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You are here: Home / Archives for 4 - Management / b Executive Functions

Changing the Profile of HR

July 29, 2009 by Matt Perman

Great perspective from Tom Peters on HR, once again from Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age (pp 256-257; as before, all the punctuation like the  “…” is his, with the exception of any brackets):

I have long believed that human resources people should sit at the Head Table. I’m a fan of “HR.” It is … after all … an age of talent.

Problem [big problem, IMO]: All too often “HR folks” are viewed (all too) correctly as “mechanics.” Not as … Master Architects … who aim to … Quarterback the Great War for Talent.

I’ve devoted my career to the “people thing.” I desperately want “HR” to “WIN.”

Why doesn’t it happen?

Simple: A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION.

I wasn’t born yesterday. I understand there are thousands upon thousands of pages of petty laws and regulations that HR “must administer.” But that still does not excuse HR from … Re-imagining itself.

As leaders!

As … THE … leaders. [I don’t know if I would go that far.]

So work to “deserve it.” [There’s a stunning indictment.]

Please.

His next point is “Forge a Bold HR Strategy!,” where he goes on to say:

If you work for a big company, it no doubt has a “strategic plan,” a voluminous document that is the offspring of ceaseless deliberation.

Question: HOW BIG A “CHAPTER” (AND WHICH CHAPTER?) OF THAT “STRATEGIC PLAN” IS DEVOTED … EXPLICITLY … TO THE “HR STRATEGY”?

Maybe I’m out of touch. But most “strategic plans” I’ve seen don’t even have an “HR Strategy.”

That’s criminal.

There needs to be one.

With teeth.

And bravura.

Our “strategic approach” to tackling the “talent thing” is more important than our market analysis. (Or surely as important, eh?) (Forget that: MORE IMPORTANT!)

HR … I … WANT YOU … at … the … Head Table.

Filed Under: HR

The Problem with "Leave the Office Early" Day

June 4, 2009 by Matt Perman

Tuesday was “leave the office early” day. Cali and Jody at the ROWE blog have a great post on the problems with that idea.

And here’s what’s great: the problem is not with the idea of leaving work early.

Filed Under: Job Design

The New Nine-to-Five

June 4, 2009 by Matt Perman

Good statement from the ROWE blog:

We shouldn’t be judging people for how they decide to approach their work.  It’s that simple. As long as the work is getting done, and as long as people have the freedom to operate in the best way to get that work done, then there is no crazy. And nine-to-five is not a badge of honor, but just one of many options.

I’ll be posting more about the nature of a results-only-work-environemnt (ROWE) in the future.

Filed Under: Job Design

What Makes a Job Meaningful?

June 1, 2009 by Matt Perman

From Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book Outliers: The Story of Success:

Those three things — autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward — are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us. If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money.

I think most of us resonate with Gladwell’s assessment of the three things make work meaningful: autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward.

Patrick Lencioni, who wrote the book The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, similarly points to three things on the flip side — three things that make a job miserable. They are: anonymity, immeasurability, and irrelevance. If we flip them around to state what makes a job meaningful, we get: not being ignored, measurability, and relevance.

Lencioni’s three differ slightly from Gladwell’s. Both have measurability in common (that is, a connection between effort and reward), but they diverge slightly on the other two.

These three lists are not mutually exclusive — they both capture very important and profound realities.

But it’s probably also the case that they are talking about different things. Lencioni would probably say that you can have autonomy and complexity and still be miserable if you are anonymous and if there is not someone specifically — even if it is just one person — to whom your work matters (relevance).

The reason is that Lencioni points out that “being miserable has nothing to do with the actual work a job involves. A professional basketball player can be miserable in his job while the janitor cleanign the locker room behind him finds fulfillment in his work. A marketing executive can be miserable making a quarter of a million dollars a year while the waitress who serves her lunch derives meaning and satisfaction from her job” (pp. 217-218).

I would put Gladwell and Lencioni together like this. Gladwell points out the conditions that make a job intrinsically enjoyable. As with Lencioni, that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with level in an organization or other such matters. The person cleaning the locker rooms after the basketball game can have complexity, autonomy, and a connection between effort and reward in his job.

But, no matter what your job is, if you do not also know that it matters to someone (even if only your boss) and are not to some degree known and appreciated by others around you (not anonymous), you are going to be miserable. Likewise, no matter what your job is, you can bring those things (plus measurability) to it in order to make it satisfying.

Putting this all together, let’s strive to make sure that our jobs (and the jobs of those we manage) fulfill both the characteristics that Gladwell points to and those that Lencioni points to.

Filed Under: Job Design

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Matt Perman started What’s Best Next in 2008 as a blog on God-centered productivity. It has now become an organization dedicated to helping you do work that matters.

Matt is the author of What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done and a frequent speaker on leadership and productivity from a gospel-driven perspective. He has led the website teams at Desiring God and Made to Flourish, and is now director of career development at The King’s College NYC. He lives in Manhattan.

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