The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster (Richard Stout's Library) (12 page)

Live with the current orthodoxy: you probably have better things to do than to argue with HR professionals about recruitment theory. Instead, look at why people get hired and why they get fired. Broadly speaking people get hired for three reasons, in order:

• Proven technical skills

• Proven track record

• Other: fit, psychographic profile, attitude, hunger for the job, age, and sex (although do not admit that, ever)

Now look at why most people get fired:

• People skills, or lack of them

• Values

• Other: gross incompetence (rare), disloyalty to the boss, being an armed robber on the side

In other words, your recruitment process will probably do a decent job of finding out if your hire has reasonable technical skills and track record: most recruiters like to recruit someone who has done the job before.

Where you need to focus your efforts is in two areas:

• Does this person have good interpersonal skills?

• Will this person fit with the values we have?

you can train people in the right skills, but not into the right attitude

Try using the method which the shoe repair chain Timpson used for recruiting people to work in its shoe repair shops. Employees usually worked with little supervision and even less pay. And yet they dealt with customers all day. Timpson quickly found that recruiting to skills (mending shoes) was a disaster. What was needed were people with the right attitude: you can train people in the right skills, but not into the right attitude. So Timpson issued all area managers with a series of cards with Mr. Men cartoons
on them. If any potential recruit was seen as Mr. Lazy, Mr. Fib or Mr. Slow, they were not hired. If they were seen to be Mr. Helpful, Mr. Honest, Mr. Speedy, or Mr. Positive, they might get in. It did not do well on gender diversity, but it did very well on recruiting the right sorts of people.

Timpson’s approach may not be as clever as your HR department’s latest psychographic profiling system, but it runs the risk that it might actually work in practice.

Management training has a bad name. This is a surprise since many executives will spend over $60,000 of their own money on management training: this is what an MBA is. Training is one of the first items to be cut when budgets are tight.

The CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel Development) did a study to find out what the obstacles to training were. Here are the top five replies:

• Not enough time

• Pressure of work

• Personal commitments

• Boss would not let me go

• No culture of training

Perhaps it is worth giving a little translation to these findings:

• Not enough time (not a priority for me)

• Pressure of work (still not a priority for me)

• Personal commitments (it really is not a priority for me)

• Boss would not let me go (not a priority for my boss either)

• No culture of training (in fact, not a priority for anyone)

So why will people pay $60,000 for an MBA but not attend free training provided by their own firm? There are three problems:

• Most training is perceived to be remedial, so it is an insult to be asked to go on the course. If you go on a leadership course, the implication is that you are not a good leader; you go on an interpersonal skills course or time
management course because you are lousy at dealing with people or time. At least, that is the perception, even if it is not the intention.

• Too many trainers are not up to the job. Once you have sat through two days of watching a facilitator with a flip chart and a franchised theory asking you to guess what they are going to write on the flip chart, the instinctive reaction is to discover your inner axe-wielding maniac.

• Even if the trainer is good, the training is either not relevant or not practical. Managers want ideas that they can apply now, and they want immediate solutions to today’s problem. So learning about interpersonal styles and doing MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicators
^®
) is interesting but not of immediate use. It takes too long to master the clever theory, and it is not clear how it will help me with the fact that my project is two weeks overdue and the month end accounts look dodgy.

The many problems with training give some clues as to what you can do about it. And you have to do something: if you are not developing your team, you are not managing them well.

Although courses and MBAs are useful, most managers learn from experience. And this is where things go wrong. In management-speak, a “development opportunity” is a “crushing weakness.” Bizarrely, managers think that the best way to deal with a development opportunity is to get the team member to focus on it. How many Olympic gold medalists won by focusing on their weaknesses? Make weightlifters focus on their synchronized swimming skills?

Most managers succeed by finding some things that they are very good at, and then working around their weaknesses. Some weaknesses, such as an inability to deal with people well, are terminal: no amount of training or development will get the dysfunctional sociopath to change.

As a manager you have to find the context in which your team members can succeed best. Right context has two contradictory elements:

•
Where your team members can showcase their existing skills and talents.
This allows them to perform well, but it also means that they can be caught in a comfort zone or imprisoned in a tight box of technical expertise. Having a skill in doing reconciliations in the tripartite asset collateralized repo market is valuable but it is not one with great prospects.

•
Where your team members can build skills for the future.
If they are to progress you need to identify what skills they need for their career in five years’ time. Start building those skills now. You need to help your team members develop for tomorrow as well as helping them perform today.

Just as you do this for your team members, so you should apply the same principles to your own career management. Balance your need to find a position where you can perform today, with the need to build those skills which you will need in your future career as well.

To manage in a growing company is to discover life in easy street. There are always plenty of opportunities and promotions to go around: if you miss one opportunity, another will come along shortly and might be even better. By contrast, if you’re involved in crises and downsizing, this may not be easy street, but at least there is clarity about what needs to be done and you can get everyone focused on the task of survival. The really hard time to manage is in steady state: no one has a sense of crisis and they all want their promotions and bonuses, which are not there if you are not growing. So either the firm grows fat (which leads to the crisis) or the politics and dissatisfaction grow as expectations fail to meet opportunities in HR terms.

The key to growth and decline is that you do not simply do more or less of the same in the same way. You have to keep on changing the way you do things. In decline, it is obvious that you have to change the way you do things. It is easy to miss the need to change the way of working when you are growing: why not simply do more of the same?

As you grow, some economies of scale come naturally: for instance your advertising budget is supported by greater volumes. In HR terms, scale economies do not come naturally. In the dash for growth, it is too easy simply to add more bodies. As the firm grows, scale economies come from increasing job specialization: this helps both with quality and with productivity. For instance, the solo consultant is a Jack of all trades and probably master of none: they are even their own IT help desk, receivables management team, and administrative assistant. The largest consulting firms have specialists by function for each industry as well as an array of internal support functions: quality goes up and cost to deliver goes down.

in the dash for growth, it is too easy simply to add more bodies

In decline, the reverse works: reorganization leads to jobs being combined. In both growth and decline, the changing nature of each job means that you have to redefine roles, management processes, decision making, compensation: everything changes. In practice, firms that are managing decline do not have the luxury of redesigning their work and restructuring before they cut: they have to cut first, fast, and deep. The cuts are then the vehicle that forces the firm to discover, or rediscover, new ways of working.

When was the last time one of your team members asked for a pay cut for the same amount of work? How often has someone asked if they can be demoted? And how many team members tell you that they are not much good at their job?

In the hands of compensation experts, compensation is an objective discipline: measure the size of the job, do some industry benchmark comparisons and you have the answer. This is a useful discipline: it tells you whether you are in the right pay league or not.

Compensation is an exercise in managing human nature, which can be very emotional when it comes to pay. Everyone on your team will want two outcomes from the pay settlement:

•
More money than last year
, so that they can fund an ever improving life style and gain some degree of peace at home: asking the family to cut back is not a pleasant experience

•
More money (especially bonus) than anyone else on the team
, so that they can get the bragging rights. To award someone a lower bonus than their colleagues is not just a statement about pay: it is like saying, “you are worth less as a human being than your colleagues (who you despise).”

You will rapidly find that compensation can demotivate more than it can motivate: even the city trader who earns a $200,000 bonus will throw his toys out of the stroller and resign (after banking his bonus) if he finds colleagues have gotten a $300,000 bonus. Big salaries go with big and very fragile egos.

Finally, remember that no compensation discussion exists in a vacuum. For the individual, compensation should be linked to their development. For the firm, compensation should be linked to an understanding of the overall costs of production, the staffing pyramid, rates of promotion, and career management for all staff.

You’ll notice that there is a difference between the formal culture of a company, which is often expressed in a values statement, and the daily beliefs of that same organization. These daily beliefs are the rules of survival and success which people follow in reality. Often you can find a large gap between the formal beliefs and the daily beliefs of the organization.