training and learning should be permanent in company culture. The operating assumptions of the company culture are that we are unfinished, we don’t know all that we need to know, and we never can know enough. Unlearning must precede new learning to clear the field of preconceived and foreclosing assumptions. Working smarter and not harder must now include understanding not only how smart we are but also how we are smart. Systems dynamics should not be limited to structure; they must apply to the new findings of cognitive studies as well. Training and learning have to benefit from and incorporate brain research and the insights of multiple intelligences.

A Composite HR Mission Discussion of preferential or optional work profiles and roles rapidly triggered two strong views and opposing directions. One was realistic, the other aspirational. The first group argued for dealing with the current and

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urgent realities of recruitment and what kinds of employees we need right now, then assessing the kinds of applicants likely to continue to be in the employment pool. The other group maintained that we should not sell ourselves short or set our sights too low. Besides, without a superior workforce—beyond what was currently in-house—we would not be able to achieve our performance goals, let alone meet the quality standards that accompany them. As is true in many conflicts, both sides were right. As they began to acknowledge their mutuality, they started developing more inclusive definitions and adjustments. Thus the realistic group embraced visionary purpose by developing a profile that was preferential. The aspirational group won its case by insisting that the preferential profile keep alive the aspirational by developing an optimal version. The final compromise was signaled by a hyphenated joining of the two. In other words, all HR goals were to be driven by the preferential but pushed always to include the optimal. Lest that lead to pie-in-the-sky expectations on the one hand and ignore the in-house capabilities of the present workforce on the other, training was to take up the slack. Only such constant interventions could ensure that those hired or already in-house could reach not only the preferential performance level of the workforce but also that optimal level required for future company survival and growth. Happily, by linking the preferential to the optimal, the present to the future, the hyphenated profile also provided training with its targets and agenda. The mission preferential and optimal profiles described here are performance essentials.

Extra Mile Work Ethic The workforce is committed to doing whatever it takes to get the job done: never using the job description as a refuge or perceiving its parameters as fixed, constantly pushing both work concepts and process beyond current definitions and goals, and designating best practices as temporary benchmarks rather than permanent milestones. The ultimate, optimal version of this profile sees job management and self-management as versions of each other.

Mutualizing of Work Relationships and Satisfaction Although job satisfaction is high on all employees’ preferential lists, no company can guarantee it. Indeed, increasingly, job satisfaction requires a shift of focus—from the organization to the workforce, from the job to

Workforce Centrality and Corporate Self-Definition

the jobholder. In other words, job satisfaction now has to be largely selfgenerated. It is what the workforce brings to the task, not an inherent quality. After all, a given position in different and optimal hands is no longer the same job. The ability to do the job thus has to be expanded to include the ability to make it personally satisfying. Equally important, job satisfaction is also interpersonal—requiring the recognition of how others contribute to individual job satisfaction. The optimal work commitment then becomes the obligation not only to generate personal job satisfaction but also to contribute to the job satisfaction of others. Indeed, such mutualizing of satisfaction imparts to all team and work environments the commonality of a distinct company culture. Productivity is then the outcome of the multiplication of job satisfactions and the mutualizing of multiple work relationships.

Market and Customer Segment Knowledge and Focus Every job description needs to be amplified by two flowcharts. One identifies in specific, not abstract, terms how that position directly influences market share and customer satisfaction. The other pictures how that position is linked and aligned to a cluster of similar positions, reinforcing them to achieve the same common ends. Such job extensions, like the one of providing job satisfaction to others, are ultimately a form of job enrichment.

Unfinished, Allowing for Constant Incremental Gains Constant and continuous improvement must be guided and driven by the assumption that incremental gains are infinite. No advance, no matter how significant, ever finally determines the end to further progress. Work performance is thus defined as an endless series of incremental gains stretching off into an infinite future. The unfinished worker and the unfinished task are ultimately to be perceived as one. Job improvement is the preferential version, job transformation the optimal.

The Collectivized Individual Teaming is perhaps the supreme and most profound current work challenge. Typically it is summed up with a rallying slogan that each employee is a team player and it is accompanied by training in conflict resolution. But teaming is not simply harmonizing. Strong individuals resist blurring or blending what makes them distinctive. If such resistance is not recognized and factored in, teams may perform below the level of their potential. So instead of focusing only on the supreme model of the team as the end goal, HR also needs to emphasize the supreme and evolving model of the individual.

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APPLICATIONS TO TEAMWORK Teams are usually defined and managed as singular and collective units that remain constant and function consistently over time. But an unacknowledged trade-off—reliability for creativity—may be at work. A solely group-based definition of team members may be reassuring, but it is also apt to lead to groupthink and lock in the range of problem-solving approaches. But if one were to combine and strive for both predictability and innovation (successfully enjoying one’s cake and eating it too), three new assumptions would quickly surface. First, team definition would have to focus on a double goal: achieving harmony but preserving difference. Second, each occasion the team convened would be regarded not as a set routine but as a new and dynamic opportunity for reconfiguration, and every new external challenge would lead to rearranging and repositioning team members and soliciting their different and unique contributions. Third, the mobility of the individuals who compose the team means that team identity would be constantly evolving, thereby redefining and re-creating itself. In fact, keeping alive and not blurring individuality determines the quality of team problem solving. The operating strategy, then, is to suggest that teaming in fact uniquely offers further stages of individual development not available any other way. Teaming asks each member to develop an additional and outward-reaching dimension of individuality. The acquisition of this new and more adhesive identity evolves as singular individuality encounters the multiple intelligences of teams—as the solitary impulse is challenged and extended by a new and larger linked identity. In other words, the goal of teaming and team training should be the creation of a new kind of individual—a collectivized individual. To tie all this together, Table 1 presents a range of traits, from the preferential to the optimal.

Workforce Centrality and Corporate Self-Definition

TA B LE 1 • P RE F E RE NT I AL— O PT I M AL S P E C T R U M TRAIT

PREFERENTIAL VERSION

OPTIMAL VERSION

Can-do attitude

Job management

Job transformation

Satisfaction

Self-generated

Self-enhanced

Linkages

To customers

To bottom line

Growth

Incremental

Discontinuous

Teaming

Individual

Collectivized individual

COMMENTARY Preferential and optimal profiles combine the realistic and the aspirational. They thus offer the clarity and focus of a checklist that can be applied to recruiting, training, and retaining a superior workforce. But lest these qualities become mechanical, they need the ownership of supervisors to dramatize and to document work profiles with their scenarios and war stories. In such cases, anecdotal evidence is not only valued but also determining and is an indispensable contribution to corporate self-definition and the preferential and optimal contributions of the increasingly central workforce.

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PARTNERSHIPS WITH RESEARCH

Research is like innovation. Both optimize. In particular, research drives businesses to be not just knowledge based but knowledge creating—not just research users but research providers. It always compels the next step, the road not otherwise taken, the inquiry not otherwise pursued. Increasingly, savvy professionals, before they embark on any new venture, supplement the basic question, What is the competition doing? with, What does the research show? The first question is urgent, up close, and unavoidable. It is a survival issue. It involves constant and current monitoring and vigilance. The second is more reflective, even speculative. It often moves beyond the immediate and the obvious to identify new sources of competition and even new competitors. Above all, it addresses whether the current problem and its solution have a future. If the research answers fall short or are deficient in range and depth, some companies will opt to do the research directly. And on that decision hangs this analysis. 15

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TRADITIONAL RESEARCH PROVIDERS Historically, research has come from four types of providers: universities, proprietary R&D divisions, think tanks and centers, and the government. Some discussion of each type is in order as background to the research issues affecting HR.

Universities Institutions of higher learning have traditionally dominated research in at least three ways: by supporting and sustaining research centers, by maintaining a research faculty, and by offering doctoral degree programs. Such efforts have produced a steady stream of original findings, especially of basic research, and also of future researchers. The findings, in particular, are highly valued by industry—a significant number of subscriptions to scholarly research journals are from the for-profit sector. Although happy to borrow the results of such expensive and long-term projects, companies often view university findings as initial grist for the mill. They still require the applied and supplementary science of their own research staff—both to tailor the results to their needs and to ensure that the results will be proprietary.

Proprietary R&D Divisions R&D units of companies seek to generate competitive edge and advantage by developing new products or services or improving those already on offer. Often their staff members are as impressive and degreed as those of any major research university. Indeed, they frequently attract and retain outstanding talent by offering research assignments so seductive or unique that they cannot be resisted or matched. For example, when stem cell research was restricted in the United States, China sought to recruit frustrated Chinese American researchers by offering unlimited access to stem cells. Recently, by approving a referendum permitting such research, California voters gave that state a recruiting edge. In its heyday, Bell Labs had more

Partnerships with Research

PhDs than many small universities. Currently the R&D research mantle has fallen largely to the pharmaceutical industry and to software entities such as Microsoft, Apple, and their competitors. But with the increasing demand for innovation, the search for research talent may rival that for senior staff.

Think Tanks and Centers The third generator of research has been various think tanks and centers, often privately and even handsomely funded, and sometimes driven by political agendas. One of the most prolific and consistently competent is the RAND Corporation. Typically, the research subjects selected are complex and national in scope and involve major policy issues.

Government Finally, government has been directly engaged in research for decades as well as being a major promoter and funder of original research, especially through grants focused on national health. Of course, national security is a characteristic government research focus—perhaps the most dramatic example being the Manhattan Project.

PROFILE OF NEW RESEARCH PROVIDERS However, many new contenders have unexpectedly arrived on the scene. A number of for-profit companies have made research their core business and used their findings to create or increase their access to a customer base. Moreover, because the research focus is frequently industry tailored and customized, research and marketing are aligned from the outset. All these new research- and marketdriven enterprises do resemble the four major research providers to some extent. That is not surprising since many have provided an alternative employment path for university-trained PhDs. Not yet

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recognized—let alone examined—is the overall impact all the doctoral business graduates are having generally on their employers and specifically on their research agenda. But in any case, these new research providers are both sufficiently distinct and creative enough to be recognized and examined in their own right. Indeed, although each may have its own focus of specialization, applications, and even research methodology, they have enough in common to generate the following generic profile: • Like university research, their work is designed to be shared.

However, unlike university research, their work is sold. • Their basic product is always new intelligence and partnerships. • Their work is frequently focused on the workforce and its train-

ing, and training thus has become increasingly research based. • Targeted customers rarely know as much about themselves and

the behaviors of their workforce as the research reveals. • Because their findings may have an impact on organizational

and even mission change, these groups also function as researchdriven consultants. • Their preoccupation with macro problems or lost opportunities

within the big picture engages the interest of top decision makers. • Often anticipatory, even futuristic, their work tends to redeem

and extend the short-term strategic planning of their clients. • Functioning in an entrepreneurial environment, they are self-

selective in the niche they research and in effect brand their expertise. In surveying and illustrating the HR research field, I have chosen to profile KnowledgeAdvisors, Thomson NETg, Bersin and Associates, Brandon Hall, IDC, and Gartner. These major research providers illustrate the typical features and the range of offerings available, possessing an impressive and often unique track record of HR goals and customer sales. In the process they all fuse and optimize three functions: research, marketing, and learning.

Partnerships with Research

KnowledgeAdvisors The research and market niche of KnowledgeAdvisors (KA) is learning measurement. The organization’s goal is to provide training operations with learning analytics through its trademarked Metrics that Matter (MTM). The basic overall outcome is to justify the costs of training through the application of return on investment (ROI) methodology. But in the process KA rightly evaluates not so much the training as the implementation of training. Not just one but many impact variables are assessed—productivity, customer satisfaction, innovation, talent retention, and more. KA uses intensely data-driven metrics to bring detailed transparency to work profiles in general and even to individual and team performance. Managers can view more than a hundred Web-based reports generated from a database that contains more than thirty million data points. Typically, KA—like all research enterprises—claims not only to offer best practices but also to embody the state of the art. Toward those ends, KA (like Thomson NETg) sponsors annual national and even international symposia on the subject. KA mounts an annual meeting on learning analytics, as does NETg. Although generally more about marketing than research, such conferences not only showcase the research wares but also offer case studies by users like Microsoft of how MTM is used and altered to address unique situations. Indeed, such documentation provides a demonstration and evaluation of a distinct new best practice: the use of research to enhance market advantage.

Thomson NETg The distinction and branding sought by Thomson NETg is its absolute commitment to innovation. Toward that end, it has recruited and maintained a robust research and development group that collectively constitutes its Innovations Lab. Its creative track record includes the technologies of learning object architecture, EKG software to measure the effectiveness of simulations, and, most recently, Precision Skilling, which links job skills to training directions and

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designs. The last innovation in particular is bringing about a major review of training foci and the diagnostic management of learning diversity. When NETg functions in a consultant capacity, its focus is always synthesizing in nature. It seeks to deliver an integrated learning solution, which frequently requires three activities: updating current in-house technologies; linking older systems to NETg’s innovations; and keeping the now-integrated learning management system (LMS) open-ended to future development. As noted, the commitment to research and marketing unexpectedly changes consultant-client relationships. The fusion of research and marketing is no longer outside but inside, no longer distant but infused, no longer separate but partnered. What drives consultant and client together is research, which reveals more about the behaviors, problems, and situations of clients and companies than they knew before. That creates the kind of captive and receptive audience, open—often for the first time—to innovations that already embody the research insights. In short, branding is not limited to products but includes process as well.

Bersin and Associates It is not necessary to be big to carve out a big research niche. Bersin and Associates has staked out the research area of developing industry-wide information and practice patterns of e-learning. The answer to the critical question of who in our industry is doing what is the group’s research focus. Its most recent source book, LMS Customer Satisfaction Survey, completed and distributed during the first quarter of 2005, is a research case study. To ensure that what is being researched is needed and valued, and to spread around the cost of undertaking such a large-scale project, Bersin has formed the LMS Quality Council, whose members represent about 80 percent of the LMS market. Many research tasks are too enormous for any single member to undertake; inhouse research capacity may not be available, and bias tends to

Partnerships with Research

intrude. So the council in effect subcontracts to Bersin and Associates to conduct surveys and compile a source book that, among other patterns, will reveal for the first time how the products of various LMS vendors stack up to one another from the purely customer perspective. Once again, research and marketing are fused to the point that it is not possible to discern where one begins and the other leaves off. In addition, to ensure that synthesis drives inquiry and remains on target, a consortium is formed of users whose common knowledge needs override their competitive and proprietary separateness. In other words, such an arrangement enables Bersin and Associates to function as a research university serving its alumni (its customer base).

Brandon Hall The research and marketing niche of Brandon Hall involves publishing best practices for e-learning. Last published in March 2004 and authored by Tom Werner, the volume offers a comprehensive survey of case studies and organizational profiles of the e-learning industry. Extremely rich in detail, the compilation features best practices in five categories: steps and documents for building the business case for e-learning; ROI methodologies; developing company-wide LMS; criteria for selecting outstanding and award-winning LMS technology, courses, and evaluation systems; and linkage of learning to human capital HR management. Brandon Hall singles out firms and practices for Excellence in E-Learning Awards each year. The identification of such industry leaders supports Brandon Hall’s focus on establishing benchmarks and thus guiding the strategy and technology selection of clients. Recently, Brandon Hall announced the publication of its latest research: “Hosted Versus Installed LMS.” This three-year perspective reveals a surprising preference for installed rather than hosted LMS. Finally, Brandon Hall offers customized research to individual clients who seek to know the best practices of their industry and

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competitors. Such individual and focused surveys benefit both from Brandon Hall’s tried and tested methodology and from its extensive database of best practices. Recycling research methods and findings in effect has become Brandon Hall’s own best practice.

IDC The focus of IDC is IT; its span, global. It produces The Worldwide Black Book, which provides extensive quarterly analysis of the status and projected growth of the worldwide IT industry in fifty-three countries. The book also contains regional subset profiles such as those of Central and Eastern Europe and Asia/Pacific. IDC also generates The Worldwide Telecom Black Book, which presents a consolidated view of market size and growth opportunities for network equipment vendors. Current and comprehensive, IDC’s research survey products accommodate multiple users and perspectives and routinely fuse macro and micro foci and issues. The result is an indispensable research data support system for the entire IT industry.

Gartner Although Gartner shares much of its focus and scale with IDC, Gartner is unabashedly and explicitly in the forecasting business. Indeed, as I write, its current forecast is simply titled Predicts 2006. But what sets Gartner’s trend monitoring apart is the degree to which it supports both short- and long-term decision making and strategic planning. Thus, it alerts print buyers and vendors to multiple technological and market trends that will have a direct impact on them and drive their immediate profitability and manufacturing choices. Of special value are those anticipatory predictions that read the emerging transformations of products and services before they are fully apparent. Such heads-up predictions basically display future agendas for company review and decision making. Indeed,

Partnerships with Research

tapping Gartner’s forecasts provides companies with a research partner and consultant that is not only typically beyond in-house expertise but also maintains an authority and independence essential to all projections of the future.

THE FUTURE OF RESEARCH It is clear that much of what we currently know about marketing and learning and the marketing of learning is being generated by these new research providers. Indeed, the process has become selfrecycling or self-perpetuating. A new and more demanding and holistic generation of HR and learning and training leaders and systems has further required that research learning intelligence be aligned with both ROI and innovation. In many ways these research providers define the training and learning industry and grant it autonomy and distinction. Above all, such alliances ensure that LMS, hosted or installed, will be smart, effective, targeted, and profitable. The new research enterprises will not eliminate or reduce the need for the traditional providers. They all will exist side by side and proceed as they have in the past—on parallel lines, never meeting. But in substance and output, new room may have to be provided for this new fifth class of research provider. Moreover, with the creation of an alternative career path, new university PhDs may find not only a new home but also perhaps a more congenial and collaborative one there. Bersin’s research fraternity—like Bersin’s Quality Council—might turn out to be a more welcoming and convergent way of identifying and addressing the increasing multidisciplinarity of knowledge, the management of learning diversity, and the global holistics of training. If that occurs, then these new research providers may not only identify and address the research agenda of the future but in the process also secure and extend their market niche by serving as an alternative research fraternity of distinction.

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COMMENTARY In many ways, these new research providers represent the state of the art. By accepting, supporting, and partnering with such research entities, HR has not only embraced the research function, it has applied the new findings to enhancing workforce productivity and adaptability. Research-driven HR is enjoying greater credibility because it has addressed trends not only close at hand but also globally. Moreover, it has also mirrored the rigors of research methodologies by developing new relationships with data-gathering analytics. That has enabled HR to present and display the patterns of workforce behavior and skills with greater precision and accountability. Although that partnership with technology was matched in every division, what is unique is the HR integration of research findings with data-tracking technology and systems. If the advocacy of workforce centrality is to be recognized and valued, hard evidence and metrics must be the persuading means.

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THE HR–TECH INTERFACE

The development and evaluation of managed work basically coincides with the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The farm was family based. Elders passed on their horticultural skills to younger members. But the production of goods and services was guild based. The apprenticeship system fit into a hierarchy. Certification was conferred by the master practitioner, occasionally in written form. In fact, in some religions and cultures today, novices are still educated and certified through the same ritual of guided mastery. Gurus and Zen masters retain their ancient appeal and power. But the industrial economy changed virtually everything. Degrees were suddenly required to certify competence. Even subspecialties needed certificates. Training became ubiquitous. These days middle managers are trained as supervisors, workers as team members. Information technology and new data systems now routinely manage and define workforce performance. Coincidental with the emergence of this modern culture of work management 25

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and measurement was the gradual appearance of the work specialist, the human resource professional. And even that nomenclature has taken on a new importance: human capital has replaced human resources to signify an importance equal to that of financial resources. In short, nearly a hundred years of transformations of how work goals and processes are conceived, managed, and evaluated have taken place. But perhaps the key transformation is in the focus on measurement and its conversion from observation to documentation, from anecdotal review to statistical rigor. How that occurred and what its principal stages were require a brief historical analysis as the context for understanding the current roles of HR and its versions of evaluation.

HR HISTORICAL HIGHLIGHTS The first development occurred in 1911 when Frederick Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management. For the first time, work was conceived as a task to be managed in detail. To demonstrate the value of such rigor, Taylor provided supervisors in the steel industry with extensive time-and-motion efficiency studies. In the process, Taylor concluded that the apprenticeship system of work preparation was inefficient and unproductive. It consisted of a series of miniature fiefdoms tyrannically presided over and monopolized by master craftsmen, who resisted all efforts for work to be managed and evaluated by anyone other than themselves. Instead Taylor proposed that all work be viewed scientifically and analyzed into tasks, and then those different job parts became separate jobs for which employees could be trained and evaluated. Scientific management marked the end of the guild system and imparted to the assembly line the kind of tight sequence and fusion of time and task necessary for improving and measuring productivity. Time-efficient studies represented a major challenge to existing HR professionals. They required a new relationship between engineering and psychology, between measurement and motivation.

The HR–Tech Interface

They also required a more analytical approach to task definition and spurred the development of job descriptions. Above all, they tied the effectiveness of scientific management to company training, which then became for the first time a domain of HR. Some of the excesses of this singular approach were satirized by Charlie Chaplin in his classic film Modern Times (1936), which was subtitled The Tyranny of Time. But what Taylor signaled was measurement as the new absolute of performance. Indeed, all subsequent academic programs preparing future HR professionals required a core course in tests and measurements. The next major stage occurred after World War II, led by W. Edwards Deming. Although he acknowledged Taylor’s work and reaffirmed the value of time as a measure of efficiency, Deming pointed out that what was missing was a focus on quality. What was the value of producing products quickly if they were shoddy? Deming was aware of engineering obsolescence. He knew that Ford himself had asked his designers to tell him which part gave out first. Then he ordered that all other parts be built to last no longer, so as to stimulate the purchase of new cars. Deming did not advise his clients, the Japanese automakers, to manufacture a car that would last forever; he advised them to make a car whose quality would be the source of its longevity. Moreover, Deming developed a new means of ensuring and measuring that quality, which he called statistical process controls. Continuing the tradition of Taylor, Deming insisted that objective and constant records of progress be compiled but now focused on specific quality goals. That alone provided what all leaders and managers wanted: quality control of process and outcome. Indeed, what subsequently emerged was the Japanese passion for incremental quality improvement. Every worker at every stage of the manufacturing process was expected to identify ways of improving quality, ways of reducing steps, or both. When both reinforced each other, Taylor and Deming were fused. But Deming did not stop with quality measurement. He invaded the HR area with his famous fourteen points. The major one called

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for driving fear out of the workplace. Quality products required a quality environment. Workers intimidated and dominated by bullying bosses do not produce quality or incremental improvements. Cultural paternalism coupled with traditional commitment to lifetime employment made Japan receptive, a fertile soil for Deming’s philosophy of the humane workplace. Only with the subsequent success and competition of Japanese industry did Deming’s ideas take hold in the United States and again find their way into the academic HR curriculum. By then his notions took the form of TQM—Total Quality Management—and its updated version, Six Sigma. What powered the significant jumps in Japanese productivity in the postwar period was the relentless pursuit of quality as the supreme form of worker motivation. Benchmarking (also introduced by Deming) established the key points for measuring quality improvement and identifying best practices. Finally, his advocacy for the workforce led him to describe and measure work cultures as they emerged in Japan as models of quality environments and of worker empowerment. The net result was a dramatic increase not only in the complexity of the HR function but also in the range of its expertise. In addition to the knowledge of psychology and the behavioral sciences, HR professionals had to master and apply statistical analysis and the principles of scientific management. On top of that, to be effective, task differentiation had to precede training, which in turn also had become a new responsibility for HR. In the process, HR attained a newly pervasive and persuasive importance and visibility throughout the entire company. But while HR’s articulation and implementation of Taylor and Deming was taking place, two new paradigms of work management appeared. Norbert Wiener and Jay Forrester, both of MIT, can be paired because both advanced the notion that everything, natural or manmade, is a system. Much of systemic behavior is cybernetic in nature, in that parts of any system are involved constantly in elaborate feedback exchanges. In fact, Wiener claimed that a machine

The HR–Tech Interface

that changes its responses based on feedback is a machine that learns. That perception served as the basis for the notion of artificial intelligence and (looking even further into the future) for the prospect of the fusion of human and machine intelligence. Forrester linked systems dynamics with the information revolution. All complexity, he claimed, can be understood and rendered in systemic terms. Whether the subject is the human body, a manufacturing plant, or urban traffic, it houses an invisible series of relationships of its parts, which can be modeled. But to test the validity of a model requires extensive and reliable data. When Dennis Meadows and Jay Forrester produced their global simulation model, their major concern was not only the design of the model but also the availability and reliability of data to test its systemic nature. In other words, it was the capacity of the computer not only to generate the data needed to run the parts of the system but also to complete computations previously too complicated or time-consuming that provided systems dynamics with the equivalent of Taylor’s time-and-motion studies and Deming’s statistical process controls. It became increasingly possible to trace the circle of cause and effect animated by systems dynamics and cybernetic feedback. Data managed such new complexities and also offered the prospect of predictability. In short, the legacy of Wiener and Forrester is not only the notion that all work relationships are systemic and symbiotic, but also that they can be tracked, documented, and ultimately directed by information technology.

METRICS AND SOFTWARE ASSESSMENT SYSTEMS This brings the evolution to the present. The current work scene displays a nearly total emphasis on the application of data to workforce management and evaluation. Indeed, its extent has in effect structured a new and permanent HR–tech interface. Although the contributions of Taylor, Deming, Wiener, and Forrester still inform

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and guide that current partnership, the use of workforce information technology has restored or newly granted HR strategic importance and participation in the major leadership decisions of companies. What forms that new indispensability has taken may be suggested by the range of five developments, all involving information technology. • Software has been developed to totally track and document the productivity of all work performance. It can be individually as well as divisionally applied and extracted. Performance evaluation is thus constant, historical, ongoing, and instant. Aggregated upward, it can profile total company performance at any given time. Using benchmarks of both past and present performance, the tracking is contextual. It can thus be disaggregated to pinpoint and test the individual impacts of leadership, training, incentives, or any intervention on productivity. In short, it offers management by the numbers. Taylor would be in heaven. • Systems have been designed to micromanage. Competencies and skills for every job have been compiled on both an individual and divisional basis. Most recently, the list has been expanded to include team competencies. This system supports the analysis of two kinds of linkages: first, the identification of what competencies and skills most support significant increases in productivity, and second, the extent to which they are aligned with company goals. Data generated here is designed to be the basis for corrective intervention by management and training. • Software has emerged to trace and evaluate degrees of interoperability between individuals, teams, and divisions. This focus is driven by research, which has shown that gains in productivity are greater between divisions than within divisions. As a result, interpersonal skills can function as interstructural skills. Both affect the extent and quality of work outcomes. Thus, to the traditional work competencies are now added the measurement of social styles. Tracking the degree to which interpersonal skills

The HR–Tech Interface

drive and support productivity is not only a management tool, it also provides HR with data profiles for interviewing and hiring applicants with the kind of strong interpersonal skills desired and needed by each company. • Training and reskilling of workforce competencies has become a major expenditure. Over a hundred companies maintain their own corporate universities. Millions are spent each year on university tuition. With such expenditures increasing, chief financial officers want documentation of the capacity of training to increase productivity before approving budget requests. As a result of this call for accountability, company learning management systems have had to build in or embed follow-up tracking systems to measure the effectiveness of the training at increasing productivity, profitability, and quality. Once again the language of persuasion is data. • To support the decision-making process at all levels, a comprehensive master visualizer was required. That led to the development of data-driven and -rendered dashboards. Like physical control panels, dashboards at any given moment provide a series of statistical stills or summaries of the status of everything in the system. All is poised for daily review in the service of three critical functions: corrective action, proactive positioning, and strategic decisions to abort or change direction. To be sure, dashboards are displays, not decisions. They require the overlays of company vision and mission, bottom-line priorities, and above all future initiatives and trends. But the dynamics of these factors can be accommodated and defined by software designed to facilitate the construction of dashboards for strategic decision making and planning. Indeed, new systems in the wings can activate dashboards and scorecards to produce simulated decisions and plans according to a series of customized contingencies. But data and documentation again determine which of those science-fictional scenarios become persuasive science fact.

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This list is far from exhaustive; in fact, it would change daily. I will propose some new electronic adaptations for recruitment later in these pages. But if all the founding forerunners were alive today, they would applaud the capacity of workforce data systems to bring new mastery to the measurement and control of quality performance.

HR ADVOCACY OF DISTRIBUTED METRICS The temptation is to claim that all these new domains reestablish the importance of HR. But that would be self-serving bravado, missing a subtler and more critical point. The mastery of measurement systems and their multiple linkages to company goals is not a monopoly of HR but an across-the-board general and generic competency required of all. The specific role of HR is to expand its advocacy of the workforce by not only embracing this new form of accountability but also insisting on its company-wide dissemination. Information and data sharing must be available at all levels for its value to be appreciated—and to minimize the paranoia inspired by thoughts of Big Brother. Transparency must be welcomed as self-knowledge. Data potentially makes everyone a manager, especially a self-manager. Continuous improvement is inescapable and must be applied to both the job and the jobholder. The transformation of the former is in the hands of the latter. Data empowers. It must be used to stir individual and interpersonal growth. The key HR orientation is that every individual is unfinished and that the future of all data tracking serves to record and to celebrate the realization of individual potential. The additional value of focusing on HR is role change. It has had to reconfigure itself. As a result, it may offer a new managerial model common to all professionals. Specifically, every HR specialist now has to be a generalist too. Information technology and data measurement must become the common means to HR ends. In addition, outward identity now has to become interpersonally defined. Management is a constant crossover and bridging activity.

The HR–Tech Interface

Expertise must minister to the whole by expressing itself in the common language of data measurement. In this way, companywide strategic decisions are shaped by aggregation—by multiple contributions at all levels. Data helps ensure that the big picture rules. Internal negotiation for larger pieces of the pie no longer follows traditional or familiar allocations but is a transparent process dominated by metrics.

COMMENTARY To be effective as the advocate of workforce centrality, the HR professional must combine and align the macro and the micro, mission and measurement. Work environments and cultures must be scientifically and statistically rendered, measured, and documented. As a hybrid, HR has to interface human capital and information technology. That way the realization of worker potential can be granted an avenue, and the documentation of continuous improvement can affirm and reflect that faith and investment. Indeed, ultimately it is the task of HR not only to advocate but also to deliver the performance yields of data documentation. No one can be left out of the information loop, least of all managers. But they too are in motion. The task of supporting managers and supervisors to accomplish the formidable task of documentation is compounded and contingent on its being built into and defining managerial transformation. Each will have to play catchup with the other.

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4

HR SUPPORT OF EMERGING MANAGER-LEADERS

At a recent Conference Board annual meeting titled “Enterprise Learning Strategies,” one of the sessions was devoted to middle managers. Its content and focus were shaped by surveys of CEOs who collectively agreed that “in every change initiative, one of the biggest stumbling blocks is middle managers . . . who frequently resist change,” and it presented various strategies CEOs have developed for enabling their middle managers to become change facilitators. CEOs’ application of such correctives rests on the larger juxtaposition of the concepts of leadership and management. The comparison always favors the former and may well have achieved permanent status as a cultural icon, having been confirmed by so many leadership experts. Table 2 gives a typical overview. Little wonder that everyone on the corporate ladder aspires to be a leader and that books on leadership are regularly best sellers. But perhaps the contrasts between leaders and managers are too 35

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TA B LE 2 • CO NT R A S T S B E T WE E N M A N AG E RS A N D LE A D E RS GOALS

MANAGERS

LEADERS

Direction

Planning

Vision

Alignment

Controlling boundaries

Creating shared cultures

Relationships

Focus on objects

Focus on people

Role

Boss

Coach

Outcomes

Maintain stability

Create change

severe. Is the unequivocal and unqualified superiority of leadership justified? Is the comparison a balanced analysis or a loaded design to make leaders look good at the expense of managers? Besides, are we comparing apples to apples? Most serious of all, by maintaining such an absolute juxtaposition, are we not also distorting the roles of both leaders and managers?

LEADERS VERSUS MANAGERS As the construct goes, leaders and managers display some primary differences. The first represents excess in two directions. Leaders become singular saviors; managers, everyday practitioners. As a result, expectations are apportioned and adjusted accordingly. Deification of leaders is justified by their monopoly on vision. Managers have to be content with mission. A more nagging problem is development. How do aspiring CEOs outgrow the stigmatizing limitations of being managers? Often, they do not. Many are unable to delegate responsibility to others or may see themselves as relinquishing their power by doing so. Then, too, fixing rigid profiles of these positions may obscure the transformation of both roles, especially that of managers.

HR Support of Emerging Manager-Leaders

Finally, when such changes do occur, how are they known and promulgated? Who takes the lead in noting, documenting, and communicating such transformations? Typically HR does. But now through its partnerships, its perceptions and analysis have become more pervasive and persuasive. The alliance with research provides objective confirmation and industry-wide authority. Its interface with metrics also tracks the larger pattern of role and goal change that exceeds the parameters of existing job descriptions. That immediately activates the intervention of revision. Talent recruitment has to reflect current practices. Indeed, as the official keeper of job descriptions, HR is in a unique position to serve as the company-wide monitor of virtually all workforce change. Such positioning generates multiple HR interventions. The most obvious—as noted—is the need to keep updating job information if recruitment is to match reality, a task that essentially remains a work in progress. HR must be sensitive to and aware of the often difficult transitions of transformation, and also of what support these transitions may require if they are to take hold, be wired in place, and finally gain acceptance as a new productive norm. Above all, HR has to communicate the nature, direction, and degree of workforce change to senior executives and planners as well as to training directors. Both need to know the current capacity of the workforce if their decisions on new initiatives and training support are to be shaped not by old assumptions but by the new dynamics of what managers are actually accomplishing. Nothing is more demoralizing than the ignorance of such capacity. And nothing could be more myopic and counterproductive than to fail to factor into future plans and training agendas such cutting-edge workforce developments.

HR ALLIANCE WITH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Speaking out for job change acquires greater credibility when HR is allied with research and information technology. Internal obser-

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vation of in-house best work practices is tested and verified by the research literature and the confirmation of industry-wide developments. The calipers used for performance management may be too narrow to pick up larger and more qualitative work transformations. Indeed, many HR researchers themselves have undertaken the development of more inclusive scorecard and dashboard systems to reflect the linkage of role and goal change. Above all, all this has resulted in a closer, often more interdependent and supportive relationship between HR and middle managers, especially as it affects talent acquisition and retention. HR provides hiring managers with a window and avenue to the recruiting world. Collaboratively recrafting job descriptions, HR and managers also develop the hiring criteria and interview protocols. Above all, HR’s knowledge of the job pool and the conditions that suggest the need to tap executive search firms allows HR to function as a coach and consultant. Critical to the efficacy of such a partnership is the acceptance by middle managers not only of the analysis and documentation of workforce changes but also of the changes’ driving creed—doing whatever it takes to get the job done. And HR’s credibility with managers rests on describing the new performance behaviors of managers based on in-house observations, confirmed and amplified by the research literature. In effect, HR certifies the essential drivers of managerial transformation.

DIMENSIONS OF MANAGER-LEADERS An examination of the job description of managers reveals ten new dimensions: • Information gathering. Managers must scrutinize and maintain

sources of organizational knowledge by developing information interfaces and internal networks. • Market competition. Managers must observe, be knowledge-

able about, and communicate the behaviors and reactions of competitive firms.

HR Support of Emerging Manager-Leaders

• Holistic strategies. Typically, managers are given the task of

introducing and implementing the company-wide systems selected by CEOs or senior staff. In the process, implementation must be distributed divisionally across the board, and the chain of command both immediately above and below has to be adjusted. Finally, such overall coordination is essential to managing the total impact on the entire organization and its decision-making process. • Strategic monitoring. Because of volatile environments, mana-

gerial monitoring has become an important ally and adjunct of strategic planning. Aligned, both serve as indicators not only of company direction but also of restructuring. • Technology supervision. Managers are increasingly also tech-

nology managers whose task is to link and optimize information to achieve operational success. • Consumer-centric responsibility. Managers are responsible for

creating, implementing, and aligning customer relationship management (CRM) systems and applications across divisions. • Resource optimization. Managers oversee enterprise resource

planning (ERP), which is a shared management tool used across the board to optimize both internal and external resources accessible at an unlimited number of points to achieve higher levels of productivity. • Financial thread accountability. Managerial awareness of and

contributions to financial and accounting processes are driven by cost-control and cost-saving goals. • E-commerce linkage. Managerial development and engineer-

ing of an e-commerce value chain is used to promote market adaptability and agility. • Success overlays. Managers need to identify and communicate

industry-level knowledge of critical success factors (CSFs), especially those of innovation, as defined in the literature of best practices.

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Although not all these roles are assumed by all managers at all times or in all contexts, it can be argued that some do even more. Most companies can (and often do) operate without leaders, but they would have difficulty without the managerial leadership of these ten tasks. The most obvious HR intervention is to rewrite managers’ job descriptions to include the ten competencies. But lest this become merely a strategic and mechanical add-on list requiring constant updating, it should be accompanied by an analysis of the dynamics driving the changes. In particular, two factors need to be articulated. The first is to postulate emergence of a new hybrid—the manager as leader. Indeed, the success of many companies in sustaining annual increases in productivity year after year has largely been brought about not by CEOs but by manager-leaders. The second factor is to explore and explain the dynamic relationship between goals and roles that accounts not only for the emergence of the manager-leader but also includes the entire workforce—in today’s world, virtually everyone needs to be a leader.

INTERPLAY OF GOALS AND ROLES The starting point is the job description and in particular its three key descriptors: goals, roles, and their fusion. But because the focus is on change, the three need to be rewritten as morphing goals, emerging roles, and the resultant restructuring of the goals and roles of the position, in this case of manager-leaders. All three exist in tandem and require a brief reexamination of the basic nature of the relationship between goals and roles. Not all goals are changing, even now. Traditionally, goals in job descriptions were stable, explicit, and enumerated. The tasks they described, in fact, appropriately reflected the job title. But gradually (sometimes precipitously), some fixed managerial goals have appeared to develop an elusive life and speed of their own.

HR Support of Emerging Manager-Leaders

Workers and managers have increasingly found themselves called on or required to go beyond the parameters of their job descriptions and to accept and embrace new kinds of tasks and assignments. But the remarkable achievement is that even though all these new goals have exceeded job description provisions, they somehow have gotten done. And because such higher productivity has been accomplished, even with downsizing, we have generally failed to ask why. It is an understandable sin of analytical omission. Productivity targets have been met, quality maintained, customers satisfied, market share retained, and so on. All that has been needed has been to maintain the pressure of competition and performance improvement. But the argument here is that competitive demands will increase—and if performance is to be maintained, we need to know the dynamics behind current success. Specifically, what drives change is not so much explicit and definable objectives as goal-role reciprocity—the interplay between task and talent. Traditionally, the relationships between managerial goals and managerial roles were those of alignment. Spelling out such equivalents was in fact the function of job descriptions. But as an unexpected consequence, stretch goals compelled role changes. Managers regularly had to multitask, exceed the parameters of their job descriptions, embrace and implement new systems, and above all stir and train the rank and file to do the same. This unnoticed and pervasive series of transformations was based on the special, dynamic, and reciprocal relationship that exists between morphing goals and changing roles. All stretch goals carry within them in embryonic form the roles required to accomplish those goals. The goals and roles thus constantly evolve in tandem. Conventional goals require conventional managers. Morphing goals require manager-leaders. Managers had no choice but to step up to the challenge, exceed their job parameters, and close the gap between emerging goals and moving targets—in short, to do whatever it took to get the job done. Managers had to move up the

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chain of command out of necessity, not desire for aggrandizement. The result is that they now inhabit both greater horizontal and vertical extent across the organization chart. In the process, the vision of distributed leadership proposed by Robert Greenleaf may have found its realization in the emergence of manager-leaders.

COMMENTARY HR did not create the new hybrid of manager-leader. Circumstances and initiative did. But its recognition as shaping company success requires HR analysis and documentation if it is to contribute to continuous company-wide survival and success. In a sense, HR’s alliance with research and the documentation of performance prepared the way for its current pivotal role as the supreme monitor and articulator of workforce change and potential capacity. By coinciding its position with evolving best practices, HR thereby joined the workforce at the future’s edge and became a spokesperson for a new alliance—with innovation.

C H A P T E R

5

WORKFORCE INNOVATION AND COMPANY CULTURE

The relentless and never-ending drive to increase productivity enough to offset the economic advantages of global competitors has led to the absolute endorsement of innovation. Incremental gains, though still valued, are not enough. What is sought is the extra boost that comes from the creative reduction of steps, the design of self-changing structures, the discovery of not just new ways of doing business but new businesses, and more. It is also clear that the sources of innovation have to be multiple. Like leadership, innovation must be distributed, accessible, pervasive. It cannot be the sole monopoly of professionals in R&D or of elite divisions. It must reach down to the rank and file on the factory floor. For innovation to work its magic, it must be total. In short, it must be company culture. Easier said than done. Such a culture has to engage and resolve a troublesome romantic notion: everyone is creative (or at least everyone can learn to be creative). Even if that were true, other 43

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formidable obstacles exist: narrow education and training, belittling and often punitive work environments and bosses, the new insecurity of downsizing and outsourcing, and finally the omnipresent requirement for metrics to measure effectiveness. Indeed, the submission of a substantial training budget focused solely on acrossthe-board creativity would have difficulty getting past and persuading any chief financial officer of its value to the bottom line.

INNOVATION STRATEGIES Overcoming such misgivings on the part of the CFO requires a number of strategies, not the least of which is the commitment of company culture to practice what it preaches—to become itself innovative. In one strategy, integrative metrics, measurement must be of a piece with what it is measuring. It should not take place separately or after the fact. Rather, it needs to be embedded in and shadow the training. The net result is a seamless integration of training content and its documentation. Integration and innovation thus quickly emerge as partners. Indeed, sometimes integration itself is innovation. A second strategy is to carry over the alignment to instructional design. In the past, stirring creativity was a separate and singular focus. Although workshop examples and exercises were often heady and stimulating, the relationships and linkages to work realities and routines tended to be nonexistent, weak, or left to individual applications. But current instructional design is less casual and more causal. Innovation is totally aligned with performance: it is built into and integrated with overall efforts to reskill employees, to upgrade performance goals and expectations, and to support company goals. Available across the board, it is thus a less costly form of piggybacking and supports the collective expectations and definitions of an evolving culture. Another integrative strategy links past and present learning in an innovative way. All new learning has to be prefaced with unlearning—

Workforce Innovation and Company Culture

with a systematic uncovering, exposing, and correcting of old assumptions that may preclude new or divergent thinking. Fashioning such square-one positions also serves to demystify creativity as the monopoly of the genius or the geek. To further support innovation as an everyday and everyone option, more comfortable and familiar language is helpful. The “innovation quotient” perhaps should become an “idea quotient.” Instead of the dramatic eureka moment, the focus should be on ideas that are less intimidating, more available, and still able to serve as thresholds to innovation. A totally new approach is to apply the findings of brain research and multiple intelligences. Both are changing the standard question from “How smart am I?” to “How am I smart?” But perhaps the most elaborate (and hence seldom undertaken) innovative approach is to examine the entire organizational structure from top to bottom, from recruitment to retention, and thereby inventory the extent to which innovation is encouraged or deflected, and whether at its root and branch the company supports and is itself an innovative culture. Such a comprehensive survey would also sum up basic assumptions about human potential and whether it is perceived as a given or amenable to an integration of nature and nurture. (A profile of the characteristics of such an innovative company culture is shown in Table 3, at the end of this chapter.) While all these strategies are necessary to clear the way for stirring creativity, perhaps nothing is more persuasive than examples of breakthroughs, especially those that illustrate the capacity of company cultures is shown in Table 3, employ innovative means to achieve innovative ends. In addition, lest expectations be fixed only on spectacular magic bullets or wands, the examples offered should not be sensational, exotic, or pie in the sky. Rather, applications should be immediate, urgent, and needs based. If they illustrate the old adage that desperation is the mother of invention, the desperation at least should reflect current and familiar difficulties. Organizations tend to be so overwhelmed and beset by challenges that they are often exhausted. Corporate energy is low; what

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remains is constantly drained away by firefighting efforts. Crisis management—a contradiction in terms—becomes a norm; planning a luxury of the past. The call for multitasking may really describe a juggling act in which balls are regularly dropped and even fall between the cracks. What is desperately needed is to reduce the turbulence—to carve out some peace and quiet so that once more work can be managed and professionals can exercise their intelligence. In short, a new and different need has surfaced: managing effects instead of causes—problem impacts and not problems.

PROBLEMS AND TROUBLE MANAGEMENT Of course, ideally, problems should be solved. But problems are so common and they are often so persistent, tireless, and relentless that they may appear intractable and thus unsolvable. The attempt to address them dissipates resources, scatters attention, and consumes energy. Creating some measure of relief from such a grind would provide a welcome opportunity to regroup. In short, what is needed is damage control. It often involves using troubleshooters to function not so much as problem solvers but as trouble finders and trouble pacifiers—in short, trouble managers. The conventional wisdom is that if you keep doing what you have always done, you should not be surprised if you always get the same results. But now uncertainty has upped the ante. Now if you do what you have always done, you may not even get what you have always gotten. Not only have the rules shifted; the game itself has changed. The result is that CEOs and senior managers, in addition to all their familiar positive, creative, and forward-looking initiatives, are also asking that HR provide them with something new and negative—trouble-avoidance insurance, a pacifying SWAT team. This request poses a unique team challenge for a number of reasons. It should not operate within any one existing division but be cross-divisional. The range of expertise would have to reflect

Workforce Innovation and Company Culture

the whole company. Participants would remain in their present assignments but essentially be on loan. When team projects were concluded, members would return to their regular full-time jobs. Limiting the members of the team to local talent, even the best available, also may be inadequate. Ideally, such a team should be global. If so, when and how could its members meet? Then, too, why would anyone volunteer? What would be the incentive? Members get no extra hazard pay. They are not singled out for special praise or distinction. With no fanfare they silently slip back into their regular jobs. In fact, they may have to play catch-up for the first few days.

PROFILES OF VIRTUAL TEAMS The innovative solution is to use volunteer virtual teams wired together by audio and video teleconferencing and Web-based communication networks. That basically solves almost all problems of logistics as well as the range of expert participation and of interaction. But what is missing is a shared methodology to structure team exchange. What seems appropriate to the task at hand and also has enjoyed some history of success is risk analysis and risk avoidance and reduction applied now to problem impacts. Other methodological adaptations and interfaces would be encouraged and developed by team members. Thus, Total Quality Management, ISO 9000, Six Sigma, and similar techniques would serve as additional bridges and in effect surround the task with a rich and enhanced series of approaches.

One Virtual Team in Action The initial team exchange produced three basic goals for the team: help the company get out of trouble; prevent more trouble from happening; anticipate trouble before it becomes trouble. The next step was to identify the

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essential orientation of problem spotters. In the process what surfaced were performance qualities often far removed from those the company officially looked for in its initial hires. The immediate yield for HR was recognition of the need for an alternative set of guidelines for hiring and retaining talent. Again by consensus, the team came up with the following profile for all its members, who must be: • Failure-oriented thinkers. They must operate on the assumption that if something can go wrong, it will. They thus must be chronic worriers and accept problem dislocation and debilitation not as an exception but as a norm. • Anticipators. They must view the future as the enemy disguised as a friend. In addition, the group cannot wait for anything to unfold. They must be time travelers who visit the future before it has a chance to arrive and threaten the present. • Caretakers. They are almost parental in their capacity to offer protection. They all have to behave like secret service agents protecting the president. • Rescuers. They always have emergency kits and supplies. They have to know where all the exits are. • Survivalists. They are basic minimalists. They use string, spit, scraps of wire. No high tech, just fast, essential, portable problem solving. Nothing fancy or dazzling. Square-one stuff. Quick and safe ways to get in and out. Escape artists. Initial team orientation took the standard form of using survival simulations (crashing in the Arctic, desert scenarios, boating disasters, and the like). But in the process a unique issue surfaced and was debated. What is the chain of command? Who do they report to? Because of its scope and focus, the team believed it should report only to the CEO or to very senior management. They perceived themselves essentially as an advisory arm of the executive level, where problem intelligence and its management should be shared, valued, and ultimately acted on. But such a precedent might disturb the general chain of command. They proposed an innovative compromise. All the team members would establish and maintain separate two-way relationships with their divisional head or senior staff. Debriefing would occur regularly. Equally as important, feedback would be shared with the team. That would serve as a reality check. It would correct the team’s natural

Workforce Innovation and Company Culture

tendency to be solely inward facing and self-referential. The group’s collective identity would not be allowed to be independent of or at variance with existing structures and territorial divisions. But perhaps the most important benefit of surrounding the team with access to a constellation of authority is that such required communication brought team recommendations closer to the next step of implementation. Above all, if the causes of the problem were found to be structural or systemic, that was the only appropriate level for corrective action. Did trouble management work? Yes and no. Sometimes, the findings were like a hot potato that no one wanted to handle. Or they disappeared by being referred for application from one department to another, swept under not one but many rugs. Occasionally, they were farmed out and subjected to the analysis of other specialists: attorneys, risk managers, communication specialists. But trouble management did succeed in buying time, carving out quiet places, and holding at bay the overwhelming impacts of problem proliferation and intensity. Most important, a new form of productivity was born: that of problem management.

Implications Pausing at this point, we might reflect on and evaluate at least three summary leveraging points that address the relationship between breakthroughs and the nature and interventions of an innovative company culture. The most obvious is focusing on roots rather than branches—on real, urgent, and recurrent situations of problem paralysis severe enough to compromise and affect everyone’s performance. Adopting such a caretaking role on behalf of all also serves as a no-fault form of exoneration. Professional limitations or failures are not the issue. The villain is generic and situational. Indeed, for such advocacy to exemplify and enjoy greater credibility, another strategy is not to summon outside consultants. Outsiders should not be a substitute for tapping in-house talent. Besides, to encourage across-the-board innovative problem solving, managers need to step back and grant those insiders selected the autonomy of task definition and outcomes even to the point of benign abandonment.

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Sometimes, innovation is itself innovative and produces unexpected creative offshoots. Indeed, innovation has the capacity to be not only reverberating but also retroactive—to move forward and backward at the same time. Troubleshooting teams often have been converted into advance early warning groups, applying their unique integration of multiple methodologies to future problem management. In the process, they routinely pursue alternative directions. If the organization turns right, the team goes left. Managing the difference of the future may thus require managing the ambiguity and multiplicity of not only decision making but problem solving. But most important, tapping internal consultants not only generates alternative and creative ways to manage current operations and structures, it also yields alternative workforce profiles. Specifically, the five qualities of problem managers itemized earlier perhaps need to supplement the traditional qualities of problem solvers. Innovation may thus require HR to value and seek to hire the artful dodger as both the ultimate problem manager and problem solver. But innovation always combines retrospect with prospect. As a result, it compels company cultures to return to and reexamine the roots exposed by innovation. The organization is thus provided with a guided opportunity to revisit its square-one assumptions. Although in the process many essentials surface, what is common to all innovation is that it is basically a mode of inquiry. Thus doing whatever it takes to get the job done requires not just work commitment but work intelligence—not just working harder but working smarter. An innovative culture requires backing up not just to the way we think, but to the way we know and question. That in turn requires identifying not only preferred and optimal modes of inquiry, as a company-wide vision, but also the role models that exemplify and embody such modes of inquiry. Already noted and tapped are the modes and role models of troubleshooters and proactive worriers. Indeed, these problem managers not only articulate and define a new mode of inquiry,

Workforce Innovation and Company Culture

they also integrate it creatively with other methodologies. By also fusing modes and role models of inquiry, they surface other examples that offer the same integration and promise of breakthroughs.

NEW INNOVATIVE AND GENERATING ROLES Although the range and variety of such inquiry models and roles may be extensive, three examples are illustrative and defining: the workforce as researchers, as students of the business, and as thirddegree forensic practitioners.

The Workforce as Researchers This is not as unfamiliar a stretch as might initially appear. Typically, employees hedge their bets about applying for or remaining at a position by doing research. To be sure, their approach does not— and should not—follow the classic research model or employ the standard and elaborate critical apparatus. But no matter how primitive or partial, research is a powerful inquiry mode that pushes the need to know—not only to know more but also to know more differently, to multiply and diversify the sources of knowledge acquisition. The researcher thus builds on and increases both the range and depth of the knowledge worker. Above all, by virtue of exploring additional sources of information and of inquiry systems, research can provide a key threshold to identifying the need for innovation. Research typically backs the researcher into the proverbial corner and begins the process of emptying and exhausting nondivergent and in-the-box ways out. The double trick is to prevent such analysis from becoming paralysis and to forestall the temptation to settle for the familiar success of incremental gains. Consequently, research training can serve as a structured form of desperation that still serves as the mother of invention. As a result, a research-focused workforce is primed for innovation.

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The Workforce as Students of the Business Although obsession is seldom regarded as appropriate, especially given the need to balance work and family, it like research can serve both as an ally of innovation and as an important commitment of company culture. But here the emphasis is not so much on information gathering as on information sharing. The company version is to share all so that all employees in effect become obsessive students of the business. Companies already use simulation board games to introduce and spell out the internal financial flow process. But perhaps the most important value of such a commitment is its diagnostic power, allowing a company to identify and investigate why information in fact is not shared or is shared in limited circles. Such inquiry would find that information is generally imprisoned in hierarchical structures to such an extent that what one knows defines who and where one is. Those in the know endure the martyrdom of their greater knowledge base and see their role and importance as restricting rather than enhancing knowledge dissemination and exchange. But that also limits their range and stimulation of challenge and thereby of creativity. Of all the obstacles facing the shaping of an innovative culture, none is more critical than X-raying company structure to identify information blockage and deflection. Facilitating rather than impeding information flow would benefit by being anchored in the inquiry mode and model of the student of the business. A good place to start might be the obsessive behavior of CEOs who live, breathe, and eat the business. Failing that, the model of the entrepreneur might suffice. In either case, a students-of-the-business workforce is poised for innovation.

The Workforce as Third-Degree Forensic Practitioners A new mode and role model of inquiry has surfaced dramatically and prolifically in the media but generally has not been recognized or applied as such. It is team-based forensics. Its information base

Workforce Innovation and Company Culture

is scientific, its team range minimally 180 and frequently 360 degrees, its interactions always interoperable. Research-driven and information rich, it also resembles and even exemplifies typical task force operations and thus affirms the collective power of teams to achieve breakthroughs. Equally important is its detective discovery pattern. Converting the focus of a brilliant and solitary Sherlock Holmes to that of the multiple talents of a forensic team, it invariably reenacts the classic drama of the dead end. The operating thesis fails. That inevitably requires going back to square one. Reformulation and redirection essentially define the collaborative creativity of the new team direction. In the process, previous accumulation of incremental knowledge is brought forward, but now freshly perceived by being fused with the new perceptual and conceptual focus. Solving the case is the equivalent of a breakthrough. By combining inquiry mode with team roles, this forensic model has the further value of paralleling, crossing over, or reinforcing that of the researcher and student of the business. The detective may thus be the ultimate artful dodger. As a way of summarizing at a glance, Table 3 provides a profile of what it would take for conventional company cultures to become innovative ones.

COMMENTARY Although the forms innovation may take are perhaps infinite, what is clear is that organizations can stir, stimulate, and structure its emergence. As Table 3 indicates, the options and approaches are many and reinforcing. The value of focusing on the centrality of the workforce is that it takes an organization to its operational core. It exposes its basic inquiry modes, information structures, problemsolving and decision-making processes, and performance expectations and measures. Such anatomical analysis of basic assumptions inevitably involves identifying work profiles for review and revision. The net result is the development of alternative work profiles.

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TA B LE 3 • C U LT U RE CO NVE RS I O N FAC TO RS

FACTOR

CONVENTIONAL CULTURES

INNOVATIVE CULTURES

Information

Impeding

Facilitating

Focus

Branch

Root

Structure

Pyramidal

Disaggregated

Leadership

Concentrated

Diffused

Work

Profiles defined

Evolving

Knowledge

Familiar

Discovered

Resources

Outsiders

Insiders

Productivity

Incremental

Out of the box

Team range

Divisional

Interoperable

Team management

Directed

Benign abandonment

Empowerment

Partial

Total

Evaluation

Blaming

No-fault

Training

Updating

Futurizing

When implemented through refocused training and recruitment, a new workforce driven by research, information totality, and team forensics begins to emerge and leave its collective mark on company culture. No partnership can match that between innovation and the workforce to provide the pervasive leverage and capacity to shape company culture into becoming, in turn, an agent of innovation. In this instance the chicken–egg problem contains its own happy solution.

C H A P T E R

6

HR’S ALLIANCE WITH SIMULATION

One of HR’s most important contributions to an organization is the knowledge and analysis of its workforce. HR monitors personnel patterns, functioning in effect as a workforce census. In the process, it reflects not only linkages of employee development to productivity but also any dramatic changes in workforce composition. For example, one important pattern is generational. Currently, four (sometimes five) generations coexist and overlap. The differentiation of Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y is critical because each cohort exhibits different generational values, expectations, and even work ethics. Thus, imposing one-size-fits-all training will inevitably fail and frustrate. In addition, other layers of differentiation have to be added, especially those of the changing distribution of racial and ethnic types. Specifically, different cultures evidence a preference not only for certain forms of communication but also for responses toward authority and initiative. Indeed, with the increasing globality of the workforce, such cultural distinctions 55

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have in effect defined the new range of diversity. But of late a surprising determiner of workforce difference has emerged in the games people play. Gaming is not a peripheral or exotic preoccupation—it further defines all census patterns. That means that all current sports, domestic and international, reflect current racial and ethnic distributions. Indeed, changes in societal makeup are often mirrored first in the composition of sports teams. In addition, gaming is also generational and thus provides a key entry point for understanding not only how different generations and cultures play but also how they think, learn, and work with others. Indeed, the younger end of the workforce shows a strong preference for gaming in general and video games in particular. This generational cohort has been raised in visually intense environments and learned through increasingly experiential means. They are thus prime targets for the application of serious games. Indeed, their future and that of gaming are not only of a piece but also reveal how deep-seated gaming is apt to be. Gaming is rooted in childhood. It is thus a profound repository of basic value preferences. In addition, child’s play is formative. It governs acceptance into and by the group. Being evaluated and then chosen as a member of a team is a critical experience of the pecking order. Managing both relationships and knowledge means that teaming is not only a socializing force but also a learning mode. Not surprisingly the gaming model has been tapped to build and develop the problem-solving ability of company teams. One of its favored versions is simulation. To understand that preference and to appreciate its endorsement by HR requires defining and exploring the dynamics and applications of simulation. At its core, simulation resembles an art form. Unlike traditional exploratory and explanatory modes, it is not predigested, predetermined, or preprocessed. Its surface and look are thus persuasively neutral, unbiased, and intriguing. Like its companion, scenario, simulation is a fictional and imaginative re-creation of people, events, and circumstances. But unlike novels or short stories, simulations are purposeful—they are crafted toward a chosen end or

HR’s Alliance with Simulation

outcome. To be sure, such goals fail if they are too obvious or insistent, or they surface prematurely. They need to be buried in the reality offered or they appear manipulative, subvert reality, and destroy the illusion. Poetry rightly has been defined as an imaginary garden containing a real toad. Verisimilitude must be honored. Indeed, in many ways the effectiveness of simulation as a learning and teaming tool is contingent on its seductive power to persuade users that it is in fact a real world and not indulgent fantasy, and further that it awaits, invites, and needs their entry and participation to be activated and consummated. Like all good art, it is intentionally incomplete and empowering.

THE DYNAMICS OF INVOLVEMENT The power of simulation lies in the dynamics of involvement. Simulation fuses play and learning, for example, and sugarcoats the pill of new knowledge. In addition to those advantages, simulation attractively structures participation in other ways. It is: • Challengingly dramatic • Experiential (learn by doing) • Hands-on and absorbing • Not boring, theoretical, or pedantic • Threatening but safe • Unarguable in its results, which carry over to the real world • Often surprising • Always revelatory

Simulation is a discovery process. It brings to the surface basic assumptions about self-capacity and sustaining relationships that ordinarily remain hidden. It can do so because it offers a reassuring safety net of illusion of art and play. But it also is exacting and exciting. It gets the adrenaline going to such an extent that misgivings

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are abandoned and the desire to compete, succeed, and win takes over and involvement becomes total. Although such dynamics define and sustain all simulations, the degree of variety and complexity of applications that simulation is able to accommodate further accounts for its range and endorsement by HR. One of the strengths of simulation is its capacity to render the whole in miniature. It is thus an ally of the big picture and of summarizing the macro in micro form. Thus, for example, to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of the flow of finances throughout an entire organization, board games can trace and simulate the money stream as it moves through and impacts the jobs of all the participants. By seeing the finances of the organization as a dynamic circulatory system, players emerge with an overall picture as well as a clear understanding of their own piece of the pie. A more ambitious version of this application fuses holistics with anticipation—the scenario of thinking ahead but at the same time moving the big picture forward so as to preserve that larger context and record the impacts of the future on company decisions. Here simulation may enlist scenario as it crosses over to resemble the creations of science fiction. Another key distinction of simulation is its focus on strategy. Characteristic of chess, this application of simulation endows every present choice with the seeds of the whole implicit range of subsequent moves. That requires investing every contemplated step with tactical positioning so that what follows is strategic sequencing— not a series of isolated or unrelated decisions. Video games, fast and furious as they are, structure this type of strategic thinking and learning. But they often do so singularly. Many of the strategic principles inherent in video games are more entrepreneurial than team based, more competitive than collaborative. But such attitudes may be desirable in their own right, as well as grist for the mill when transmuted into team aggressiveness. Indeed, it would not be far-fetched to characterize such simulations as war games using technology to practice the art of war.

HR’s Alliance with Simulation

GAMES AS STRATEGY In any case, here is a brief summary of some of the strategic options and positions that are posed and discovered by the players of typical video and computer games: • Remember that sacrifice is inevitable for long-term gain. • Be aware that excessive hostility always consumes valuable

resources. • Build quietly and slowly; don’t rattle cages. • Be ready to abort or disengage at any time. • Keep in mind that the short term is the first stage of the long

term. • Invest in and trust your fellow players. • Maintain mind over brute force. • Win without being vengeful. • Constantly review and revise the game plan. • Don’t box yourself in. • Develop backups and contingency plans. • Always keep your strategic options open.

Clearly, by putting participants in charge, simulation compels the problem-solving and decision-making process to be a strategic endgame. Winning or posting the highest score can become a way of signaling not only a strategic mind-set but also an effective leadership style and behavior. Winning is thus ultimately the equivalent of leading. But perhaps the most challenging issue serious games confront is that of uncertainty. Of course, that is not new. Uncertainty has always existed. But current versions are not just different in kind and scale—they are also more secretly and unpredictably connected. Indeed, the knowledge of such subtle or hidden linkages derived from system

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dynamics and computer analytics and metrics, while welcome, has also upped the ante. Are there more secrets? And are those not just undiscovered but undiscoverable? Uncertainty also has become a major object of study by forecasters and generated an impressive futuristic literature. In the process the inadequacy of current management tools has been exposed. As a result the problem is compounded. On one hand, we face the unprecedented and deep challenges of globality, technology, and unfettered competition. On the other hand, we are finding that the traditional strategic tools of market segmentation, value chain and factor analysis, and cashflow tracking generally seem to fall short of managing the complexity of uncertainty. But happily a series of consensus positions seems to be both emerging and converging to better manage uncertainty.

Managing Uncertainty The first consensus position is acceptance—acknowledging that uncertainty is in fact a new norm of all planning and decision making. Reducing uncertainty to zero is thus regarded as an illusion. There is no such thing as a surprise-free forecast. Wild cards always have to be included in the deck. Probability always has to partner with possibility. Most important, the approach does not seek risk elimination; instead it settles for risk reduction. That especially applies to the knowledge base of decision making. We can never know enough or accumulate enough data to guarantee the outcome. We must forsake the hubris of totality. Rather, the knowledge base now needs to be adjusted to and accepted as a mixture of the known (extrapolation), the unknown (trending), and the unknowable (surprise). Planners consequently have to be content with less than the whole. In short, a greater humility and respect for unpredictability strangely may make the increasing unpredictability more manageable. The value of simulations is to shift the implacable enemy of uncertainty into a more or less friendly adversary, which can spur inventive risk management.

HR’s Alliance with Simulation

Another contribution of simulation is to put in place a system of internal reality checks. This series of wake-up calls has to be built in at every step of the way, including just before launch. It functions as a chain of interventions that automatically stops the production line when quality is compromised. Above all, it facilitates and welcomes the perception that the emperor may not have any clothes on. Such checks and balances are not easily negotiated in a culture that is exclusively inward facing and inclined to value its management of uncertainty excessively. Traditionally, outside consultants and executive coaches could be counted on to bring a company up short before it went into the abyss. But a combination of cockiness and cost cutting has taken its toll and eliminated that perspective of valuing uncertainty and hearkening to minority opinions. There is thus a new need to follow and apply the pattern of distributing quality control correctives throughout the ranks and at every stage. Insiders have to be trained as outsiders. That may be the only way the enemy inside the gates can be granted the same importance and threat as the one outside the gates. Happily, simulation is one of the few ways such contrary views and voices can become the object of training. Indeed, inculcating such a perspective not only may provide more risk insurance, it may also enrich the problem-posing and solution process. Finally, simulation also can break down uncertainty into more manageable pieces. It is not unlike the typical challenge of motivational speakers: “How do you eat an elephant?” (The happy—and often thunderous—answer is “One bite at a time!”) Similarly, although simulations are generic, they can be customized. For example, privatization has created uncertainty and angst for a number of U.S. public utilities and government entities. Its international version is the conversion of state-run units into marketresponsive economies. In both instances, those in charge have to adapt to a more competitive environment and be newly judged by bottom-line profitability.

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Customized and granulized simulations can structure that transition effectively. They possess the unique rendering power to create and simulate the nature of the totally new world, and also to structure the operations of a different business model. They thus can bring to bear the power of macro-micro alignment while spelling out a larger paradigm shift in the details of day-to-day operational processes. For example, in one simulation an imaginary electric generation plant, initially nonprofit but subsequently for-profit, is created in skeletal form. Its operations are reassuringly familiar to all present managers, but it is different: efficiency now must be measured by profitability. Although such new measures would ultimately have to be applied across the board to all operations and personnel levels, the acclimation process is granulized by using a series of more focused and applied simulations.

Structuring Opportunities One customized version requires all managers and engineers to address the familiar issue of maintenance—but do so not only from the point of view of downtime but also that of cost saving. The net result is a maintenance game that provides all participants with structured opportunities to create and flesh out their new operational world. In the process, the accomplishments are many. This brief list provides some of the highlights: • A new cost definition of the role of maintenance exists. • Resource allocation becomes a collective decision. • The whole system must be rendered, which facilitates discover-

ing systemic breakdown patterns. • Quality and cost control have to be applied to maintenance. • Increased allocation of resources would be offset by less down-

time and increased revenues.

HR’s Alliance with Simulation

The maintenance simulation functions as a rite of passage. Not only does it gradually introduce a new operational reality, it also prepares the way for other customized versions to follow and for the transition to approach totality.

COMMENTARY Organizational re-creations and reinventions are made possible and enhanced by five essential principles that are common to all simulations. The first is holistics—imaging the whole so as to manage the system collectively and collaboratively. Second, returning to square one, raising to the surface buried assumptions, and redefining and reinventing all essential operations and roles. Third, investing problem solving and decision making with tactical and strategic next-step options. Fourth, accepting uncertainty not only as the new operational and data reality but as the ultimate spur of future creativity. Fifth, building an internal early warning system by empowering all levels of the workforce to participate in and critically review future choices and directions. Simulation embraces and empowers the workforce and strategically positions its contributions to bear on the future survival and growth of organizations. Given the extent of these benefits, it is not surprising that HR has endorsed simulation as the new global model for managing uncertainty and accommodating workforce diversity.

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TWO

PA R T

Redefinition of the HR Mission

The alliances and partnerships examined in Part One have separately and collectively granted HR a new lease on life. Its conversations and contributions now have a currency that reflects and recasts what is driving company-wide change. As a result, HR has positioned itself to confront not only the workforce challenges it is facing but also the larger prospect of the apparent decline of the United States as a major power and economy. That latter task has fallen in large part to HR because the possible loss of U.S. dominance is dramatized and mirrored directly by the present and future changes in the workforce. Recently U.S. News and World Report (March 27, 2006) asked five CEOs to project what the job market would be like in 2020. The replies showed nearly total agreement on the following issues:

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• Intense work competition will come from overseas. • Emulation of U.S. jobs and lifestyles will be a motivating force. • Globality will rule all markets and professional preparation. • Digitization of work will facilitate outsourcing. • Imitation will be supplemented by innovation. • Bilingual competence will become a norm. • Chinese will rival English as the international language of business. • Investments in education and job training will determine who leads

and who follows. The prospect of winners and losers, in fact, characterizes the rest of the article and even its title: “Can America Keep Up?” The consensus position is that we are falling behind in the race for global economic leadership. The reasons for such decline are many and obvious. R&D investments have seriously declined; of the world’s top information technology companies, six are based in the United States—compared to fourteen in Asia; U.S. eighth graders rank ninth in science and fifteenth in math among forty-five countries; more than 55 percent of engineering PhDs granted in the United States go to foreign-born students, and non-U.S. students also earn more than half the online MBA degrees that are awarded. In short, the conclusion is that the United States has become a nation of complacent, fat (literally—look at the obesity stats), and easily satisfied citizens preoccupied with being the world’s outstanding consumers rather than its producers. To combat the unfortunate evidence that supports the case for the erosion of U.S. preeminence, at least five correctives are in order. The first is context. A global framework is now the measure of stature. That in turn requires a new and constant double-counting system. Traditional tallies by country now have to be supplemented by aggregate global cumulative totals. All the standard metrics of GNP, productivity, and profitability also have to be perceived singularly and en masse. National and industrywide comparisons will still be made, but because companies (unlike coun-

Redefinition of the HR Mission

tries) are statistically, financially, and operationally interoperable, the measure of their performance now also needs to be global. Indeed, U.S. companies already have largely blended and merged their assets, workforces, and strategic markets to function in a global economic network. It is the increasing extent of economic interdependence that defines the framework not only for describing and evaluating the collective performance of an overall new world economy but also for assessing the individual performance of countries operating within those parameters. In other words, the U.S. obituary I described earlier is premature, as it fails to invoke the new double standard. National declines may be more than offset by international gains. A U.S. company may have shifted its size and substance to the point where it is a giant overseas and an almost token presence here. Apparent domestic failure may obscure dramatic international success. Although rallying wake-up calls always have value, this one’s unfavorable analysis and conclusions rest on at least four other equally static assumptions. The most serious is the assumption that the U.S. workforce has not changed in response to the new pressure, and that it is perhaps incapable of change (too comfortable, too fat, and so on). It is the task of this book to describe and document not only how our workers have responded to and met global challenges but also how they have done so in distinctive ways characteristic of our culture. In fact, the preservation of the nation’s historical competitive edge has required both reaffirmation and reinvention to the point where what is distinct and inimitable about its work culture is once more made indigenous and resistant to being outsourced abroad. Once again double counting is required. Micro and macro statistics need to display and accommodate work culture. The current global battle for leadership is being rendered in miniature in the transformation of the workplace. A third serious misconception has to do with the assessment of U.S. talent. The percentage of our best and brightest youngsters in math and science has remained basically the same over the past fifty years. Currently, they are learning Chinese, spending internships abroad, and

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developing an understanding of their new global roles. The apparent decline reflected in international test comparisons is more the result of a larger pool of students whose lower average scores affect the overall comparative positioning rather than the actual loss of superior performers. But even among this emerging larger group, the number of students going on for further study, especially in technical fields, has raised the overall level of aspiration and competition just as rising water elevates all boats. The net result is the substantial appearance of a new segment of the middle class functioning at a technical and managerial level of a growing service economy. Fourth, surveys of decline also fail to factor in the massive infusion of funds for company training and the creation of more than five hundred corporate universities. That story happily also involves the fifth and last corrective: the changing role of HR. The chapters in Part Two discuss how HR has redefined one of its main tasks of recruitment and retention. In the process, alliances with research, technology, and metrics have equipped HR to speak for the nation’s continued capacity to be a competitive and innovative force in the global economy, as well as to advocate for the centrality of the workforce. Toward these ends, HR has developed and compiled an extensive manual of best practices to guide companies in the critical directions of global performance competition.

C H A P T E R

7

ORIENTATION AND HIRING PRACTICES

Exit interviews routinely ask only what led to the decision to leave the company. They do not include questions about how the departing employee got started there. It turns out that adding such questions can reveal a clear linkage between beginnings and endings. Terminus backs up to genesis directly when promises made at the beginning have not been honored. Overeager recruiting sets the new hire up for disappointment that is often compounded by an orientation process that adds to the misrepresentation. But first things first. Why and how does deception slip into interviews? It is often a desperate move to attract an outstanding candidate leaning toward a competitor. At other times, many people are conducting interviews without sharing and coordinating a common interview protocol, and suddenly one breaks ranks and makes a spontaneous offer the candidate just cannot refuse. But the most serious lapse is not telling the truth—especially the new truth of the workforce: namely, that the job is likely to change, and change often; that all goals are 69

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stretch goals; and finally that constant adjustment and doing whatever it takes are the new norms.

JOB DISAPPOINTMENT When job disappointment occurs, how should it be managed? At the outset it should be assumed. Dislocation is typical in the first weeks. The issue is how extensive it is and whether it also involves broken promises. Supervisors need to be sensitive to the situation of a new hire. The candidate—now employee—may have had to relocate, move, and settle a family in a new community and schools. The work environment will certainly be new and different, with its own systems of doing things. The immediate supervisors may be unavailable or their management style may require getting used to. Then, too, only the new employee knows what other job options were on the table, so it’s impossible to predict how much variance between reality and expectations will inspire regret about the choice. So the first order of business is to look for signs of discontent. Above all, benign abandonment is not an option. It is often not benign—and abandonment itself is not a commendable management strategy. Corrective action requires fusing talent acquisition and talent retention. Indeed, the time it took for hiring—often sixty to ninety days—should also be allowed for fitting in and settling down. Moreover, this orientation period needs to be communicated by the supervisor. An outline of what needs to be mastered should be spelled out, given a reasonable timetable, and discussed and shared. Effective managers also set up a number of frequent but brief meetings (no more than ten or fifteen minutes). At least one early on should be an off-site breakfast meeting with the supervisor picking up the tab. To structure such meetings, the new hire should be asked to keep a daily work log and develop a weekly bar chart of activities and time allocations, color-coding it to show which activities are new and unexpected and which ones reflect the priority of being aligned with company goals.

Orientation and Hiring Practices

RETENTION STRATEGIES The focus of all retention exchanges should be on the mutual flexibility and alignment of the new hire and of the hiring manager. Indeed, what defines a supportive company culture is a similar value placed on adaptability and the commitment that nothing is more important than hiring and retaining talent. Above all, the company must move to prevent the loss of talent as a result of faulty interviewing and unrealistic promises followed by inept and impatient management of the initial probationary period. Preventing early talent losses requires not only a company commitment to HR but also the established practice of evaluating managers by their ability to retain talent. It is well known that the main reason talent leaves is bad bosses. Indeed, the reason good applicants are so cagy and suspicious when involved in job searches is precisely their bad experiences with broken promises, benign abandonment, and punitive supervisors. The only antidote is full disclosure in the form of information-rich sharing of job information, followed by strategic interventions early on by supervisors.

Orientation Blunders Even when the interview process is not compromised, attending an orientation of new hires may jeopardize retention. Here is a quick list of orientation blunders and tactics that start new hires down the road to their exit interview: • Intimidate them. “We are distributing a policy book and man-

ual. We call it the bible. It totals 639 pages. We will go through it, page by page, line by line.” • Control them. “We take the organization chart seriously

around here. It documents the chain of command from which there is to be no deviation. Here, everyone knows their place.” • Dazzle them. “We believe in being cheerleaders. We live,

breathe, eat, and sleep the company’s success. You will too.”

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• Amuse them. “We will show you episodes from Wings, Frasier,

and a lot of sitcoms that deal hilariously with starting out on a new job. You are going to have a great time.” • Impress them. “We are a company of winners. Unfortunately,

none of our stars are available for this orientation.” Orientation is often an afterthought or a stepchild. All the real effort has been put into advertising the position, crafting the job description, working with headhunters, conducting multiple interviews, doing the reference checks, and so on and on. Frequently, orientation is not handled by senior personnel dedicated to overall culture, mission, and vision. Rather, it is conducted by supervisors at a lower level who are concerned primarily with how this new person fits in and can contribute significantly to the specific work they have to do right now. But such superficial or token introductions can lead to a series of negative conclusions. It takes very little to make new employees think that accepting this job in the first place was a big mistake. They may take themselves to task for failing to ask the right questions during the interview. Worst of all, they may conclude that their interviewers did not tell the truth at the outset. They may begin to become distrustful.

Retention and Orientation Principles Orientation should be perceived as the way to keep what it cost you so much to get—in short, as the first step in talent retention. Ten basic practices can help guide the development and evaluation of orientation programs. They are basic and yet ambitious, easy to install but hard to coordinate, requiring a lot of work and planning, and contingent on cooperative involvement with many others, including some at a distance from the job position and division. Although often difficult to obtain, such a larger range of participation offers a miniature of the big picture, and that is critical to

Orientation and Hiring Practices

retention. In any case, these ten recommendations are effective for orientation-retention programs: • Build a seamless bridge. Everything must be of a piece. What is

said in the posting, what is covered in the job description, what information about the company is conveyed in the interviews, and everything else that applicants encounter must match what new employees hear at the orientation and what their supervisors say when they join their department. In other words, orientation is a replay of the interview process. Discrepancies invite suspicion and even lawsuits. • Make the orientation a miniature of the whole company. The

opportunity to sample the organization in miniature, to talk across divisional lines, to meet people who ordinarily would not be encountered, is usually lost because the prospect of such interaction is either not valued or a cross section of relevant personnel seems too troublesome to assemble. But this kind of overview is critical to later cross-divisional productivity. • Make orientation ongoing, not a one-shot chore. Follow-up and

debriefing are standard business practices. Why should orientation be a one-shot affair? Why should everything be crowded in one day or even week? Why overload employees when followups can be scheduled? Remember how long hiring takes, and run orientation as a series of short sessions over at least six weeks so the information has a chance to sink in. • Cover vision, mission, and essential information. What and

how much does the organization want its new people to know? The answer is what it would also want its customers to know. One entire session should be devoted to customer demographics and metrics and to the customer as data. • Help new hires become students of the business. New employ-

ees should be encouraged to build their understanding of their business and of its industry, especially if they have stock options.

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This is the time to present the big, big picture—industry-wide and global. • Identify the challenges. What drives what we do now? Cost

because of competition? Quality because of customer complaints? Morale because it affects everything we do? Innovation because that is what will set us apart? Continuous improvement because we constantly have to exceed ourselves to reach our stretch goals? Let new employees know what worries the company so they will be able to help make things work better. • Outline the future. What are the critical trends that may impact

the company, the new hire’s specific job, and the industry in general? Have HR show changes in job descriptions and in the nature of workshops over the past ten years. Set out the shortand long-range targets and forecasts for the business. • Outline effective internal communication patterns. Commu-

nication can save or break an organization. How many organizations have rumor mills stronger than all their e-memos and newsletters combined? How many organizations regularly have three meetings: the original meeting, the next one in the hallway or around the water cooler, and the third on the phone at night? Communication has to be elevated to the level of being a culture. It is the glue that holds everything and everyone together. • Apply instructional design principles to the program itself. The

new-hire orientation should be seen as the first training workshop. It should be memorable—and very few are. It also should be interesting. And the supervisors of new employees should always be part of the design team so that they know what to follow up with what. • Discuss the performance review and improvement program

and show how it is an extension of the orientation. Discuss the capacity of performance improvement to affect productivity, profitability, competitive edge, customer quality, and even inno-

Orientation and Hiring Practices

vation. Don’t just maintain that performance is the key to the organization’s success, prove it. Show correlations between performance improvement, training, and company gains. Identify innovations that have been generated by employees, and what savings and earnings they resulted in, so the new hires will see that you mean what you say. Orientation should neither be boastful nor intimidating. It should be a sample of the whole. And it should be as engaging as the work that is to follow and the reasons for accepting the job in the first place. To be sure, companies rightly seek to put their best foot forward—but truth and not hype should govern. Orientation is not the time to engage in elaborate justifications or claims of superiority. Waving the flag should be replaced by a fascinating array of examples of company problem solving. Why we structured the company this way; why this brand of information technology was selected; what correlations exist between training and productivity. And finally, what challenges remain? Above all, orientation—like training itself—should build leadership. It should undergird, enhance, and strengthen the commitment of top management to make their success and that of their employees—especially new ones—one and the same. Indeed, one of the best orientations is for every new hire to have breakfast with the CEO. Imagine the impact that would have on talent retention and growth!

HIRING FALLACIES Most companies big and small believe they have an effective hiring system. But when pressed on how they do it, what principles guide hiring decisions, and how happy they (and their new hires) are with the results, serious deficiencies surface. Indeed, having served for many years as a professional headhunter and HR consultant working up close with hiring managers, I have found not only a number of misconceptions and even delusions but also a high degree of

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commonality across industries. It is worth taking the time to examine what’s not working and why regarding recruitment. Juxtaposed in Table 4 is a list of ten seriously flawed hiring beliefs with the actual situation, followed by a brief commentary on each of the ten belief–reality pairs.

TA B LE 4 • H I R I N G FALL AC I E S BELIEF

REALITY

Interviewing is infallible.

Interviewing is effective only 50 percent of the time.

Hiring decision time is short.

Average decision time is 90 to 120 days.

Selection is determined by best qualifications.

Selection is determined by best interviewing skills.

Traditional interviewing is 95 percent subjective.

Traditional interviewing is 95 percent objective.

The interview process involves broad participation.

The interview process has job-related limitations.

Selling the job too soon creates a shorter hiring time.

Overpromising creates retention problems.

Fit is gut instinct.

Chemistry is often unpredictive.

Salary offers reflect the best that money can buy.

Salary offers can distort the value system.

The hiring system is foolproof.

The hiring system notes hiring mistakes.

The system provides information sharing.

The system enables information hoarding.

Orientation and Hiring Practices

Interviewing Most people involved in job screening are not trained in interview dynamics, let alone in the adjustments needed for face to-face, telephone, or electronic interview modes. At best, all they can tap is their own interviewing experiences, which may or may not be applicable. Then, too, they usually are given and asked to obediently follow an elaborate checklist of questions, many of which are blunt instruments rather than penetrating inquiries. In addition, who asks what is often randomly parceled out, without regard to expertise and decision authority. Finally, the candidates on the short list often get mixed up; the answers attributed to one really were from another. Often the interviewers come up with a composite but imaginary candidate who may share a name with one of those on the final list for consideration, but little else. In short, companies that put all their eggs in the interview basket—especially one that depends on untrained interviewers—are not much better off than they would be if they just flipped a coin.

Hiring Decision Time Although most companies and hiring managers believe the process should be short—say, two to four weeks—procrastination rules. In part the delay stems from the fact that those involved are doing other things, many of which they regard as more important. A wake-up call occurs when they learn that the best candidate has taken another job. Then they scurry together to accelerate the search with those remaining or conclude that they need to advertise the position again or hire a headhunter. What should have been a relatively short process has become too long. The division in need of a replacement is forced to limp along longer. The conclusion? Hiring is not a high priority. If it were, it would be so stated in the job description of every manager, whereas in truth references to hiring are either absent or muted. It may take a CEO to proclaim loud and clear that there is nothing more important than the acquisition of new talent to establish company-wide practice.

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Selection Companies tend to favor those who interview best. Candidates know that. They understand that they have only one chance to make a good first impression. So they hire coaches to do interview prep, make videos to see how they look and talk, use colleagues to anticipate questions to be asked, research what they should wear— in short, they set themselves up to be the most outstanding interviewee. If the ability to look someone directly in the eye, have a firm handshake, and be modest but assured happens to coincide with the right qualifications, then all is well. But more often than not externals trump credentials.

Traditional Interviewing The standard pretension of a systematic approach is round-robin interviewing—spreading the candidate around over many divisions and among many different hiring authorities. That is then followed up by collecting opinions and impressions. But the emerging consensus may be more the result of herd instinct. Believing that your whole group can’t be wrong does not guarantee that you have selected the one who is right. A more rigorous and less fallible system that is gaining HR support involves carrying over the 180degree or better still 360-degree evaluation process that was developed for performance appraisal. Such a comprehensive approach to employment interviewing rescues the piecemeal sorting out by requiring the range of distribution and participation to be more interactive and self-correcting.

Interview Process It is a fundamental axiom of work that no one knows the job as well as the one who does it. And yet those selected to be an integral part of the recruitment process are often unrelated to the job in question or distant from its performance. In part this reflects again the political need for group exoneration. But more disturbingly it

Orientation and Hiring Practices

betrays a failure to see the vacant position as interoperable and not solitary. What precedes and what follows it, how it serves as a communications nexus to other positions and divisions, and finally how it is related to customers and the bottom line—that should determine the choice of interviewers. Some firms have begun to see interviewing as a two- or three-tiered process involving correspondingly different groups. The first focuses on the job, the second on its relationships, the third on its likely future versions.

Overselling the Job Hiring time is a variation of eager selling of the job to a particular candidate. Often that involves one interviewer who breaks away from the ranks, but sometimes it includes all or a majority. The danger here is twofold. The choice is often premature. More seriously, it overpromises what the company is or can deliver. It can create serious problems of retention later when a new hire brings up such promises to the supervisor who made them. Finally, overselling creates a potential problem of company credibility, especially if it is at odds with the research the candidate has done.

Fit Versus Chemistry When the traditional emphasis on fit is coupled with gut instinct, the results are often disastrous. Applying the notion “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it” to hiring decisions makes the entire hiring process superficial and amateurish. First, fit is limited to the interviewing committee, whose members may or not be typical. Then, too, some or many may not even be around to witness whether the chosen candidate still exhibits fit over the longer term. Besides, given the need for company change, too tight a fit may not reflect room for the necessary growth. No matter how it may serve and affirm the egos of the hiring committee, obedient replication should not determine selection. Even speculating on future fit would bring a more predictive reality to the process.

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Salary Requests/Offers A standard (often knee-jerk) dimension of the hiring process is the request for salary levels from candidates. The fear is that the one selected will ask to be paid at a level in excess of the amount authorized. So pay is used to eliminate such candidates from the outset and to spare the committee the pain of not being able to hire the one they want. But it does not work. Shrewd candidates are evasive or indicate that salary is negotiable so they can get a foot in the door and find out what the job is really like. They can always withdraw later. But there are even more serious and subtle consequences of an emphasis on salary. The most obvious may be excessive turnover. Devaluing the position may actually cost the company more in both personnel dollars and lost revenue caused by downtime. In addition, hiring committees should not try to run with their legs tied. They should negotiate a salary range that reflects both the job market and company needs. Above all, they should not be tempted into making money a driving definer but rather an important item among other job values.

Hiring Mistakes Most companies are so determined to prove that their hiring system is foolproof that they not only fail to admit to hiring mistakes, they also keep them around longer than they should in the vain hope that they may yet work out. Given everything discussed thus far, it may be surprising that more hiring errors do not occur. In any case, companies have to bite the bullet and limit the damage by terminating a new employee who cannot do the job. Just as important— but seldom done—they need to run the process backward to detect where things went wrong. Often that brings to the surface a correctible fault or weakness in the system. Sometimes it highlights an intersect of process and individual action on the part of certain professionals whose bullying egos may compromise or jeopardize balanced judgments and review. That more delicate problem may be best handled by a training workshop on hiring dynamics.

Orientation and Hiring Practices

Information Sharing Versus Hoarding The availability of job information ranges from the stingy to the partial. Candidates are usually given only a job description—often an out-of-date job description, a hoary document that has survived since its approval at many levels a number of years ago and is now trotted out whenever a vacancy occurs but not otherwise regarded as significant. A revised version would have to go through elaborate rites of passage with no assurance that it would be approved. But the more basic problem, of which job descriptions are only a part, is that companies generally hoard rather than share information at all levels, a custom that certainly leaves its stifling mark on the hiring process.

ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION ACCESS Effective recruitment begins with assessing an organization’s information culture. What is its information environment and the nature of its conversations? What does it typically talk about? Are those exchanges frequent and open or occasional and whispered? Is the company information chart largely vertical, with few if any horizontal crossovers? With the increasing emphasis on knowledge workers, to what extent is information access available to serve as the supply side of informed workforce initiatives? In short, are job descriptions fundamentally information documents? Mere listing of job duties and responsibilities, no matter how comprehensive or detailed, exhausts a position’s information base. For example, it fails to link knowledge to competence—or more important, to link knowledge to expertise and talent. To pretend that it does is symptomatic of an information culture and process that is fundamentally and intentionally obscurative. The degree to which job data is available and communicated is largely determined by a political process ruled by rank. Chain of command is really chain of information. Information availability is restricted to insiders. Indeed, it is used to set apart

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those on top from those below them. Layered access defines the extent of access. But whether executive or managerial, the process identifies the circles of those in the know. Sometimes it even may involve information martyrdom—suffering the burden of being among the elect. In short, information sharing is really the key form of privileged positioning protected and sustained by the laws of scarcity and hierarchy. When information flow is routinely guarded and controlled, imagine the information paranoia when outsiders are involved. Information flow becomes restrictive and stingy as those in the know regard truth as too valuable to share. The language chosen becomes intentionally opaque and unrevealing. Most seriously, without realizing it, this knee-jerk information withholding is often carried over and applied to job applicants, a maneuver that is particularly inappropriate and counterproductive because many candidates judge an organization by the transparency of its information dissemination. In fact, it can be argued that the current problems of talent recruitment have been compounded and even compromised by niggardly releases of information about a job and its duties. Even the newly developed electronic talent tracking systems are managerial in nature. They neither directly engage the information problem nor improve the recruitment process itself. That requires focusing analysis and change on information barriers and then hearkening to Robert Frost’s wise warning: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out.”

Information Limitations of Job Descriptions It is useful to pause at this point to consider the basic information limitations of even the best of current job descriptions. They are almost universally: • Purely verbal • Lacking interoperability • Devoid of examples of whatever the job takes

Orientation and Hiring Practices

• Fixated on the past and present • Noninteractive

Employers do not want to sift through piles of résumés in the hope of matching skills to jobs. Over and above any perception of the scarcity of talent, companies hire search firms precisely because of the burden of prescreening, just as book publishers use literary agents. But the key point is that good candidates are equally diligent. They are researchers. They are their own headhunters. They seek to know as much as they can about the current position and the company culture. Past annual reports and industry ratings are grist for the mill. But they also are future oriented. They want to know where this position can lead and where the company is going. In short, many of the best potential candidates begin to lose interest after reading the typical job description and finding it jargon rich but information poor, falling far short of their need to know.

A New Interactive Job Inquiry System How can employers and candidates be brought closer together to meet each other’s needs? Information sharing is the key. Employers cannot withhold or hoard job information. If the desired match is to occur with any precision, more not less information sharing must occur. Specifically, the information exchange of an initial interview must be simulated and then front-loaded and made available to candidates in an interactive form before the interview. In addition, employers must do their homework by identifying the essential match minimums—benchmarking the position as it were. Finally, the job description needs to be expanded to include and answer questions as to the future projections of both the position and the company. Candidates in turn must be willing to engage in self-screening and self-qualifying. The traditional static job description needs to be transformed into a dynamic exchange process. It must be redesigned as a prequalifying interface, empowering candidates to

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interview themselves. Through a series of at least three initial exchanges, candidates must be asked to come to two judgments: whether they are qualified or not, and if so whether they are interested in pursing the job quest further. When this interactive prequalification process is done properly, both sides get what they want. Employers finally receive only qualified candidates. Applicants are more knowledgeable about what the job has to offer now and in the future, and whether or not that is what they are seeking. Consequently, the classic process of fit is mutual. To accomplish all this requires structuring the content of each of three stages into a new job inquiry system. Information Access of an Initial Interview

Imagine a job description set up as a Web site. Using virtual technology and simulation, job profiles would be enriched and house more extensive job information than what is offered in the typical skeletal and exclusively written job posting. For example, if the position requires the supervision of twelve professionals, an applicant should be able to click on each one and see a photo, a job summary, and a résumé. If the position involves regular and significant exchanges with other divisions, examples of such interoperability should be accessible. Even for that elusive and tantalizing section calling for the performance of all other duties in order to get the job done, past and present examples should be provided. In short, candidates would gain the basic informational benefits of an initial interview without the time and costs of such a meeting. Self-Scoring and Self-Qualification

The minimum qualifying essentials for an acceptable match would be listed by the employer. Collectively, these criteria can serve as gatekeepers. Each one could carry the numerical value of ten, which would signify a perfect match. Prospective candidates would respond by inputting aspects of their résumés and backgrounds appropriate to the key descriptors. They would estimate how close

Orientation and Hiring Practices

each of these responses are to satisfying each qualifier by selecting a number between one and ten. A minimum total score would also be provided to indicate whether the applicant has met the basic qualifications. In effect, this is an interactive self-qualifying interview. Applicants would advance or abandon their own candidacy. Only those with satisfactory scores would go on to the next step. Candidates would be cautioned not to exaggerate or be self-serving. The lack of objective and accurate judgments would only reflect negatively on their candidacy. Providing more information in an interactive self-scoring format winnows the list to a pool of qualified candidates. Those who are successfully self-screened are then invited to undertake the next and final step. Future Fit

Candidates always want to know where the job will lead. Firms are equally curious about the future expectations of candidates. Again the match is the target. Employers generally seek employees who are not only ambitiously realistic but also in tune with the articulated future directions of the company. In short, the final preliminary assessment involves not just a present but a future fit. The job description thus must provide two projections: the future of the job and of the company—and how the two are linked. But answers should be more than anecdotal. Records of career paths of former employees holding that position should be provided electronically. Equally important are the future trends projected for the industry and especially the company’s own five-year vision and strategic plan. The rationale for this component is to provide candidates who meet the minimum qualifications with an additional stage to determine whether the future projections of this position as well as those of the company match their own vision of their future career. Finally, those who pass all three stages constitute the short list and are then invited for face-to-face conversations. This new job description model, then, is essentially a frontloading process. It also builds on a company knowledge base that

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is already in hand. What benefits would it bring? The job description model: • Is always current and updated • Produces a dynamic self-screening process • Reduces turnover due to mismatching • Generates a final list of self-qualifying candidates • Creates a new career pathing database • Meets not just present but future needs

COMMENTARY Perhaps the time has come for job descriptions to take advantage of the technology now available and to reflect the realities of today’s work. In effect, by outsourcing the process to candidates, the system I propose puts them in charge. It places a high value from the outset on initiative and on operating both independently and interdependently. But such welcome results from an interactive job inquiry system will be contingent on two changes in the existing culture: information sharing has to replace information hoarding, and empowerment has to be predicated on always knowing more about the future.

C H A P T E R

8

THE CHALLENGE OF JOB SATISFACTION

Historically, the workforce has placed the highest values on the basic trinity of job satisfaction, security, and recognition—not always in the same order. For a while, downsizing and issues of company loyalty elevated job security to the top spot. But still the need to find work fulfilling and for it to be recognized remained high priorities. Indeed, HR’s efforts to minister to such values have led to job development and job enhancement. Of late more focus has been placed on the nature and sources of job satisfaction, because job satisfaction is part and parcel of company morale, directly affects productivity and customer satisfaction, and is a major factor in talent retention. Efforts to promote job satisfaction have tended to be selffocused and singular. The employee is placed at the center of the universe, and all else revolves around individual attitudes and work. Both the job and the company are perceived to be obligated to offer satisfying experiences. When that fails to happen, both the job and its holder should become objects of job enhancement. 87

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But should that be the only (or even primary) approach or remedy? Perhaps job satisfaction should not be perceived so narrowly and egocentrically. Perhaps it is really too important to be so rigidly defined as inward facing. Besides, it is not that cut-and-dried. A more complicated process involving many variables is at work. Other factors and workers encircle each employee, with an inevitable influence and impact on job satisfaction. Beyond that, the organization itself needs to link and align job satisfaction and company outcomes. In short, the current self-centered way of positioning job satisfaction needs to be reconfigured to go in both directions—from the employee outward to a circle of relationships and then back. Supplementing the lines from the periphery to the center, the new norm would be a two-way street.

VALUING THE NEGOTIATION OF MUTUALITY Work is not merely what we do. It is also increasingly who we are and how we relate. Every company has three basics: this is what we do, this is how we do it, and this is how we do it together. The last item is the culture of an organization. The research shows that what we mostly talk about—to friends, spouses, or ourselves—is what pleases or bothers us. Thus, typically an employee’s immediate world minimally involves key workplace relationships and processes. Those central relationships are with coworkers and the immediate supervisor. And when someone complains and moans about those relationships, job satisfaction and perhaps also performance suffer. In fact, that is why we are concerned about job satisfaction in the first place. It directly affects not only individual but team productivity. Currently, job satisfaction as an evaluative category is onedimensional. A new assumption needs to guide inquiry. Job satisfaction is not just inherent, it is also created. A given job done by different workers is not the same job. The difference is in the doers— what they bring to the task. Similarly, job satisfaction operates the

The Challenge of Job Satisfaction

same way: the satisfaction extracted varies with input—more in, more out. The task then is to develop a model that not only embodies the two-way process but also allows for individual differences nested within the common requirement for all to pursue job fulfillment. At the heart of that model are relationships and the dynamics of dialogue. Job satisfaction then can be defined as negotiated relationships. For example, employees’ job satisfaction is often linked to their supervisor’s job satisfaction. Many managers actually tell workers that it is their individual and collective task to make the manager look good to the next level up. Unfortunately, supervisors often reward those that do and punish those that don’t. Many supervisors are very unhappy when they regularly have to take time out of their busy day to soothe ruffled feathers or to stop a shouting match. Contentious behavior generally reflects negatively on the evaluation of the employee who regularly demonstrates inability to work well with others and on the evaluation of the supervisor who seems unable to manage such behavior. But maintaining relationships is not made an explicit and shared goal of all. It is not defined as a minimum performance expectation. It is seldom linked to job satisfaction. That sin of omission haunts the entire process. Company policy manuals and evaluation sessions almost never state explicitly that employees’ job satisfaction is tied to the satisfaction of their supervisor and coworkers. No one points out that it is not enough for individuals to be self-satisfied—it is also part of everyone’s task to help those who work with them to attain satisfaction as well. And because that has not been made explicit and official, it is absent from all job descriptions. In short, serving others (and being in turn served) has to be made a job requirement. More than any other category of performance appraisal, the dynamic of negotiating job satisfaction is the nexus for evaluating and achieving individual and team performance. In the process, the mutualizing of job satisfaction has to become the principal means not only for talent retention but also for talent acquisition.

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DETERMINERS OF JOB SATISFACTION Company culture has to place at its center the negotiation of relationships so they build job satisfaction. Assessing that capacity also has to become a key focus of the testing and interviewing of prospective employees. Although the forms they might take are various, five guidelines should help define a symbiotic matrix that links job satisfaction and relationships: • Self-starting. Initiative is the key—encouraging and persuading

workers to go the extra mile, to take on the task of achieving the collective identity of teams. Creating and sustaining job satisfaction is the only leverage available. Bonuses, job security, and company loyalty can no longer be promised. Only what is intrinsic and self-motivating can work. • Self-defining. The job and its satisfaction can be defined only

by the jobholder. This definition serves as the basis for the negotiation of priorities of alignment with the supervisor. Above all, it establishes the threshold for all subsequent forms of self-empowerment, such as self-organizing, -managing, and -evaluating. • Self-generating. Job satisfaction is neither inherent in the job

itself nor supplied or guaranteed by the company. It is not given but made, not assured but discovered. It is what each worker uniquely brings to the table. • Self-supplementing. The generation of job satisfaction has to

be captured and incorporated into job descriptions so as to improve performance evaluation and talent retention and acquisition. The net result is a more empowered statement not only of what the job requires but also of what it has to offer. The latter serves to encourage and entrust the supplementing of job development to those who hold it. Each employee becomes in effect a personal HR advocate.

The Challenge of Job Satisfaction

• Self-mutualizing. The benefits of job satisfaction need to be

mutualized. What and how others contribute to individual fulfillment must in turn become what is offered to others as well. The constant negotiation of mutuality thus not only describes the interpersonal and team contributions of each jobholder, it also defines company culture as dynamically collaborative in nature. It is the task of HR to demonstrate how the alignment not just of job goals but of job satisfaction leads to greater gains in all areas. Above all, this kind of advocacy leads to the enhancement not just of work but of the entire work environment and culture. Job satisfaction is too important to be allowed to face inward. We all work in worlds that are near and far. The first step is to turn people around so they are not locked into themselves but instead see how they are linked multiply: to others, to teams, to customers, and to structures—big and small, near and far. Employees have the potential to be big enough to perceive themselves as extensions of their division and their company. Indeed, if the increased demands for competitive performance are to be met, job satisfaction may be the primary way—and perhaps the only way— to drive not only continuous improvement but also those innovative gains beyond the incremental. Job satisfaction is too rich not to be wisely spent, too critical to talent acquisition, and finally too expansive to be rigidly caged.

GROWTH POTENTIAL AS JOB SATISFACTION Another important component of job satisfaction can be found in the opportunity for individual development and growth—and this potential should be kept in mind even during recruiting and hiring. Testing is one of the norms of today’s hiring process; it has become as basic as the application form. Current tests, however, exhibit a number of common limitations. Most serious, the questions are so obviously patterned or tilted toward favored answers that only

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idealistic or cynical choices are encouraged. In either instance little or nothing is revealed about the true views of the applicant. Similarly, being designed to apply to many clients, they often reflect little or no specific knowledge about the company or its values. But whatever the tests’ limitations, the most significant lapse is in not capturing, storing, and analyzing their results. With the findings of a wide range of employee tests, HR can create a database at the front end to generate comparisons of workforce changes over the years and also serve as a series of benchmarks to measure later company training. Such metrics, in short, reinforce the double HR function of tracking and communicating changing workforce patterns while establishing the baseline for measuring later development. The one identifies what applicants bring to the table by way of native talent, and the other their potential and capacity for growth. Ideally, then, testing should be both short and long term—focusing not just on present but also on future fit. It should address that favorite interview question: “Where do you see yourself three to five years from now?” Finally, given the substantial allocations companies make in tuition remission and extensive training programs, the resulting data provides HR and organizations with a powerful tool for measuring return on investment.

PROACTIVE TALENT TESTING It costs too much time, money, and effort to find the right people without also considering whether they will stay and how adequately they will perform later on. Development and retention should not be an afterthought or exist apart from the original hiring process; instead, talent acquisition and talent retention should be one from the outset. Present fit should involve future fit. The time span should involve not only the immediate present (the first thirty to sixty days) but also the short term (six months)

The Challenge of Job Satisfaction

and the longer term (twelve months). Performance assessment and projection need to function as two sides of the same coin. In addition, proactive examination of later adequacy has to be set within the context of evolving company goals and needs. Insight about future candidate and company alignment can then in turn be applied to current fit, tightly linking job start to job growth. But the challenge of all innovation is that it cuts both ways. It changes the change agents. The hiring process is no longer onesided. “Where do you see yourself three to five years from now?” has to be answered not only by the candidate but also by the hiring team. To anticipate and determine future fit requires projecting the company’s future. Proactive assessment cannot be an abstract process or take place in a vacuum. It must be company specific. Indeed, when company vision and plans are defined and then applied as an overlay to the growth capacity of the applicant, hiring may also be better able to answer applicants’ questions about the company’s future. Above all, the assessment of future fit serves as a critical defining lens on current estimates and hiring choices. Mutual growth assessment enhances retention. The case for proactive talent assessment as well as for bringing test results within the larger purview of metrics reinforces and supports the other key HR goal of making the process more predictive. But such results require targets for measurement. Moreover, they have to be more precise and focused than just generalized assessment of talent for further growth and development. Although that may vary by company and industry, the search always has to strike a balance between common assessments of potential and specific company-driven applications. Joining and aligning the two leads to the development of a preferential performance profile, which in turn generates the recruitment targets that will reinforce company mission and culture. That profile, for example, would identify candidates who place a high value on information access, on expectations of job transformation, and on interpersonal negotiation to bring about mutual job satisfaction.

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The challenge then is how to test what drives workforce growth. That requires going deeper in areas normally left unexamined: who we are, how we have come to be that way, our values and career preferences, how we relate, how we learn, how we work, how we work together, and finally how we change—or fail to change. The problem is compounded by the need for privacy and by the general lack of suitable testing tools. One approach is to return to the commitment to grant greater information access and involvement to candidates.

MEASURING GROWTH POTENTIAL Measuring growth potential has to fuse talent recruitment and talent retention. Extending the principle of providing candidates with maximum access to job information, HR can request qualified applicants to be involved in and observe the results of various simulations currently available. Indeed, this involvement seeks to reflect the same kind of forward-looking answers sought by situational, what-if interview questions: “What would you do if this or that occurred?” But simulation is a better way of eliciting anticipatory behaviors because it is so involving and spontaneous that little can be faked or hidden. It can also accommodate preferred company targets easily. General company and specific job preferences become variables of simulation design. Such customized simulations provide prospective employees with the key performance preferences that also define the company’s workforce mission. Above all, such simulations would elicit and measure growth capacity in the following interpersonal terms: • Work as mutual dependency • Work as not solely job parts but job relationships • Job knowledge that integrates what we know with what others

know

The Challenge of Job Satisfaction

• Job skills that require negotiation and persuasion • Job communication as a collective problem-solving activity

Using the same simulations over time generates a baseline for further qualifying candidates in terms of future fit as well as current fit. Companies would be hiring not only the kind of talent they need now but also what they will need to face future challenges. In the process it also provides talent with the major reason for longterm retention.

Yields of a Reflective Journey A different approach, more invasive and time-consuming, is to ask candidates to undertake an introspective and reflective journey that links who they are with how they learn and change. Few candidates have ever been asked to do this consciously. To ease their way into such a process of self-revelation requires that it be gradualized and converted into a step-by-step, building-block process. Its major stages need to be structured so that they are reassuringly progressive and cumulative. Together, they simulate a total learning journey and inventory involving five stages: 1. Compiling a personal inventory 2. Identifying its operating values 3. Portraying its operating relationships 4. Assessing the learning potential of that inventory 5. Linking the personal inventory and learning potential to job performance Throughout, the focus is always on three major relationship clusters: self, others, and teams. Each of the five stages would reflect those three areas along the lines demonstrated in Table 5. If you also give each of the five areas an aspirational and futures direction, a summary would emerge as in Table 6.

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TA B LE 5 • M U LT I P LE SAT I S FAC T I O N L I N K AG E S PERSONAL INVENTORY AND PROFILE: “THIS IS WHO I AM.” Subject

Lines of Inquiry

Influences

Goals

Self

Who am I?

Familial impact?

What satisfies me?

Others

How do I relate?

Where did I learn that?

How can I change?

Team

Responses to authority?

Friendships?

Sharing and trusting?

VALUES PROFILE: “THIS IS WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO ME.” Subject

Beliefs

Moral Mentors

Behaviors

Self

Family? Achievement?

Memorable

Right and wrong

Others

Equal treatment

Values

Open-minded

Team

Diversity

Team leaders

Respect

RELATIONSHIPS: “THIS IS HOW I RELATE.” Subject

Family

Friends

Coworkers

Self

Remain intact

Favor family

Civility

Others

Their commitment Acquaintances

If possible, buddies

Team

Another family

Satisfaction

Trust

ASSESSING LEARNING POTENTIAL OVER TIME: ”THIS IS HOW I LEARN.” Time Focus

Learning Successes and Blocks

What Works and What Doesn’t

Child, teen, adult

Recollections list

In previous workshops

Others

With certain teachers

With certain supervisors

Teams

Sports plus other teams

Team knowledge level

LINKING LEARNING TO JOB PERFORMANCE: “THIS IS HOW I WORK.” Focus

Work Values

Job Performance

Job Learning and Growth

Self

What’s important

Evaluations

Gains and losses

Others

Working together

Interpersonal ratings

Team learning

Team

Innovation

Collective achievements

Group stretch

The Challenge of Job Satisfaction

TA B LE 6 • P RO G RE S S I O N F RO M C U R RE NT TO F U T U RE S E L F - E VALUAT I O N CURRENT

FUTURE

This is who I am.

This is who I want to be.

This is what is important to me.

This is what I want to value more.

This is how I relate.

This is how I wish to relate differently.

This is how I learn.

This is how I unlearn and change.

This is how I work.

This is how I work more productively.

Composite Profile The final assignment is for each participant to assemble a composite profile using selectively the input from the five stages in Table 5. Here are some samples. Sample 1

“My name is Sally B. I work in assembly section B. I have always had a strong sense of who I am and my worth. My folks gave me that. So family is probably what is most important to me. I find it hard to understand those who don’t believe in a strong family. I trust my bosses or supervisors. I guess they are sort of parental figures to me. I prefer their giving us directions or telling us what to do rather than all this discussion about options. The supervisor knows more than all of us put together anyhow. Besides, he has his marching orders.” Sample 2

“I usually get along with others. I am a hard worker; so I like to work with hard workers. I have a hard time with goof-offs. I cut

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people a lot of slack, give them enough rope to hang themselves. When they do, that’s it. I will be civil, but that’s as far as I will go. If you are lucky enough to be a member of a good, tight team—that is heaven. You could not ask for anything better than that. They become a family of friends. Sometimes they are so good they lead themselves.” Sample 3

“I never was good in school. I just graduated high school by the skin of my teeth. So I was kind of surprised that in some of the training, I learned a lot. What’s more, I put it to good use on the job. In one class I really loved, the instructor took me aside and praised me for my participation. I was embarrassed. I told him I always thought I was so dumb in high school and here I am taking to it like a duck to water. He told me that I am at a different place now in my development; and high school might have been too far away from work to engage my interest and intelligence. I could feel my cheeks flush when he praised my intelligence. What a wonderful thing to say to me! He reminded me of Father Ryan, who was like a second dad to me.” Sample 4

“Working in a terrific team and learning how to be more productive and innovative has resulted in the best evaluations I have ever had. Going through this five-step exercise also has taught me a lot about myself, my job, and my relationships. I find that I am now into everything I do. Work has become personal. It might as well be that way because of all the time I spend here. It also helped me write a better self-evaluation. But what I liked best about it all is how it changed my attitude toward the future and where I can be. Or as we always say in the team, this is Operation Leap Frog: while we are catching up, let us also get ahead.”

The Challenge of Job Satisfaction

COMMENTARY With this approach, recruitment and retention can be grounded in each employee’s identity, motivation, and belief system. Although it is inevitably personal, it does not pry. It is a voluntary exercise of self-study and self-review. In the process, it establishes key links between employee and work, between personal values and work behaviors, and between individual learning styles and performance improvement. It thus identifies the key motivators for change. Above all, it compels employees to perceive interpersonal relationships as knowledge relationships and job satisfaction as mutual. Finally, it dramatizes how beneficial it is to alter and improve such relationships and the extent to which improved relationships can lead to increased learning and job performance. Indeed, hiring such growth employees introduces change agents along desired future lines into the workforce and shapes the future of company culture. Such gains alone should not only invest the entire hiring process with greater importance but also improve the way it tests for, discovers, and retains talent that is basically unfinished.

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Organizational culture is both official and unofficial, set and evolving. Formal vision and mission statements and policy formulations establish its identity and direction. A less acknowledged but often more telling version of the culture shows up in conversations. Is the organization a busy and restless place of exchange? Are people constantly talking things over, revisiting earlier settled discussions with new bits of information or perspectives? And do people enjoy talking their way through problem solving? Finally, should not organizations be defined in terms of the extent and character of their conversations? If so, then they inhabit and reflect an interior world not reflected by conventional organization charts. Every company has a persona and a personality. More important, it has a voice. It regularly has something to say; its messages are defining. The choice of spokespersons often determines the language selected. Official communication employs a recurrent vocabulary of operations and structure. The language tends to be somewhat smug and self-confident. It is also usually familiar and 101

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comfortable—so much so that sometimes it sounds processed and generic. Ultimately it blurs the image of the company—it could come from anywhere. Its descriptors, like those found in many mission statements, are applicable across the board to all organizations. But to many such uniformity is reassuring. They can sit back and relax because what they hear certifies that the organization is behaving in the manner typical of all organizations. Unfortunately, that kind of official communication does not reflect the organization’s own conversations, which are its lifeblood. The difference between announcements and conversations is that the former settle the matter, while the latter keep the door open for further exchanges. One type of message is proclamation, the other invitation; one disembodied, the other personal. When CEOs or senior vice presidents speak for the company, they often do so in generic operational terms. When managers or rank-andfile employees speak, they always do so in work and personal terms. Official communications always use the language of efficiency, alignment, and the bottom line. But when the company is perceived and defined in terms of its work conversations, what emerges is a network of relationships. The company thus becomes recognizable in another and different way. Its organizational identity is no longer abstract or static. It is alive and insistent. It is, in short, a culture.

SOCIOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF COMMUNICATION Although analyses of company life have often benefited and been facilitated by psychology, perhaps official communication needs the approach of sociology. An organizational identity and communication profile would then be rendered by the following ten principles: • An organization is a community. • Its conversations are what constitute its evolving identity. • Its exchanges are strategic, multifaceted, and managerial.

Strategies for Retention

• It operates as a highly reflective and self-examining culture. • How work is organized is a recurrent subject of that exchange. • Such strategic work conversations are often anticipatory. • They routinely involve what-if questions. • As a result, they serve as thresholds for innovation. • They are also designed to intervene and alter the evolution of

the organization. • Finally, they are always agents of talent retention.

At least two aspects of this conversational profile can be fused. One is the role of the manager; the other how work design is shaped by empowering conversations that, in turn, support retention. Managers have been trained to be better listeners—to listen with the inner ear. But effective listening also involves asking better questions. It requires managers to be not just information gatherers but question generators. The process resembles the classic quip of Louis B. Mayer: “For your information, let me ask you a question.” Questions are the heart of exchange because they are eliciting and emerging. Open-ended questions do in fact open things up. Because they are also unfinished, they constantly extend the life of the discussion into the future. Stirring and sustaining such work conversations has to become a critical requirement of a manager’s job description. What makes such exchanges strategic is that they are goal-driven and expansive. Their range includes conversational exchanges between individual and company goals, between employee and company mission statements. The entire process of work problem solving becomes increasingly collaborative; it evolves and is guided by inquiry and collective exchange. Only then can problem solving be recast in terms of longer-term planning. Managers can also use the data of conversation to assess and redesign work environments. By listening strategically, they can determine the degree to which each unit is cross-communicating or

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is essentially an inward-facing and separatist community. They can detect whether information flow and exchange is clear or muffled; whether work flow is correspondingly focused or scattered. Such overlays can be put upon all divisions and aggregated upward. The net result would be a series of conversational interfaces between work and worker, between work design and work productivity, that sum up and approximate the company-wide whole. Such interfaces would also address how communications and conversational relationships between supervisors and employees shape performance improvement and talent retention.

MANAGERIAL COMMUNICATION INTERFACES Three primary managerial interfaces—work, design, and interpersonal and organizational—are involved. A brief definition for each follows. • The work interface. Developing a more reflective and self-

conscious series of conversations leads to a clearer understanding not only of each employee’s job and performance expectations but also of the impact of each job on work environment and work flow. • The design interface. Perceiving and altering the relationships

correlates the impact of work environment and work design on job performance and retention. • The interpersonal and organizational interface. Identifying the

degree of collaboration shapes the interactivity and interoperability of the entire work community and its interdependence. The value of using interfaces as the focus of strategic conversations is that this approach not only facilitates the exploration of work definition and change as dialogue but also keeps alive and factors in the official language of company goals and mission. The sequence and the content of the three interfacing conversations also would involve managers’ role-playing the behaviors and language of their employees.

Strategies for Retention

The Work Interface Many managers find it difficult to accept that conversations between managers and employees should not always or essentially be evaluative. If and when a conversation is evaluative, then the gulf is preserved and collaborative exchange is jeopardized. Rather, conversation has to be exploratory and nonjudgmental. Above all, it should not be dominated or monopolized by the supervisor. The focus, in fact, should be on questions, eliciting the employees’ views and their description of their jobs and the parts of those jobs. In the process, the manager needs to affirm that no one knows a job as well as the one who does it, but that it is also critical to keep in mind company goals. Jobs do not exist in the abstract in and for themselves; they contribute to overall organizational objectives. The manager is thus not only able to certify the employees’ expertise but also to redirect it toward strategic ends. Because strategic conversations aim to get at root causes and to discourage the routine, mechanical response of reciting job descriptions, they make it possible for the manager to focus the exchange in a more reflective direction. This encourages a more self-conscious attitude toward job definition by suggesting that the employee verbalize—that is, talk out loud the kind of thinking that occurs while doing the various parts of the job. Prompts for this kind of analysis go through three steps: 1. Give personal examples based on the manager’s own work. For example, the manager may describe the kind of thinking and rethinking that is involved in putting together a production schedule or ordering parts from competing vendors while staying within budget. 2. Discuss the difference between the written job description and what really happens, and suggest describing the job as though talking to someone new to the division. 3. Ask some basic questions: What concerns you when you start doing your job? What do you think about? Look out for? Worry

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about? How much and often do you look ahead to the next step or where the work goes after it leaves you?

The Design Interface Such responses to the job process lead to the next series of questions: Does your way of thinking about your job resemble the way other people holding the same job think about it? Identify some different types of workers and ambitions and their sense of standards or values. How do you think they approach the job? What would be the range of attitude and thinking—from the best to the worst? Finally, the key question: Given everything said to date, what would you change in the way the job is done? If you could design or redesign your own job and the work environment, what would you change, and for what reasons? How do you think that new way of working would affect your fellow workers in the division and those on your team? If negatively, how would you suggest that be managed? If nothing else, a more self-critical attitude toward work leads to job and worker redefinition. The gains of self-consciousness and self-confidence are also reflected in a more involved, more knowledgeable employee. The worker-job interface is fused. Conversations on work environment and on the way the work is organized support company-wide goals of productivity, quality, and retention. Aggregated upward, the multiple changes generated by many employee conversations impact company culture. Moreover, once in place, the conversations are ongoing, just as are the people who sustain that dialogue.

The Interpersonal and Organizational Interface This approach to communications also encourages employees to explore collaborative relationships. Team and group conversations are different. The interpersonal interface thus now involves not just two but many contributing voices.

Strategies for Retention

The model of strategic conversations requires that each unit or division be perceived not as a separate series of job interactions but as a total community sustained by thoughtful and self-conscious reflective conversations. That dialogue in turn not only has to subsume but also align the three interfaces to the point where all are now more integrated and collaborative. In the process conversational accountability is shared by managers and employees. The more contributive role of the employee is matched by a manager more receptive to employee self-definition. The number of the recommended changes of different ways of designing jobs and work environments can also affect structure. In addition, divisional leadership may not be singular but multiple, not unilateral but shared.

LINKAGES OF WORKFORCE CONVERSATIONS Implicit throughout this process is constantly linking and integrating the conversations of the workforce to focus on the value of their active involvement. Retention is thus built in throughout. The workforce discovers not only its indispensability but also its selfdetermining power and capacity to redesign work and even work environments. With a community-centered workforce in charge of sustaining job conversations, interfaces, and planning, the organization is redefined as a place where employees constantly talk and question their way through problem solving, strategic planning, and performance improvement. Finally, even official communications can acquire a new voice and language and give the culture a new sense of community and conversation. In addition to these conversations of forward-looking organizations, other ways of building loyalty, retaining talent, and engaging future performance exist. To understand further, it is necessary to step back and review the challenges HR faces.

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THE MULTIPLE CHALLENGES OF HR The three most pressing problems HR has always faced are hiring good people, keeping them, and improving their performance. Talent shortages and savvier candidates have complicated the first task. Downsizing and loss of company loyalty have upped the ante of retention. However, the one bright area is performance and productivity, especially stirred by training. That has generally remained a force for positive and continual improvement. To be sure, even here HR faces a downside: inadvertently preparing professionals to leave for better jobs elsewhere. A more serious limitation is not making employee performance improvement an integral part of a total and seamless continuum from talent acquisition to retention. That would require a new and expanded welcoming of employee input beyond all current empowerment efforts. For example, who usually decides on training topics? Top management often, occasionally HR. Who assigns priorities? Ditto. Occasionally, employees may be asked, but if so it is usually limited to offering choices from an established list. And with that input in hand, or without it, decisions are made and the company frequently then claims it is a learning organization. Or it hooks up a number of training offerings and occasionally some e-mail linkages and describes itself as a corporate university. In most organizations the selection of training topics is also determined by negative—almost punitive—factors: • Inefficiency or ineffectiveness. Something needs to be fixed.

For example, following the discovery of serious flaws in the way employees are evaluated or judged as to who receives incentive bonuses, a new performance appraisal system will be installed and the training will focus on introducing and explaining it. • Ignorance or updating. Incremental needs require catch-up,

mostly technological. Highly technical updates dominate the offerings of most corporate universities and e-businesses.

Strategies for Retention

• Big-picture correction or amplification. Paradigm shifts occur

that require revising training: reengineering the corporation, introducing a balanced scorecard approach, teaming, learning organization, and more. When all three are operative, the list is at least representative and respectable. But it is far from ideal for a number of reasons. It is essentially external and depersonalized. It may tinker with what is needed, but it does not touch who the employees are or what they can become. In addition, because the selection process is not broad-based enough to generate comprehensive input, the final results, although beneficial, may when applied be partial, fragmented, or ill-fitting. For training to be effective, it cannot be scattered or piecemeal; it must have coherence. It also needs to be ambitious or profound enough to reach down to basics and ahead to future aspirations. It has to rest on the fundamental bedrock of self-directed and focused learning and unlearning. It has to tap what a knowledge worker really is and knows and to profile a model of the employee as a contributing and developing lifelong partner of the business. Creating an employee-centered organization thus is based on employee self-definition. Each member of each division has to craft an employee mission statement. In fact, they need to write two sets of pairs: one summarizing who they are now and who they want to be; the other what their division is and what it seeks to be. These overarching statements can be aggregated both horizontally and vertically to generate divisional and company performance goals. They also collectively shape the future training agenda: what instruction will be required to reach those future performance goals, who will offer it, and what forms it should take. Above all, employee mission statements can become either supplements to job descriptions or better still a more dynamic, authentic, and owned replacement.

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EMPLOYEE MISSION STATEMENT What are the building blocks of an employee mission statement (EMS)? The standard mission statement is organizational. It speaks to the business of the company and its values. Employees are seldom mentioned. They are assumed. If they are explicitly identified, they are given an aggregated identity as “teams” or “the workforce.” But empowerment has raced far ahead of such traditional and impoverishing descriptions. In many cases, it has fundamentally altered organization structures, cultures, and charts. It has intensified the importance of interpersonal and teaming relationships. Capital is now defined as human capital as well as financial capital. Above all, it has required CEOs to be leaders of workers and not just organizations, because without the focused efforts of individual workers the five major goals of productivity, profitability, quality, customer service, and innovation can never be accomplished. Thus the notion of an employee mission statement comes as a natural new outcome of an evolutionary process. It is an equity step. One way to help the process along is to identify the major areas or essentials an EMS must address. The temptation is to use managerial categories, which in fact dominate most traditional mission statements of organizations. But the need is to personalize the process, to align it as much as possible with everyday conversation, to have it express the genuine voice of employees, and to get it to flow so as to reach down and articulate true feelings and even deep doubts. The last is important because two paired mission statements are to be written. The first addresses the present, the second the future.

EMS Descriptors Although a number of topics can be chosen as guidelines for discussion, the following five cover the basics and have proved engaging: attitudes, expectations, learning, relationships, and standards. Managers can facilitate individual or team exchanges or both. The

Strategies for Retention

discussion of each of the five areas can be aided and preceded by a brief multiple-choice questionnaire. The choices can be structured so that the last one is always the ideal one and thus sets up the key descriptors for the second or future-oriented EMS. Here, then, are some examples for each of the five categories. Attitudes: Toward Work

Four choices generally cover the field: “generally OK,” “sometimes strong,” “committed,” and “passionate.” Typically, the first two items are chosen. Discussion between members then usually centers on definitions. What do we mean by committed? By passionate? One or two who have selected either may gingerly begin to describe their choice. They may be greeted by sarcasm: “You expect me to be passionate about filling out forms, listening to some stupid customer’s complaints, sitting through all those dumb meetings, and the rest of the garbage we have to shovel through?” Quickly, the rubber hits the road and reality rears its truthful head. After venting, the new question becomes, “What will it take to change our attitude to being at least committed if not passionate?” The quick consensus response is, “A lot.” A list then is prepared to serve as the conditions for a change in attitude. But the change is noted in the future version of the EMS as the stretch goal, and the conditional list is sent upstairs. In short, the future is negotiated. And so is everything else in each category, including the relationships between categories. Inevitably, trade-offs are required for change. But the process has just started. Other areas of change have to be similarly explored. The final results then are related to each other. The interaction may result in revisions. Thus, each EMS is a draft. The process is not linear but circular, cumulative and not sequential. The final point is revisiting all the stages and asking, “Then what kind of training do we need, who will the instructors be, and what else is required to help us reach our future stretch goals?”

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Expectations: Of Performance

The basic discussion here is open-ended. It addresses three basic issues: What are our performance goals? Who sets them? How often do we meet or exceed them? The value of the initial discussion is to get everybody on board the same train. It is often surprising how many are not. The second issue may result in some spirited exchanges. But here, too, the gap is between extremes: one advocating no leash at all, the others some leash, hopefully long. Again compromise comes to the rescue: a medium-sized leash. Next is to arrive at some common ground: “At least let us have collaborative determination of performance goals.” The future EMS statement puts the two pieces together and attests to the following: “All mutually defined performance goals will be met and at least half exceeded.” Before leaving this topic, one member of the group notes that it will take a committed, passionate attitude to exceed goals. Everyone nods in agreement at the emergence of the first linkage. Learning: Knowing Not Just the Job but the Business

This issue regularly generates complaints and reveals some past baggage. This venting should be encouraged because it clears the air and the field, and thus prepares for a discussion that turns directly on the employees themselves as knowledge workers. How smart are we? How important is it that we be smart? Work smarter not harder? Sharpen the saw? How often are we self-analytical about our job? How we do it? Is there another and better way to do it? Do we routinely pursue root causes? Or opt for the easy way of the fast and the dirty? Of blame and shame? Do we ask “Why?” five times when something goes wrong? Do we ever do research or ask for it? Are any of us students of the business? Do we want to get rid of the culture of blame and shame? Unlike the first two sessions, which by comparison were always vigorous, easy, and fluid, this one stops many employees in their tracks. They become increasingly reflective and introspective. They

Strategies for Retention

are a bit shocked to find how mechanical, unthinking, and unquestioning they have been about their work. Many acknowledge— often for the first time—that they have operated with a number of unarticulated assumptions that need to be examined. Curiously, all find it relatively easy to agree that the future statement needs to focus on the model of knowing not just the job but the total business. Finally, they perceive that being a student of the total business is incrementally beyond being a knowledge worker, and that an employee university is superior to a learning organization. In fact, they designate both “knowledge worker” and “learning organization” as belonging to the present, and “student of the business” and “employee university” to the future. Relationships: Aligning Linkages

The focus here is on work relationships and job satisfaction. The goal is to determine the strengths and weaknesses of interpersonal relations—and the effects of interpersonal relations, positive and negative, on performance. If teams are already operative, the assessment is both individual and group. If not, then the exercise serves the diagnostic function of indicating what strengths can be tapped and what areas need improvement if teams in the future are to be more effective. Above all, because again the stress is on present benchmarks and future growth, unhappy current work relationships that may jeopardize performance can with some helpful coaching be changed. Indeed, that becomes a future EMS statement. But perhaps the most dramatic change in this arena has to do with present and future definitions of job satisfaction, which has just been examined and now needs to be folded into the EMS. Standards: The Practice of Quality

Quality embraces all. It is what holds everything together. It is both quantitative and qualitative. It can be measured in terms of zero defects, minimum spoilage, total customer retention, and other factors. It has its data.

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But it also constitutes the culture of the enterprise. It is how we do things around here, and above all what we do not do. It is about integrity of relationships so that every employee is treated like a customer. In short, every goal, action, relationship, and outcome will carry the overlay of quality. And where current limitations are discovered, the future EMS will project quality goals to be achieved. Those may include the end to bossism, to blame and shame, to manipulation, to coercion, insecurity, and so on. And in their place will appear a commitment to persuasion and working by consensus. Not pie in the sky but all reachable because what is aspired to is trainable.

Composite EMS It might be helpful at this point to offer a draft of the two composite versions of an employee mission statement. Current

“We are part of a dedicated workforce with high expectations of ourselves and our products and services. We are committed to constantly improving how we do our job. We also value learning about and creating best practices and insist on quality operations throughout the organization.” Future

“We aspire to be a cohesive and passionate workforce committed to the highest quality standards of customer satisfaction. We seek to become students of the business so that we can meet and even exceed our stretch goals of constant and continuous improvement. We aim to set the standard for the industry.”

COMMENTARY Although the creation of an employee mission statement is justified in its own right, it also offers and needs to serve as a powerful

Strategies for Retention

supplement to the organizational version and thus acquire the same official status that the traditional one has enjoyed. In addition, it reflects an organization that values the centrality of its employees and provides them with a forum for their own voice. It thus says to customers that when they choose this company they are fundamentally choosing its people. And when employees believe that they make the difference to prospective and current customers, they frequently do.

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10

REEXAMINATION OF WORK AND ITS RELATIONSHIPS

Increasingly, employees are questioning those in charge and wondering how smart and anticipatory they really are. The first thing a savvy consultant does when brought in to solve a problem is talk to—and listen to—employees. Invariably, they not only know what is wrong but also how to fix it. But they are seldom or never asked. Increasingly, employees are not blinded by hero worship or codependent on father-knows-best. They value their own intelligence and refuse to suffer the consequences of the incompetent and the paternalistic. Too many have endured downsizing and reductions in force associated with mergers and acquisitions to have much confidence in a leadership that gives lip service to participation but essentially practices benevolent authoritarianism. And another rebellion is brewing too, only in this instance it involves managers. Thinning or flattening out the organization has made overwork a norm. Fewer managers are being asked to accomplish and supervise more, to fill in gaps left by losses, and to rely on less qualified 117

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workers to accomplish ambitious “stretch” goals. Moreover, to do all that they have to create, train, and sustain worker teams. Often they have little or nothing to manage. The team does it all. As managers become aware that they are being asked to cut their own throats, they are less than enthusiastic about supporting teams whose increasing effectiveness increases productivity but forecasts their own demise. In short, there is discontent on both sides. Workers want more say; managers seek to preserve their status. Employees want to become not just shareholders but stakeholders. Managers want their expertise of planning and supervision valued. Workers argue that their experience is critical; managers argue the same for their education and training. The net result is an impasse in which neither side will yield. Employees will not surrender their recently achieved centrality nor will managers, after all their years of dominance, quietly take a back seat. And the rope in this tug of war is the organization that employs both groups. When the CEOs or senior staff speak on behalf of the organization, all the familiar declarations come from the mount: we are in charge, we set policy and choose direction, we determine who is hired and who is fired— in short, we rule. Not so anymore. Too many major misjudgments, flawed products or services, failed companies, unprofitable maneuvers—too many outright errors—have torn or tarnished the mantle of infallibility. Moreover, the dissension on both sides is generally ignored, and thus little or nothing is done to bridge the two or bring them together. Current CEOs and their senior staff preside over a divided house that bitterly resists traditional monarchial harmony and capacity to resolve. The net result is a wobbly three-legged stool. The CEOs and senior staff (and the board) no longer provide constant support for managers because of the pressure for worker productivity. The managers in turn still have to do all the dirty work, fill in holes brought about by reductions in force, and trade off their traditional control with worker teams. The employees are becoming increasingly distrustful of upper management’s judgment and resentful of

Reexamination of Work and Its Relationships

their obscene salaries, often increased precisely when layoffs occur in some kind of perverse reward system. In many organizations distrust has become the norm. Replacing CEOs solves credibility problems temporarily, but it is dismissed as an external public relations game as soon as managers and workers see no internal changes follow in its wake. In short, disunity reigns among the three major components of an organization: upper management, middle management, and rank and file. When surviving global competition is factored in, what follows is a total preoccupation with the bottom line. Then virtually everything and everyone becomes expendable. The dilemma is clear: How do we put the organization together in a new way? Can a different alliance between the three major constituencies be forged or negotiated? If so, what is the glue? I see some tentative and partial signs that a new understanding and even re-rapprochement is gradually surfacing. The standard official negotiations between workers and their organization have been extended unofficially between workers and managers. Some CEOs are willing to limit executive power to bring about internal alignment. They are beginning to understand that their central task as leaders is not to glorify their role but to find and proclaim areas of commonality. Increasingly, middle managers are warming to their new and different tasks as team leaders and coaches of improved performance. Employees are increasingly aware of the need for a less adversarial, more cooperative attitude and for releasing enough productivity and creativity on their part to offset the lower wages of global competition.

A BRANCH POINT IN CHANGING RELATIONSHIPS In other words, we appear to have reached a major branch point in which all sides are more open to changing their fundamental relationships with each other. We have some hope of producing a whole that may be more than a sum of its contending and divisive

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parts. The need then is to explore and to define—no matter how tentatively—the different roles of all the major participants in what I have called collaborative work covenants. Although what is offered here is not prescriptive, it is based on perceptible changes of practice on one hand and major shifts in the literature of leadership and empowerment on the other. If such covenants are to take hold, however, there can be no take-backs in the hard-won battle of employee empowerment. New interfaces born of mutuality and commonality must be found to close current gaps. In the process, private enterprise may find itself moving more in the direction of socialism than capitalism. How are covenants and collaboratives different from their earlier predecessors, the social contract and the union contract? The most obvious is that the focus is not limited to workers. In fact, the major problem is not eliminating adversarial relationships, which can sometimes be of contributory value, but getting all three parties to the table together to negotiate or renegotiate their roles with respect to one another. That in turn requires all to acknowledge that what is at stake is the company itself and its future. Indeed, that is the first and most important area of commonality to be acknowledged. The company may be owned by stockholders, but its fate belongs equally to all those who are at the table. All bring their special expertise to bear, but that expertise is not exclusively held. It is available for input and overlap from each of the others as well. In addition, whatever form the negotiation shapes, it will never be final or emerge as a singular legalistic, elaborate formulation. Rather, it will be a mosaic, a series of clusters, a compilation of agreements of understanding. It will also be deliberately incomplete. Negotiations can go only so far—and then they must cease. The endless and often trivial details of union contracts cannot become the substitute for basic operating principles guiding new relationships. Moreover, room must be left for fleshing out the skeleton and accommodating the subsequent contributions of all those who have to implement the accord.

Reexamination of Work and Its Relationships

Collaborative Work Covenants Unlike union contracts, which spell out every point in chapter and verse, and which can require as many hands to monitor as to implement, a work covenant leaves room for day-to-day adjustment. It is routinely discontinuous and preserves gaps. It compels constant dialogue and negotiation on every level and between every division and unit. In addition, it is defined not so much in terms of the individual but the group or team. And there are no jurisdictional limits. Nothing is out of bounds. If the team lacks anything, it can be imported. The group may have a core, but its periphery and final extent may vary with the focus and the process. It is free to expand and even cross divisional boundaries in pursuit of its quarry. And when that happens successfully, new configurations of operations may emerge, not even anticipated in the original agreements. Structural dexterity follows goal pursuit. Form catches up with and supports function. But no addendum to the contract is required to freeze this new variation. To etch spontaneous change in stone and finalize its shape may preclude a different configuration from emerging at another time and for another purpose. If anything, the work covenant process resembles the metaphor of a river flowing through an organization described and extolled by Margaret Wheatley. Self-learning and self-organizing, the process affects the fundamental structure and culture of the company and brings about changes gradually from within. The organization chart itself no longer imposes order from without but benchmarks change points. It is the history of a work constantly in progress.

MASTERY OF GROUP DYNAMICS This kind of change is neither easy nor rapid, and it does not happen without extensive and intensive reconceptualization of work and work relationships by all the members of the triad. Effective

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groups attuned to process rather than function are not born. They have to be made, remade, nurtured, coached, challenged. They are newly created. All the participants need to master at least five group dynamics skills: • Conflict must be seen as the norm. Managing opposition is the

key to higher levels of understanding and performance. • Interdependence of teams becomes the model for all. A worker

who is dependent or co-dependent must become more independent. But ultimately all the workers have to become more interdependent, not at the expense of their individuality but in addition to it. They have to become a new composite: collectivized individuals. • Transition has to be accepted as a dominant and recurrent

norm. Paradoxically, it provides the overriding and ambiguous benefit of an organization permanently in flux and committed to the dynamic give-and-take of collaboration. • Work covenants require constant negotiation and persuasion.

The process is endlessly consultative. The agreements reached are always tentative and situational. How they are arrived at is as important as what is finally agreed upon. Negotiating them is an optimizing skill. • Communication must be constant and total. It is the stuff of

mutual empowerment and a way of leaving no one behind or outside the circle. Persuasion is the key to bringing groups back together into new wholes, healing wounds in the process and forging a new consensus. Again and again the recurrent summary and debriefing has to include the same litany: “OK. What have we learned? Where have we been? Where are we now? What is our focus for the future?” These skills must be supplemented by an understanding and examination of the assumptions, expectations, and agenda of each group. Often that requires reflection, assumptions analysis, and subsequent unlearning. For example, CEOs believe they have a

Reexamination of Work and Its Relationships

monopoly on leadership. Managers are convinced that workers must be managed. Workers often think they know more than their immediate supervisors or the top brass. But a central covenant value is the self-organizing principle of groups’ managing themselves. Overcoming limits to productivity may require that the traditional distinctions between workers and managers be blurred. Workers assume managerial roles, and managers assume worker roles. This is the ultimate cross-training. It is also the key to how and why covenants can also accommodate managers. Managerial functions are thus shared and are not the monopoly of one class of employees. But aside from the commonality of training and objectives that now ties both groups together, what is also required is a different definition of leadership. It is not enough to claim that leadership is shared. Expertise is leadership, and it must be acknowledged and given its due at all levels or directives and initiatives will not be heeded or respected. Such recognition means that every level leads. Each one not only possesses and practices its unique version of stewardship, it is also responsible for harmonizing all the others as well. Traditionally, shaping the whole was the distinction (or cross) that top management had to bear alone. Bits and pieces of the cross were parceled out to managers so that they could serve as minileaders. But that pecking order pecked at and muzzled or minimized the leadership of each level below the CEO. However, the work covenant functions not unlike a multidisciplinary task force: the whole belongs to the whole. It grants not only common purpose and focus but also collective responsibility for sustaining and if necessary altering it. The covenant thus defines and celebrates commonality.

GROUP COLLABORATION One of the key problems of effective group collaboration is keeping the big picture in front of everyone and not passing off a half as

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a whole. Indeed, the primary responsibility of all leaders at all levels is to preserve and optimize the collective individuality of the group so that the full force of its diversity can be brought to bear on all problems and opportunities. Finally, one of the key distinctions of such groups is in fact the creation of the collectivized individual, someone who epitomizes the behavioral and cultural power of work covenant collaboration. What might a work collaborative look like? And how would it work? Perhaps a defining way of rendering that is to offer a profile of each of four groups—top management, middle managers, rankand-file workers, and teams. It should be noted that they have not been blurred into each other. Each set of characteristics has been developed to focus on what is within their altered power and province and how they now contribute to the process of creating new interfaces and a new set of working relationships. A listing of dos and don’ts may be the most succinct way to present them.

Top Management The role of top management is to constantly draw, shape, and share the big picture—routinely, periodically. It is not to summarily announce or promulgate decisions; instead, it is to provide persuasive reasons and documentation for decisions. Top management must also: • Align policies with vision and mission and be value-driven • Be proactive, anticipatory, and future-driven • Conceive and present initiatives in clusters of alternatives and

trade-offs • Recognize, reward, and value innovation, small or large • Be intellectually rigorous, savvy, interesting, and occasionally

daring • Signal clearly that the era of top-down, heavy-handed punitive

bossism is dead and buried

Reexamination of Work and Its Relationships

• Give to get: to get more accountability, offer more choice • Finally, always tell the truth, especially if it is bad news

Middle Managers The role of middle managers is to listen always; especially twoeared listening—hearing both what is said and what is not. They must also: • Minimize nos, maximize yeses, optimize maybes • Not play the blame, shame, or gotcha game; look for root causes • Not play favorites • Be straight shooters and talkers • Be workers; get their hands dirty • Not oppose or suppress opposition; incorporate it • Keep the customer alive and in everyone’s face, every time and

everywhere • Develop everyone they touch • Recognize that success is always multiple

Workers The overriding objective of all employees is to have a say and stake in everything. They should: • Not allow themselves to be treated like children and accept

pabulum when they have the teeth to chomp steak • Claim that expertise resides with workers; no one knows the

job better than those who do it • Constantly ask, discuss, and explore • Act as if there are no limits to individual and group develop-

ment and capacity

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• Acknowledge that all are collectively responsible for what is

done, said, and sold • Treat everyone with respect and dignity • Value the diversity of commonality and commonality of diver-

sity: everybody is the same in a different way • Practice what is preached

Teams The primary goal is to create a team that is change-ready, able to shift direction and focus as needed. Teams should also: • Be intolerant of mediocrity in everything, demanding quality of

product, service, communication • Shape the values of the collaborative work covenant to align

with the vision of the company, and vice versa • Be smart about their industry; position their company to take

advantage of emerging trends • Minimize bureaucracy—weeds push out flowers • Be obsessive about customers. Meet them, talk to them. The

customers are data. They may not always be right, but that is still the challenge. • Move authority closest to the point of action and expertise • Examine statistics • Challenge assumptions • Check alignments vertically and to the right and left • Give a prize for the best question of the week • Create employee universities in which teams teach • Create happiness, camaraderie, and enthusiasm as a unique

expression of the team—but never use it to shut out newcomers

Reexamination of Work and Its Relationships

• Always seek to be interesting • Recognize and embody Blanchard’s dictum: “None of us is as

smart as all of us” In many ways, collaborative worker covenants are being built upon previous breakthroughs and hard-won achievements. But these agreements in many other ways are basically new. They signal a new competing centrality. No longer is the spotlight solely or even largely on CEOs, managers, or employees. Rather, the focus is on the interfacing relationships among them. Commonality is king. The commons of the old village is what is shared and owned by all. All collectively shape a new organizational configuration. Both vertical and horizontal alignments can be retained, but only if surrounded and enclosed by a series of multiple concentric circles of common cause and purpose. The circular thus governs the architecture because all the knights of the Round Table are equal and all are leaders. Jurisdictional boundaries are no longer sacred. Everything must flow and meander like a river through the entire enterprise. Leadership is not the monopoly of the CEO or senior management. Leadership is distributed and written into everyone’s job description. Cross-training and work interchangeability are common best practices. Above all, collaborative work covenants should create a new and interesting home for a new kind of worker-managerleader as a collectivized individual. Toward that end, the employment matrix in Table 7 summarizes all the changes work covenants have to manage.

COMMENTARY To many, perhaps, the prospect of such a covenant appears utopian. But given the realities of the economics of competition on one hand and the forces of empowerment and commonality on the other, workplace collaboratives and covenants may emerge merely as the embodiment of a transitional present and a transitional future.

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TA B LE 7 • E M P OWE R M E NT M AT R I X BEFORE EMPOWERMENT

AFTER EMPOWERMENT

Structure

Centralized, vertical

Decentralized, horizontal

Job description

Prescribed

Self-directed

Mission statement

Organizational

Employee generated

Operations

Function

Process

Employees

Workers

Assets

Leadership

Specified, top-down

Distributed, available

Pay

Salary

Gains-sharing

Human resources

Recruitment

Retention

Relationships

Individual (independence)

Group (interdependence)

Training

Homogeneous, singular

Heterogeneous, cross-divisional

Information

Hoarded

Shared

Performance

Blame and shame

Improvement

Manager

Boss

Coach

Listening

Limited and selective

Feedback and feed forward

Decisions

Top-down

Consensual

Innovation

R&D

Learning organization

CATEGORY

Reexamination of Work and Its Relationships

CATEGORY

BEFORE EMPOWERMENT

AFTER EMPOWERMENT

Forecasting

Planners

Lay forecasting

Agreements

Contracts

Covenants

Voice

Singular

Multiple

Roles

Given

Negotiated

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PA R T

Perspectives on Evaluation and Training

Traditionally, employee evaluation occurs once a year, usually at the anniversary of the job start. The exchange is usually one-sided. The supervisor has a fat folder, the employee nothing—and with no prior knowledge of what the folder contains. Often its contents are surprising, even intimidating. Employees are thus frequently and understandably apprehensive, and tend to be defensive. Although they accept the ritual of being judged, they rarely know its basis in advance and are equally uncertain as to its final conclusions. Not surprisingly, evaluation is often dreaded, sometimes by both sides. Happily, much is changing, and for the better. Evaluation is still a work in progress, as the information in Part Three demonstrates.

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In the greater arena of evaluation and training, two absolutes now dominate all current operations. Everything is under review, and training is endless. Nothing and no one is ever allowed to remain unexamined, unaltered, and underdeveloped. Indeed, all are beset by the same current pressures: increased demands for competitive performance, uneven workforce preparation, constant need for incremental and even innovative gains, and new company directions. Everything and everyone is very busy. All lean on training for survival and growth. Thus workers are being reskilled, missions reinvented, operations reengineered, divisions reconstituted, and structures reconfigured. Often many such tasks are propelled by updating—factoring in new technology and software and adjusting to new markets or customers. But because even the need for currency is part of the larger future of discontinuity, managers of training and instructional designers have found it necessary to apply both retrospect and prospect. Not content to improve what exists, they have had to reconceptualize the entire process by going back to square one and then anticipating what new basics will be required in the future. It follows a leap-frogging pattern: while catching up, try to get ahead. But perhaps all these efforts should not be mechanically, automatically, or indiscriminately pursued or applied. Pause may be needed. Does the evaluation in turn need evaluation? Do we have a case of “Physician, heal thyself”? In short, are we overlooking some undetected, unexpected, and unexamined opportunities in our hurry to reinvent? Part Three addresses several topics—evaluation, teamwork, training, and the goals and roles of managers and leaders—and we must consider the current condition of each to enable us to ponder new options and the future. Finally, we must fuse the best of the past and present to create an optimal future.

C H A P T E R

11

EVALUATION OF PEOPLE, TRAINING, AND TEAMS

Performance improvement, not easily achieved, often requires workers to change. They are asked to become more self-conscious about their work, recast job descriptions as mission statements, and recognize that job satisfaction is something they not only receive but also give. And it has worked: productivity has consistently improved or remained steady every year for at least the last ten. But the gains may not offset the substantial wage differentials between workers in the United States and developing countries substantially enough to keep jobs here. Still, performance improvement rightly remains the principal source of competitive advantage. But a number of challenges have emerged. The first is catch-up. So many jobs have changed so drastically that they regularly exceed their job descriptions. With stretch goals routinely being built in, such discrepancies are the norm. And yet many companies and HR divisions still store and trot out their old warhorses. This is particularly dislocating when a new vacancy is advertised and 133

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applicants are sent job descriptions that do not reflect the real nature of the current position. A second related matter is matchup. Whether or not the job description is updated, the job evaluation process may have changed. And if the process is now more involving, participatory, and even proactive, the new evaluative dynamic has in effect become a critical part of the job description. Limiting description solely to what the job requires without also indicating how it will be evaluated is as deceptive as a dated job description. Finally, there is lineup. Increasingly, workers are required to prioritize their work goals so that they are aligned with company objectives. But company goals are rarely shared. Even when they are, the prioritizing and aligning process is often an add-on and thus not made an integral part of job performance or its evaluation.

SELF-EVALUATING PERFORMANCE PROFILES How best to update, communicate, and integrate catch-up, matchup, and lineup? Two related approaches might be helpful. One would be to bring together and capture all three in a more dynamic, interactive, and holistic form. That form also would accommodate job changes by regularly and routinely updating job descriptions so they are always current. Designated a “performing profile,” the new document would subsume current job descriptions (catch-up), the evaluation process and worker roles (matchup), and prioritizing and aligning goals (lineup). The related strategy would not impose the new form or process from the top—it would turn the task over to each worker so that it is a job learning experience for its compilers. That process would allow it to serve as an employeecreated and self-evaluating performance profile. The resulting ownership would also be self-correcting and -improving. But first a key distinction. This would not be a performance but a performing profile. The change in terminology signals a change from essentially static and written job descriptions to a more fluid,

Evaluation of People, Training, and Teams

dynamic, and open-ended database. The aim is to shift the focus from job parts to job process, from passive and retroactive descriptions to active and proactive compilations updated by ongoing employee monitoring. Overall it compels a more self-conscious and self-reflective review of work dynamics.

Compiling a Performing Profile Here are some of the options workers can choose from to facilitate such self-tracking and self-evaluation: • A visual record to supplement the written version of employees

in motion • Daily and weekly calendars combed to generate patterns of

movement, meetings, and activities • Communications and conversations (e-mail, letters, phone

calls, and messages) mined to identify directional flow and impasse • Configurations drawn of interpersonal and interfacing net-

working relations • Entries in a daily work journal reflecting self-progress and

obstacles to work performance and satisfaction examined In effect, the performing profile would apply time and motion study to job dynamics and help create an audiovisual record of the total work process. It would be both more objective and more subjective, generic and individualized. Situated in real time and space, infused with thought and judgment, the performing profile would mirror not just the job but its flow, not just its outcomes but its impacts. Moreover, because it would be basically self-compiled, it would also be a self-evaluation tool.

Matrix Database What would such an amplified job database contain? A performing profile, unlike static job descriptions or unilateral managerial

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directives, is interactive, reciprocal, evolving, and goal-driven. In other words, from the outset it is set up as a workforce action agenda— it identifies the key elements of the performance environment for both worker and manager and structures the shared development of their continuous development. Minimally there are four such ongoing interfaces for each member of a job and work change partnership summed up and itemized in Tables 8 and 9. Finally, what benefits would profiling produce as a self-evaluation tool and process? The most obvious gain for employees is that it would be total, candid, and individualized. It would capture the job in its entirety. It would be each employee’s equivalent of the big picture. Then, too, the profile would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the job. It would identify what is challenging, tough, and frustrating. It would stress how critical supportive bosses are, the endless negotiations of teams, and the nature of job satisfaction. Unexpectedly, perhaps, it would strike a confessional note by suggesting the extent to which problems are often self-created—Pogo’s familiar conclusion: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Finally, the individualized profile of strengths and areas of improvement would be positioned within the context of the optimum performance of each specific job or position. Employees could thus perceive the extent to which they are aligned or not with that template and with company goals, which would make it possible for them to take corrective action to bring their performance more in line with that optimum center and with optimum company performance. The performing profile also benefits supervisors. At the least, it would expand their knowledge base and focus their intervention. Supervisors would learn more not only about the dynamics of each job and how it is perceived but also about what corrections are being contemplated in what areas at what points. The supervisors would thus be cast into a responding rather than a directive role. Instead of always telling employees what they must do, they could

Evaluation of People, Training, and Teams

TA B LE 8 • P E R FO R M I N G P RO F I LE ( WO R KE R AG E N DA ) RECORDING PROCESSES

MEANS, MODES, AND SOURCES

Work flow

Time and motion monitoring

Observation

Interpersonal factors

Fellow workers and customers

Calendar

Communication

Job-related conversations

Letters, e-mail, phone

Thought and judgment

Mental motivation

Job journal

Job satisfaction

Giving and getting

Feedback

Training

Incremental gains and change

HR workshops

CATEGORY

TA B LE 9 • P E R FO R M I N G P RO F I LE ( M A N AG E R AG E N DA ) CATEGORY

WORK GOALS

WORK CHANGE

Daily activities

Increase worker input

Implement worker changes

Interaction

Coach, not boss

Support worker growth

Communication

Listen better

Encourage worker reflection

Thinking and deciding

Become more self-critical

Encourage worker self-evaluation

Job satisfaction

Develop interpersonal skills

Give and get

Training

Develop work profiling

Fuse job and evaluation

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function as coaches—supporting, redirecting, and enriching their employees’ change plans.

Contrast with Job Descriptions Unlike job descriptions, which are static and sequential, profiling is inclusively circular, continuous, and holistic. It is essentially a job narrative. It records in moving pictures worker and work, thought and action, process and outcomes. Above all, it measures the capacity of each employee to be self-defining. It requires employees to demonstrate the extent of their self-management skills by identifying ways to improve productivity and performance. Indeed, it makes it possible for the involvement and contributions of supervisors to function at a higher level of employee awareness and job analysis. Supervisors can tap their knowledge of the performance of other employees doing the same or related jobs and raise questions about the completeness of the profile as well as the suggestions for improvement. And the range of this managerial expertise is now tapped in the critical tasks of establishing the job template, its performance centrality, and above all its optimum definition. To be sure, in the new environment those discussions are not unilateral but collaborative, evolving and not imposed. With this new alliance, performance outcomes are more likely to take hold because they are shared, corroborative, and mutually informed. Implementation would be enhanced by a buddy system. Pairing off would involve each partner shadowing and observing the other while working. As a reality check, HR in turn could observe the entire process and make suggestions. Initial results and patterns would be reviewed for any midcourse corrections. Partnering with someone in another division or with a different job may be more easily negotiated and less of an obstacle than initially imagined. In fact, employees may find the process richer because of it. Most critical, it anticipates and prepares the way for a new partnering arrangement with supervisors. Nonetheless, the new process may be greeted with undisguised resentment and even anger.

Evaluation of People, Training, and Teams

NEW EVALUATION ROLE OF MANAGERS Many supervisors may believe that half or more of their employees lack the intelligence or self-worth to undertake such a self-critical journey. On the contrary, they need to be told what to do, and in some cases read the riot act. In addition, many supervisors may be fearful that the way this new system is designed, they will become increasingly superfluous. A minimum-wage clerk could take care of compiling the profiles, and a software program could generate the recommendations. A few might even warn as a parting shot that as production targets are not met, they would have to be called back at the last minute to straighten everything out and put it all back on track. But the most powerful persuaders in the final analysis may turn out to be the final performing composites themselves, combined with the promise of a new partnering relationship between supervisors and employees, where the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed, in large part the profiling pattern can offer such range and focus because the supervisory role is built into the evaluating process, only now totally shared. It also facilitates the managerial role of establishing a nexus between horizontal interfaces and vertical alignment. Individual and company goals are in sync. Aggregating divisional profiles, supervisors could review performance in multidimensional and optimum terms. And employees who are in charge of managing and achieving their own individual productivity goals would be aligned with the guidance of their supervisors to company objectives. The reason performing can powerfully drive performance is that it dramatizes and personalizes process. Profiling is insistently self-focused. In the process, it makes the job less mechanical and predictable. It opens it up to review and reconfiguration. It invests how one thinks one’s way through work with more self-conscious precision and decision. It enables employees not only to see themselves on their own but also with others, and thus offers the interface of interpersonal relations. When compiled, it provides a more

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current, accurate, and in-depth profile of work to new applicants. Above all, it restores the job to the one doing it and invests the holder’s decisions to make changes with intelligence and initiative. Finally, profiling drives supervisory role change. Each manager, far from being diminished, now leads and coaches a unit that ideally miniaturizes the whole. The supervisor bears the key double burden of alignment and optimum performance. Without their knowledgeable input, coherence and shared purpose might be missing. As a result, managers may now more resemble middle-level CEOs who display the wise behaviors of the Taoist proverb: “When the leaders lead well, the people think they did it themselves.” In this case, they both did.

EVALUATING THE EVALUATION OF TRAINING Most trainers are good at what they do. Their evaluations at the end of a workshop are consistently high. And for good reason. They typically design solid and well-paced workshops, nicely mix lecture and exercises, and provide handouts both to illustrate and to take away for later review. Above all, the presenters are experienced and effective. They are adept about adapting their work to different audiences or group chemistry. They know how to handle deflective or argumentative employees. But one area even the best-designed course and the most effective trainers cannot overcome: the application of the training. All trainers will concede that the real evaluation is not the rating of the training but its on-the-job implementation. But companies generally resist the proposals by HR or trainers for such follow-up. Why? Many reasons. They believe many outside training organizations primarily want to increase their billables (which is often the case). They also believe that supervisors have been entrusted with that follow-up and they would be undermined if the trainers performed such managerial roles. (Unfortunately, supervisors often do not take the basic course their direct reports take and

Evaluation of People, Training, and Teams

hence do not know what needs to be followed up.) Another objection is that trainers may generate the expectation that employees need to have their hands held and cannot be trusted to implement course objectives on their own. That would incur an expensive dependency the company wishes to avoid. Given such responses, what can trainers do? Obviously, if employers do not wish to protect their investment in training and recognize the value of follow-up evaluation, trainers have to find enterprising ways of crossing the no-man’s-land of implementation. Here are some tried and tested strategies as well as a few new ones.

New Training Design Options One strategy is a time option. Workshops should not always be compressed into one or two hours or days but spaced over time. Content would be modular and set up in stages. Although each stage would be followed by the next, they would be separated by an intermediate period for testing, evaluating, and reporting back changes. Such review should not be quick, cursory, undocumented, or merely anecdotal. Instead, extensive debriefing and feedback would be presented before and at the second stage of the workshop. Analysis and discussion would focus on finding a consensus of implementation problems, which also may surface during the next stage. To be sure, that alters the workshop dynamics. It introduces a new partnership, which some trainers may have difficulty accepting because the workshop now has two sets of trainers. There may even be a power and agenda struggle. But if implementation is to be made part of training, such juggling is as inevitable as it is productive. When it’s impossible to schedule multiple sessions, another option is to employ at least two evaluation forms. The first deals immediately with the workshop. The second is due two weeks later and involves implementation evaluation. Both entries are recorded on the same form, which is set up as a scorecard to identify what worked and what didn’t, and what adjustments had to be made and

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why. To ensure return of the form, trainers can let attendees know that the attendance sheet signifying that they have successfully completed the workshop will not be turned in without the later entries.

Follow-up Still another technique is telephone or e-mail follow-up. Everyone needs to know they will be contacted later on. It would be helpful to provide guidelines for responses. Ideally, the trainer could also extend invitations for individual coaching sessions. This would allow for a discussion of particular problems with advice sought and given. If such exchanges take place, the trainer should take notes and use them, perhaps, to alter workshop design. Follow-up can be customized. To the standard evaluation form add a proactive section to solicit what students believe to be the major problem they will face in implementing the training. Subsequent contact then should be focused on matching problem identification with actual problem solutions. Finally, most organizations have a regular newsletter. A monthly column can feature the follow-up feedback from members of the workshop. That should include implementation success stories and how employees are advancing company-wide goals. In short, two feedback continua need to be created. One involves fusing implementation with training. The other involves creating ongoing versions of all workshops to report the development of best practices of creative adaptation. Whether or not the company appreciates the value-added dimension of evaluating implementation of training, instructional designers and presenters who provide such all-important linkages of continuity function not only as professional trainers but also as allies of HR. It is perhaps regrettable that trainers have to be devious to preserve their integrity. Those who authorize the training should recognize and honor trainers whose professionalism requires nothing less than the knowledge that their effectiveness is reflected in ultimate terms—the improved performance of those they train.

Evaluation of People, Training, and Teams

REEVALUATING TEAMS TO RETAIN INDIVIDUALITY The dominant configuration of the current work environment is teaming, and its influence is pervasive and company-wide. Assessment of someone’s capacity to be a team player usually determines hiring, retention, and promotion. In fact, a significant portion of training programs includes conflict resolution, negotiating skills, and valuing and managing diversity. And managers separately receive instruction on how to be effective team leaders, facilitators, and mentors and coaches. Finally, the rallying cry of team spirit and coherence has replaced the vision of the company as a caring and tight-knit family. But although teams now enjoy the status of motherhood and apple pie, improving team performance may have reached the point of diminishing returns. Does a tight identity preclude or limit a team’s capacity for creative problem solving and for innovation? Teams are made up of two fundamental types of employees: loners and joiners—solitary go-it-alone rugged individualists and group-oriented go-along belongers. Their most difficult and important challenge is to persuade independent loners and dependent joiners to become interdependent team members. That process is never finished. New members join and require a reenactment of the original fusion. But often what emerges is not a new reflection of the new mix but basically the same team identity. The change has not produced change. Often even external challenges do not alter team cohesion and identity. No reconfiguration occurs. In short, the evaluation of how to achieve greater team productivity and creativity may have fallen short of addressing what may be the builtin current limits of teams to generate such improvements. Teams themselves often possess inherent downsides and blindsides.

Team Downsides The most obvious and distressing downsides of teamwork are lockstep and groupthink. Ironically, harmonizing has been so effective

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that many teams have developed a unique and successful tool kit that defines both their distinction and their limitation. Indeed, a team may become so cocky and predictable that it automatically shifts into its favorite problem-solving mode regardless of the challenge. The net result is that teams may be both the celebrants and prisoners of their own success. Trotting out the favorite engine of recurrent identity, teams often display the kind of knee-jerk responses that preclude innovation. Such limitations typically bypass the detection of team evaluation. Performance is usually factored into the individual evaluation of a team’s members and leaders. The team itself is rarely scrutinized and critiqued, let alone compared and contrasted with the performance of other in-house teams. As a result, the comparative benchmarks of team performance are not part of data and thus metrics. Equally serious are the limitations that stem not so much from group uniformity as from the nature of the membership. Typically because of workforce reductions and retention problems, many teams may not be up to par in numbers or quality. New members may lack the basic skill sets earlier ones had. Such team unevenness is often dispiriting and may be beyond the compensatory efforts of training. Finally, most disturbing of all, team cohesion may exact a price. It may prematurely force strong individuals to fit in and thus mute their opinions or jeopardize their ability to contribute to higher-level performance. It also may leave intact and unchallenged the overly enthusiastic joiners and eager beavers. Given these threats to team effectiveness, what appears to be needed now is to develop a new approach to teaming. Current inhouse team training principles and processes, which have evolved over the years, should not be abandoned. But for their value to be retained, they need to be recast and nested within a new model. That in turn may require redefining team development as individual development, imparting one-of-a-kind configurations to each team.

Evaluation of People, Training, and Teams

Redefining Team Development Typically, teams combine team and individual development. Far from being at odds, the two halves of an evolving whole are perceived not as alternatives but versions of each other. But rather than viewing individuality as an obstacle to team cohesion, we should regard it as an avenue. In short, far from being suppressed or undernourished, individuality would find its ultimate identity and fulfillment in group identity. Teams need to be individualized. But for that model to take hold, a number of conceptual shifts are required. The first would be to delay the formation of team solidarity and instead concentrate on identifying the different nature of individuality of both independent loners and dependent joiners. That would establish and benchmark team building from the outset as based not on similarity but on difference: strong individuals who might resist teaming and those who may be too eager to join. The next stage is to minister separately to the needs of each type. Strong loners have to be persuaded that interpersonal team relationships—far from smothering or deflecting their individuality— constitute the means for extending their difference and development. Eager beavers need the opposite reassurance. They need to perceive the team environment as the special way to build up independence of thought and character. Third, the two groups then need to be brought together as a team. The standard and familiar training techniques of group dynamics would be tapped but focused on a new outcome: the capacity of interpersonal relations to both support and strengthen not only team definition but individual definition as well. That new shift of focus from the group to the individual is justified throughout by the rationale that the group offers a degree of individual development not possible for someone working alone. The team acts as catalyst and multiplier. In addition, teaming is now perceived as a unique means to provide thresholds for growth

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that are tailored to the individual members. The final step is to evaluate group performance as the degree to which the team now facilitates the development of its members and also how such individual growth shapes the nature of the interaction and contribution of both the team and its individual members. Individual and team performance would thus be made one. Individual development would be made part of the larger dynamic of interdependent team development. Above all, the primary emphasis on each individual would be reinforced by granting each member the exercise of a veto to stop and revisit. Individuality thus would never be erased, subdued, or silenced. The team would be redefined as the optimum ensurer, restorer, and elevator of individuality. Over time that would contribute to team capacity to develop alternative and divergent problem-solving techniques and to pursue innovation. But obviously a double issue remains: application and access. How would instructional designers and human performance technology professionals accommodate this new multiple focus? And how would they do so with a moving target? After all, the description addresses team formation as a new venture, but most teams already exist and are in motion. One suggestion is to employ a mechanism that is currently missing and that would put teams on pause, provide access, and render group process as a series of transparent stills for examination. The mechanism would be a new team evaluation form and process designed to capture and measure the contribution of individual growth to team growth.

Double Growth Factor A double growth factor would thus be routinely assessed. Each team member would be reviewed as to individual development and then how that development contributed to team performance. Cause and effect, source and end result, would be not only clear but also intertwined. Above all, the responsibility for individual development and its alignment with team development in the final

Evaluation of People, Training, and Teams

analysis belongs to the team itself. The degree to which each team assumes and is successful in applying that internal role would provide the missing external evaluative benchmarks for company-wide assessment. Undertaken four times a year, the evaluations would be aggregated upward to measure changes in overall and companywide team performances and to generate trainer feedback for midcourse design corrections, if any.

COMMENTARY Implicit throughout this chapter has been a larger ideological issue. All acknowledge the capacity of overseas employees, especially Asians, to work in groups. After all, it is part of their culture. But approaching teaming from the point of view of individuality not only plays to the distinctive strength of Western culture, it also keeps alive the prospect that this kind of teamwork grants the United States a new and future competitive lease on life. In addition, it may temper the current wholesale overseas outsourcing and preclude obediently going down an alien road of group cohesion and emulating a kind of workforce identity that historically is at odds with Western civilization. Revaluing and reconstructing teamwork may provide a new way to tap the traditional U.S. difference of individuality as the unique way of maintaining our global competitive edge and advantage.

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12

A NEW HANDBOOK FOR TRAINING

All training follows the same paradoxical rhythm. It combines reassurance with change, affirmation of the status quo with incremental advances—in short, it straddles present and future. It is thus persuasive, coaxing the now and the given to include more—and more that is different—beyond its original benchmark position. But venturing forth from comfort zones is typically eased by offering only modest and digestible bites. However, the pressing issue now is change management. Indeed, the need for that larger competence has led to questioning whether incremental gains are comprehensive enough and sufficient to provide catch-up, let alone to get ahead of the game. Then, too, the expectation is that engaging and mastering discontinuity may also bring the workforce closer to the threshold of creativity.

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TRANSITION TRAINING But as in all training, the bold needs to be anchored in the familiar. So the initial search, then, is always for what is in-house—existing examples of change management and creativity—as well as what affects the entire workforce. In other words, what stimulates creativity should be sufficiently mainstream that if innovation does not occur right away, there is still the consolation of mastery. We might call this workforce management of changing change.

Innovative Types Who, then, are the most innovative types? Invariably, three groups appear. The first is made up of entrepreneurs. These perpetual motion and restless start-up protean types live on the edge of change. Their career path is measured not so much by how many jobs they have had but by how many businesses they have created. They generate unlimited variations on a theme, exhibit spin-off thinking, and often display the uncanny ability to stay ahead of the pack. Or as Wayne Gretzky claimed: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it is.” They are a marvel and often exhausting to be around. The second group is made up of those managerial coaches whose stock and trade is challenging workers to change. Their value resides in their ability to read signs, decipher the handwriting on the wall, and operate as early warning and opportunity agents to those they mentor. Their success is always reciprocal. Finally, there are all the exceptional professionals and project managers found in all organizations and all sectors who are routinely transformational and transactional. They are endless advocates of training and unlearning, finding collaborative ways of doing things differently, and endorsing leap-frogging: “While we are catching up, let us also get ahead.”

A New Handbook for Training

Common Innovation Qualities

What characteristics do the three innovative types have in common? • Living and thinking ahead of their time • Being impatient with, even having disdain for current paradigms • Always negotiating change—one state to another • Having a keen sense of the dynamics of implementation—reality

checks of scenario and simulation • Imagining and creating what did not exist before • Being inclusive, integrative, and collaborative • Patchwork cobbling—always putting together holistically what

is separate • Thriving on and managing risk and flux

Shared Innovation Dynamics

What stirs such innovative types? Do some special contexts, conditions, and cultures not only match but spur their creativity? If we step back and observe their performance, what dynamics emerge as norms? Several become apparent: • Their goals are always moving targets. • Performance evaluations correspondingly have to occur more

often, sometimes daily. • Midcourse corrections are regular adjustments. • Job descriptions are regularly exceeded and outdated. • Crossover operations and integration are routine. • Nothing and no one remains intact.

Such workforce impacts are so far beyond the norm that even the standard and familiar answer of change addresses only symptoms and not causes, business-as-usual practices and not basic

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assumptions. Perhaps what is needed is a deeper definition of change—one that engages not just branch but also root and above all directly reflects the new everyday working reality of employees.

Transition as Creativity The standard expectation is that when dislocation or disruption occurs, it will be both temporary and nonrecurrent. It is a singular event that happens every once in a while, but if we are just patient and stoical enough, everything will return to the way it was. After all, cycles of ups and downs are familiar and inevitable. But suppose a transition lasts a very long time, much longer than previous transitions? Or worse, suppose the transition finally gives way not to reassuring and familiar stability but to another transition? And further that the second transition is then replaced by another and still another, and so on and on? What then? When that happens often enough and lasts long enough that transition and not stability becomes the norm, then we confront the paradox of continuous discontinuity. The only problem is that we have not been trained to recognize, let alone accept and engage, transition as a permanent and recurrent reality. Instead, we worship the absolute god of stability. But what if instead one were to acquire another outlook entirely? Perceive transition as not the exception but the rule? With such expectations, we would not have to develop surprise-free forecasts. Surprise would rise every day with the sun. Rather than avoiding change or running away from threats of novelty, we would regard change as a daily occurrence. We might even welcome it as a new constant, not an occasional variable. Above all, transition would normalize continuous improvement as the minimum response of keeping up with ongoingness. It would also stir innovation to be the new version of incremental gains.

Transition Training for the Workforce We need to provide transition training for the entire workforce. But how? Three immediate directions surface. First, consideration

A New Handbook for Training

should be given to creating a special and separate workshop on transition as a common orientation for all new hires at all levels. It would extend the typical discussion of company values to include company operating assumptions. The conventional statement of “This is how we do things around here” has to be supplemented by “This is why we have to do those things this way.” Performance expectations thus would be imbedded in the metrics of the company’s operational reality. Second, mission and vision statements should be reviewed to determine to what extent (if at all) they embody the norm of transition and the performance expectations associated with workforce reality. Third, employing transition as an overlay and not an overhaul, all training offerings should be reviewed to determine to what extent they support both the continuous and disruptive nature of transition. Where lacking, a healthy dose of the temporary may have to be injected. These measures would embody the new principle that all performance is a work in progress. There are no longer any final goals. The endgame has become the ongoing game. Persuading employees to embrace transition as a permanent condition of daily work may be eased by developing and offering a taxonomy of transition in the form of a performance template. Although additions and supplements can be encouraged, Table 10 can serve as common ground. Trust is based on truth. In this instance, it requires telling the truth about the new reality of work. That, in turn, needs to be followed by the various ways new performance expectations and evaluation metrics are being shaped and driven by the new norm of transition. Far from shrinking from the challenge, the workforce not only may welcome the truth of what is in fact their familiar daily reality, it may also bring new mastery and creativity to the reality of permanent change.

DIAGNOSTICALLY DRIVEN TRAINING The current process of selecting training topics focuses essentially on what the company believes it and its employees need to succeed

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TA B LE 1 0 • TA XO N O MY O F T R A N S I T I O N CATEGORY

PAST

PRESENT

FUTURE

Goals

Given

Stretch

Embryonic

Evaluation

Annual

Multiple

Daily

Tasks

Singular

Multitasking

Crossover

Focus

Divisional

Team

Interoperable

Structure

Vertical

Horizontal

Intersecting

Leadership

Hierarchical

Shared

Diffused

Innovation

Limited

Accessible

Required

together. Relatively little attention is paid to the cognitive psychology of employees, their intrapersonal and interpersonal receptivity, or the range, actual and potential, of their intelligence and ability to grasp and implement the training. The current emphasis on e-learning technology and cost savings deals mostly with the externals of training. It generally leaves untouched the question of assessing and defining the capacity of those trained to contribute to their training. In other words, training may be guilty of the old myopia of focusing on the business rather than on the customer. Instead, it needs to balance what it is offering with how it is being perceived and received. That step would also accommodate a shift from the evaluation of the training and its implementation to the transformation of the employee trained. Such a focus would include another implementation evaluation too often also ignored: the degree to which the training is internalized—that is, the extent to which not only the work changes productively but also the employee is altered habitually. In short,

A New Handbook for Training

training needs to be preceded, shaped, and driven by employee data. It needs to be targeted. Happily, a number of diagnostic tools are available, ranging from traditional to innovative. Training has to catch up and be driven by the diagnostics of how we sell and serve (marketing), how we relate (human resources dynamics), and how we think (cognitive psychology). Some traditional tools, although tried and proven, generally have been untapped or applied to training design, and some psychologically based tools include team as well as individual development. Another, the theory of multiple intelligence (although around for more than twenty years), has only recently captured the attention of instructional designers in business. In other words, the state of the art of creating the learning management system (LMS) can be advanced by creating state-of-the-art learning management diagnostics (LMD) at the same time.

Tools of Learning Management Diagnostics Training could benefit immediately, significantly, and obviously from the external and extensive knowledge of customer and market behaviors. Every training program should employ the overlay of customer knowledge and service. Whatever the specific training subject, the customer would be a recurrent—almost obsessive— generic focus. Regardless of job title, job description, or customer proximity, every employee would have access to a dynamic profile of customers who use the company’s product or service. The principal form that dynamic profile would take is that of simulation, especially enhanced by role-playing and storytelling. Indeed, the combination of the three generally has been found to be the most effective mode of communication and training. Simulation, roleplaying, and storytelling have even proved to be invaluable in testing new products and services in terms of customer appeal and purchase. All training would thus feature the demographics and sociology of marketing to the extent that every employee in every training program would be customer-driven.

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Another key diagnostic that has been used for quite some time by human resources, in the training arena specifically, is a series of psychological assessment tools. CPP publishes a number of them, including the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator ® (MBTI®) instrument, the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI), the CPI 260® and CPI™ 434 instruments for leadership development, and others, as well as career guidance through the Strong Interest Inventory® instrument. The MBTI instrument, a development tool for helping individuals understand personality type, also has a team-building program. The concept is to administer the assessment to each team member and thereby generate the preferences and profiles of the entire team. So armed and informed, communication and teamwork can be improved, and the negotiation and resolution of conflicts and differences can be made more manageable. Once again, the gain is twofold and synergistic: both the work process and the worker, by being more closely aligned with task and team dynamics, enjoy greater productivity. The adage of working smarter rather than harder finds perhaps its major advocate in such diagnostically driven training.

Multiple Intelligence The concept of multiple intelligence (MI), already mentioned briefly, is seldom used and generally has not been applied to training design. It was developed by Howard Gardner of Harvard and presented initially in his book Frames of Mind (1983). Gardner basically argued that intelligence is neither confined to nor measurable by a single kind of intelligence (the literacy of reading and writing). Rather, there are many intelligences. He originally designated seven, then added an eighth a decade later. Although originally and subsequently mostly taken up by educators and school textbook publishers, MI has the potential by itself and allied with the other traditional and psychological assessments to offer the most powerful training diagnostics available today to business.

A New Handbook for Training

Gardner currently posits these eight intelligences: Linguistic, Bodily, Spatial, Musical, Mathematical, Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Naturalist. This view of intelligence is trackable and traceable as the basic learning pathways of the brain. In fact, when cognitive researchers complete their total mapping of the brain, the results and applications may rival that of cracking the genetic code. But the critical point for the discussion here is the fusion of physiology (brain) and psychology (cognition). Linking human thinking and learning, Gardner claims that MI characterizes not just individual or social behaviors but those of the human species itself. In other words, MI goes way beyond learning styles or preferences and even natural or developed gifts or talents. It also transcends historical differentiation. It is what all humans possess by virtue of being human. Indeed, that starting point enables Gardner to present the general operating laws of MI, which may also be those of training as well. The range of MI varies with each individual. The extent and depth of that range is determined by genetics, environment, and use. The range of MI is not fixed or predetermined. It can be expanded by education, exposure, and direction. Goals and environment can guide, stimulate, and even determine the configuration of intelligences chosen or favored. But control is never total, because MI operates with a will and direction of its own. For goals to be optimal, they should always combine the small and the big, the immediate and the long term. MI is brought more fully into play, mobilized, and energized by task completion and task extension, accomplishment and incompletion. MI is also stirred when the focus is on uncovering rather than covering materials or topics. Basic ideas and concepts—square-one thinking or first-cause thinking—stimulate the synergistic interplay between MI and problem solving. It is particularly responsive to the multiple challenges of constructing scenarios, simulations, case studies, portfolios, and the like—in short, to artificial and futuristic realities. Finally, the ultimate value of MI may be to serve, in Gardner’s terms, as “the optimal taxonomy of human capacities.”

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A Series of Multiple Smarts

To many, this discussion of multiple intelligence may appear too academic and removed from the urgencies of training to have any practical value. Perhaps MI can become less distant if it is perceived not only as a new way of revisiting human potential but also as a series of multiple smarts. What Gardner is really saying is that as a species we always exceed at any given point in time the definition of who we are, what we know, and what we can learn. There is thus a need to tap and direct each of the eight intelligences so that they are rendered and extended in terms of immediate growth and long-term expectation. What may be more helpful is to translate and animate multiple intelligences into action applications. The eight could be rendered as follows: word-smart, body movement adept, spatially agile, musically facile, math-sequenced, personally and interpersonally savvy, and environmentally sensitive. In addition, clustering preserves and enriches the dynamics of the process. Operationally, one intelligence may dominate, but it often taps or engages others in a support capacity to address a task or solve a problem. The process thus features primary, secondary, and even tertiary intelligences all activated by the nature and complexity of the task on one hand, and by the interactivity of smarts within the problem solver on the other. Indeed, the more formidable or unfamiliar the challenge, the more resourceful and varied the team of intelligences is marshaled. To be sure, an important and recurrent goal of training is to enlarge and differentiate the range of tools in the toolbox. But the key first step of diagnostics still has to be taken. Assessing MI Range and Potential

All employees need to be assessed as to their MI range and potential. To tie together the improvement potential of both work and worker, the assessment should be linked to and ultimately made part of the job description. Such data would then be used not only to shape the design of training but also to benchmark growth and realization of potential. Training design also should factor in

A New Handbook for Training

Gardner’s key guidelines for optimum stimulation and synergy. In other words, training design would always incorporate immediate and long-term goals, be intellectually rigorous and focus on governing ideas and first causes, be practical and visionary at the same time, and offer the multiple challenges of simulation and scenario. Such a revised and enlarged scope of training would yield outcomes that are both work and worker specific. What is done better would always be fused with what in fact drives such improvement: the application not only of more intelligence but also of more intelligences. Suddenly productivity would no longer be limited to a singular or narrow definition of the work task or process, and workers themselves would no longer be confined to singular intelligence. By tying together productivity and human potential, trainers may be able to tap a whole new vein of learning.

STRETCH TRAINING FOR MANAGERS AS COACHES Increasingly, managers are serving as coaches or mentors. The distinction offered is to be a guide on the side rather than a sage on the stage. Although time-consuming, the request makes sense. It is individualized, addresses resource building of team members, and hopefully advances their contributions. But if current practices of executive coaching are a model, coaching is not always reassuring. Frequently, coaches prod and push leaders to stretch, often beyond their comfort zones. When resistance occurs, the counterargument is that future stretch and strain are the antidotes to future shock. Taking the time to think ahead is always better than hurrying to catch up. Besides, the fall-back position of crisis management is a contradiction in terms. Such exchanges are a form of stretch training and can help managers become more effective mentors.

Coaching Exercises Although the following list of ten coaching exercises is not offered as a universal system, it may be sufficiently generic for general

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application. The goal is always the same: to recharge and surprise mentors and mentees into being more creative and unfinished. These exercises, focusing on specific descriptors for each one, are designed to help managers stir and restart those they supervise. • Be new. Being new is hard for workers—who typically spend much of their time feeling overwhelmed—to accept. But the worry is their becoming predictable, routine, and mechanical; worse, routinely predictable and mechanical. The persuasive antidote is to sharpen the saw. The newness needed is not familiar or friendly. The key is to see the challenge differently, even obliquely, at an angle. It might be a recent arresting book or article, the lens of a new manager, a difficult stockholder, a favorite professor. Suggest creating and maintaining an increasingly expanding folder labeled “The New.” Managers and workers need to find their work interesting and even finally elusive. • Be big. The bigness required in this exercise is not the same as focusing on the big picture, which again may be a regular preoccupation. Rather this requires going back to square one and endowing basics with macro extent. That way origins emerge as bigger than life, their impacts as megatrends. Such bigger frameworks may be housed like a series of nested boxes in past history. Or they may require stepping forward to redefine not only the scope of competition—now worldwide—but driven by new and more urgent agendas. What are your Chinese counterparts thinking and contemplating? What is their big picture? Finally, the stretch of the ecological or the divine is often bracing and gives pause. But in all cases the key challenge of being bigger is making vision mission. • Be multiple. Success may often obscure limitation. Problemsolving kits have carried us through so often that their application is almost knee-jerk. Although such a single-minded focus should not be abandoned—that might precipitate an identity crisis—it should be supplemented, amplified, and multiplied.

A New Handbook for Training

One way is to get to know and master the methodologies of other fields, and to observe and marvel at how they each reconfigure data, display solutions, and capture reality. • Be contingent. Managers generally place a high value on knowing all so as to make informed decisions and to avoid surprises. In the process they urge their staff to be independent and interdependent—to think on their own and as a team. But it also may be important to acknowledge that not everything is knowable or manageable and that leadership may sometimes have to be less decisive and express itself in contingent and tentative terms. To be sure, that may not be the popular or conventional image of leadership, but in many ways it may be a better model to follow. Not being so totally sure of all that is going on, not totally trusting the data, being somewhat uncertain of the hidden impacts of decisions or new policies, far from appearing indecisive, may encourage contingency planning as a new norm. It also may bring new respect for uncertainty and ambiguity. • Be quiet. Ways to wisdom and insight are often quiet. Turning a troubling problem over to the unconscious can lead to surprising inventiveness. Asking or empowering a problem to solve itself is another road to solution. Stilling the constant inyour-face noise and urgency can often produce an intelligent stillness. Above all, embracing quiet may introduce workers to reflective inaction. You are not always indispensable. You don’t always have to make a decision—not now, maybe never. Indeed, sometimes the most important leadership act is attitudinal— remaining calm, confident, and committed. It conveys the quiet and reassuring steadiness managers and leaders have to provide. • Be integrative. Productivity gains between divisions are generally greater than within divisions. But they are also tougher to achieve. Division heads tend to be excessively loyal and separatist in preserving their boundaries and budgets. Integration has to be modeled from the top. All have to embrace a constant new doubleness: facing both inward and outward at the same

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time. Whatever else managers may do, they remain the supreme integrators—the connectors between parts, the bridgers between professionals, the aligners between top and bottom. Their obsessive question again and again is, “How is this linked to _____?” Their view of the future of their company has to mimic the future itself by becoming increasingly symbiotic. • Be empathetic. The request for managerial empathy is often totally misunderstood and resisted. It is wrongly perceived as compromising being hard-nosed. Actually, it is a supreme form of crossover and stretch. It seeks to understand difference—the behaviors, thinking, and values of those who are so far beyond your own orbit of assumptions that they may appear to be aliens from outer space. But such appreciation follows the proverbial wisdom of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. Never underestimate the substance of those who are not like you. • Be inventive. Managers have to help make innovation a company-wide goal for all. Incremental gains may be sufficient for survival but not enough for lasting growth. Innovation is growing your own competition from within. It surfaces internally as a potentially new business or a totally new way of doing business. When it actually appears externally it is capable of putting you out of business or becoming an acquisition that could be your lifeline. Managers have to make innovation an absolute— an expectation that has the same pervasive power as the now amended catchall line of all job descriptions (brought to the front if my recommendations are followed): do whatever it takes to get the job done. • Be flawless. Never underestimate the endgame—not the point of sale but the promise of delivery. Pride should always precede profit. Quality is painstaking. Contrary to popular advice, you should sweat the small stuff. One old teaching tale suggests that if you want to learn from the master, watch the way he ties his shoes. God is finally in the details. So execute flawlessly.

A New Handbook for Training

• Be ahead. In many ways this exercise encapsulates all the rest. It is no longer enough for managers to exist at the future’s boundary. They need to cross over and be embedded regularly in its flux. To be students of the business now requires managers to become students of the future—its history and its own future. Only by granting what lies ahead separate and intimidating substance and difference can the present acquire its cutting edge and offer the illusion of continuity. Managers have to court the future, set aside time every day to read the handwriting on the wall, and require that all executive summaries be in the form of scenarios and simulations. Managers who look ahead lead ahead.

COMMENTARY Obviously this chapter is not definitive. Many other exercises could be added. But all coaching is payback. It honors how each of us has been helped in turn along the way. It should also be self-applied. Above all coaching is a change agent. It uniquely facilitates not only stretch but also transformation—managers’ mentoring work management.

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13

GOALS AND ROLES OF MANAGERS AND LEADERS

U.S. workers are constantly on the stretch and routinely asked to do more with less—and they have succeeded. Steady increases in productivity, profitability, and quality are being achieved even with downsizing. Why? Basically, two reasons: global competition’s sharp edge and performance improvement training. As for the future, it seems all that is needed is more of the same: upping the ante and sustaining the learning. Right? Perhaps not. Two problems, one practical, the other conceptual. The workforce may encounter the law of diminishing returns. It may not be possible to reach increasingly competitive goals with fewer employees and managers. In fact, the sign of a new substitution has already appeared: companies are outsourcing to locations where wage differentials translate into immediate profits. Insourcing can achieve the same cost-cutting ends. Circuit City replaced its entire commission-based sales force with fixed-pay employees at lower hourly wages. Others are following suit by replacing experienced and knowledgeable salespeople with clerks capable only of writing up 165

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orders. Customers have adjusted by becoming experts before entering the store. No doubt more ingenious outsourcing and manipulative variations will surface as companies seek to remain viable and competitive. Financial experts and HR professionals will attend conferences displaying the latest cost-saving schemes. But they’re still likely to find limits to doing more with less. A quartet can be cut back to a trio but it cannot perform music written for a quartet. Can training pick up the slack and close the gap? Perhaps, but only focused training—training backed up with knowledge about those being trained. The proposed framework involves transformation of the give-and-take relationship between work goals and roles.

GOALS AND ROLES Traditionally, goals are elaborate, roles simply stated. Goals are multiple, roles singular. Goals may alter or vary, but the role remains the same. Moreover, goals and roles are not perceived as possessing a dynamic or changing relationship; they are seen as reassuring reflections of each other. Ideally, they are a mirror match. A job title or role is linked with appropriate goals, which essentially define that role. For example, performance evaluation is always set against goal achievement and not role change. In short, goals rule. That is where the action is. Because the focus is always on the action side of the equation, the role is regarded as static and given. It remains intact and the same. That focus made sense in the past. Goals were manageable because they were of a piece with the given role, and they were achievable because they did not stretch beyond the role’s reach. And even when such efforts routinely did exceed the parameters of both goals and role, no one noticed or cried foul because the ploy was successful, and so no one needed to press inquiry or scrutinize more closely. Attaboys and congratulations were the order of the day as cheerleading managers expressed confidence in future repli-

Goals and Roles of Managers and Leaders

cation. But it can be argued that what made such achievements possible was an unexamined and even undetected dynamic between goals and roles, and that when the nature of that secret interaction is known and tapped, it can yield a model for more targeted training and performance improvement, even upgrades. The job classification process is both clarifying and imprisoning. All jobs and job titles are acts of positioning, sandwiched between one above and one below. The pyramid dictates the pecking order. The detailed list of objectives that accompanies each job title establishes its role parameters. When spillover occurs and is spotted as part of the evaluation process, it is often interpreted as a basis for promotion or reassignment of greater responsibility. But only then is role change—usually a future one and not the one under examination—contemplated as part of the goal achievement process. In other words, attention is fixed on goals and not roles and hence on goal change, not role change. But as noted, times have changed. Not surprisingly, goals bear the imprint of such changes. Although they are no longer the same, the job description preserves them in amber and gives the illusion of continuity. But an overview and analysis of the workplace and the workforce reveals that goals have undergone at least five major generic transformations: • Goals have been stretched incrementally, even exponentially. • Targets have been altered while still in flight. • Alignment must now be both vertical and horizontal. • Goals are constantly linked to structural and personnel cross-

overs and cross-training. • Goals must embrace the discontinuity of innovation.

Stretch Most current incremental increases are without end. They may occur daily, and they are often not evenly spaced. Except for their

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constancy, they are not predictable in scope or degree. Like computer advances, they require constant updating and sometimes abrupt shifts brought about by paradigm changes. Constantly raising the bar, incremental stretch goals have become the new norm.

Moving Targets Often even the incremental is not singular but multiple, fanlike and not linear. Add-ons are affixed. Variations on threads are developed. Direction is altered. Updating and upgrading meetings are many and constant. The calendar has little or no white space left. The pace is breathless. Heads-up announcements regularly interrupt process. Evaluation occurs every Friday, sometimes daily or tied to specific dates so as to capture the goals of the week. Flight plans or repairs have to be undertaken while en route. All must remain in motion. Everything is in a state of transition. Multitasking is now a generic task for all. Everyone has had to become a juggler.

Alignment Individual and team priorities are driven by alignment with divisional partners near and far, and with company objectives. Organizational flow systems are nested within the larger big picture of vision and mission and serve as employee road maps of coincidence. But the priorities change, routinely and regularly. For large companies, the challenge is how to rapidly change the direction and momentum of an enormous battleship. Agility is what helps Jack be nimble and quick.

Crossovers Structural reconfigurations into more open and fluid forms and functions increase and hasten cross-training and job rotation. In the process, even the smallest cog in the machine becomes many cogs. The overall shape of an organization comes to resemble more a series of rivers flowing through it than a tower of mechanical

Goals and Roles of Managers and Leaders

boxes. Accordingly, employee stretch goals become increasingly fluid, open-ended, and unfinished. Every job becomes a variation on a theme, and every employee an artful dodger.

Innovation Finally, all employees are asked to contemplate the discontinuity of job processes and functions. They are stirred to create alternative cost-saving and more productive ways of doing more with less. Every aspect of the process has to become grist for the mill of innovation. The assumption is that everything, broken or not, needs to be fixed. Creativity is no longer the monopoly of R&D. Although at any given time the press for innovation and all other changes may not be operating at once, sooner or later they all will have an impact on the workforce. They have to because they are driven by the unavoidable common impetus of competition that will not go away. As noted already, these transformations may collectively be so daunting and intimidating as to require moving the conventional last phrase of all job descriptions—“and do whatever is necessary to accomplish the job”—to the first position. Such a generic catchall presented from the start would at least serve as a more accurate and appropriate warning of what has become increasingly undefined. But the key obstacle to the application of this generic taxonomy is a mistaken focus on fixing or faulting only the fluxy goals. When they are not met, the predictable explanation is that the objectives exceeded the parameters of the job description as well as the skill sets required to succeed. But when success occurs, we are so delighted that we give up being defensive but still fail to ask why and how.

NEW GOALS CREATE NEW ROLES So it is back to basics. Every goal houses the role needed to accomplish it. If they are not in sync, employees regularly protest and

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object to being unfairly judged. So they become territorial and defensive and complain, “That is not in my job description.” Currently, that disparity is ignored by hard-pressed managers who respond by snapping, “Welcome to the new world.” But what may be overlooked and lost sight of is a symptomatic mismatch. The kind of transformation-driven goal changes required cannot be accomplished without role changes. Goals still may rule, but roles trump. The argument here is that the current achievement of changing goals can only come about by changing roles. We have been so fixed on the goal side and its measurement and training that we have failed to recognize that a secret reciprocity exists between goals and roles. Certain goal changes cannot be accomplished without role changes. Employees often have to shift into high gear and alter behaviors and attitudes to reach their more demanding goals. But by failing to understand and value that new dynamic between goals and roles, managers and trainers have not only ignored the remarkable growth potential of employees, they have also been ignorant of what is deeply at work in performance improvement and its evaluation. To overcome those limits and to develop a more comprehensive and interactive basis for both training and assessment, two critical questions need to be answered: What kinds of goal changes require and even compel role changes? And what kinds of role changes emerge? Clearly, not all goal changes stir role changes. Some may be different only in degree but not in kind. These may still be manageable and achievable and thus may not require role change. But the five factors cited earlier do necessitate new roles. The task now is one of dynamic linkages like the matched goal-role relationships shown in Table 11. From these partnerships between goals and roles, two sets of conclusions may be drawn. The first describes the essential changing and reciprocal dynamics between goals and roles; the second redefines the new job descriptions driven by role performance upgrading. Most current training focuses on goal transformations and not on role changes. Most performance evaluations fail to factor in the

Goals and Roles of Managers and Leaders

TA B LE 11 • G OAL– RO LE E XC H A N G E S MORPHING GOALS

CHANGING ROLES

Incremental

Flexibility and stretch

Multiple

Multitasking and entrepreneurial

Alignment

Priorities, decisions, and corrections

Unfinished

Open-ended

Reconfiguration

Innovation and implementation

changing relationships between morphing goals and changing roles. Morphing goals cannot be met without changing the roles required to achieve the new objectives. Job descriptions create static expectations of a dynamic goal-role relationship and need to be totally redone. The ultimate and cumulative impact of goal-role metrics is the transformation of the workforce.

CORRECTIVES The correctives are clear. Training has to pair goals and roles and then link emerging roles to reach morphing goals. Performance evaluation has to mirror and reinforce the training by measuring the emergence of roles appropriate to goal attainment. Job descriptions have to be brought in line by spelling out the unfinished nature of “whatever it takes” as the highest and ruling priority. Finally, learning and human resource directors have to contemplate that, given the transformation of performance goals and the corresponding emergence of higher-level roles, the upgrading required is a matter of kind and not of degree. When roles are reviewed, what dramatically emerges is a new workforce definition of rank-and-file workers. Here, then, is the

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second set of conclusions. The roles compelled by morphing goals are essentially managerial in nature. Employees not only have to do their work, they have to manage it. The level and kind of reflection and evaluation formerly reserved for supervisors now are being exercised by those in the trenches. Monitoring, scheduling, and planning—traditional preserves of middle managers—now are routinely carried out by the rank and file. Innovations of form or function are not lofty interventions introduced from above but created and accomplishable at the basic job level. New job descriptions have to be written for the emergence of the employeemanager. Goal-role exchanges have to become the new and future focus of training and evaluation. But their application has to be revised to develop employees not as workers but as managers. Such a dramatic change at the base reverberates throughout the entire organization and not only alters but also parallels the new goal-role changes of managers and leaders. Collectively, they constitute the emerging workforce of the future.

THE MANAGER-LEADER HYBRID As noted earlier, management and leadership are constantly juxtaposed. Most of the time it is a lopsided comparison designed not so much to honor the differences between the two as to preserve and elevate the leader’s position. No wonder everyone wants to be leader and books on leadership far outnumber and outsell any on management. In a typical three-ring circus of workers, managers, and leaders, the leaders always appear in the center ring. But aside from being a forced exercise of hype to make leaders look good at the expense of managers, the comparison entails a number of serious, pejorative, and perhaps unintended distortions. The first is the way it imputes a rigid and myopic mind-set and lockstep process to managers that may ultimately be embarrassing to leaders. How are those limitations to be discarded, revised, or trained out of managers on their journey to the top? Evidently it

Goals and Roles of Managers and Leaders

fails, because some CEOs are criticized for behaving more like managers than the visionaries they are supposed to be, or worse, of being micromanagers. But paralleling the two roles involves a more serious distortion: it obscures the current managerial role transformation. In successful organizations, managers take on many roles previously considered the leaders’ exclusive arena. A discussion of ten such transformations of managers is featured in Chapter 4. A review of that list reveals the emergence of a new hybrid—the manager aggregated upward as leader. As suggested, organizational productivity owes its steady increase to the new manager-leader.

Emergence of Leadership Options But how did that happen? Three factors: morphing goals, emerging roles, and the general restructuring of the goals and roles of managers. All three exist in tandem and require a brief reexamination of the basic nature of the relationship between goals and roles. Goals in job descriptions have been recognized as generally appropriate to the job title role; above all, familiar and accomplishable. Besides, if anything new surfaced, it went under the last line— “whatever it takes.” But gradually, some fixed managerial goals became more mercurial and even chameleon-like. Workers and managers increasingly have become breathlessly involved in chasing their own tails—constantly playing catch-up. They have also become nervously accustomed to tasks being perennially incomplete and even out of reach. And yet, they have succeeded in reaching what may at first have appeared to be impossible goals. If this trend is to continue, everything involved in goal attainment must be understood—and training reshaped accordingly. Specifically, learning and training have to be driven not solely by objectives but by the connection between task and talent. Formerly, tasks were linked to roles and that was that. But with stretch goals and changing environments, managers have had to shift into high gear to function in teams and even become team leaders.

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This almost imperceptible transformation (described in Chapter 4) has made goals and roles somewhat like secret sharers. As managers have assumed roles previously reserved for the top, hierarchy has been leveled. The distributed leadership vision has found its realization in the new manager-leader. But to be effective, traditional managerial training has to catch up and embody the dynamics and metrics of goal-role synergy. The need now is to train managers for their new leadership roles, rewrite the archaic job description, and finally figure out what to do with CEOs.

New CEO Agendas and Executive Composites Typically, discussions of the future of leadership in general and of CEOs in particular stress the need for new visions and goals. Although what that must include may vary significantly with different organizational and sector priorities and urgencies, it will undoubtedly include globality, forecasting, information networks, and learning management systems, and most important, the pressure to integrate all of them. But if such projections portend a substantial and even radical change in CEOs, should not who they are, where they are coming from, and where they are heading be as important as what they will have to do? Should not new goals be linked to new roles?

FIVE NEW EXECUTIVE TITLES The process has altered even the familiar executive acronym, with five new C-level titles drawn from the alphabet soup of the future: CIO, CLO, GBO, CIC or CIA, and CIP. Whether or not any of these prevail over time or appear officially on the masthead, they do serve to identify and perhaps to define the new dynamics of top leaders and why the new focus on recasting goals and visions surfaced in the first place. Above all, they may demonstrate that the CEOs of the future, like the organizations they lead, will not be singular but composite, not lone

Goals and Roles of Managers and Leaders

rangers but a hybrid blend of diverse associates. In any case, exploring and examining each new pretender to the throne may tell us more about the seat of power than the current discussion of new goals has yielded so far.

CIO as CEO This top position of chief information officer is the creation of information technology and systems. In some organizations the CIO is designated as CIT to signal and symbolize the degree to which all business has become e-business. Indeed, all courses in current MBA programs are officially or unofficially e-courses to dramatize the extent to which research and information sources are Web based. In some instances the Internet serves as the only current library available. The CIO is responsible for creating, maintaining, and structuring organizational data and information flow. The extent to which that is increasingly the lifeblood and circulatory system of companies has determined the elevation of the director of IT to CIO. What also has pushed that position forward to the executive level and even to the point of becoming the CEO is the addition of data decisions. Embedding just-in-time and real-time data in all internal and external operations has brought new transparency and precision to decision making, the key task of top-level executives.

CLO as CEO The chief learning officer, whatever initial specialization the executive comes from, is a generalist whose discipline and expertise is generic learning. The CLO creates, manages, and evaluates learning management systems that operate vertically from top to bottom, cut horizontally across all divisional lines, and provide e-training available 24/7/365. The CLO is the heir apparent to Senge’s learning organization. The immediate and ongoing principal task of the office is to increase productivity, profitability, quality, customer satisfaction,

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and market share through knowledge acquisition and management. The long-term goal is to help create and train the workforce of the future—and that visionary prospect alone nominates the CLO to be a CEO. What also reinforces that equivalency is cost control–driven assessment. CLOs constantly evaluate offerings to determine whether they in fact are implemented by all across the board and bring about the desired degree of performance improvement. CLOs are ruled by ROI, as are in fact all CEOs.

GBO as CEO The global business officer is an empire-building executive who operates in two ways and directions simultaneously. First, the job involves creating a miniature of the whole. Depending on existing structures, it either serves as a global overlay over all operations and levels or subsumes them all under a new international imperative. Second, it involves dramatizing the extent to which companies envision themselves and their future to be global in nature, scope, and focus. When those kinds of global reach combine and become the primary goal, the GBO may become the CEO. But even as an intermediate position, the GBO is mission critical. The GBO offers a center that is often lacking altogether or only occasional and partial: a global mind-set. The task of the GBO is to facilitate the diffusion of that new ideology throughout the entire organization and to spell out the opportunities and challenges of global markets and customers. As overseas numbers climb and reach the point of matching or exceeding U.S. sales, and overseas profit margins are greater than those of domestic operations, the prospect of a GBO becoming CEO will proportionately increase.

CIC or CIA as CEO Progress is always incremental but it is not often holistic as well. Intellectual capital (IC) or intellectual assets (IA) qualify on both

Goals and Roles of Managers and Leaders

counts. IC was developed initially by Skandia to bring more realistic criteria and greater precision and detail to the evaluation of company assets. Book value and annual reports not only failed to reflect critical though intangible assets, in the process they also distorted both market capitalization investment and stock purchases. But the correctives involved required a total conceptual overhaul, not just an overhaul of the financials. That involved factoring in both tangible and intangible assets such as human capital and R&D until all the parts summed up a new whole. As IC became the shaping structure of organizations, it seemed a natural progression for a CIC or CIA to become a CEO.

CIP as CEO The title “chief innovation pusher” may appear whimsical at first, but what is behind it is instructive. Jacob Jaskov claims to be the first chief innovation pusher. Not accidentally, Jaskov is a futurist and active member of the Copenhagen Institute of Futures Studies. Indeed, he even suggests that his role is totally future-driven. The essential thrust of his new title is innovation. He believes creativity will be so critical to future success that it is future-creating. The CIP thus will preside over a future time that will be so constantly and intensely new that as much as 90 percent of everything may appear different. Reinforcing and accelerating that prospect will be “the Singularity,” a development that is projected to produce more progress in the first two decades of this century than in all previous periods combined. Future shock may have to be redefined as future displacement. Past inventory will be replaced by future cornucopia. Innovation will be the front and back of change and may even become its synonym. The company that redefines change as innovation will, according to Jaskov, inherit the future and ultimately replace its CEO with a CIP. In summary, here are the major alternative titles for CEO, and the goals and gains that will shape and drive them:

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• Chief information officer: information technology data and

decision systems • Chief learning officer: knowledge acquisition and needs of the

future workforce • Global business officer: global competition and the need for

worldwide operating systems • Chief of intellectual capital (or intellectual assets): emphasis on

other than financial assets and new integrated enterprises • Chief innovation pusher: embrace of futuristic surprise and dis-

connects so as to stir out-of-the-box creativity There remains one final matter to discuss: How will all or any of this come about? Are current CEOs less egocentric than those in the past and therefore better able to share leadership? Have they been differently educated or trained to recognize and be receptive to these new executive-level trends and usurpations?

A Training Program for CEOs When was the last time a training program for CEOs was offered? Evidently, everyone else needs it, but CEOs are finished learning— or that task has been turned over to a private or invisible executive coach or trusted adviser. In other words, aside from the shock of the new and its future-driven executive titles, the comfort zone of most current CEOs would preclude wholesale adoption. Once again gradualism rules the day. At least three less dramatic and more gradual courses of action surface. The first involves the CEO as hybrid, the second an amplified CEO executive team, and the third a two-tiered executive layer, one traditional, the other transitional.

CEO Hybrid The CEO may in fact have come from one of the key new areas, or the changing direction of the company may have compelled the

Goals and Roles of Managers and Leaders

CEO to become a quick study. The CEO may be a woman or someone born outside the United States or both and thus more reflective of the demographic and market shifts of the company. In any case, current CEOs have the option to choose a new partner identity and to exist as a hybrid before circumstances force such collaboration.

Executive Team Reconstituted A CEO who prefers the old role may shift the need for change to the rest of the executive team. Typically, that minimally consists of a COO and CFO; sometimes also the head of HR and the head of Legal. The latter may have been elevated to that level because of mergers and acquisitions. To that inner circle, all five of the new roles discussed in the preceding section, or a selection of them, could be added. But it may not be an easy fit. The new executives may be younger, culturally more diverse, speak in technical terms or from different paradigms, and behave like young and impatient invaders from outer space. Putting together this kind of top team is thus not unlike putting two very different families together and, the Brady bunch notwithstanding, it is no easy or automatically successful task. The CEO may have to become involved in conflict reduction and resolution—to calm the waters during the shakedown cruise as well as exploit and direct the tensions toward shake-up. But sooner or later the company must forge a new and diverse executive team who are all on the same page. That may require a retreat. With this polymorphous group, it may require a retreat every three months—but it must be done.

Two-Tiered System The prospect of such interpersonal turbulence as well as the jockeying for power and leverage may lead the CEO to pause. Traditional and older members who have the CEO’s ear may heighten uncertainty. They may argue that these new titles and areas of expertise

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are unproven, flashes in the pan, or advanced by and for obvious self-interest and self-promotion. They may ultimately suggest that these new areas can be subsumed under traditional operations and thus not incur the additional expenses of a new executive appointment as well as its expensive staff. But a CEO with any vision at all will hearken to the directions of the future. The CEO will move toward compromise, creating a two-tiered executive team. One will be traditional, the other transitional. Like the choices of Column A and Column B, they can exist in different combinations. The CEO has a number of options: make the members of the new top team equal, meet with them separately, and combine them only for certain topics such as long-range planning. Or one team may be elevated over the other, permanently or temporarily. They may even be set at odds with one another if the CEO assigns them both the same task.

COMMENTARY Whatever variations on the theme of future leadership are played, the position of CEO itself is now beset by the same forces of change buffeting the rest of the organization. Indeed, the first order of business may be to set the executive house in order as the threshold for developing company-wide future plans. The challenge now is that there are many new and eager would-be firsts.

FOUR

PA R T

The Future of HR

Nothing is ever finished or done once and for all time. Nor is even being current enough. What’s new inevitably has to involve what’s next. The future is no longer respectful of time barriers; it crosses over at will, invades the present, and establishes transition as the new operating norm. But what is amazing is the workforce’s adaptability—doing whatever it takes to catch up, keep up, and get ahead. That in fact is the often untold and unexamined story—not only of the current U.S. work ethic but also of why the United States will remain a global force in the future. In Part Four, the emphasis is on many of the future-driven developments already put in place by HR. I also identify additional trends that constitute our future agenda.

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14

FUTURE HR OPERATIONS AND HPT PROFESSIONALS

New training metrics, new strategic planning modes, corporate universities and their knowledge cultures, employee empowerment and productivity, and future learning leaders—chief learning officers (CLOs)—all deserve a closer look, especially with regard to the impact each may have on HR operations. The future of HR operations and that of human performance technology (HPT) work also need attention.

NEW TRAINING METRICS How have organizations and individuals coped with flux? Basically through three kinds of training and learning: catch-up, lineup, and crossover. The thrust of catch-up is incremental: bringing professionals up to date with the latest developments. These are usually add-ons. Occasionally, they may incorporate new directions, but in almost 183

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all cases they are focused and designed to bring everyone to the state of the art. Although future influenced, they are essentially present bound. Lineup involves structure, not content. It is also multidirectional and requires not so much the acquisition of new knowledge or skills as their constant repositioning and prioritizing. The aim is to align individual and divisional goals with company objectives, especially across satellite centers, and especially if these are multinational. The need for managing and aligning multicultural and multigenerational diversity and values provides a key new learning complexity. Crossover involves two kinds of additional learning. One is cross-training. Coworkers are trained in each other’s jobs not only for obvious purposes of replacement if necessary but to expand the knowledge and skills base of workers. The other crossover is more structurally ambitious—more interoperable. It involves linking the work focus of different divisions to promote greater collaboration. It may link such operations as planning and customer service, marketing and auditing, or purchasing and production. For example, employees may spend a day or week on the phone in customer service. The goal is greater integration of function and process across the board.

NEW STRATEGIC PLANNING MODES Because of increasing uncertainty and discontinuity, strategic forecasting needs futures thinking if it is to preserve its integrity as a discipline and sustain the reality of its mid- and long-term projections. The changes required reflect the degree to which the knowledge of at least three distinctive ways the future operates has been incorporated into strategic planning methodologies, in particular: patterns of escalation, degrees of knowability, and the partnership of monitoring.

Future HR Operations and HPT Professionals

Responding to future discontinuity varies according to reaction time and with advance intelligence. In fact, the goal of strategic planning is to preserve decision time and options. But that, in turn, requires perceiving unfolding developments in the progressive and aggressive terms of stretch, strain, and shock. The sequence is ruled by a law of grim escalation. The first version of stretch, if ignored, is followed by the second; and if that in turn elicits no response, then the third dominates the scene. If the future is an enigma, it is often a transparent one. It is an amalgam of the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. The obvious strategy is to move the knowledge base along that continuum. Extrapolation of present data and demographics builds the extent of the known in the present and short term. Trending converts the unknown into knowable long-term patterns. But then all stops short with the unknowable, because that is in fact what defines the final future. The consolation is that as much as twothirds of what may come can be in hand. Monitoring is no longer occasional and external but permanently embedded. It constitutes at least half of planning. Tracking sensors are distributed throughout to function as an early warning system to catch deviations. Monitoring requires its own plan. Usually it is a permanent overlay of data tracking equipped with its own software, which has the capacity to adjust planning when certain parameters are exceeded. Not only do futuristic adjustments of strategic planning produce a more integrated and dynamic whole, but also—and here again is the critical point—the plan itself would be a futures-thinking document. It would behave like the future.

Corporate Universities and Their Knowledge Cultures The incredible growth of corporate universities, across industries as varied as McDonald’s, Ford, Disney, and Toyota, bears witness to the centrality of training and learning as a major U.S. and especially multinational investment in the future. Constantly responding

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to new challenges, corporate universities in the process have been involved in at least two major future-oriented shifts: multinational acculturation and e-learning. Acculturating new employees whose work cultures are different and may in fact be at variance from that of the desired mainstream is an increasing focus of global companies. For example, Dell employs a number of programmers from India and recently outsourced a significant portion of its customer tech support there. Typically, employees from India favor supervisors who tell them what to do. They find it difficult to act on their own initiative. They prefer description to opportunity. Dell, which values worker participation over obedience and nonlinear thinking over rote, employs extensive situational training to bring about a shift in values and thereby a shift in work dynamics. The other major change is the gradual conversion to e-learning. In some cases, a blended approach has been used for older, less technologically comfortable workers: traditional face-to-face classes have been joined with e-classes. The primary motivation is cost: lower instructional costs, less time away from work, elimination of the travel and per diem expenses required for centralized training sites, and so on. The other gain is increased quality control through standardization of content in the three areas noted earlier: catchup, lineup, and crossover. To a large extent, corporate universities are themselves future entities. They embody Senge’s learning organization and incorporate Toffler’s knowledge workers, a combination that creates unique knowledge and learning cultures. They are almost like countries in their own right. To be sure, unlike traditional academic universities, corporate universities are ideological. They promote the perpetuation of their own survival and growth as well as their sponsor’s bottom line. They are their own lobbyists. In effect, they use themselves as case studies. But individually and collectively, they also need to be corporate global citizens—including the new ideologies of global interdependence and sustainable development. It is not enough to hail and

Future HR Operations and HPT Professionals

benefit from the global economy. It also requires the unique leadership of multinationals calling for and aspiring to world stewardship of the global commons. Such a commitment requires going beyond singular ideology to embrace an interdependent ideology that commands the international respect and loyalty of all professionals. In both instances, the value of futures thinking again is inevitably visionary. Finally, futures thinking would encourage convergent thinking, which raises the integration of thought and process to optimum levels of synthesis without compromising differentiation. Whether or not the Singularity occurs according to its projected timetable, what is clear is that it is born of and driven by convergence. Edward Wilson called it consilience, to signify the future synergistic math of one plus one equaling three or four or five. Emily Dickinson held that “everything that rises converges.” Discoveries or breakthroughs at the apex will in volcanic fashion reach out, touch, extend, and enrich all the other apexes to produce a total greater than the sum of its parts. In short, the visionary corrective here is that the future itself is essentially a convergent force.

EMPLOYEE EMPOWERMENT AND PRODUCTIVITY The obvious goal of training and learning is to increase productivity, profitability, and quality. Of the three, the first enjoys the highest priority because of the competition of the global economy. To preserve their middle-class status, U.S. workers have had to become more productive. Often, because of downsizing, increasing productivity also involves requiring fewer workers to do more. Among the many ways of increasing worker productivity, one approach that has received relatively less attention—but offers the option of a major application of futures learning and thinking—is that of employee evaluation. In the past five years the nomenclature has changed. Employee evaluation has become performance evaluation—and then shifted

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to its present version of performance improvement. Employees themselves have become human capital, and that means that training is perceived as a way of securing ROI. Worker agreements have in many organizations become worker contracts and finally worker covenants. The common denominator of all these changes is the increasing centrality of employee productivity and the increasing dependence of companies on the capacity of workers to constantly create or find cost-saving and creative ways of increasing productivity. There are signs that some organizations are contemplating a futures step in the performance improvement process. Currently, the standard way to improve productivity is to encourage employees to consider how they might do their jobs differently. Many managers—especially those with seniority—have had to be retrained as coaches. They found it difficult to confer such initiatives upon the workers they supervise and to accept the idea that those who do the job know it better than anyone else and thus have the expertise to improve it. In some instances, the inquiry into performance improvement has been pushed further in two ways: asking employees to define and evaluate the effectiveness of the interfaces between divisions, and encouraging more overt interpersonal attitudes and behaviors so that receiving work satisfaction is accompanied by giving it to others. The gains have been significant. Structural changes have been made, and interpersonal behavior modification has improved the mutuality of work environments. Matters appear to have gone as far as they can go, in the present. Not so if one adds futures thinking and training. The next logical step is to push inquiry into the future itself. Welcome though the changes recommended by employees focused on doing their jobs more productively may be, they are still present bound. They deal with new configurations of various kinds but are generally incremental in nature. But with their empowerment endowed with more forward-looking vistas, workers can be invited to speculate on what they believe their jobs will be like in the

Future HR Operations and HPT Professionals

future. Building upon their increasing competence in job review and change, workers not only may welcome such an opportunity but also warm to the task of projecting their future roles. Such worker projections can be followed by inquiring what kinds of training would be critical to get them from here to there. Such speculation can be a gradual rather than a one-shot process, and it may be accompanied by discussion and the distribution of some basic reading materials. In any case the yields can be significant. Individual projections of work change can be aggregated upward to generate patterns of the future that may shape the company itself. In addition, the same process may identify the common training needs and in effect identify the training agenda of the future. Of perhaps greater long-term importance, the process would contribute to developing a future-directed workforce. Finally, those companies supportive of futures empowerment would thereby create an employee-based alternative to the expert model in the form of futures learning communities. In all these instances, the vision of the future not only brings a new dynamic to work environments, it also shapes futures learning communities of best practices.

FUTURE LEARNING LEADERS One of the signs of the future arriving head of schedule is the emergence of jobs and titles for which there is often no previous classification or formal academic preparation. The positions of chief information officer (CIO) and chief learning officer (CLO) are cases in point. No traditional or even corporate universities offer masters programs or degrees in learning management or have retrofitted existing executive educational programs to accommodate learning leadership at an executive level. And yet professionals are being appointed to such top-level positions, and a new journal (hard copy and online), professional organization, and Web site have appeared devoted to the CLO.

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For many the appearance of CIOs and CLOs comes out of the blue. Not so for futurists. Indeed, one can study and compile the emergence of every new profession as reflecting the regular and most current incarnation of the future. In any case, such emergence already has left its mark and permeated the entire organization, including defining the hybrid nature of CEOs discussed in Chapter 13. Perhaps the best way to summarize HR future-driven developments and applications is with the visual shown in Table 12. And similarly, the best way of expressing what futures thinking at different levels can bring to current learning and HR challenges is to offer Table 13.

THE FUTURE FOR THE FIELD Although official notice and response has been guarded, HR appears to be making a comeback these days. After many years of reduced budgets, internal downsizing, shifts of tasks to other divisions, and the outsourcing of many of their functions, HR and HPT

TA B LE 1 2 • F U T U RE S T H I N K I N G A N D LE A R N I N G S U M M A RY CURRENT FOCUS

FUTURES CONTRIBUTION

FUTURE OUTCOMES

New training norms

Transition training

Optimizing knowledge

New strategic planning

Strategic monitoring

Optimizing choice

Corporate universities

Global interdependence

World citizens

Employee productivity

Future work projections

Future workforce

Learning management

Future learning foci

Future intelligence

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TA B LE 13 • F U T U RE S RE S P O N S E S TO S E VE RE LE A R N I N G D E M A N D S LEARNING DEMAND

FUTURES RESPONSE

Futures thinking

Divergent/convergent thinking

Futures problem solving

Multiple methodologies

Futures learning

Multiple intelligence

Futures visioning

Intuitive and holistic forethought

professionals have led, developed, and presided over a number of future-driven workforce developments. What are the factors driving the return of HR to centrality? And, equally important, what do those forces in turn tell us about overall changes impending in corporate vision and workforce structures?

New Directions and Options The five areas listed and examined in this section—although not definitive—are collectively sufficient in range and substance to outline the new landscape for HR and HPT professionals. Hybrid Acronyms

The difference of HR from its earlier versions may be rapidly summed up by one of its new names—HRM, for human resource management. Indeed, it can be argued that should be expanded to include leadership: HRLM. Then, too, because of its increasing role in outsourcing, it has acquired a new specialization and even the creation of a professional society—HRO. Finally, as the initially European notion of intellectual capital found a home here, HR itself has frequently been altered to IC or the compromise of HIC. If one puts all the above inputs together, what emerges is

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HICLMOS, or human intellectual capital leadership and management outsourcing systems. Awkward, of course—but this overloaded acronym is no mere alphabet soup. It reflects the general add-on nature of both workforce and general structural developments, which routinely have embraced hybrids as the new way of stretching or extending organizational identity. Talent Recruitment and Retention

The increasing focus on talent shortages as well as the steady decline of company loyalty as a means of retaining such expertise has reinvested the traditional HR role in both areas with greater urgency. In the process, the general mastery of data management and application of metrics by HR professionals have signaled the field’s currency, readiness, and competence to accept and master this double challenge through technology. Indeed, a number of new electronic candidate management systems have been developed and put in place. In addition, HR has had not only to acquire the aggressive hard hustle of an executive search firm but also combine it with the softer—even caressing—retention mentality of mentoring and coaching. The net result is that HR not only has become increasingly the key resource for maintaining and retaining the competitive edge of personnel, its performance as well as its track record have become in turn the measure of a company’s own comparative advantage. The Workforce Training Link

Although the empire of training was taken over or parceled out to corporate universities and to chief learning officers and their respective learning management systems, HR has reentered and recovered its access to training through a number of crossover areas. First, HR has argued that talent retention is linked to talent development. But this double gain—for employee and company— required the advocacy of HR and the integration of its agenda with that of the LMS. Then, too, as team training and performance

Future HR Operations and HPT Professionals

became the norm, another bridge of integration had to be forged. The training and nurturing of teams had to be made part of the larger HR commitment to the care and feeding of work cultures as the agents of total company vision and mission. Once again this became a shared partnership. Another crossover area involved the induction of new hires. The earlier HR monopoly now was perceived as a joint venture. Orientation programs were the first step of both retention and professional development. Finally, both HR and Training placed the same high value on research. The findings of training intelligence were of a piece with those of employee development. Indeed, such a fusion refocused and grounded traditional support of the human potential movement with the rigorous application of metrics and easily incorporated both e-learning delivery systems and measuring of both ROI and strategic alignments. New Goal-Role Relationship Dynamics

As stretch goals dominated and the timetable of evaluations became compressed, HR had to address two inadequacies. Workers were regularly exceeding their job descriptions. Downsizing, coupled with greater pressure for productivity, was tampering with the static relationships between job goals and job roles. The inadequacy of job descriptions was only symptomatic of the emergence of a new dynamic between goal change and role change. While HR was involved in mastering such flux, it also had to examine the larger issue of the entire evaluation process. What immediately was altered was frequency and equality. Evaluations were scheduled more frequently and structured more collaboratively. Sessions were often monthly or on an as-needed basis. Supervisors were trained to be coaches, and employees were empowered to be partners. In short, such solutions to new and intense workforce realities not only became the province of HR but also tapped its further links to training and the task of talent retention. Such adjustments also positioned HR as a supreme advocate and partner of productivity.

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The HR Organization Chart

Perhaps nothing dramatizes the new centrality of HR more than the prospect of the organization chart being turned on its head. Gradually, various forms of employee empowerment implemented by HR to increase productivity and to align work goals with company goals began to be cumulative. Work knowledge was supplemented by self-knowledge; managerial and leadership roles of those at the top were made available and distributed across the board; the need for alignment led to employees’ crafting their own vision and mission statements; the demands for interoperability led to the mutualizing of job satisfaction; future needs were addressed directly by employee identification and definition not only of the future versions of their current jobs but also what training they would need to get them from here to there. Given such interventions, if one now steps back and takes in the whole new picture of a typical organization, what emerges? The top has essentially remained intact and the same. The middle has been thinned out and given a horizontal extent. It is very busy supervising and coaching more employees, playing catch-up, planning ahead, urging innovation—in short, not just running but leading the company. The busiest sector is the rank and file, now sharing with managers the same need for multitasking on behalf of the survival and growth of the company. In the process, managers have become leaders, and employees have become managers. In other words, the organization chart has changed both horizontally and vertically. The middle of the pyramid has been bulked out so that it now has a more horizontal extent and shape. But more radically, the bottom has become the top. The new hierarchy features the rank and file first, followed by an extended set of middle managers, and finally CEO and senior staff last.

New Roles As goals have changed, so have roles. The rank and file must not only do but also manage their work. Managers in turn must not only supervise but also lead. To accomplish its stretch goals, each

Future HR Operations and HPT Professionals

group is doing whatever it takes to get the job done. In this case, that requires each group to move up in the chain and assume the roles of the next level. The organization now has not one but three ruling classes. To survive, capitalism has to grant internal equality and access of leadership to the proletariat so that externally it can remain competitive and profitable. The HR version of the organization chart thus may serve to mirror the reality of not only what exists now but also what is to come. In that case, mission and vision merge. At this point at least two summaries are needed. One relates to advocacy, the other to agenda. Clearly, advocacy for HR and HPT is not totally speculative. Relegated to the sidelines for many years, HR has not only regained but also expanded its position by being ahead of the game. It has led the charge of the hybrids, transforming itself from HR to HRM and then HRO. In the process, it has also helped to develop and apply metrics of accountability and alignment. The current challenge of talent shortages and talent retention is ready-made for HR, which now employs new software not only to track but also to manage the entire candidate process. HR has been tireless and focused in arguing for new crossover areas between HR and Training, including sharing its traditional preserve of the orientation of new hires. It has been at the forefront of identifying, describing, and addressing the new dynamics between goal and role change. Finally, it has held aloft a more operationally and truthful version of the organization chart to guide both current and projected versions of the reality of change and aspiration. Perhaps the only missing or neglected step is to apply the reality check internally to the job descriptions of HR itself as well as externally to present academic programs preparing future HR professionals. Both may belong to the old rather than the newly evolving organization chart.

COMMENTARY Although encouraging, all these developments still leave the issue of an HPT agenda. And that in turn always involves HPT performance criteria. To ensure that all the developments discussed here

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not only happen but do so with persuasive rigor, HPT performance criteria must serve as a quality overlay. Specifically, HPT professionals must ensure that such initiatives are not haphazard or unconnected but are subsumed and made part of a total systematic approach. Only in that way can value be comprehensively added and change be extended and reinforced by partnerships. Above all, development and implementation require the feedback function and test of evaluation, including the innovative prospect that HPT professionals may have to create new evaluation measures and metrics. The test of any profession is that it is not only current but future-driven.

C H A P T E R

15

DEMOGRAPHICS AND THE FUTURE OF HRM

HR and motivational speaking have much in common. Typically, motivational speakers value knowledge of their audience. In fact, well-known and highly paid ones employ staff to research the demographic composition of a prospective audience. They also seek to discover local and current hot topics and juicy tidbits to customize their basically generic presentation. Finally, such speakers are aware that they are in the big change business, and that that is no easy task. So they always do two things: they signal from the outset that the task is formidable, and they also make it clear that the engagement and participation of the audience is indispensable. They frequently seek to accomplish both ends with a question: “How do you eat an elephant?” And the audience responds in unison: “One bite at a time!” And so the journey of mutual discovery is launched. Similarly, HR has been involved in a number of change journeys. Not too long ago, the employee virtues that HR extolled and 197

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recruited for were past oriented: being dutiful, hardworking, trustworthy, loyal, and obedient. These traditional attributes have been supplemented by a new crop of present-focused behaviors: adaptability, involvement, agility, innovation, ownership, transformation, mutuality, alignment, morale, and empowerment. Finally, futuredriven hybrid roles have been added: knowledge worker, team player, customer advocate, technologically amplified, and distributed leader. The range from past oriented to present focused to future-driven has been facilitated by a thirty-year process of structural reengineering, talent selection and retention, and worker centrality. In the process, the organizational pyramid has been gradually flattened, and its new shape has conferred upon managers prerogatives and responsibilities previously reserved for senior officers. Employee empowerment in turn has taken from middle managers more control and self-direction. Vertical authority has been transformed into horizontal initiative. In short, work has been decentralized and redistributed to teams, and the proverbial organization chart has taken the form of a network as constantly transitional as the future it seeks to model.

CENTRALITY OF THE WORKFORCE The new centrality of employees proceeded from the recognition that if productivity, profitability, and creativity were to occur and to provide the competitive edge in a global marketplace, it would have to come from the base of the now nearly flat pyramid. Indeed, in some organizations teams have either replaced their supervisors or made them marginal. The task of HR was to keep pace with those changes and above all to help deliver and train employees to minister to the new challenge of greater task and role self-management. But in many ways and areas, HR needs to push the envelope of worker knowledge further. It needs to know more about how workers really acquire knowledge, how it is applied, and how it alters

Demographics and the Future of HRM

job expectations. But that in turn requires recognizing that audience knowledge determines how training is designed. Increasingly, the demographics of the workforce have been tapped as the sociological and psychological source of worker behaviors and learning preferences. In large corporations, typically at least five (soon to be six) generations coexist. The oldest were born in the thirties, the newest in the eighties. The first group may live until 2050, the second almost to 2100 even without further extensions of the human life span. The histories of each generation shape their work attitudes, preferences, and behaviors. The degree to which they are willing to work together in turn affects their degree of alignment with company goals. That is not a problem in an e-commerce start-up. All are usually the same generation. Indeed, that may be why they can move so fast so far. Differentiation is not an obstacle because it is minimal. But that is also one reason why so many fail. There is no internal tension, and diversity is not sufficient to offer the checks and balances of generational difference.

TARGETED GENERATIONAL BEHAVIORS The complexity of generational behaviors and values has led to a focus on more targeted behaviors, and three in particular. First, attributes desired by HR and the company, drawn from a combination of those listed earlier and constituting recruiting presences. Second, determining what in the employee’s demographics and background supports or opposes change and how training has to be designed to turn inertia into action. Third, identifying what bridging strategies coaches and supervisors can employ to bring workers over to the desired side. Such a process would be daunting if it had to be done on an individual basis for every behavior. But the diagnostic middle piece is generational, and the demographic range of indicators, once done, can not only be stored in the database but also tapped to

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benchmark targeted behavior change. But above all, the task also has been eased by having it take place within a dynamic framework of changing employee–manager relationships.

LEADERSHIP STYLES Leadership styles are generational. They range from the past to the present to the future: from the autocratic to the consultative to the participative. They can also be classified as either directive or nondirective, accompanied by respective coaching styles. Table 14 provides some essential characteristics of each. Demographic analysis describes how worker differences affect the perceptions of managerial style. Eight categories are used: age, gender, nationality, education level, tenure with organization, functional area, hierarchical level, and place in the family birth order. Only those factors are included that are relevant to job performance and do not violate privacy. In effect, these factors constitute the basic demographics of all employees, but focus on identifying potential support for change or obstacles to change. The follow-

TA B LE 1 4 • D I RE C T I VE A N D N O N D I RE C T I VE LE A D E RS H I P S T Y LE S DIRECTIVE

NONDIRECTIVE

Power-driven

Achievement oriented

Role oriented

Support oriented

Hierarchical

Crossover

Chain of command

Doing whatever it takes

Rules

Goals

Incremental

Innovative

Demographics and the Future of HRM

ing are interpretations of how each factor shapes leadership style preferences: • Age. Generally older workers prefer and respond to directive managerial and coaching styles. Younger workers respond better to nondirective coaches and managers. Some high-tech start-ups—where all or most employees are in their twenties— show a high tolerance for chaos and even anarchy. • Gender. Males prefer directive styles, females nondirective. Typically, men are more forceful and assertive, women more cooperative and nurturing. Increasingly, however, convergence is occurring, with women leading the way. • Nationality. National cultures shape leadership preferences. Strong and assertive national cultures want strong leaders. Other more egalitarian countries in fact distrust leaders with too much power and favor imposing constitutional limits on executive power. • Educational level. Typically the higher the level of education, the greater the inclination to favor the nondirective leadership style. • Tenure with organization. The longer the period of employment, the greater reliance on directive leadership; although a succession of poor or mediocre CEOs may mean the allegiance is accompanied by skepticism. • Functional area. Predictably, blue-collar workers favor strong bosses, white-collar more nondirective ones. • Hierarchical level. Line personnel and managers favor what they are and increasingly want to become. Staff want an easier life associated with simply being told what to do. • Birth order. First-born tend to be more aggressive and insecure, and more resistant to authority. Last-born are more distant and harder to reach, and often capricious. The middle-born are usually the most reasonable, although they can lean on occasion

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toward the behaviors of the first and last and sometimes both at the same time. Organizations, typically through HR, would use the findings from this initial analysis to compile and configure two demographic clusters of each managerial style. That composite provides the key managerial and training guidelines as to the key perceptions and attitudes of employees. Examine the sample employee clusters and configurations in Table 15. The first is of an older director of the transportation division whose general profile places him within a directive cluster. The second depicts a younger employee who leads a team of mostly entry-level software engineers and who falls within a nondirective cluster.

Manager-Coach What does such clustering offer the manager-coach? A more extensive knowledge base to tap for performance improvement and

TA B LE 1 5 • D I RE C T I VE VE RS U S N O N D I RE C T I VE C U LT U RE S DIRECTIVE EMPLOYEE

NONDIRECTIVE EMPLOYEE

Older

Younger

25 years’ tenure

3 years’ tenure

Male

Female

Transportation Division

Marketing

High school

College

Nationality—strong

No declared nationality

Assistant director

Team leader

Demographics and the Future of HRM

evaluation sessions. It makes it feasible to correlate, for example, instances of initiatives being taken by employees with a partiality for a nondirective leadership style; or a lack of initiative as a result of having to relate to a highly directive manager. The manager may find employees who prefer a nondirective style to be more open and responsive to questions about seeking different and even more creative ways of doing the job. In contrast, the employee who prefers following orders will be more reluctant to volunteer suggestions for change or improvement and prefer instead to have the coach point out what ought to be done differently. But the supervisor now has no choice but to minister and adjust to the generational range and preferred style of each employee. Indeed, the demographic knowledge base also provides the leverage points. For companies that develop a future stance in which work performance is continuously improved, innovation is encouraged, and teaming becomes a new norm, the role of the manager-coach is that of a stretch agent. The essential task is not only to coach change but also to align and wire it in place in terms of specific job requirements and expectations on one hand and company objectives on the other. But with an expanded demographic and knowledge base, accompanied by the many clusters that it can generate and sustain, the manager-coach has a richer and more diverse and flexible set of alternative routes to take. In fact, taking the time to provide employees with an opportunity to share their histories, perspectives, values, and the overall complexities of their lives and work often sets the stage for change and job improvement. Companies do not have the luxury of replacing an existing workforce with one that might be better able to manage the future. For better or worse, then, they have to work with what they have. However, they have two options. They can train and they can coach. But the current argument of HR is that to be effective both need more extensive worker knowledge for behavioral change to be targeted and for future performance goals to be addressed. Moreover, such knowledge should be reciprocal.

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COMMENTARY Both managers and workers have a great deal to learn from one another. Such equality and mutuality can generate a tangible model of what future work relationships should be all about. Turnaround of employees requires the combination of art and science. Databases and demographic clusters set up the science; the coach functions as a knowledge artist. The dynamic dialogue of partnership between equals raises the task of integrating performance and change to a new level. Indeed, performance evaluation, which combines the science of data and art of partnerships, may provide employees and managers with the greatest challenge each has ever faced: creating a workforce that regularly replaces itself.

CONCLUSION

The HR agenda will be dominated by the search for future-driven talent, learning diversity, and innovation. Although individually and collectively these qualities will define the critical options for professionals and organizations, the resulting foresight, cognition, and creativity also need to be interoperable. Each one has to participate in and impinge on the others because in the future convergence rules. The future is thus essentially multimodal and innovative, diverse and not singular. Anticipatory leadership and management thrive on the alternatives of the probable, the possible, and the aspirational. Innovation not only hastens but partners with the future. Breakthrough ideas and technology also create new businesses or processes that if recognized and incorporated give existing organizations a future lease on life, or if not become their competition. But to gain the benefits of multiplicity and creativity, a new relationship with the future must be formed. It cannot be the old top-down dominating relationship in which obedient servants are 205

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given the marching orders of traditional strategic planning. Nor can one safely stand in the protective present insulated from and trying to tame the uncertainty that lies ahead. The future has to become an alter ego—better still, a secret sharer. Fortunately, access to such otherness is facilitated by multimodal and innovative thinking, learning, and leading.

FUTURE THINKING AND LEARNING Multiple intelligence and learning diversity, by virtue of combining both progressive and circular thinking, enrich both the problemsolving process and its outcomes. The constant insistence on processing data and knowledge through multiple lenses makes people comfortable with alternatives, the basic stuff of futures and innovation. Above all, it offers a learning system that is supremely selforganizing, self-monitoring, self-managing, and self-amplifying. Learning range is also extended as the more dominant intelligences enlist and strengthen peripheral ones to become involved and offer their difference. As a result, the concept of multiple intelligence is not merely a way of explaining how we think, learn, and lead. It is also a powerful way of learning to learn and even unlearn, lifelong. As such, it is perhaps the optimum way of structuring a proactive and multiple relationship with the future, employing innovation as the ultimate version of problem solving.

OBSTACLES TO INNOVATION As with futurity and multiple intelligence, innovation is similarly beset by a number of basic misunderstandings and misconceptions. Two in particular: the belief that it is a eureka moment and thus easy and fast, or that it is reserved only for the privileged creative types of R&D. Then, too, its implementation is often hurried and crude in order to guarantee results. However, no matter what the

Conclusion

difficulties and organizational obstacles are, creativity is an absolute of company survival and vitality. Its ties to the future provide a lifeline of continuity to such an extent that futurity and innovation become versions of each other. Creativity does not just happen. Nor can it be ordered into being or become an object of company cheerleading. Rather, an environment and culture supportive of learning diversity prepares the way for innovation. Most important, transition has to be accepted as its new permanent norm. Ideas have to be multiply perceived and rendered by the dynamics of many intelligences collectively involved in understanding and problem solving. The question must shift from “How smart am I?” to “How am I smart?” Building on that add “How innovative am I?” to “How am I innovative?” If we reconceive our relationship to the future, expand our notions of how we think, learn, and lead, and approach innovation as more mystery than mastery, then the promise of synthesis may be within our grasp, and the coming years in turn may appear less as a disruptive antagonist and more as a collaborative partner.

DECLINE OF THE UNITED STATES? One last matter, or rather two. The current state of the United States is worrisome. There are sadly many signs of decline. Downsizing and outsourcing have devastated the workforce. The educational achievement levels of U.S. students have slipped seriously in worldwide comparisons. Other countries—even developing ones— are producing more engineers and technologists than we are. One could go on, but what is clear is the uneasy sense that the United States may have passed its peak and that other countries are in the process of overtaking it and leaving it behind. In large part this book was written to demonstrate that such an obituary is both premature and unjustified. In fact, many signs and examples indicate not only how resilient, resourceful, and innovative

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the current U.S. workforce is but also how its embrace of change augers well for its future. In short, the U.S. work ethic is not only alive and well, but HR has helped to give it a new lease on life. The other issue may be a more difficult stretch for many. A recurrent item—often number one—on every future agenda is globality. But its prominence is ambiguous or adversarial. The outsourcing of U.S. jobs overseas and its justifications by company executives have not only seriously affected company loyalty but also jeopardized worker and company goal alignment. Why should the workforce collaborate in its own demise? Support companywide teaming and collective action rather than protective selfinterest? In short, the problem now is not so much accepting the content of change as its context. The dilemma is the positioning of the United States in a new worldview. As always it is a matter of perception or, more comprehensively, vision. The old frameworks of international careers function more like sieves than containers. New paradigms have to be shaped by a series of new questions. Up until now it has been jobs that moved out. Will that be followed by workers moving out? If so, will globalization require workers not only to travel abroad more often but also be stationed abroad? Will professionals be required to do a series of tours of duty overseas? Will they be given choices of where and for how long? Will families accompany them or stay behind? How will they be serviced? Will there even be a corporate or parent center anymore? What about the differences not only of country but also of corporate values? In short, what will careers defined by globality look like?

THREE FUTURE-DRIVEN NEEDS Understandably, expediency has largely driven current global workforce decisions. Survival in the face of global competition has led to outsourcing as the way to level the playing field of wage differentials. But far from having answers, in many companies these

Conclusion

questions are only just being asked, usually by HR professionals with foresight. Three directions of inquiry are emerging. The first is the practical need of global companies to access talent worldwide. As with multinationals in the past, rather than ship someone overseas, mature people already comfortable with and knowledgeable about the existing culture are sought. But now they must not be expedient add-ons but integrated into what becomes a company’s globally based workforce. The longer-term solution requires HR to go international—to create forums and conferences to explore and define the workforce interfaces necessary to facilitate global placements as seamlessly as possible. But the more urgent and related strategy for HR is to take the lead in researching and identifying the kinds of changes an international career may require by studying the patterns of those employees already so involved. The key is to assemble a global workforce profile within that would be nested both in global job descriptions and crosscultural training. In short, we need to globalize every job. The net result will also be the futurizing of work. A second approach is technological. It is probably not accidental that globality and interconnectivity coincide. The Internet is already global. Indeed, a number of virtual teams from all over the world have already been functioning effectively in asynchronous fashion. When a particular expertise or cultural input is lacking, appropriate international experts are brought on board for the duration of the task. Indeed, such searches would be greatly facilitated by the compilation of the kind of global database HR would advocate that each company assemble. Generally, participants find global teamwork challenging and become familiar with and respectful of their global counterparts. Indeed, it is conceivable—especially with further technological advances in Internet communications—that a significant segment of the global workforce will be working together virtually. Distance will be overcome, and the need for relocation eliminated or minimized. A new international teaming mind-set will structure work and its global conversations.

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But the third and final piece is to better prepare current employees as well as future college students for globality. Training and curriculum need the addition of the “g” sign. Currently, many academic courses and training offerings are designated as e-courses. That signals not just that they are available online but that the basic subject matter explores the extent to which the content has been affected by the Internet. Now the next step is for every e-offering to be also given a g-designation to spell out the multiple impacts of globality on both companies and the workforce. At least that way, as the new global workforce profile begins to emerge, it can be perceived not only as part of an evolving big picture, but also as a global redefinition of every job description. Preparing the workforce for globality is no small or easy matter— especially for the United States. We are accustomed to being the biggest or only fish in a relatively small pond. Now the pond has become the entire world. In addition, the complexity of its operations exceeds the conventional parameters of our understanding. Our perception of the worldview turns out to be not so much a worldview as a U.S.-centered version of the whole. The sobering adjustment will not be easy or quick. Moreover, it requires straddling. The major challenge we face now is that of acknowledging and preserving the accomplishments of the current workforce while beginning to anticipate and manage global impacts. Integrating and harmonizing the two constitutes the future agenda of HR professionals and of the new CEO hybrids, for whom a changing workforce is synonymous with an emerging future. Finally, the United States that will emerge will not be what we were or what we currently are now. But whatever its futuristic versions, the workforce will lead the way.

INDEX

accountability, 31–32, 39 acculturation, 186 anticipatory leadership, 205 applicants: fit of, 85–86; interview preparations by, 78; salary requests from/offers to, 80 apprenticeship system, 25 benchmarking, 28, 145 Bersin and Associates, 20–21, 23 best work practices, 38 Brandon Hall, 21–22 CEO: agendas, 174; alternative titles for, 175–178; CIA as, 176–177; CIC as, 176–177; CIO as, 175; CIP as, 177–178; CLO as, 175–176; composite nature of, 174–175; description of, 5; executive team, 179–180; GBO as, 176; job market predictions by, 65–66; as manager, 36; training program for, 178 CEO hybrid, 178–179

change agents, 93 change management, 149 changing roles, 171 Chaplin, Charlie, 27 chief information officer, 175, 189–190 chief innovation pusher, 177–178 chief learning officer, 175–176, 189–190 CIA, 176–177 CIC, 176–177 CIO, 175, 189–190 CIP, 177–178 CLO, 175–176, 189–190 coaches, 159, 188, 202–203 collaborative work covenants, 120–121, 127–129 collectivized individual: description of, 11; preferential–optimum spectrum, 13; traits of, 12–13 communication: empowerment and, 122; internal, 74, 101–102; managerial interfaces for, 104–107; official, 101–102; sociological principles of, 102–104 211

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companies: distrust in, 119; downsizings in, 2; future projections of, 85; internal communication patterns in, 74; loyalty to, 2–3, 108 company policy manuals, 89 competencies: compiling of, 30; reskilling of, 31 competition: manager’s awareness of, 38; monitoring of, 15 composite employee mission statement, 114 conflict, 122 consilience, 187 continuous improvement, 32 convergent thinking, 187 conversations: announcement vs., 102–103; linkages of, 107; managerial interfaces for, 104–107; strategic, 105, 107 corporate identity, 6–11 corporate universities, 31, 68, 185–187 covenants, 120–121, 127–129 CPI 260® instrument, 156 CPI™ 434 instrument, 156 creativity: elements necessary for, 207; by employee, 169; from innovation, 50; transition as, 152 crisis management, 46 cross-training, 168, 184 cultural paternalism, 28 customer relationship management, 39 customer-focused training, 155 dashboards, 31–32 data: empowerment through, 32; sharing of, 32 decision making, 31–32 Deming, W. Edwards, 27–28 diagnostically driven training: learning management diagnostics, 155–156; multiple intelligence. See multiple intelligence; overview of, 153–155 directive leadership, 200, 202 distributed leadership, 42, 127, 174 distributed metrics, 32–33 distrust, 118–119 downsizing, 2–3, 108, 193, 207

e-courses, 210 educational degrees, 25 e-learning, 186 empathy, 162 employee(s): aligning with company goals, 134; conversations with, 104–107; creativity by, 169; directive, 202; distrust by, 118–119; empowerment of, 187–189; experiences of, 117; future-oriented behaviors for, 198; goals for, 125–126; listening to, 117; managers and, 118, 123; new. See new employees; nondirective, 202–203; past-oriented behaviors for, 198; performing profile for. See performing profile; present-oriented behaviors for, 198; productivity of, 187–189; requests by, 118; self-evaluation by, 97–98. See also workforce employee evaluation: changes in, 131–132, 187; manager’s role in, 139–140; traditional approach to, 131 employee mission statement: attitudes toward work in, 111; benefits of, 114–115; composite, 114; description of, 109–110; descriptors used in, 110–114; expectations of performance in, 112; learning in, 112–113; performance goals, 112; relationships in, 113; standards in, 113–114 empowerment: collaborative work covenants’ effect on, 127–129; communication and, 122; data and, 32; of employees, 187–189 enterprise resource planning, 39 entrepreneurs, 150 evaluation: of employee. See employee evaluation; of training, 140–142 executive team, 179–180 exit interviews, 69 failure-oriented thinkers, 48 fit: chemistry vs., 79; future, 85–86, 92 follow-up after training, 142 Forrester, Jay, 28–29 future thinking, 190, 206

Index

future-driven needs, 208–210 future-driven orientation, 9 games: pervasiveness of, 56; as strategy, 59–63; structuring opportunities through, 62–63; uncertainty inherent in, 59–62 gaming, 56. See also simulation Gardner, Howard, 156–157 Gartner, 22–23 GBO, 176 generational behaviors, 199–200 generations in workforce, 55–56, 199 global business officer, 176 global citizens, 186–187 global simulation model, 29 globality, 208–210 goal(s): changes to, 167–169; in job descriptions, 40, 173; manageability of, 166; morphing of, 171–172; roles created by, 169–171, 194–195; stretching of, 167–168, 194–195; traditional view of, 166; updating of, 168 goal-role exchanges, 170–172, 193 goal-role reciprocity, 41 government research, 17 Greenleaf, Robert, 42 group collaboration: employees, 125–126; managers, 125; overview of, 123–124; teams, 126–127; top management, 124–125 group dynamics, 121–123 groupthink, 12, 143 growth potential: as job satisfaction, 91–92; measuring of, 94–98 guild system, 25–26 HICLMOS, 192 hiring: decision period for, 77; fallacies associated with, 75–76; fit versus chemistry approach to, 79; information sharing during, 81; interviewers involved in, 78–79; interviewing, 77–78; job overselling in, 79; mistakes in, 80; salary requests/offers in, 80; selection considerations in, 78 HPT, 195–196

human capital, 26, 110 human intellectual capital leadership and management outsourcing systems, 192 human resource outsourcing, 2, 191 human resources: advocacy for, 195; challenges for, 108–109; changes by, 32–33; Deming’s influences on, 27–28; employee characteristics valued by, 197–198; functions of, 55; future of, 190–196; historical highlights of, 26–29; insourcing in, 3; motivational speakers and, 197; research alliance with, 37; role of, 32–33; technology interface with, 29–32; training by, 192–193; training topics selection by, 108–109; workforce advocacy by, 32–33 human resources leadership management, 191 human resources management, 191 human resources vision, 8–11 IDC, 22 information access: description of, 81–82 information gathering, 38 information sharing, 52, 81, 83 information technology, 37–38 information technology companies, 66 innovation: as company goal, 162; creativity from, 50; distribution of, 43; elements necessary for, 207; importance of, 43; integration and, 44; managerial support of, 162; misconceptions about, 206–207; obstacles to, 206–207; performance and, 44; researchfocused workforce and, 51; strategies for, 44–46; workforce affected by, 169 innovative culture: breakthroughs and, 49–50; characteristics of, 54; company structure and, 52 innovative types, 150–152 insourcing, 3, 165 integrative metrics, 44 intellectual assets, 176–177 intellectual capital, 176–177 interactive job inquiry system, 83–86 interconnectivity, 209 internal communication, 74, 101–102

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interoperability, 30–31 interpersonal skills, 30–31 interview: applicant’s preparation for, 78; deception in, 69–70; exit, 69; information access of, 84; orientation and, 73; self-qualifying, 84–85 interviewers, 78–79 interviewing: fallacies regarding, 76–77; 360-degree evaluation approach to, 78; traditional approach to, 78 Japanese productivity, 27–28 Jaskov, Jacob, 177 job(s): devaluing of, 80; disappointment with, 70; dislocation associated with, 70; information sharing about, 81; outsourcing of, 2; overselling of, 79 job classification, 167 job competencies, 30 job descriptions: development of, 27, 38; exceeding of, 41; expanding of, 83; future projections for company included in, 85; goals in, 40, 173; information limitations of, 82–83; manager-leader, 40–41; of managers, 38–40; outdated, 133–134; performing profile vs., 138; revising of, 81; talent recruitment and, 37 job information: updating of, 37 job inquiry system, 83–86 job market, 65–66 job preferences, 94 job satisfaction: description of, 10–11, 87; determiners of, 90–91; growth potential as, 91–92; guidelines for, 90–91; linkages, 96; mutuality of, 88–89; onedimensional nature of, 88; positioning of, 88; promotion of, 87–88; relationships and, 113; of supervisor, 89 knowledge training and learning, 9 KnowledgeAdvisors, 19 leaders: future types of, 189–190; managers vs., 35–37; responsibilities of, 124. See also manager-leader

leadership: age and, 201; anticipatory, 205; birth order and, 201–202; demographics and, 200; directive, 200; distributed, 42, 127, 174; educational level and, 201; gender and, 201; hierarchical level and, 201; nationality and, 201; nondirective, 200; options for, 173–174; organization tenure and, 201; preservation of, 5; styles of, 200–203 learning: e-, 186; employee mission statement goals and, 112–113; future responses to, 191; future thinking and, 206; goals of, 187; knowledge training and, 9; marketing of, 23; past and present, 44–45 learning management diagnostics, 155–156 learning management systems: creation of, 155; development of, 20–21; follow-up tracking systems used by, 31 listening, 103–104, 125 loyalty, 2–3, 108 managed work, 25–26 manager(s): as coach, 159, 188, 202–203; communication interfaces for, 104–107; company-wide systems implemented by, 39; conversations with employees, 104–107; design interface for, 104; development of, 36–37; empathy by, 162; employees and, 118, 123; evaluation role of, 139–140; innovation supported by, 162; interpersonal interface for, 104; job descriptions of, 38–40; leaders vs., 35–37; listening by, 103–104, 125; meetings with new employees, 70; performing profile for, 137; questions by, 103; requests by, 118; role of, 125; talent retention abilities of, 71; work interface for, 104–106. See also supervisors managerial coaches, 150 manager-leader: description of, 40, 172–174; goals, 41–42; job description, 40–41; reasons for creation of, 42

Index

Meadows, Dennis, 29 meetings with new employees, 70 Metrics that Matter, 19 micromanagement, 30 middle managers. See manager(s) mission statement: composite human resources, 9–11; description of, 6; employee. See employee mission statement; organizational, 6, 110; transition and, 153 Modern Times, 27 monitoring, 185 morphing goals, 171–172 motivational speakers, 197 multiple intelligence: assessment of, 158–159; description of, 156–157; expansion of, 157; intelligences, 157; range of, 157–159 multiple smarts, 158 Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® instrument, 156 new employees: discontent by, 70; fit of, 79, 85–86; future of company discussed with, 74; job satisfaction of. See job satisfaction; orientation of. See orientation; understanding of industry by, 73–74 newsletter, 142 nondirective leadership, 200, 202–203 open-ended questions, 103 organization: culture of, 101; distrust in, 119; future projections of, 85; information culture in, 81–86; overwhelming of, 45–46; structure of, 45 orientation: cross-organizational approach to, 73; future of company discussed during, 74; individuals who conduct, 72; interviews and, 73; mistakes during, 71–72; ongoing nature of, 73; period for, 70; recommendations for, 72–75 outsourcing: benefits of, 1; effects on United States, 207; guidance for, 2; stages of, 1–2

participatory power, 8–9 partnering, 3, 138 performance: employee mission statement goals and, 112; innovation and, 44; software tracking of, 30; team, 144, 146 performance evaluation, 171 performance improvement: challenges for, 133–134; competitive advantage through, 133; programs for, 74–75; requirements, 133 performance review programs, 74–75 performing profile: benefits of, 136; compiling of, 135; definition of, 134; for employees, 137; features of, 134–135; job descriptions vs., 138; for managers, 137; matrix database, 135–138; self-focused nature of, 139; supervisor benefits of, 136–138 personal inventory, 95–96 policy manuals, 89 Precision Skilling, 19–20 Principles of Scientific Management, 26 proactive talent testing, 92–94 problem solving, 46–47, 75 productivity: employee, 187–189; work, 30–31 progress, Deming’s focus on, 27 proprietary research and development divisions, 16–17 quality measurement: benchmarking, 28; Deming’s focus on, 27 relationships: changes in, 119–121; description of, 88; job satisfaction and, 113 research: benefits of, 15; future of, 23; human resources alliance with, 37; knowledge and, 15 research providers: Bersin and Associates, 20–21, 23; Brandon Hall, 21–22; for-profit companies, 17–23; Gartner, 22–23; government, 17; IDC, 22; KnowledgeAdvisors, 19; proprietary research and development divisions, 16–17; summary of, 24; think tanks and centers, 17; Thomson NETg, 19–20; universities, 16

215

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researchers, 51 return on investment, 188 roles: changing, 171; goals and, 169–171, 194–195 salary requests/offers, 80 scientific management, 26 search firms, 83 self-confidence, 106 self-consciousness, 106 self-evaluation, 97 self-knowledge, 194 Senge, Peter, 175, 186 simulation: characteristics of, 56–57; checks and balances use of, 61; discovery-based nature of, 57–58; holistic view using, 58; internal reality checks through, 61; involvement in, 57–58; principles of, 63; scenario and, 58; strategy-based focus of, 58; structuring opportunities through, 62–63; uncertainty management through, 61; whole organization visualized through, 58 Six Sigma, 28 software: interoperability evaluations using, 30–31; work productivity tracked using, 30 strategic monitoring, 39 strategic planning, 184–187 strategic sequencing, 58 strategy: games as, 59–63; innovation, 44–46; simulation focus on, 58 stretch goals, 167–168, 194–195 stretch training: coaching exercises, 159–163; description of, 159 Strong Interest Inventory® instrument, 156 supervisors: cross-divisional concerns, 7; job satisfaction of, 89; orientation of new employees by, 72; performing profile benefits for, 136–138; selfinterests of, 6–7. See also manager(s) systems: dashboard summaries of, 31–32; importance of, 28–29; manager’s role in implementation of, 39; micromanagement by, 30

talent: assessment of, 67–68; global access to, 209; proactive testing of, 92–94; retention of, 3 talent recruitment: focus on, 192; job descriptions and, 37 talent retention: focus on, 192; job overselling effects on, 79; manager’s abilities in, 71; orientation of new employees and, 70–72; recommendations for, 72–75; strategies for, 71–75; workforce conversions linked to, 107 Taylor, Frederick, 26–27 team: definition of, 12; double growth factor, 146–147; downsides of, 143–144; goals for, 126–127; individuality in, 143–147; interdependence of, 122; interpersonal relationships, 145; performance of, 144, 146; redefining the development of, 145–146; troubleshooting, 50; virtual, 47–51 team cohesion, 144–145 team members: double growth factor for, 146–147; group-based definition of, 12; types of, 143; unevenness among, 144 team training, 12 team-based forensics, 52–53 teaming: description of, 11; goal of, 12; growth benefits through, 145–146; individual development through, 12; pervasiveness of, 143; socializing effects of, 56 think tanks and centers, 17 Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, 156 Thomson NETg, 19–20 360-degree evaluation process, 78 time-efficient studies, 26–27 top management, 124–125 total quality management, 28 trainers, 140–142 training: business-focused, 154; catch-up, 183; CEO, 178; correctives, 171–172; crossover, 184, 192; customer-focused, 155; design options for, 141–142; diagnostically driven. See diagnostically driven training; e-courses, 210;

Index

effectiveness of, 109; elements of, 143; evaluation of, 140–142; feedback about, 142; follow-up after, 142; goals and roles addressed by, 171, 187; human resources involvement in, 192–193; internalization of, 154; lineup, 184; metrics for, 183–184; need for, 25; stretch. See stretch training; topics for, 108–109, 153–154; traditional elements of, 149; transition. See transition training transition: as creativity, 152; taxonomy of, 154 transition training: innovative types, 150–152; for workforce, 152–153 trouble management, 46–47 troubleshooting teams, 50 trust, 153 two-tiered executive team, 179–180 uncertainty: in games, 59–60; managing of, 60–62 union contracts, 120–121 United States: decline of, 207–208 universities: academic, 16; corporate, 31, 68, 185–187 unlearning, 44–45 U.S. companies: corrective actions for, 66–67; economic interdependence among, 67; outsourcing effects on, 207 virtual teams, 47–51 vision statement: composite human resources, 8–9; description of, 6; transition and, 153

Wheatley, Margaret, 121 Wiener, Norbert, 28–29 Wilson, Edward, 187 work collaborative, 124 work covenants, collaborative, 120–121, 127–129 work management: paradigms of, 28–29; systems-based view of, 28–29 work productivity: interpersonal skills effect on, 30–31; software tracking of, 30 workers. See employee(s) workforce: acknowledging of, 210; capacity assessments, 37; centrality of, 6–11, 53, 198–199; challenges of, 210; changes in, 37; company-wide articulation of qualities of, 7; cultural influences, 55–56; Deming’s advocacy of, 27–28; educational level of, 207; generations in, 55–56, 199; globality preparations for, 209–210; human resources’ advocacy of, 32–33; importance of, 5; innovation effects on, 169; misconceptions about, 67–68; mutualizing of relationships, 10–11; outsourcing effects on, 207; preferential profiles in, 6; as researchers, 51; as thirdparty forensic practitioners, 52–53; transition training for, 152–153; work ethic of, 10. See also employee(s) workforce information technology, 30 workplace: fear in, 28; quality environment in, 28 workplace relationships: changes in, 119–121; description of, 88; job satisfaction and, 113 workshops, 141

217