Welcome to this week’s Discuss HR, the blog written for and by members of Human Resources UK.
You’ll be pleased to know there is no long winded intro today, but I will use this opportunity to tell you that all the technical issues with LinkedIn are now fixed. Similarly I have confirmed venues for the next round of networking for London, Reading, Swindon, Bristol, Manchester and Gateshead – so we just need Birmingham to step up to the plate! Without further ado, here’s Annabel Kaye’s latest excellent article. (Ed Scrivener)
The past is no guide future performance
Mary is an established member of her team with good social and professional relationships with her co-workers. Her boss has managed the unit with a fair degree of success (neither perfect nor imperfect) and everyone knows where the boundaries are and what is expected of them.
Boss moves on with fond farewells as a new boss Sarah arrives with her own way of doing things. Mary feels put out by the changes and wants to carry on working the way she had. She complains to colleagues about the changes and starts to campaign with them that they should not implement them. She tells her colleagues that many of the changes are pointless and will not work and she will not participate in them. When a colleague told her “Sarah’s the boss why not just do what she says?” she turned on her heel and laughed. She is a valued member of the team but her campaigning is making life very difficult for her new boss and the team is dividing into ‘pro boss’ and ‘pro Mary’ camps. She talks about “I was here first” and “it worked well before”
Sarah is a very popular boss with her old team, and some of the new team. She is very approachable, regularly buys drinks for everyone in the pub, and is willing to bend the rules to help her team members, letting them go home early if needed. Standards are slipping a bit – the old boss was a stickler for detail whereas Sarah is more of an overview person. No-one from outside would notice the difference, but old team members shrug their shoulders and pick up the slack. Sarah doesn’t seem to know.
Why is it we are so bad at change?
Planning for change, or accepting changes that are not planned is something few us are willing or able to do.
Sarah went into a new team without a clear plan for how she would evaluate whether change was needed, communicate that change, implement it and monitor it. She just did what worked well in her old team.
Mary did not expect any change except for the name of her boss. When faced with change she resisted it all.
If the team is lucky there will be a natural mediation on the team – one of those wonderful people who are the glue that really make the workplace work. We need someone to say to Mary “the boss is the boss, unless it is dangerous, or illegal it is her job to say what we do. If you think it is inefficient or there are better ways, have a quiet word with her and let her know, otherwise you need to do it.” We need someone to feedback to Sarah that she is changing how things are done (she may not be aware of it) and that she needs a process for bringing people along with her and for dealing with Mary.
How many HR specialists does it take to change a light bulb?
That depends on whether you want to keep the light bulb.
Sarah can have a useful learning experience that will enhance her skills and make her next promotion easier, or she can struggle with Mary and slowly begin to fail and get stuck here. Mary may even accuse her of bullying as Sarah repeats the same instructions over and over again and Mary gets progressively more isolated from her team.
Mary can learn how to handle change and difficult situations or she can campaign against her boss and sooner or later she will find herself with no promotion prospects, or no job. Mary can feel bitter that her lovely job was ‘stolen’ from her by this awful manager and that may affect her life at home as well as work.
It’s not a big deal to help new managers put together a system of ‘raising the bar’ so that they can change the way a team works. It’s not such a big deal to help Mary (at an early stage) to work out the difference between changes she needs to give feedback on and those that are not really something to worry about.
Where was HR when all this was happening? They were busy with other important things. They had not touched base to see how this team functioned. Of course, when Mary claimed she was being bullied, and Sarah claimed she was totally unsupported by management, HR was all over the investigations like a rash. The hours of note taking and decision making meant they were too busy to touch base with any of their other teams.
Is there a happy ending to this tale? Not really, Mary spent years resenting Sarah and then transferred to another team. She is not regarded as a popular or successful team member since she has kept up the habit of complaining about the boss and resisting all change. Sarah never got another promotion in the organisation. She stayed in post for a few years and then got a job outside. She joined her new team in the same way and is now convinced that people are just awkward and you have to push them harder to get what you want. HR are still doing a lot of paperwork and taking a lot of notes at meetings with unhappy people. No change there then.
Employment law is where the metal hits the road – where people problems become legal problems and the law intervenes. It can’t make Sarah a better manager, or Mary a more realistic employee. It can’t make an organisation have the small interventions that prevent this type of problem What it does do is penalise and sanction those organisations who get to tribunal, where they haven’t done their part and a legal issue arises.
Of course if there are any ‘equality’ or ‘discrimination’ issues here this turns into a nightmare scenario. Sarah picked on me because I am white, transsexual,.. Even in unfair dismissal terms, the process of performance management (if started this late and from here it can be a long haul). If there were no employment law and the organisation was free to act in any way, would it really solve the problem? To what extent is the very existence of employment law the problem?
To my thinking employment law, if incorrectly applied, can be a complicating factor, but not the problem itself. Giving long serving employees three warnings and an opportunity to change their behaviour doesn’t seem unreasonable. Would you really want to walk in and just sack Sarah or Mary (or both)?
There is another complicating factor that both performance management programmes and warnings are often seen as the death knell for individuals in the organisation – and we need to do something about that. But that is not an employment law issue, it’s a cultural one.
We often blame employment law for giving us difficult problems. This is a problem we get every day. It has a relatively easy prevention plan – and more painful remedy.
About the author
Annabel Kaye has been specialising in employment law since the seventies. She founded Irenicon in 1980 and has spent the last thirty years helping HR, line managers and everyone else look at employment law in a way that gets some organisational gain. She likes to think about things from a different angle and making the complex simple – despite the government’s best efforts. She has traded through three recessions and advised clients from multi-national corporations to the smallest organisation. The toughest thing has always been to balance the competing needs of staff and organisation and that never goes away whatever the legal details.
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Discuss HR is the blog for Human Resources UK, the leading LinkedIn group for those involved with HR in the UK. Next week’s Discuss HR will be published on Thursday 17th November and will the debut of Susan Popoola.
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