Team GB is sending the feel good factor back from China

August 19, 2008

So the Olympic Games are in full swing and I think it’s safe to say ‘so far so good’. True, there is a nagging feeling that the greatest show on earth is being stage managed a little too precisely by its hosts, but despite this the Games are doing what only the Games can do – creating a real ‘feel-good factor’ that connects almost all the countries of the world. True, Football’s World Cup does have this feel-good element, but it’s only for the select few who have qualified – so there’s no doubt that the Olympics really are unique.

And what about Team GB? As I write this blog we are third in the medal tables behind China and the USA with 16 Gold medals and more almost certain to follow. That’s the best result since London in 1908 and something that was unthinkable before the start of the Games. In fact, the British Olympic Association (BOA) had stated a goal of fourth place for the 2012 Games in London – not for Beijing. Add to this, the startling fact that the two Countries at the top of the table, USA and China dwarf Great Britain in every way: China has a population of around 1.4 billion compared with the UK’s 60 million and this is also reflected in the size of the teams - both China and the US have teams of over 600 athletes compared with the UK’s which is under 350.

All of this means that Team GB’s achievements so far are all the more remarkable and certainly makes it one of the strongest pound for pound teams at the Games. This starts to explain the positive buzz that these achievements are creating back home in the UK  - the performances, achievements and emotions at the Olympics are creating a genuine sense of national pride that is offsetting the bleak economic and weather outlooks this summer. As in our working lives, the hardest achievements are valued the most.

Success for team GB also creates connections and a greater sense of togetherness among the members of the United Kingdom – Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England. When the Olympics are not around it’s so easy to focus on our local rivalries – even down to the level of rivalries between cities (football supporters are the prime example). But when we see people from all over Great Britain representing us and doing us proud these divisions are blurred or removed altogether. It would be nice to think that some of this pride and togetherness could roll forward after the Games. It also sets an example for organisations – aspiring to develop a sense of pride among our workforces similar to that which is generated by our Olympic achievements has to be a good thing.

One more thought – I think a word of congratulations has to go to our Government for the investment they have made in Olympic sports such as swimming, cycling and rowing. You don’t achieve the kind results we have seen in Beijing by getting lucky with talented athletes. It takes investment and more than a little dedication from those who are charged with implementing the plans – the managers, coaches and, of course, the athletes themselves. I’m looking forward to seeing how much better it can get and this is all before 2012 in London!

No Comments » | Talent, Well-being | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper

The UK economy: A lean, mean money saving machine

May 21, 2008

I’ve been struck recently by how widespread the application of Lean Management principles has become in the UK economy – both in the private and public sectors. Traditionally reserved for the manufacturing and retail sectors, Lean is a model for managing organisations in a way that focuses only on delivering exactly what the customer wants, when they want it. In other words, there is no slack or waste in the system and this allows businesses to keep costs to an absolute minimum. The current trend for using these principles pre-dates the credit crunch, but the shortage of cash in the economy makes them more relevant than ever.

However, these are not new ideas. In fact, the American Edwards Deming pioneered many of the techniques associated with the Lean approach when he exported this way of thinking (which became Total Quality Management and Just-In-Time manufacturing) to the Japanese car industry in the ‘50s - a time when US car manufacturers were on top of the world - rich, comfortable….. and complacent. This complacency came back to bite them over the next forty years as leaner foreign manufacturers gradually eroded their market share. And the effects of this abide to this day, as I’m reminded by the proliferation of Japanese cars I see every time I return to the States!!

The claims made for the efficiency gains that Lean processes can deliver sound impressive – with 50% improvements in performance and quality being perfectly achievable in relatively short timescales. But are we to believe that there are no negative consequences to such major change? Think about it for a minute - even if the costs vs. outputs balance better on paper after the changes are made, removing cost generally means removing people (often in significant numbers) as well as other resources. How can removing hundreds of people from an organisation not affect morale, motivation and employee engagement?

As a result of such changes, the workload of some people grows exponentially which, in turn, puts pressure on work relationships, communications and employees’ ability to maintain quality under pressure. For some this will change what work feels like forever in terms of the nature of the relationship they have with both their job and their employer. These people may feel that their employer has broken the psychological contract and the risk of the best people leaving is increased. All of this is against a new background of relative job insecurity that has accompanied new economic times and this is a particularly unusual feeling for public sector workers who in the past have been immune to such concerns. But these days, given the current climate, we can all justifiably ask ourselves the question “Will I be next?”

It’s here that the spotlight falls upon leadership and internal communication. Because I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the Lean model, just that this kind of ‘all or nothing’ cost-based approach requires extremely high levels of leadership skill and ability if it is to be a success. Apart from managing the aftermath of the change process itself, this is fundamentally about culture change and the trick is not to lose all of the good aspects of the old culture while bringing in the new ways of thinking and acting. For example, I have talked before about discretionary effort - something which has been given willingly in many organisations where in the past there has been space and time to go beyond the current task. But one of the likely side-effects of the Lean approach is a new employee mindset that sees spending time thinking about the bigger issues as a waste of time in a world where it’s only important to focus on the essentials of the next deliverable. Of course, organisations can manage impressions to the outside world so that it looks like they are becoming leaner and fitter for purpose, but inside these things can quickly take on a life of their own and before you know it you have a completely new culture! This is fine if you want a completely new culture and weren’t fussy about what you lost from the old one, but most organisations have positive differentiators that are worth holding onto – cherishing even.

Radical change always has consequences. Lean is a very efficient way of finding the dead wood, but it can be a brutally blunt instrument so the changes it suggests should be thoroughly evaluated for sustainability and implemented wisely. Above all, it should only be considered if a leadership group is confident and talented enough to pull it off.

1 Comment | Engagement, Leadership, Management, Productivity, Talent | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper

Be flexible and use your Elders wisely

April 17, 2008

Flexible working is not only important for those at the start and in the middle of their careers – it matters just as much for our most senior workers. There inevitably comes a time when senior leaders actively seek more flexibility because they want to start to enjoy the fruits of their labours - but this is not to say that they don’t still have a lot to offer the business. I can really empathise with this perspective and I’m fortunate enough to have employers who provide plenty of opportunities for academics to work flexibly: The benefit for them is that we stay productive and feel motivated to perform our jobs to the best of our abilities; and can do it in different contexts.

But this is not true for all senior leaders – as often they feel (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) that the business cannot function without their full attention. This is exacerbated where there isn’t any sign of a well-developed succession plan that delivers the next generation of leaders to the organisation. In this situation, the pressure is piled on a small number of senior leaders with no end in sight - in some cases cutting potentially impressive careers short. 

However, where succession planning is well-developed, all sorts of innovative options are available. For example, outgoing CEOs can spend a number of months / years actively mentoring potential successors, and can generally get much more closely involved in inspiring and developing high potential employees.

This kind of behaviour hints at a concept known as ‘Eldership’. Eldership has its roots in African and Asian tribal culture where former leaders pass over into a council of Elders at a certain point in their lives. The role of the Elder is to be a challenging sounding board for the current leadership. So each tribe - itself an organisation - has an impartial group of people who they know only have the best interests of the group in mind. Their role is to draw on their individual, collective and cultural experience to ‘quality assure’ the decisions of the current leaders.

To me this sounds like something that could work well in many organisations I know - both public and private. Of course, some might say that this is the role of Non-Executive Directors, but this is not always the case because, unlike Elders, Non-Execs could be younger but have specific professional skills (i.e. financial accounting, legal) and they may have multiple roles in many different companies. No matter how well-meaning and impartial the individuals concerned, they’re really just acting as consultants.

The closest equivalent to Elders in the western world are experienced statesmen such as Nelson Mandela, Kofi Anan and Jimmy Carter. These are people who have been there and have done it, and who have now crossed a line from being full-time politicians to acting as trusted advisors to the world. In the case of these people, I think the vast majority of us believe that they have the world’s best interests at heart.

Commercial organisations are not tribes, but they do share plenty of characteristics with these most ancient of communities which evolved with the narrow goal of survival.  It may be too idealistic to expect senior executives to continue working for the good of the business ‘gratis’ into their dotage, but there are aspects of the concept of Eldership that most organisations could fairly easily adopt anfld integrate with their succession plan for the top level.  This is all part of the recipe  for designing a sustainable, successful organisation - and of course, providing extra flexibility in the latter stages of a career means the business is looking after those who spend a large part of their careers looking after the rest of the workforce – which, when you think about it, is only fair.

 

1 Comment | Leadership, Management, Productivity, Talent | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper

Talent on its own is not enough – you have to nurture it

April 11, 2008

“The war for talent” is an established phrase for summing up the challenge that all organisations face in terms of keeping and securing the best people. Many businesses, particularly bigger ones, have established programmes and processes for finding and developing talent, but the key relationship is always the one with the direct line manager.

Griffeth, Hom and Gaertner (2000) looked at a large number of staff retention studies and aggregated results across them to look for the trends. One of the strongest predictors of whether a person would leave was the quality of exchanges between employees and their boss - stronger than gender, ethnic origin and intelligence. Indeed, the critical role of the line manager in employee retention arises countless times in the literature and it is also frequently cited as a reason for quitting by employees after departure.

So this is where it can all go wrong…..or right. When a manager has genuine concern coupled with the motivation to develop talent and to inspire staff to do their best work you get a fantastic coming together of organisational processes and individual leadership talent that enables employees to realise their full potential.

But the other side of this is when a manager sees a talented team member and interprets it as a ‘let-off’ for him/her. When this happens, and it happens more than you might think, the employee’s talent is his/her worst enemy because it has convinced their manager that he/she is capable of delivering what’s required with minimal intervention. And this can work for both parties…..for a short time. The manager is free to get on with ‘real work’ and the talented team member is rewarded by being given autonomy to get on with his/her work independently. This can feel like a privilege in the early stages of a career, but it’s really an illusion because managing and developing talent is real work - more strategically important than many of the administrative tasks that most managers undertake every day.

So the situation described above is simply not sustainable - after a certain amount of time talented people get bored of doing the same work to a predictably high standard. They start to wonder ‘What’s next?’ They need to be constantly challenged if you are to see their potential and, just as importantly, if they are to stick around.

Then there’s the wider organisational perspective: It doesn’t matter how good the talent management programme is - if the operators of the system (the managers) aren’t engaged it will not deliver. Imagine a business with 200 managers each managing 10 staff- if half of these behave in the manner I’ve just described you have a pattern that will undermine the development of the talent pool that has been earmarked as the future of the organisation.

Finding talented people is no easy task – it’s time consuming and expensive - so it’s nothing short of criminal to use people’s talent as an excuse not to manage and nurture their potential. The best businesses have a constant eye to this potential ‘derailer’ of their talent programmes.

1 Comment | Leadership, Management, Talent | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper

What’s more important – our own personal Oscar or more money?

February 29, 2008

This week saw the Oscars ceremony come round again and it was great to see that British talent in the film industry was recognised once again. The likes of Daniel Day Lewis, Tilda Swinton and the lesser known names like Suzie Templeton all won much-coveted statues - and I bet they’ve felt great all week!

The Oscars is a particularly public and grandiose form of recognition, but it got me thinking about the kind of recognition our workforces find most motivating and how this compares with the experience of Hollywood actors.

You can’t talk about reward and recognition without mentioning money - it will, of course, always be important to people. Imagine you had a UK worker in a room with an Oscar nominee and you asked them both whether they would rather receive an internationally recognised award or a pay rise - I think you’d get very different answers from each of them. Obviously, this is partly because the actor already has plenty of money, but it’s also partly because in the UK (as in many other countries) we measure our success largely by how much money we earn, as opposed to how good we feel. Or at the very least most people assume that having money will make them feel good.

However, there have been some changes in this area of late because potential recruits now place more importance on the non-monetary aspects of a job than ever before. Recruiters who compete in the ‘war for talent’ have been starting to find that being seen as ‘an employer of choice’ is critical for securing the best people ahead of their competitors. Employers have discovered that applicants value aspects of employment that go well beyond pay – such as the potential to work flexibly, having high levels of autonomy and whether the organisation feels good to work in.

This picks up on some of the points that my colleague Ivan Robertson was making when he was a guest on my blog recently – that is, that leading organisations now know that paying the best salary is not enough to attract and retain the top people – staff stick around and give you their best when they buy into the vision painted by the organisation’s leaders and when they enjoy and are recognised for their work. These conditions, combined with pay that they see as fair reward for their contribution, are a recipe for success.

And it’s probably not that different for Hollywood actors – the pay is usually higher, but the principle is the same: Doing work that they feel is worthwhile for the right rewards and with recognition from respected peers and the public is a blend that leads to their best performances.  As Confucius once said “choose a job that you like and you will not have to work a day in your life”.

No Comments » | Talent, reward and recognition | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper

Guest Blog Spot: Should I stay or should I go? New insights into how to create loyalty and boost staff retention

February 19, 2008

This week, I’m really pleased to be able to share the blog with my colleague and good friend Professor Ivan Robertson, Managing Director of Robertson Cooper and Professor of Organisational Psychology at the University of Leeds. He is a leading figure in the areas of personality assessment, recruitment, retention and well-being. Over to you Ivan….

Ivan

Employers never like losing their most valued employees, but this will always happen to some extent because it’s actually the best (and worst) performers who are most likely to leave organisations. In fact, research shows that it is those in the middle range of performance who tend to have the longest tenures, but the most successful organisations actively invest in extending this trend to their best performers.

They do this because of the cost of losing good staff, but it seems that staff retention is becoming an increasingly difficult trick to pull off. The latest CIPD survey showed that the number of employers reporting retention difficulties has risen from 69% in 2005 to 78% in 2006 (which included a staggering 83% reported by private sector businesses). My estimate, based on CIPD data, is that it costs organisations at least £8,000 for each productive employee who leaves – other, less conservative, estimates have put this figure at over £20,000!

The CIPD survey reported that the most common reasons for leaving jobs were career development (including lack of promotion) and pay. This suggests that improving people’s career prospects (e.g. through promotion) would be one way of holding on to people. But not all of the research supports this idea - with at least two studies suggesting that promotions may, in fact, lead to higher turnover. It seems that people who move up the organisation more quickly are more likely to leave and that this effect is, in fact, more pronounced for poorer performers.

Of course not all employers want to increase employee retention, some are happy with their current situation – with a minority (10%) actually wishing to increase turnover. Regardless of how happy an organisation might be with current turnover rates, it’s important to be able to establish a trend whereby good performers stay and poor ones leave. Achieving this requires relatively high levels of performance management so that organisations know who the good and poor performers are. But this is not the full story.

After career development and pay, the most frequent reasons for people leaving cited by the CIPD were lack of support from their manager and stress. And just as in the case of performance management, line managers are therefore highlighted as key ‘operators’ of an effective retention strategy. So, investing in line manager skill development is usually seen as a priority for the most successful businesses.

All employees – whatever level – derive motivation from having a strong sense of purpose and feeling good about coming to work every day. The relevance of this conclusion is inescapable for all organisations that compete in the war for talent: When people are engaged in activities that bring them pleasure, activities which have a clear and relevant purpose, they are unlikely to actively choose to stop doing them!

Professor Ivan Robertson

3 Comments | Guest Blog Spots, Management, Productivity, Talent | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper