Category Archives: Human resources

Is “The Right Thing To Do?” the right thing to do?

Posted on by
Reply

Last December we embarked on this blog with little idea where the journey would take us. We just felt that a lot of people of good will were out there with good ideas about how to make our world better. All we had to do was find them. Or, better yet, for them to find us.

And, through a mix of word of mouth and downright cajoling, they delivered their thoughts, based on their life experiences, for us to share with a wider audience. And, for that, we are truly grateful to every one of them. Here they are:

David Tebbutt Felix Dennis Ray Maguire Ben Goldsmith Clive Longbottom
Euan Semple Mark Chillingworth Martin Banks Hussein Dickie Tracey Poulton
Rob Wirszycz Anne Marie McEwan Tarquin Henderson Dr Bill Nichols Andy Redfern
Tari Lang Jason J Drew Ibukun Adebayo Neil Crofts Drew Buddie

As you probably know, this site is non-commercial. Everything is voluntary and the most anyone gets is the opportunity to see their words published and to give themselves a slight exposure to a wider audience. Some benefit from this more than others. No names, no pack drill.

I’d just like to say “Thank you” to every contributor and reader and wish you all seasonal greetings and a happy new year. We’re going to take a bit of a break now. I’ll leave you with a list of the contributions and perhaps you’ll enjoy reading some of those you missed.

Why things will get better - from a Matt Ridley TED talk
Entrepreneur Extraordinaire, Felix Dennis, on Good Fortune
Never mind GDP, what about Gross National Happiness? - from a Chip Conley TED talk
Reconnecting kids with the school curriculum - Ray Maguire
Has the Khan Academy found the right way to educate? - from a Salman Khan TED talk
Why green makes business sense - Ben Goldsmith
Is sustainable growth a myth? - Clive Longbottom
Rag and bone men of the information world - Euan Semple
The power of community Mark Chillingworth
Where’s the ‘social’ in ‘accountancy’? - Martin Banks
Mind the gap - Hussein Dickie
Inhumane HR behaviour - Tracey Poulton
Listen! (To the right people) - David Tebbutt on Cognitive Edge work
Get on the trust trajectory - Rob Wirszycz
Baby, bathwater, beware … - Anne Marie McEwan
Is green the new gold? - Tarquin Henderson
Hunters got us into this mess – will farmers get us out? - Dr. Bill Nichols
Fairtrade, Organic or Me-Me? - Andy Redfern
How sticky are your labels? - David Tebbutt
Reputation is deeds, not words - Tari Lang
Passion + talent = magic - From Sir Ken Robinson’s work
Authenticity vs perception - Dr. Bill Nichols
Could the fly save humanity? - Jason J. Drew
Ignorance and prejudice - Ibukun Adebayo
Superstorm Sandy: what would you have done? - David Tebbutt
Doing the right thing – even when no one is watching - Neil Crofts
Stubbornness – The Nailhouse Principle - Drew Buddie

So, what do you reckon? Is “The Right Thing To Do?” the right thing to do? Do you know anyone who would like to share their learnings from real life for the greater good?

Please point them at me trttd@tebbo.com. Thank you. (PS It could be you too!)

Ignorance and prejudice

Posted on by
1

I’ve never been one to cry foul when someone calls me a “‘black’ whatever”; I’m usually more concerned about the ‘whatever’ bit than the fact they’ve confirmed what I’ve known since birth, i.e. that I’m ‘black’.

I once started a job in IT whereby I met with so much resistance in my early days there that I felt like taking up kick-boxing to relieve the stress. I was turned down for kick-boxing lessons because, apparently, my massive feet could have knocked an opponent into a coma.

Eventually, the manager who had led the unwelcoming pack told me one day, “You know you’re the best leader I’ve ever worked with and the only problem I had with you at the beginning is you’re black and you’re a woman, and I’ve never worked for either before”.

Okay, so how did this two-pronged ‘revelation’ affect me, and did it influence my views on the IT industry? It didn’t really. Many people have prejudices and biases, yet very few are as honest as this manager was with his straightforward admission that he was prejudiced against women in IT and that his ignorance about reporting to a black woman was affecting his professional relationship with me.

Things got better after this; and after he’d realised my massive ideas matched my foot size (ten, if you’re interested). While on the subject of my feet, I also take strides of purpose while carrying my team members along with me. Moving to the other end of my body, my unusually large nose means I sniff about and probe and ask my managers the right questions, expecting them to provide answers as I steer my department towards our agreed vision.

In the CIO (Chief Information Officer) community, things do need to be spiced up a bit. Attending CIO conferences (we met at one – ed.) is still a pretty testing experience for me as, despite being born in Balham, I’ve always enjoyed rice – preferably extra-large plates with curry, beef and goat meat – with some nice chilli hot pepper, whereas conference delegates tend to be presented with bland tasting rice, sometimes err… dripping with water, and a few tiny bits of lamb, while, of course the ‘polite’ thing to do is to take about two tablespoons of rice and move on to an equally bland tasting sauce. But, more importantly, you don’t see many female CIOs at these events because there are so few women in ‘C’ positions in IT in the UK. And you see even fewer women there from ethnic minorities.

I don’t believe in quotas, rather in appointing the right person to each role whatever their colour, gender or religious orientation. Sexual orientation shouldn’t even come into the recruitment equation, after-all nobody should care who you get into bed with, as long as you’re personally not being asked to get into bed with anyone other than the love of your personal life.

Managerial life really isn’t that stressful and, because of my baptism of fire into a role where I received affirmation of my race and gender plus of my credentials as a good leader, I’ve learned that leadership means being able to differentiate between prejudice and ignorance. It means being able to deal with any conflict that arises from prejudicial behaviour, and being able to identify development needs where ignorance is the issue. It means ensuring that the ignorant are developed until their ignorance turns into awareness, and always remembering that not all ignorant people are prejudiced, yet all prejudiced people are ignorant.

Passion + talent = magic

Posted on by
2

If you are already familiar with Sir Ken Robinson‘s work, stop reading now. You will already know how much sense he speaks, interspersed with jokes and asides. You’d never know from listening to him that he was born in Liverpool, to a large working-class family. He speaks beautifully and intelligently about the human condition and what we can do to make our lives better.

He rails at how so many of us fail to achieve our potential, largely because of the way we are taught and conditioned. His 2006 TED video on children and creativity is a classic (it has been viewed almost twelve million times). Here’s a quote, “My contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.”

He views traditional education as an industrial-style narrowing exercise which squeezes out creativity (my paraphrase, not his, by the way). He says, “Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.”

The RSA was inspired to get his talk Changing Education Paradigms animated by Andrew Park’s Cognitive Media. That’s been viewed over eight and a half million times. Talk about viral …

And there’s more, much more, on Sir Ken’s website. His most recent work has been around the subject of aligning your passions and your abilities. He contrasts the lives of many who eke out their working lives in anticipation of the weekends and those who are fulfilled in everything they do. Opposite ends of a spectrum of experience, but it’s easy enough to plot where anyone sits on this continuum. His assertion is that we can move. And, indeed, we should move.

In a recent presentation on Passion for the School of Life, he told the story of a book editor who absolutely loved her work yet prior to this she’d been a concert pianist. Her whole life, her education – right up to her PhD – had been centred around music. Yet, she was far more passionate about books than piano recitals. One day, after another successful concert, the conductor suggested that she hadn’t enjoyed it. It was a pivotal moment. She admitted he was right. Soon after, she became a book editor and closed her piano lid for good.

He suggests that if you are doing something you’re good at and that you love, an hour seems like five minutes. To pinch the title of his recent book, written with Lou Aronica, people like this are in their Element.

If you or your colleagues are finding that time drags, then surely that’s a clear signal that you should plan for change. And, if you need inspiration, Sir Ken Robinson can provide it in spades. Providing you’re partial to his jokes.

 

Baby, bathwater, beware …

Posted on by
Reply

William Hague said recently, “There’s only one growth strategy: work hard.” Without daring to go near the politics of that statement, I have to say that it would have made more sense to say “work smart.” You can flog your guts out working hard the same old way but if you don’t take into account the changing world and intelligently figure out how to work with it, then you’re likely to exhaust yourself and fail into the bargain. Sorry William.

At the moment, you hear a lot of buzz around ‘social business’ or, before that, ‘Business 2.0′ and similar sounding slogans. The trouble with such ‘paradigm shifts’ is that they all imply a jettisoning of past experience. How stupid is that? And, no, I’m not taking a pop at anyone or any organisation in particular, just making the point that ‘new’ is often complementary to some of the ‘old’.

Some of the ‘old’ is with us, rallying under a new banner. “Organisations are networks of formal and informal relationships.” Geddaway. Of course they are; they always have been. The difference now is that we have software and communication tools to massively improve their effectiveness.

We have the legacy of the first wave of smart working, in particular, “the need to make innovation everyone’s business and to empower workforces to ‘take action that will benefit the customer without layers of bureaucratic approval’.” Lessons learned from the successful pioneers of these working methods are invaluable input to what’s needed now, in this even more uncertain and chaotic world.

We need to build flexible systems with adaptability, integration, disciplined collaboration, innovation and knowledge sharing in mind. This isn’t a lazy set of buzzwords, each is a vital consideration as we invent our way to a better future. I could have added more – discovery, sharing and co-creation, for example. The point is that the networked world really is a network of brains, knowledge and information sources all orchestrated for the collective good. ‘Collective’ in this case has to include customers which, by extension, means suppliers. Otherwise you won’t have any customers when the current turmoil ends.

Turmoil? No, I’ve not made a big deal of the ways in which the world is changing and the challenges we face because I assume you know. But, just in case, try these for size: ageing populations; shifts in global economic power and declining industries. The latter being replaced by new high-value industries such as: bio-tech; electronic gaming; renewable energies; and so on. Adapting to change is not easy but the status quo is no longer a place of refuge.

The future of work is visible. Most of the ingredients exist, even though we’re bound to see more come along. It doesn’t matter; we have enough to act. We can blend the old with the new and connect up to internal and external knowledge flows.

Here’s an example taken from a presentation by Alistair Moffat: NSN, a 60,000 person organisation formed from parts of Nokia Networks and Siemens Communications, faced the challenge of accelerating the emergence of a common culture. It chose to use discussion forums to create The Culture Square, a forum where company‐wide conversations could take place.

People were encouraged to talk freely and anonymously without risking dismissal for saying what they believed.The values and attitudes of the Chief Executive and his desire to nurture an organisational culture consistent with adult-to-adult relationships, where people could disagree without being disagreeable, were core to how the conversations unfolded and, indeed, succeeded. The Culture Square came to represent trust and inclusion., revealing the important issues that people were most concerned about.

Each person involved in innovation and problem-solving can be augmented by the knowledge and capabilities in their network. This is massive. And it’s at our fingertips. Yet what are many businesses doing with social technologies, the potential turbochargers of change? Imposing a blanket ban.

How blinkered is that?

 

Anne Marie wants you to know that she was aided and abetted by David Tebbutt in the creation of this post.

Inhumane HR behaviour

Posted on by
4

Taking my usual journey into town (London) I sat next to an individual who was quite obviously distressed. Over the phone and despite knowing he was on a train, his employer gave him the news that he had to make a choice there and then about a relocation package.

It transpired later that the company had just merged with another and he was offered several jobs, all of which were a fair way from his home, meaning that he needed to relocate his family. As he has two teenage children aged 15 and 17, he felt that he would have to decline all such offers in order to prioritise the needs of his children.

This was a dreadful conversation to overhear and I apologise for not tuning out. But it was a distressing demonstration of how not to deal with a situation in the right way; firstly that the HR department chose to talk to him on a train with no privacy and, secondly, that it insisted that he made a decision there and then. I and another passenger agreed after he’d left the train that the company’s behavior was totally unacceptable. What made the situation considerably worse was that, from his responses and his body language, it was clear that this individual was made to feel inadequate for choosing to put his family needs first.

In reading Roger Steare’s book, Ethicability: How to Decide What’s Right and Find the Courage to Do it, I realised that we can lose some basis caring fundamentals in the way we deal with situations. What would have been the right thing to do in this situation?

I put myself in the train passenger’s shoes and immediately felt his distress and then put myself in the employer’s shoes. I rummaged around to find a rational justification for this behavior, but couldn’t find an element where the employer would be in the right. The lack of care in dealing with this situation would put me off ever working for the firm. Lucky for them I didn’t find out who they were.

But it did illustrate that some businesses need to change the way they see their employees, not as a commodity they can deploy wherever they like but a human resource that needs to be valued and nurtured in order to be able to thrive in the home and then at work. A happy family man or woman is often a happy worker, so surely the potential for a better system should be reviewed. Perhaps said company needs a workshop with Roger Steare!

(later)

I’m on my way home now to appreciate the times that my husband and I put our boys first. A good lesson to be reminded of!