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Archives for January 2008

Boom times or recession: It is all about people

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However when the economy takes a downturn it is easy for the tyranny of the bottom line to ride rough shod over effective people development processes.

As Gill Corkindale says:

“People skills will be more important than ever as we head into the uncertainties of 2008. The threat of recession, global credit squeezes, and political uncertainty will magnify the challenges all businesses will face … But without emotional intelligence, clear communication, delegation, feedback, giving recognition and celebrating success, companies will fail their employees, their customers, their shareholders and all their other stakeholders. Ultimately, they will probably fail completely.”

While you might be itching to crack the whip, focus on sales and reduce costs – you must maintain a focus on people and relationships. Only by effectively managing team members will you enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your organisation.

How to Motivate Your Problem People

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Everyone has motivational energy. Everyone acts in ways that they believe will make things better for them, their loved ones or the wider community.

Even problem employees are driven and committed — it is just that the direction or nature of their drive and commitment is not recognised or valued in the workplace.

In trying to motivate problem employees, most managers either:

  • try to “sell” their viewpoint to employees—or
  • dismiss them as ‘lazy’
  • avoid managing them all together and hope that the problem will go away.

1. Create a rich picture of the ‘problem’ employee.

Don’t simply label him difficult. Build a relationship and find out what drives him, what’s blocking those drives, and what might happen if the blockages were removed. A system of regular 121s should let you build a relationship that can achieve this within a month or two.

2. Replace predetermined ‘solutions’ with feedback

Don’t demand new behaviours just point out the impacts of those already in place and ask what he might be able to do differently? Help him to develop a menu of possibilities and choose to follow the ones that interest him.

Does your workforce have the right skills?

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Currently ‘Skills’ within the workplace is high on the government agenda. Funds are filtering down into regional ‘pots’ that have been allocated to support the up-skilling of the nation’s workforce. David Lammy, Skills Minister commented, ‘Yorkshire and Humber has the highest proportion of low skilled workers in the country because its traditional manufacturing industry could rely on low skilled workers.’

In the past two decades the region has suffered from the decline of traditional industries with massive job losses in coal mining, steel, engineering and textiles. These have been partly offset by growth in financial, legal and telephone-based services. Were these really low skilled jobs that were lost? Just because the skills did not show up on the national qualifications database does not mean that these were unskilled workers! Was a miner really less skilled than a telephone worker with an NVQ Level 2 in Call Centre Operations?

The skills that your business needs should not be determined by Mr Lammy and the agendas and prejudices promoted by an army of skills brokers. The skills that your business needs will be determined by your customers, by your markets, by your suppliers by your competitors and by your decisions.  It is likely that the skills needs will change quickly and significantly – so the real premium will go to those that learn – continually.

The Limits of Lean?

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Lean

Earlier this week I went to ‘An Evening with Simon Hill’. Drawing on his experience of manufacturing industry and Yorkshire Forward, Simon Hill, Executive Director of Business at Yorkshire Forward talked about strategic business improvement using ‘Lean Principles’. Simon chose not to offer a quick reminder of what these Lean Principles are – leaving a proportion of the audience in the dark. As a reminder they are:

  1. Specify what creates value from the customers’ perspective
  2. Identify all the steps along the process chain
  3. Make those processes flow
  4. Make only what is pulled by the customer
  5. Strive for perfection by continually removing waste

With its origins in the world of total quality management Lean Principles provide a wonderful way to ensure efficient product or service delivery by allowing the whole business process to be analysed and made efficient. It emphasises systems, compliance, analysis and objectivity in pursuit of the perfect process. It really is scientific management for the late 20th Century. It is one of several business improvement tools that can help an organisation with one of its purposes – that of the efficient delivery of a product or service.

However increasingly efficiency is not the only game in town. Indeed it is not even the main game for most organisations. Renewal, re-invention and transformation are increasingly the key drivers of sustainable value creation in modern knowledge based economies. If I heard Simen rightly then after a considerable investment of money and time in implementing Lean his business had just about managed to stand still. Now this is an great achievement for a manufacturer of automotive components in South Yorkshire – but I doubt if it carries the seeds for a major economic re-birth.

My concern is the ‘story’ that Lean tells about the nature of business and enterprise. That it is about analysis, rationality, incremental improvement and mediocrity – giving the customer just what they ask for – when they ask for it. It is that the expectations of the customer should drive the production of the organisation. And Lean is not just a set of tools – it is a management philosophy – a culture. It becomes the way we think and act.

Andrew Mawson – one of the UKs most outstanding social entrepreneurs tells of the first time he asked some members of his community what they would really like to do. It turned out that they aspired to go on a day trip to the coast. Fair enough thought Andrew and worked with them to make it happen. After the trip had been undertaken he asked them what they would like to do next? And the reply came – ‘Let’s go on another trip to the (same) coast’! Let’s do it again! Andrew recognised that the aspirations of his customers were narrow. That he could provide experiences far more powerful and effective in driving community development. He understood that they had no real idea of what was possible. So he proposed that their next project was to be a journey across the Sinai desert. As their supplier he transformed their ideas of what could be achieved based on his on his knowledge, experience and expertise. This would never had happened had been trained in Lean principles.

And now Lean Simon tells us Lean consultants are being engaged by Yorkshire Forward to increase organisational efficiency. No doubt pieces of paper will soon be travelling less far on their journey through the offices, being touched by fewer people and processes generally more efficiently. And many of the employees perceptions will be reinforced that their role is not to facilitate the entrepreneurial re-birth of the region – but to design and administer effective bureaucratic processes.

For me business is about emotion, aspiration, imagination, passion, energy and risk. I am not making an argument for waste (although I do often find myself encouraging clients to ‘create slack’) but I am arguing for cultures that favour action and re-invention over perfection. If the price of Lean is a culture that favours analysis and incrementalism over imagination, re-invention and risk taking then I for one find it a price I am not prepared to pay.

At the end of the presentation I asked Simon whether he really felt that Lean held the answers to sustainable competitiveness in knowledge based business – whether it could drive the creativity and innovation necessary to compete in the future. And he answered ‘ No!’.

Good Boss Behaviours

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As part of a training session on Managing Your Boss I recently asked a group of managers to think about what their best managers did that made them so good.  I got lots of the usual labels (passionate, visionary, inspiring etc) and had to work quite hard to explore what they actually did that made the followers believe them to be those things.

Here are some of the results:

  1. Always drove ideas forward
  2. Made you feel a part of it, valued your achievements.
  3. Saw in me things that I did not see in myself. A mentor.
  4. Tended to say ‘yes’ – always encouraging – looking for reasons ‘why’ rather than ‘why not’.
  5. Saying  ‘Thanks’.  Appreciating my work.

You will notice that I still didn’t get to the behaviours behind some of these.

What did the boss do that made you believe they were driving ideas forward?  Regular updates, clear achievements against goals?

How did the boss make you feel a part of it?  What did he or she do?

What does your boss do that makes them so effective?

Describe their behaviours in the comments section below.  The best entry by the end of the month – January 08 –  (as decreed by me) will get a prize.