Rather Than Reinvent, Why Not Borrow and Use It?

Your Corporate Strategy:  It Just Doesn’t Matter?       Part 20

The previous discussion concerning the 24 hour commitment also appears to be a perfect example of “the more things change the more they echo the past”.   In a recent Forbes post, “Why Management Is Broken - And Why It Matters”, Gary Hamel, outlines what needs to happen with management and why.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=K3-_IY66tpI

Gary Hamel’s states 20th Century management required training agriculture workers as robotic factory workers.  Real robots may do some of that work today, but robot training psychology, teaching and performance is still being used and the norm.  Many companies use data/metrics as the sole criteria for grading an employee’s worth. This is the type of robot mentality people truly hate, especially when they aren’t told how it works.  The number of people unknowingly graded by data is hard to estimate but represents a huge check mark in the anti-people policies and culture column.

Secondly, other than the new industries mentioned in Gary Hamel’s presentation, the approach and solutions are not new!  He has updated them to make them more relatable to newer more globally dispersed, culturally diverse and technically advanced organizations.  Positive employment practices have disappeared along with the slow erosion of legal employment compliance.  However, they are the same tried and true positive employee culture practices great employers have utilized for decades.  The primary difference is very few HR practitioners today have personally learned or experienced them.

Gary Hamel is turning his silver (experience and wisdom) into gold (tried and true practical solutions to current catastrophic people policies and practices).  They work because people have changed very little. Every employment satisfaction survey has produced the same results for decades.  To those newer and less experienced HR/People practitioners and companies these solutions are new only because they have no experience or knowledge using them.  They disappeared as main stream somewhere along the way.

Ex-Apple and now former Penney’s CTO, Daniel Walker, has been practicing since 1974.  There are still many wise and very accomplished People/Talent leaders plying their skills in the HR/Talent/People world.  Their wisdom, experience and knowledge was once mainstream, but is now the fringe.  Their solutions to today’s people culture problems are practical, useful and proven common knowledge to them. You need to utilize their wisdom in your organization by borrowing it, using it and incorporating what works.

One final note concerns the police/cop role many companies place on their HR/People/Talent Department, especially by top leadership.  Without a trusted, open, neutral and safe place for employees to vent and get help, your people will go elsewhere.   This type of organizational culture becomes one of us (management and rule) versus them (the employee).  If the People Department becomes the enforcer, the company’s ability to have a neutral safe house, trusted by employees, enabling a secure pipeline and window into problems for what’s really going on slams shut.  This is where most organizations find themselves today – untrusted!

Next: Does Your People Department’s Structure Need Changing?