Eliminate Silos, Increase Results

Welcome to this week’s Discuss HR, the HR blog written for and by members of Human Resources UK.

Firstly a bit of group news, today we have the final networking event of May.  After a lot of hard work by a number of group members, we will be hosting the Newcastle event tonight, so well done Antoinette and everyone else.  If you would like to attend you can find the details here http://bit.ly/HKjYZl

One thing I am particularly good at is finding extremely tenuous links! Our Newcastle event is satellite of our country-wide events, you could even call it a silo... And today our regular writer Una Doyle looks at how you can remove organisational silos and improve performance... I did say it was a tenuous link!!

Finally, I hope you all have a very enjoyable Jubilee weekend. (Ed Scrivener)

Eliminate Silos, Increase Results

Too literal?!

Something that I’m always focused on in one way or another is alignment within organisations, or in many cases, the lack thereof.

I believe that this is the underlying cause for so many complaints from managers and employees. Think about what you may hear around the water cooler such as to how various teams are preventing them from doing their work, that senior management don’t get what really needs to happen and that cross-functional teams are anything but functional!

Think of an iceberg and how much of it is beneath the water. A hairline crack barely visible on the surface is probably a gaping chasm below the water line. All it takes is a little pressure for it to break apart.

Apply this to a leadership team and you’ll understand how even subtle misalignment or gaps at the top could cause chaos among the rest of the organisation.

“By failing to eliminate even those small gaps, they are leaving employees below them to fight bloody, unwinnable battles with their peers in other departments.”

Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage

When there is enough clarity and alignment at the top on the key issues and that is communicated well to the whole organisation then it makes all the difference in the world.

So what are the key things that require such clarity and alignment?

• The number one organisational priority over the next 3-12 months
• The key activities required to achieve that one priority
• The ‘business as usual’ objectives (which mustn’t clash with the top priority in terms of direction)
• Who is responsible for what

Gaining alignment on the top three is something that I think a lot of organisations think they do, yet don’t to the extent that it eliminates or at least massively reduces silos and negative politics.

Something that really helps in this process is when people throughout the organisation understand that it’s only by helping others to be more effective, can they themselves get into flow. You see in addition to the leadership team being aligned on these four points above, there also needs to be alignment between the talent in the organisation, responsibilities and accountabilities and the company’s objectives.

When this happens too, then you eliminate wasted time and other resources and get to leverage the value offered at individual, team, departmental and organisational levels effectively. This itself leads to further alignment between the systems and processes, people and the organisational objectives.

Not only does all this result in incredible (yet sustainable) increases in turnover and profit, it leads to a workforce that is more motivated and engaged. Why wouldn’t they be? They get to use their strengths to work on priorities and objectives that they and their peers are clear on and are all working towards.

So the next time you see something not functioning in or between teams, or hear somebody moaning ask yourself, what is not in alignment here? What can I and/or they do to help this? How can I add more value to the organisation in my HR capacity by helping to increase the alignment in my team and the teams that I work with?

About the author

Una Doyle is an accredited Talent Dynamics Performance Consultant and an award-winning speaker, coach and consultant. Una has worked with organisations such as Argos, Asda, Yorkshire Forward, Kodak and local authorities from a one-to-one basis, to groups as large as 2,000.   She is passionate about helping to create intrapreneur teams; getting the right people, in the right place, doing the right things with ownership and commercial acumen. Una has learned how to apply many of the world’s top-thinkers’ ideas in a way that is simple, profound, gets massive bottom-line results and a more empowered, motivated and engaged workforce.

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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 7th June and will be written by HR recruitment specialist Ed Scrivener. 

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The past is no guide future performance

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 17^th November and will the debut of Susan Popoola.

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Why performance review doesn't always work

Welcome to this week’s Discuss HR.  I would like to take this opportunity to thank all our readers for being so interactive with this feature.  We wanted Discuss HR to do exactly that and it is really pleasing to see all editions of Discuss HR still generating comments.  So thank you for reading!

So to the point at hand, this week Dawn Clarke returns and looks at the fear of giving and receiving constructive feedback.  The article is particularly relevant for me as I have to give constructive comments on a daily basis, but I know I am also not very good at receiving them! (Ed Scrivener)

Why performance review doesn’t always work

The HR department has designed a structured and supposedly objective framework for reviewing employee performance.  Managers have been trained and employees have also been briefed as to how to get the best out of the process.  All the paperwork has been explained to everyone who will be involved and as the Head of HR I am looking forward to a successful outcome.  Managers can look forward to improved performance as a result of the performance review and employees will have the opportunity to discuss their work and career aspirations.

Heaven! 

Well, not exactly.  I have yet to implement a framework where it all goes to plan and almost always find that the HR team will be ‘chasing’ managers for their completed paperwork.  Maybe it’s the formality of the whole process that turns people, managers and employees, against it.

Frank was slightly over-zealous with his feedback

Whatever the real reason, it would appear that performance review is a task that the majority of managers absolutely hate.  How many times have I heard ‘I’m too busy, I don’t have time’.  And it’s not just managers – employees either dread the meeting or treat it as a bit of a joke.  From the employee side I hear comments such as ‘it doesn’t matter what I say, it will still be what my manager says that gets written down’ or ‘can’t be bothered, it doesn’t achieve anything’ and even ‘my manager doesn’t like me so he’s just going to use the opportunity to pick on me again’.

The fact is that most managers are not comfortable giving objective feedback and they fear provoking a defensive response from the other person.  This is perfectly normal because the natural response to an attack, whether it is real or perceived, is to run away or attack back.  An innocuous comment made by the manager is perceived as a ‘threat’ by the employee and so the manager reviewing the performance finds him/herself being ‘attacked’ in return.  Alternatively, not engaging in the process is akin to the ‘running away’ response.

I believe it is this fear of conflict that is the key reason that many decent managers will often avoid giving honest feedback and of course this defeats the whole purpose of the process.  Whenever the employee’s performance is rated as less than the best, or less than the level at which they personally perceive their contribution, the manager is viewed as unfair or even punitive. Disagreement about contribution and performance ratings can create a conflict ridden situation that festers for months and many managers will prefer to avoid conflict that will undermine work place harmony.

However, if we don't know how to give constructive feedback we reduce our effectiveness as communicators.  Many people do not like to give negative feedback because they are afraid of a scene.  They are afraid of conflict and of what the other person might say back to them or might say about them at some future date.  The key to success is not to avoid such communications, but to become more effective in these communications by developing skills which can facilitate this process.

So what’s the answer to this perennial problem?

Many companies do train their managers in giving feedback however what does not happen so often is the training of employees in ‘receiving’ feedback.  Receiving feedback is an important part of the whole interaction and so training the ‘receiver’ is as important as training the manager if we are to ensure that the process adds value. 

Whenever I have had to work on a performance management project, I always make sure that individuals are trained in how to receive feedback without becoming defensive.  These are normally awareness sessions lasting about an hour so they don’t take up too much time away from the workplace.  I don’t go into lots of detail, rather I focus on a few key principles:-

• I encourage employees to see feedback as an opportunity to grow and improve.

• We discuss the natural response to a perceived attack is to counter-attack or opt out – just making them aware of this significantly improves the interaction

• If they don’t agree with the feedback, ask in a non aggressive way for more details

• Replay the scenario to the manager using your own thought processes – explain why you are doing it that way

The most important one I pass onto managers is that before you are able to confidently give feedback, you must learn how to take it and I take them through the points above.  If you can handle receiving feedback, you will be far more effective in giving it.  Being able to take feedback and learn from it is a vital part of self-development and in so doing the manager may learn from those he works with how to make things within the team better. 

Of course the big issue for me is around managing expectations.  A performance review cannot solve all problems or make everything better as there are limitations as to what can and cannot be achieved.

One thing is certain in terms of performance review.  It will never be effective until it is embraced by all parties and seen as a value add activity in that both parties feel that they get something out of it.  The challenge for HR therefore is not chasing the paperwork but working to facilitate the process so that it really does add value and this can be a time consuming activity.

I would be extremely interested to hear from anyone on this blog who has been involved in a truly successful process.  Is there a quicker way of achieving success?

About the author

Dawn is an experienced HR professional with strong development & internal consultancy experience. She takes a practical approach to HR turning strategic plans into operational reality. Dawn has experience in a variety of industries with a track record of commercial success by engaging people and making work a fun place to be. On a personal note she is a huge Liverpool fan, well someone has to be!

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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 16^th June.

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