Ed O'Brien's courageous approach to HR for global, creative companies.

What real Leaders do differently

Leader does not equal Senior Executive.  Most Senior Executives aren't really Leaders.  The best Leaders I have seen have 5 things they demonstrate consistently.  

1.  They are optimistic and see the opportunities ahead.  They may deeply understand and empathize with any current struggles individually and collectively, but they deeply believe they see the way forward to a better future and convince people to dedicate themselves to that vision.

2.  They are human and demonstrate the great strengths and weaknesses that all of us have.  They are not perfect human beings, and they know that.  They have weaknesses and don't let that keep them from doing great things and energizing others.  Ultimately, followers understand their flaws but follow because the good far outweighs the bad. Leaders also accept the flaws of others, as long as they stay within acceptable lines, especially as it relates to working with others.  They are willing to work around the weaknesses of others to take advantage of their great strengths.

3.  They are incredibly human.  THEY CARE ABOUT PEOPLE, not just accomplishing goals or personal advancement.  They are willing to take extraordinary lengths to do what is right for people even if it means a hit on quarterly earnings or if it goes beyond fiscal reason. They recognize key moments in the lives of employees when they are vulnerable and they provide support beyond reason.  

4.  They are fiscally responsible and attend carefully to the key business drivers.  No great Leader cares about people at the total expense of the business.  If they did,  there would be no business, so they understand they need to keep the business healthy and growing to provide the freedom to take care of people the way they want to. They are willing to eliminate jobs, reorganize, make tough people related decisions, but they do so with extraordinary compassion.

5.  They don't tolerate jerks (especially in management roles) and never demonstrate that behavior themselves.  They treat all people well all the time and won't accept anything less from every employee in the company, no matter their expertise or value to the organization.  Many Executives don't do this.  They behave badly and visibly signal to others it is ok for them to do so as well, as long as the results are there.  Employees only follow these Executives (note I did not say Leaders) out of fear of losing their jobs. Compliance at best.  

I only listed 5 elements, but there is a sixth, integrity.  Leaders MUST do what they say and say what they do, all the time.  I have seen Executives try to "act the part" but not stay true to their word or promises.  That is deadly and no Executive will be trusted if his walk doesn't match the talk.

Over recent years during the recession too many poor Leaders have survived or even thrived because they produced bottom line results in the short term, during a very bad time.  In some ways it is understandable.  The truth is though, that in an age where innovation and employee engagement will be the only competitive advantages, this behavior will undermine any chance a company has to compete long term.  

Evaluate your Executives on the 6 factors I mentioned, and you are positioned for tremendous sustainable financial success.

Make services Desirable!

Simon Clatworthy tells us in This is Service Design Thinking the three components to making any service desirable.  Respecting your customers means making your service desirable and it is not always so easy as it requires collaboration across functional silos. 

But to make your service desirable optimize 3 things:  Utility, Usability, and Pleasurability.  

Utility means offering customers exactly what they wants but no more.  "Feature creep" causes customers to find the core service "fuzzy" or vague. Just stick to the benefits customers need. Usability is about the ease of use of a service.  It's not the what but the how.  Pleasurability is about how the whole solution makes you feel.  

There is a lot more to be said on all of these areas, but this blog will serve as an appetizer and not a meal.  Do your homework on Service Design, it is the next frontier for Innovative Human Resource professionals.

Eyepatches, Capes, Oysters, Innovation, and Human Resources

What do all of these things have to do with one another?  They all tie together in the person of the late David Ogilvy.  He liked to wear capes and his Ad Agency created the iconic advertisements using the man in the eye patch and matching oysters to beer.  His organization was one of the most creative of its time and was hugely successful.  

So how does that connect to Innovation and Human Resources?  Well, in 1985 during a dinner in London of top executives he addressed the issue of corporate culture.  He wondered if the agency had one:  "Apparently we do.  We seem to have an exceptionally strong culture.  Indeed, it may be this, more than anything else, which differentiates us from our competitors."  

It starts with the working atmosphere:  "Some of our people spend their entire working lives in our company.  We do our damnedest to make it a happy experience for them."  We treat people like human beings.  We help them when they are in trouble - with their jobs, with illnesses, with alcoholism, and so on.  We help our people make the most of their talents.  We invest an awful lot of time and money in training - perhaps more than any of our competitors.  

Our system of management is singularly democratic.  We don't like hierarchical bureaucracy or rigid pecking orders.  We abhor ruthlessness.  We like people with gentle manners.  Our NY office goes so far as to give an annual award for what they call "professionalism combined with civility".  We like people who are honest.  Honest in argument, honest with clients, honest with suppliers, and honest with the company.....

Innovation, creativity, and great design thinking can and will differentiate an organization from its competitors, but the right culture must be in place first.  It requires a culture where creativity and treating people well gets as much attention as spreadsheets.  I think David Ogilvy did a better job articulating this notion than I ever could.   That is where Human Resources can make an immense impact...in developing the right type of culture to allow Innovation to flourish.

5 Principles of Service Design Thinking

Marc Stickdorn in This is service design thinking lays out principles for Service Design Thinking.  Here they are:  1.  User Centered  2.  Co-Creative  3.  Sequencing  4.  Evidencing  5.  Holistic  Let's look at each in turn.  User Centered means services should be experienced through the eyes of the customer.  It is not enough to just look at statistical data about your customers.  As Stickdorn describes, "Think of 2 customers.  Both were born in 1948, male, raised in England, married, succesfull and wealthy.  Furthermore, both of them have at least 2 children, like dogs and love the Alps.  One of them is Prince Charles and the other is Ozzie Osbourne."  But they both look alike if you just look at the statistics.  To be User centered you must go way beyond just statistical data.  Co-Creative means working with all stakeholders to explore needs and new processes.  And the most important stakeholder is the Customer.  Yes, Co-Creation means bringing Customers under your tent to work with you on creating better,  more customer centric processes.  Sequencing is focusing on how the rhythm of the service impacts the mood of the customer.  Think of service as a movie with multiple scenes.  If the service is too fast, it might makes customers anxious.  Too slow (think waiting in a check out line) and customers get bored or even mad.  Evidencing is something we don't commonly think of with services.  It means making customers aware of intangible, sometimes "behind the scenes" services.  It is the chocolates on your pillow at a fine hotel.  The hotel maid service may have been fairly inconspicuous, but the chocolate on the pillow reminds you they were there.  All services should provide some form of artifact to remind they customer a service took place....you don't want the bill to be their first reminder!  Last, is Holistic.  It means keeping the mood and feelings of the customer in mind throughout the service journey.  How do all the service "touchpoints" add up?  How does the customer's senses react to the physical environment?  Everything matters in the final customer experience.  

Follow these 5 principles and you are on your way to creating great Service Design.

In my next post I will talk about Service Interaction and Desirability.

Design Thinking for Human Resources

I can see the future and it will hinge on design thinking within organizations and the human resource function.  My focus today is on Service design.  If you ask 10 people about what "design" means you will get 11 answers, and it is probably worse for "service design" but that is a good thing.  It means the field is still vibrant and growing.  Service design is a cross disciplinary approach to creating optimal customer experiences, from the viewpoint of the customer.  Unlike Six Sigma, it is not about just getting better...it is about being different.

Unfortunately too many managers are deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to creative processes. They learned by rote and apply the same linear logical, spreadsheet friendly processes daily. As the authors of Design Thinking note, an MBA said: "the language of design is a sound only dogs can hear."  

My research right now is focused on learning the language of Design. So, if you don't know what "Stakeholder Maps, Service Safaris, Customer Journey Maps, Personas and Storyboards" are, you need to learn the new language of Organizational Effectiveness.  You are not behind...yet.

Is HR becoming a portal!?

I am astounded at the rate at which I see HR support in multiple forms ( Employee Relations, Benefits support, Training & Development, etc.) being reduced to a portal that people are sent to get their answers.....or sometimes not really to get their answers but to log questions.

I get it.  HR like everyone else is being asked to do more with less and the favorite solution is to "automate" any process that can be.  I don't think just because you "can" means you "should".  I am stealing that quote from the first Jurassic Park movie.  It referenced the wisdom of using cutting edge technology to bring the dinosaur back to life. I question the wisdom of taking the human touch out of HR.  Employees need to be able to reach a live person on occasion and they shouldn't have to go through a mine field of websites and/or automated voice response systems to do it.

I take a different approach.  I give EVERYONE I support and work with my one and only cell phone number (I don't have a separate personal phone).  I tell them they will compete with my wife, kids and others to reach me, but I am available to them when they really need to talk to a live person.  Now, when I offer my cell phone number, I expect our HR processes to be good enough to avoid the need for me to receive too many calls.  I also expect those working for me to make sure they are as available as possible as well.  In my experience, I have not been bombarded with calls though over 2000 people have my number and know I want them to call me if they need help or direction.

I have also been in the position to work directly with external clients in my HR Leadership roles, and I know our Clients like the ability to reach me directly if needed.  In fact, on a recent phone call from a Client (at a Fortune 500 company) this Corporate Leader talked to me about how refreshing it was to be able to reach a HR person on a moments notice. She said she used to know who supported her in HR in the past and how vital that person was to her.....now she said she has lost contact with HR...not knowing who specifically she should be trying to Partner with.

Which takes me back to the HR as "portals" premise.  I think it is getting overused because someone can show they can reduce headcount costs with software.  I am a believer in using technology to enable the cost efficient handling of transactions and many linear logical tasks.  My concern is that the problems employees face are not always "linear logical" and sometimes it isn't even an answer they want.  I hope the pendulum starts its inevitable swing back in the direction of "high touch" as I think it will allow HR to regain the relationship currency we have lost.

Cool Hunting for high impact HR practices

Looking for fresh new unconventional Human Resource or Managment practices that drive amazing results! Time to let go of some of our Industrial Age methods that died long ago. Let me know what new HR approaches you are using!

Talent Management

Every organization wants to manage talent better.  A great mechanism to accomplish Talent Management is the Talent Review.  The Talent Review has lots of the components founds in a traditional Succession Planning Process, but it is targeted at the levels of the organization below what would normally be considered in the Succession Planning process.  The Talent Review process actually "feeds" Succession Planning, but it does much more.  In fact, it is the backbone of how to manage talent.  Here is how the process works.

The complete organization performance model

Malcolm Gladwell, famous author and thinker, once said "we are experience rich, and model poor", meaning we have lots of experience but not enough useful ways (models) to make sense out of all this experience.  I agree and I therefore am always looking for models to help me better understand and improve organizations.

In "Designing Organizations for High Performance" David Hanna illustrates a performance model designed to provide HR professionals and even line managers with a great tool to diagnose organizational issues and to solve them.

It starts with understanding the Business situation.  That is, what are the hard number requirements? What are company requirements?  What are the social, political and legal expectations?  That leads to the second element of the model Business strategy.  What is the organizations reason for being?  What is it's purpose, vision, mission?  What are the operating principles and assumptions that are made?  What are the companies values?

The next piece of the model looks at Organizational design elements.  This includes tasks, people, information, decision making, rewards, and structure.  All of this was discussed in an earlier post.

The next component to the model is Culture.  No, not something real "fuzzy", instead the definition for culture used here is a very practical one.  And that is, what do people actually do.  What behaviors do they demonstrate.  This is intended to show how the organization really operates.

The final piece to the model is Business Results.  What the organization delivers now.  Hard numbers and the extent to which company requirements are or are not met.

A careful review of each of the components will reveal "disconnects" and ultimately show where an organization is deficient or unaligned.  Addressing the issues will lead to better and more predictable performance.

You can contact me at ed@edobrienhr.com for help in using this tool.

Is your organization designed for machines or people?

During the industrial age, men like Max Weber and Frederick Taylor came up with the dominant organizational theory used at that time.  Some have dubbed it Machine Theory because of the underlying assumption that an organization is like a "machine".  To be fair, Machine Theory worked quite well during the industrial age.  However it soon ran into problems such as:

Task Specialization - Worked reduced to its smallest components soon gets monotonous.  Workers rebelled (sometimes more overtly than others) and "Monday cars" from Detroit assembly lines began to emerge.
Standardization of Performance - Time and motion studies were used to determine the "one" best way of doing things.  The problem is that the one best way for one person may not be the best way for another person.
Centralized Decisions- Unity of command was offset by the fact the decisions were not being made by those with the most relevant information and delays became synonymous with the bureaucracy.
Uniform policies- Policy manuals and adherence to them became more important than results, and the policies tended to set not only a minimum standard but the maximum as well.

What became increasingly evident to those observing the results of these bureaucratic organizations, was that organizations built on Machine Theory don't work all that well over time.  People don't really behave like machines.  Hence a new approach was needed.