The HR Paradox, Part 4 – The Solution

What we are about to describe is theoretical. Few companies will have internal staff and resources to implement the solution. Most companies will need assistance from qualified advisors, consultants, coaches, and third party knowledge resources.

We will paint the strategic picture but every company will need to decide whether to pursue as a company-wide strategy or as a tactical piecemeal process. In every case, how it is implemented within your unique company, industry, culture, value-system, structure, and political environment will differ. That is why we are teaming with advisors, consultants, coaches, and best of breed partners who can apply the solution within your unique situation.

So, what is the solution?

Step One: Decide strategically, at the CEO level, whether having the right structure with the right roles, the right people in the right seats, helping those people add personal and team value, and developing the right culture of innovation and value add with organizational alignment is worth his or her personal attention. If not, consider tactical piecemeal steps for tactical improvements co-sponsored by a line decision maker and HR.

Step Two: Analyze and Evaluate the existing organization for weaknesses and HR Paradox gaps.

Step Three: Diagnose and Prescribe what actions, tools, and resources would be recommended for strategic and tactical improvements. The C-Level team should decide whether to self-treat with existing resources or to engage professional assistance.

Step Four: Implement the treatment plan utilizing the recommended resources and tools. This will take time, will impact people (especially blood-suckers and selfers), and will take an investment of money and management resources. However, the ROI impact will be obvious:

Studies have shown that:

1. Actively engaged employees make up less than 1/3 of the workforce. Source: Gabriel Institute
2. 60% of failures are due to people problems. Source: VC Industry / Gabriel Institute
3. Nearly 80% of job turnover is due to hiring mistakes. Source: Harvard University
4. The cost of a bad hire can range from 1.4 to 10 times (or more) of the annual salary. Source: Right Path Resources

This list does not include the additional costs of internal conflicts, lack of alignment, and a host of other HR Paradox symptoms.

What impact do these examples have on your business? 

What impact could reducing the HR Paradox have on your business? 

The HR Paradox, Part 3 – The Value Worker Model

At the end of every day, company success is dependent upon every employee adding value in the area where they work. Otherwise, why pay them?

We believe that there are several types of employees. These differences are discrimination neutral and quite simple. Either they want to work and contribute to company success or they want to be paid without working or they are want to work but are so self-focused that company teams and other employees are adversely impacted. I call those who want to work and contribute to company success as “Value Workers.”

Those who want to be paid without really working, I call “Loafers” or “Blood-Suckers” (they suck the life blood out of companies). Those who are self-focused may appear to be highly successful but result in sub-optimizing long term results. I call this group the “Selfers.” They create a highly inefficient company that is usually inward focused, slow moving, and often bureaucratic.

Which group would you want in your company? Value Workers, Bloodsuckers, or Selfers?

Yet in most companies, all three profiles exist. What is that costing your company? How is that impacting client sales, client satisfaction, product quality, company branding / image, profit, response times, employee turnover, employee development, and company teamwork? How is it impacting your company alignment and leverage?

Yet somehow HR is expected to have a magic wand to “fix the problem.” Top management is busy focused on growing the business and assumes that just hiring a HR team will transform the organization, or just spending more money internally will fix the problem, or outsourcing HR will fix the problem. Unfortunately, even the best HR team in the world cannot “fix the problem.” That is part of the HR Paradox.

Just as finance does not create the money it helps to manage. Just as technology does not create the business requirements it seeks to automate. Just as procurement does not specify the products or services it seeks to purchase. HR is only one out of four components to “fixing the problem.”

Unfortunately, unless HR has the right team in place there is no one else in the company whose job it is to coordinate the solution. Executive management does not have time. Managers do the best they can but are time pressed and do not have the tools or training. Even if the rare manager “fixes her department,” that does not fix the entire company. The individual employee has the least personal impact, responsibility, authority, skills, time, or ability to help. Even Value Workers are impacted when Bloodsuckers and Selfers exist throughout the company.

So strategically, how can a company resolve the HR Paradox?

Next week we will discuss the HR Paradox Solution.

The HR Paradox, Part 2 – A Top Management Opportunity

C-Level Management is usually focused on three areas: product development, marketing, and sales. Everything else is in support of those three functions, unless the goal is to grow and flip (sell or go public) the company. Then strategic finance is added to the decision making table. Every other function is in support of or part of those areas. For example, R&D is part of product development. So are manufacturing, product outsourcing, and product management. But at the end of the day, if you have no product to take to market, no marketing effort to communicate that you have a product, and no sales effort, then you have no company.

In some cases the product is HR, Finance, IT, Consulting or other product/solution. However, even in those companies there is usually a distinction between what they productize for clients from what they run internally.

Of course you can outsource some product development (e.g. license from others), outsource portions of marketing, and even tactical sales but the strategic decisions of what products/services to develop, how to market, and how to sell is usually the primary focus of top management.

Support functions that are integral to the product or go-to-market process usually become part of the strategic trusted advisor team. Examples would be IT and Finance. However, HR is usually not integral in product development, marketing, or sales daily discussions and often becomes an afterthought.

We believe it is up to senior management to understand how HR could become a competitive differentiator and contribute to company profit. The challenge is that most HR organizations do not know how to cross that bridge and communicate the value that world-class HR organizations provide to the C-Level executive team. This gap is one of the reasons why we created Integrated Success™. We have strategic processes to help management include strategic HR solutions that add company value while providing a tactical umbrella to align HR support with the business and company direction.

Our model allows us to help top executives, support strategic HR executives, help HR learn how to become more strategic, and provide tactical processes and resources that add value to the company. 

If the company goal is to design the right structure with the right roles, hire the right people and put them in the right seats, help those people develop personal and team value, set up a culture of innovation and value add, and align with the current direction of the C-Level team while still fulfilling the daily tactical duties of HR, then we believe our Integrated Success™ model can help.

 

The HR Paradox

HR is a critical function in every company. However, not all HR organizations are fully appreciated, viewed positively by executive teams, and safe from being outsourced. From a HR perspective, their members are often overworked, focused on helping employees, and satisfying company and legal demands. So, where is the paradox?

There are often gaps between the CEO strategic focus and many HR teams who are tactically focused. For example:

• Many HR functions (and other support functions) do not have strategic minded people on their team. I define strategic as understanding the business, understanding executive needs and wants, and knowing how to create the vision, strategy, innovation, implementation plans and communication skills necessary to talk to and advise decision makers at the C-Level (CEO, COO, CFO, CTO…).
• HR can be seen as too employee focused, similar to a union or government bureaucracy mentality. Few support functions, including HR, realize that they are, at best, a trusted advisor to decision makers. They are to represent the company’s interests, which includes alignment of individual and team success toward creating value for company success. This misunderstanding often results in senior management assuming that HR may secretly be a union representative whose answer to employee turnover and productivity is spending more money on more programs.
• HR has so many laws and regulations to follow that the risk is to become a watchdog who says, “you can’t do that” instead of a trusted business advisor who says, “I understand what you want to do but to follow what I believe is the law/regulation means _____ in order to get what you want without legal exposure. We may also need to seek a legal opinion to be sure.”
• Many senior decision makers intuitively know that some HR theory is merely theory and not helpful to their unique business. By not learning the business of the company and what the executives need and want, HR’s value to the company is often perceived as tactical and subject to being outsourced.
• It is not uncommon to hear a CEO define HR success as keeping them out of jail, eliminating lawsuits, and taking care of the daily (tactical) work. The result is that most HR teams are not included at the decision making table.

So what happens? Management often assumes that they will handle the strategic and the management of employees while holding HR accountable for turnover rates, hiring right, motivating the workforce, keeping salaries and costs down, training without budgets, and a host of expectations that are often not realistic. Not only is HR undervalued but also the executive management team misses out on what could be a secret weapon for greater company profit and competitive advantage.

So, where is the gap? The gap is that while management may devalue, rightly or wrongly, their HR team it is the C-Level management team itself that is to blame. The solution starts at the top.

Next week we will discuss the other side of the paradox – why C-Level management is missing a tremendous opportunity. Later, in following blogs, we will suggest steps that C-Level management and HR can take to eliminate the HR Paradox for their company.

Hopelessness Versus SEE

I imagine that we all understand “hopelessness.”  Hopelessness usually leads to defeat and cessation of even trying to keep going. For some, it can lead to self-destructive behavior.

In this Christmas season, there is spiritual hope for those who seek it. Personally, my greatest hope is in Jesus Christ, in His Promises, and in His Future Return. This is the foundation of hope that I build upon.

However, there is also a secular way of dealing with hopelessness. In my opinion, there is always hope but it is difficult for those under pressure to see it, to see opportunities, and to grab those opportunities.

Some have suggested that the reason for hopelessness is the insistence that they want what they want, how they want it, and they want it NOW! If they can’t get it, then they lose hope. If that is true, then many in America are losing hope; but they don’t have to lose hope. They just have to be willing to see the world through a different lens. Old paradigms must be replaced by new paradigms. What used to be true is not necessarily the world we live in today. The world is changing and we must change with it or lose out.

So how does one usually make those changes, redefine what is their hope, and move from defeat to victory?

I call the process “SEE”. It stands for Significant Emotional Event.

When we grow up, we learn ways of thinking that impact our perception of reality, our dreams, and whether we see the world as full of empty promises or incredible opportunities. You may be thinking about the motivation principles of positive thinking but that is not what I am referring to. Positive thinking can change an attitude but it cannot change a fact. However, changing your attitude, identifying opportunities, and going after those opportunities can change your circumstances.

Here is an example. I have heard that the Chinese writing that means “Chaos” can also mean “Opportunity.” Many successful businesses today were started during the Great Depression. Most successful entrepreneurs failed and even went bankrupt several times on the way to making fortunes. You may see Chaos. However, there is Opportunity all around you if you are willing to change your view of the world.

That is where “SEE” comes in. I used to use it when I ran a global organization to help people become successful when they were on the edge of being fired. It is a process to grab someone’s attention, shake them up, and force them to make a decision to either change (in the way that spelled success in our company) or leave for an opportunity in another company (that meant they would be fired or leave voluntarily).

If you are in transition, you are undergoing a significant emotional event. If you are in a job that you hate, you are undergoing a significant emotional event. Whatever or whoever caused it does not matter. What matters is how you respond to it.

For example, one person who read Jobpreneurship™ 101 took notes and is implementing every step. He sees the opportunity of how to compete in the marketplace and should do well. Another person read my book and told a supplier of mine that there were so many good ideas that he did not know where to start – so he didn’t do anything. You want to give that person a swift kick in the you know what! The book is a road map. You start with one step. Do it. Go to the next step. Do it. Then go to the next step… Our upcoming Jobpreneurship™ 201 is a Career Success and Mentoring Guide which combines the road map to teaming with a mentor to leverage your success opportunity.

Success is one day at a time, one step at a time, and looking for ways to succeed. If you follow these principles, you will eventually be successful.

If you feel hopeless, I encourage you to take that Significant Emotion Event turn it into opportunity. To paraphrase a famous Latin quote, “Seize the day”…by starting today!

Have a great Christmas and New Year!

Next Page »