LEADING THOUGHTS

You can see it in the streets and smell it in the air: signs of economic recovery are beginning to emerge in Canada. But according to the latest estimates from the Conference Board of Canada, it will take up to five years for the economy to return to full capacity. For workforce planners with an agenda for change, now is the time to strike.

According to the Conference Board’s Industrial Relations Outlook 2010, “Employers now have a window of opportunity to develop effective workforce strategies before the recovery pushes us back to full employment and the challenges of a tight labour market.”

The report suggests that employers use this time to train and re-skill the workforce and more effectively integrate immigrant and Aboriginal communities.

As for the near term, the Conference Board predicts that the public sector will dominate collective bargaining in 2010, with negotiations involving 750,000 public sector workers. Faced with national deficits, federal workers will feel the need to concede gains. Municipal workers, however, may push for contract improvements.

Factoid: Union density rate in Canada is 29 percent — 71.3 percent in the public sector and 16.1 percent in the private sector

In the private sector, the Conference Board says, employers will continue to focus on controlling costs. The strength of the Canadian dollar relative to the U.S. dollar means dampened exports of manufactured goods.

According to the Conference Board, there are two big issues that employers face: one, a continued structural labour deficit; and two, a private pension fund system that requires fundamental change, particularly regarding employer finding.

For their part, unions will continue to be focused on protecting their existing rights and benefits and protecting jobs of existing members.

Given the uncertainty in the private sector and the fiscal deficits in the public sector, the Conference Board says, “universal labour peace is unlikely in the coming year.”

InfoBox: Current Negotiation Issues (Canada)

Management Issues:

1. Wages
2. Productivity
3. Health, pension, and benefits
4. Organizational change
5. Business competetiveness

Union Issues:

1. Wages
2. Employment security
3. Health, pensions, and benefits
4. Employment/pay equity
5. Outsourcing/contracting out

(Source: The Conference Board of Canada union-management survey)

Industrial Relations Outlook 2010: A recovery offering little relief, by David K. Shepherdson; Conference Board of Canada

photo credit: Aaron Magner

Labour Relations compensation, pensions, public sector, training, unions

Dirk Lindebaum of Manchester Business School argues that organizations should forget about trying to develop the emotional intelligence (EI) of their employees. Lindebaum doesn’t have an issue with EI itself; he just feels it is best developed as a result of individual initiative.

In the Academy of Management Learning and Education, Lindebaum identifies three barriers to workplace EI initiatives.

Industry barriers: Some industries, such as construction, are notorious for encouraging aggressive management styles and fierce competition. In such environments, EI may not be an advantage. “Owing to the dominance of males in some industries, and their influence on power relations, an inauspicious framework for introducing EI indiscriminately across various industries emerges.”

Intra-organizational barriers: EI workplace initiatives can ignore the varying personal motivations to commit to organizational objectives. Many employees, for example, may not be receptive to developing their emotional intelligence, and shouldn’t be forced to. Lindebaum: “Some individuals may be perfectly content to pursue with little organizational involvement their ‘nine-to-five jobs’ while others are keen to climb the organizational ladder.”

Intra-personal barriers: One, it is believed that EI is partly an innate ability that cannot be developed. Two, Lindebaum says that as workers become more emotionally astute, they could end up reevaluating whether they fit in their existing jobs (what’s wrong with that, I say), which isn’t necessarily in the organization’s interests. “Does the individual benefit from high EI or is it the organization? I argue that the individual is the primary beneficiary and organizations come second.” And three, more emotionally intelligent workers could be so preoccupied orchestrating favourable impressions that honest social interactions are few and far between.

Linebaum advocates individual initiative to foster EI, focusing on learning rather than performance. “Since emotions are an individual’s engagements with the world,” he writes, “the fostering of EI is a profoundly personal and private affair.”

“Rhetoric or Remedy? A Critique on Developing Emotional Intelligence”, by Dirk Lindebaum; Academy of Management Learning and Education (2009, Vol. 8, No. 2, 225–237)

photo credit: xiaming

Communications, Uncategorized Conflict Resolution, emotional intelligence, training

“Diversity management” (DM) has become one of the more successful management ideas of the past 25 years. It entered the lexicon in the late 1980s in the U.S. as a response to growing frustration with legislation-based affirmative action and equal employment opportunity initiatives. DM was taken up in Europe a decade later, beginning in the UK and Netherlands.

DM aims to encourage employees to be comfortable with diversity in the workplace and appreciate differences in race, gender, or sexual orientation. It focuses on demographic groups, organizational self-interest, and workplace training. “Diversity” has become an industry in itself, fed by management consultants, conferences, and publications.

Writing in the Scandinavian Journal of Management, Evangelina Holvino (Simmons School of Management, Boston) and Annette Kamp (Roskilde University, Denmark) take a hard-boiled look at diversity management in practice in the U.S. and Europe. They identify a number of DM “dilemmas”:

:: Does DM refer to individual or group-based differences? For some, diversity refers to all the similarities and differences among organizational members. For others, diversity refers to identities based on membership in social groups and their power relations in organizations.

:: Is DM all about reproducing the status quo or “catalysing change in inequalities and power relations”?

:: Should DM be based on a business case or on social justice? In North America in particular, DM is sold as an effective HR and marketing strategy, encouraging team effectiveness, increasing employee retention, and improving financial performance. But as the authors point out, assessing DM outcomes is a tricky affair. Few organizations seem interested in measuring the success of their diversity efforts, and independent findings have been inconclusive or contradictory.

“DM, like other ideas, has become blurred and blunted, distorted through inappropriate quantification, and taken over by academic researchers making it increasingly unsuited for practical purposes,” Holvino and Kamp write. “In the U.S.A., DM has provided an opportunity to discuss differences, identity, power, and equity in organizations like no other management idea has done before, but its ‘success’ as a managerial discourse has hindered its power as an idea that can make more of a positive difference in the world.”

“Diversity management: Are we moving in the right direction? Reflections from both sides of the North Atlantic,” by Evangelina Holvino and Annette Kamp; Scandinavian Journal of Management (2009, 25, 395—403)

If you cannot find this journal is your local library, email me for a copy of the article at Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: PaDumBumPsh

General HR, Uncategorized demographics, diversity, hr practices, training

Four of every 10 employers in the U.S. profess to be concerned that the aging of the workforce will have a negative impact on their business over the next three years. But it might be all hand wringing and no action: the same survey found that two-thirds have not analyzed the demographics of their workforce and 77 percent have not analyzed the projected retirement dates of their employees.

So what do you make of that seemingly mixed message? According to the Sloan Center on Aging and Work, the unit that gathered the data as part of its Strategic Talent Management Study, part of the answer lies in the tight financial circumstances in which many organizations find themselves.

Researchers at Sloan dug deep into their survey of 696 U.S. organizations and identified four different employer groups:

• “Lower pressured employers” anticipate a positive or neutral impact from the aging of the workforce and are not suffering from the economy (24 percent of the sample).
• “Economically pressured employers” aren’t concerned about an aging workforce but are struggling to keep up in the economy (36 percent).
• “Age-pressured employers” are really worried about the aging workforce but are in decent financial shape (12 percent).
• “Age/economically pressured employers” are stuck in the worst of both worlds (28 percent).

The Sloan report builds the case for organizations to conduct a rigorous assessment of their workforce demographics, projected retirement dates, and future skills needs. The report includes a handy chart outlining workforce planning considerations for employers, depending on where they sit on the “pressure” scale.

Download a copy of the report here or email me at Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com.

photo credit: AMANITO

Org Development, Uncategorized aging, assessment, demographics, engagement, hr practices, recruitment, training

The UK suffers from a 30 percent productivity gap with the U.S., which translates into 85 working days per worker. Research has shown that up to half of that gap is due to how U.S. competitors deploy resources within their businesses, which in turn is traced to different management and leadership practices.

Kieran Mannion (Dept. for Employment and Learning, Belfast) wanted to figure out why U.S. managers seemed to be more productive than their British counterparts. He discounted the usual reasons trotted out, such as cultural differences or the fact that American managers work longer hours.

Instead, Mannion conducted interviews with 45 American HR managers and leadership development practitioners with first-hand experience working in both the U.S. and the British Isles. And what did he learn?

Higher instance of degree-level education among managers in the U.S.
Most respondents said business leaders in the U.S. were generally better qualified than their counterparts in the UK. “In the private sector, managers expressed surprise that so many of their UK colleagues had not been to university, pointing out that a degree, or even an MBA, was simply the starting point in the recruitment process in the U.S.”

More focus among students on business as a career
Again most interviewees said business management was more highly regarded as a mainstream profession in the U.S. “The perception was that European business was dominated by professional accountants rather thabn marketers or other generalist leaders. . . On the other hand, fewer people in the UK enter directly into management.”

Greater mobility among U.S. managers
Many of the managers interviewed from multinational corporations said American leaders were more mobile compared to colleagues in the UK and Ireland. “In the U.S, business leaders tend to take a much greater level of personal responsibility for the management of their own careers. This leads to much more proactive job searching and generally lower tenure in any one job.”

More flexible employment laws allow for non-performing managers to be weeded-out
While the HR specialists interviewed recognized that labour laws in the UK and Ireland were among the most flexible in Europe, the predominant view was that it was difficult to terminate the employment of a non-productive manager.

Greater use of leveraged compensation packages and stock options
Variable pay schemes, including bonuses and profit sharing, form a much larger proportion of the US managers’ overall compensation package than is the case in the UK.

Greater development and adoption of business strategy theories
“The sheer volume of research into business strategy and management techniques and practices in the U.S. had created a clear role for business process engineering that had given the U.S. a competitive advantage.” Factoid: As recently as the 1980s, UK universities had little involvement in the business world.

More prevalent geographically distributed management teams
American corporations could pioneer standardized management practices because the U.S. is a single large marketplace with no currency, language, or cultural barriers. This encouraged much higher growth levels and more widely distributed management teams. This, in turn, forced U.S. companies to find ways “to ensure consistency across widely geographically distributed managers to replicate the same standards of performance across different regions and markets. In turn, the development and adoption of standardized management practices helped these companies to achieve higher productivity, better returns on capital and even more robust growth.”

“Leadership. . . for success”, by Kieran Mannion; Leadership and Organization Development Journal (Vol. 30 No. 7, 2009; pp. 639-648)
photo credit: R4vi

Global HR, Uncategorized britain, business education, ireland, learning, productivity, training

If you were to identify the 10 most important skills that leaders must have and compare it to the 10 skills that leaders actually possess, how closely would those two lists overlap?

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) set out to answer that question in a study involving 2,200 leaders from 15 organizations, conducted between 2006 and 2008. The CCL’s conclusion: there is an alarming leadership gap or deficit.

In the CCL survey, seven leadership skills are consistently viewed as most important now and in the future:

• Leading people
• Strategic planning
• Managing change
• Inspiring commitment
• Resourcefulness
• Doing whatever it takes
• Being a quick learner

Of the top five needed skills, only resourcefulness is considered a top 10 skill. The four most important future skills “are among the weakest competencies for today’s leaders,” the report concluded. Other areas where there is a significant gap between the needed and existing skills levels are: employee development, balancing work and personal life, and decisiveness.

“These data show that many leaders’ strengths are not in areas that are most important for success,” the report concludes.

For a copy of the report, send me at email at Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: splityarn

Org Development assessment, leadership, learning, strategy, training

The answer to this provocative question, according to John Peters and Kate Snowden of Emerald Group Publishing, is “no, but. . .” Organizations still have a role to play as centres of learning but their role of “controlling and specifying a learning environment” is on its last legs.

Peters and Snowden write that the democratisation of information, from Google and blogs to wikis and YouTube, is an “irresistible tide.” On a personal level, we can easily call up information on any subject, “and can add our own voice, usually unmoderated, to the discussion, or start a brand-new discussion of our own.” In the organizational world, a company can buy an online collection of management research and own a  library of research similar to that found in a business school.

So in this information-saturated environment, what can organizations add of learning value? The authors suggest two things: action learning and critical thinking. Action learning is essentially “learning by doing” and then reflecting on successes and failures, either with the support of other learners or a coach. Critical thinking is a particularly vital skill these days because it enables people to be more discerning about the information they consume.

“Both of these, the latter especially, will help both individuals and organizations gain more from the increasing democratisation of information, and from the increasing informality of learning.”

Video killed the radio star, but has Google killed the learning organization?, by John Peters and Kate Snowden; The Learning Organization (Vol. 15 No. 6, 2008 pp. 449-453)

Email me for a copy of this paper: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: swortman53

Learning Orgs action learning, learning, training

Creating or performing art can be a powerful way to develop managerial and leadership awareness and skills. It can also be a flavour-of-the-month technique that is used as a novelty with little understanding of how it may benefit individuals.

Writing in the Academy of Management Learning & Education, Steven S. Taylor (Worcester Polytechnic) and Donna Ladkin (Cranfield U) offer a model of four unique processes underpinning arts-based management development methods.

Skills transfer: development of artistic skills that can be applied in organizational settings (medical residents being taught theatre skills to increase their clinical empathy). “Arts-based methods allow managers to feel the experience of those skills rather than think about them, such as when theatrical improvisation exercises are used to get managers to feel what it is like to listen deeply and be listened to deeply.”

Projective technique: the output of artistic endeavors allows participants to reveal inner thoughts and feelings that may not be accessible through conventional means (managers building 3-D representations of their org strategy using LEGO bricks). “Two managers can have a discussion in which they differ about what an image that has been created means in a way that doesn’t make them feel defensive but rather fosters learning about each others’ perspective.”

Illustration of essence: participants can apprehend the “essence” of a concept, situation, or tacit knowledge in greater depth than conventional methods (viewing the film Twelve O’Clock High to illustrate key leadership lessons). “Reading and seeing Henry V performed and engaging in extended discussion of leadership as Shakespeare has portrayed it can help a manager have a much more complex and nuanced understanding of leadership in a way that is based in a felt, emotional, personal connection rather than through an abstract, intellectual theorization.”

Making: creating art can foster a deeper experience of personal presence and connection (MBA students taking art classes to enhance their creativity). “It is a form of personal development that is not tied directly to specific organizational outcomes, but rather is undertaken with more generic long-term goals in mind. Thus we can imagine arts-based programs being included as part of wellness initiatives aimed at the long-term health and development of employees.”

The authors caution that not all arts-based techniques are the same. Managers engaging with Shakespearean plays experience something different from those making masks that represent their leadership styles. Using their model, trainers can select the right art form for their learning objective.

Understanding Arts-Based Methods in Managerial Development, by Steven S. Taylor and Donna Ladkin; Academy of Management Learning & Education (2009, Vol. 8, No. 1, 55–69)

Email me for a copy of this paper: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: paurian

Personal Development arts, business education, learning, storytelling, training