It seems that in every management training session I do lately, the same issue comes up: we’re being forced to do this flex time and telecommuting stuff and it doesn’t work for us.  We need our people here in the office.  We need them available during certain hours.

I acknowledge that it’s not as easy as saying, “If you manage by results then it doesn’t matter where your people are working.”  Some jobs are structured around handling service tasks as they come your way and you really do need someone to be in a particular place at a particular time.

Nonetheless, it often seems to me that managers are acting out of entrenched habits or resistance to change.  Open-mindedness is called for.  The world is changing, and we must change with it or risk becoming an employer that can no longer attract the best and brightest.  Here are some common objections I hear, and my response to them:

1. My people don’t produce anything, they just answer questions and provide support. So I need them to be here during the hours I’ve said they will be available.

Clearly in this case, the hours your people work are critical.  You need to be able to publish specific hours to your customers.  But does it really matter where your people are working from?  Set standards for responsiveness, and then find a way to gather customer feedback.  Do your customers tell you that the phone goes to voicemail frequently, or that they leave a message and don’t get a call back in a timely manner?  Then you have a problem.  The problem is not that the employee is working from home and you can’t see them, it’s that they aren’t answering the phone or returning calls to the standard you have set.  Address the real problem.

2.  I often call my employee because I need her and she doesn’t answer the phone.

Doesn’t that happen when she’s in the office too?  Let’s be reasonable here.  Sometimes your employee is in a meeting, on the other line, or in the bathroom.  These things happen in the office as well as at home.  Set standards, once again.  Tell her how soon you expect a call back when you leave a message.  Or ask for a schedule of conference calls and breaks so that you know when the best time to call is.

3. I get what I ask for.  But how do I know that my employee is really working eight hours a day?

This is really a key point.  Who cares if he’s working eight hours a day, if the employee is producing the results you’ve asked for?  Is it fair that the employee who works efficiently and gets the same job done in six hours as others do in eight hours gets penalized?  They should be rewarded instead.  Give them some extra assignments if you think they have extra time.  Choose assignments that are “stretch” assignments and will develop the employee, or choose projects that you know the employee will enjoy.  That way you get more from them, plus they get rewarded for being efficient.

4. I think my employee takes care of personal business on company time.  Sometimes I call and I can tell he’s out in a store or somewhere other than at home.

Again, this comes down to setting standards, communicating your expectations, and then measuring what you get.  If your employee is delivering what you’ve asked for and can shop at Home Depot at the same time, why does that matter?  If, on the other hand, your customers are telling you that they call and get put on hold while the employee deals with a cashier at the grocery store, then you have a problem.  Deal with the real problem.

5.  I need my people to work well together as a team and to communicate frequently.  They need face time for that.

Perhaps more than any other objection, I acknowledge this one as a true challenge.  Teamwork is important, and face-to-face communication is a great teambuilder.  Nonetheless, the world is changing.  Some teams are entirely virtual and they make it work.  Recently I heard a good suggestion from a manager in a federal agency.  She said she sets one day a week, Wednesday, as an “all hands in the office” day.  Except for true emergencies, everyone must be in the office that day and all routine team meetings are scheduled for that day.  For teams that are geographically dispersed, video conferencing is a way to make something similar happen.

I’m opening up a can of worms here, but there really is a generational trend in all of this.  Some of us Boomers just can’t get over the fact that we weren’t allowed to work from home or have flexible hours when we were just starting out in our careers.  Get over it!  If you’re truly managing by results, and you should be in most cases, then you’ll eventually see all these objections for what they really are—excuses and irrelevant noise.

I’m driving a 26-foot truck from Colorado to New Hampshire this week with my friend Allison.  I’ve never driven a truck this big before.

At first I approached it as an exploration of a new world.   We stopped at truck stops and tried to figure out how things worked in the world of professional driving.  It was confusing; at every truck stop there were different rules for the pumps.  Sometimes you could pay at the pump but mostly you couldn’t.  Sometimes you had to pre-pay and sometimes they wouldn’t let you.  There were also some issues with what side you pulled through from and whether it was rude to go the opposite way.

The professional drivers were all very friendly but they didn’t offer advice and we didn’t ask for any.  We just kept talking about how we were “truckers” now.  When pulling off the highway we yelled “there’s the truck entrance!” at each other, as if this made us something special.  One time Allison even told a lady behind the counter at a truck stop that we were truckers.   (The lady did not seem impressed.)

Then this morning, while trying to figure out the incomprehensible rules of yet another set of gas pumps in Joliet, Illinois, a driver at the pump next door came over to help us and gave us some advice.

“You know, you should really use the diesel pumps over on the auto side,” he said.  “Sometimes the diesel at the truck pumps is more expensive because of the road taxes we pay.”

Allison and I looked at each other in dismay.  “But we’re a truck!” Allison protested.

“Well, those other pumps are for the smaller trucks,” he said.  “The private ones.”

Smaller trucks.  That stung.  We thanked him and went on our way, but the trip was not the same after that.  Were we really a truck, or not?  It seemed we were only a truck when it came time to pay the higher fees at the toll booths.

Here’s what we’ve learned so far:

1.  Inclusiveness is a great thing but you can take it too far.   Don’t try to include people in groups they don’t really belong to, especially if it will cost them dearly.  And don’t assume you’re a member of the club just because you wear the jacket.

2.  The world of professional driving is worthy of great respect.  Truckers are courteous, friendly, helpful, and very skilled at what they do.  Sometimes we just sat and watched them back their enormous vehicles into tight spaces, admiring the confidence with which they maneuvered.

3.  Next time I need to move, I’ll hire movers.

A recent article in Harvard Business blogs (Why We Shouldn’t Hate HR by Bill Taylor) commemorates the 5th anniversary of the infamous 2005 Fast Company article  Why We Hate HR, and challenges the original author’s thoughts about why the title of his essay seems to name a fundamental truth.  The real problem, Taylor says, is that organizations don’t make the same investment of creativity and rigor in the human element of business that they do in R&D, marketing and finance.  Successful organizations are focused on getting “wildly talented people” in the door and then encouraging them to form productive partnerships.

I don’t disagree in the least.  In fact, I would even add an example to Taylor’s list of successful companies (he talks about Cirque du Soleil, Pixar and DaVita); Zappos is another company that has focused on the human element as the chief success factor in its business and seen a payoff as a result.  They’ve done it by translating the trendy term “engagement” into something simpler and more intuitive: a definition of “employee happiness,” which the company then strives to achieve through meeting intrinsic motivational needs like a sense of purpose, progress and relatedness.

Having said that, I think there is another perspective on why we hate HR, especially when it comes to smaller companies.  It’s a simple one: we ask HR to walk an impossible tightrope as a member of management who must also advocate impartially for employees.  We set up our HR people for failure.  No one trusts them as a result.

Recently I worked with an organization in which the hourly HR staff had just organized and certified a union.  When the training director told me about it, I was both horrified and fascinated.  “How could that be?” I asked the training director.  “Wouldn’t that bring up all sorts of conflict-of-interest issues?”  She shrugged.  “We certainly think so.  But it remains to be seen how this will play out.”

I thought about it all the way home.   Even the HR people don’t trust HR!  Not to mention they don’t trust senior leadership; and senior leadership will undoubtedly not trust HR in the future.  What a muddle it will be to redefine the role of HR in that organization now that they’ve thrown a third party into the mix.  Questions will arise in the handling of every issue; who is HR representing?  Who has access to confidential employee information and how will it be used?  What are the hidden agendas?  Thinking about it just boggles my mind.

It seems clear to me that if the HR profession is to fight its way out of its PR problem, it will take a complete redefinition of roles and responsibilities, as well as a bigger investment of energy and resources on the part of an organization’s senior leadership.

In an article on the Harvard Business Publishing site, Trina Soske and Jay A. Conger argue that leadership development programs fail for two reasons:

1.  They focus on the individual instead of on a leadership group

2.  They focus on behavioral competencies instead of on situational factors like how the leadership group is responding to competitive threats or shifts in strategy or other organizational specifics.

I couldn’t agree more, especially with #1.  The authors hit the nail on the head when they say, “The complexity, interconnectedness and transparency of today’s organizations mean that no one individual can get much accomplished by themselves. Most challenges and opportunities are systemic. Leadership is distributed and change now requires a collective sense and a coordinated set of actions.”

This is exactly why my own training and consulting practice focuses on onsite instructor-led training and facilitation for teams or work groups, despite the continuing protests in the learning and development field that this is an outdated model for learning.  When you send individuals to training—successful training that is—they come back with a new paradigm and a new vocabulary for expressing it.  When no one else in the group gets what they’re talking about, that new paradigm slowly fades away instead of producing behavioral change.  There is no reinforcement for the new language and new worldview, and perhaps there is even a sense of poking fun about it.  “Jay’s using those big words again, you can tell he’s been shipped off to leadership training.”

When you send teams or work groups to training, on the other hand, they are able to put their new concepts and ideas into practice as a group, and can reinforce each others’ new behaviors and collectively apply strategies for using the ideas to tackle specific organizational needs and challenges.

I believe this applies to nearly any type of  training you might provide, whether it be customer service or diversity or communication skills or supervisory skills.  Even so-called “hard skill” training topics can benefit from this approach.  Send your entire administrative staff to learn a new computer software together and they’ll learn more because they’ll be able to help each other with individual learning challenges and they can pool their ideas about how to use that software to improve operational efficiency.

What are your thoughts?  Does your organizational believe in leadership as a team sport?  Why or why not?

Years ago, after a period of intense reflection, I realized something about myself.  When I looked back at the less successful ventures in my life, nearly all of them could be attributed to a failure to read the culture of a particular organization or group of people.

My worst job experience ever was at a company that had a very strong culture around dotting i’s and crossing t’s.  I had come from an entrepreneurial company where everything was, in the words of a colleague, “loosey goosey.”  Creativity and risk-taking were rewarded, and lack of attention to detail was often forgiven or perhaps not even noticed.  I failed to read the tremendous shift in my new organization and failed in the job as a result.

But the examples I can come up with are not limited to organizational ones.  I remember a  boyfriend whose family I never really fit in with.  At the time I couldn’t put my finger on why it wasn’t working, but in retrospect, there was a crucial event at a birthday party for my boyfriend’s sister.  I got bored with the cocktail party chatter so I  jumped in a lake with my party clothes on to make the kids laugh.  The adults at the party were horrified.  In my family, a group of veteran practical jokers, jumping in the lake in a dress would be considered mildly amusing but certainly not radical.  In my boyfriend’s family it meant there was something “not quite right” about me.

Culture, which I define as “the way we do things around here,” is so powerful that it shapes our judgment of a person’s character, whether we recognize it or not.  The fundamental attribution error comes into play in such situations; instead of recognizing that someone is acting in a way that makes sense to them, given how they see their situation, we attribute behaviors that don’t make sense in our culture to bad motives.  I didn’t jump in the lake because that was considered a fun thing to do where I came from; I did it because I wanted to upset everyone, or perhaps I was drunk.  I didn’t miss the details at my old company because I saw a big picture that I considered more important to focus on; I did it because I was a sloppy person who didn’t care about messing things up.

When you follow a simple rule, to always ask yourself “why would a reasonable person do that?”, I think you open doors to recognizing the impact of culture on a person’s behavior.  And then you give them the benefit of the doubt instead of further alienating them from the group through the expression of judgment.

And the lesson for me, a perpetual cultural misfit, is to always think about how my behavior will be read in light of the culture I’m in.  That’s a journey with no end.

In a recent article by Susan Cantrell and David Smith, How the recession has changed the face of talent management–for the good, the authors argue that tight budgets have forced companies to offer customized rewards and internal employee-created training options instead of lump sums of cash and formal classroom training, and that this is a good thing for employee engagement.

I appreciate any efforts to find a silver lining in the impact of the recession on today’s workforce.   And I agree that most employees prefer customized options and individual choices over a one-size-fits-all approach.  What I’m not sure about is that this is really happening on any sort of large scale.

It might be that the article is written for an HR magazine in the UK.  Here in the US, I’m seeing employers cut their efforts as well as their expenditures.

It would be great if we were really spending extra time being creative about motivation and development, offering lower cost options that better serve individual needs; it’s like when your younger sibling made your Christmas gift for you instead of buying it.  Maybe she knitted you a pair of socks or a sweater in your favorite colors.  You knew she did it because she couldn’t afford to buy something at the mall, but it was touching that she spent extra time to create something meaningful for you.  And in the end it probably better served your needs than some manufactured product from the mall would have.  But what I’m seeing is stressed-out short-sighted managers looking to cut costs everywhere they can and spending too much time putting out fires to make Christmas gifts.

What about you, are you seeing a silver lining?

Recently I began a grant writing project to help raise funds for a local emergency services purchase.  The process got me thinking, what if every organization had to write a grant application every year?  What an organizational soul-searching process that would be.

Grant applications, I’ve discovered, really ask you to ask some hard questions and paint the big picture in terms of organizational responsibility.  Why does your organization exist?  What need does it serve?  How is success measured?  Why do you deserve assistance?  How will you make good use of money if it’s given to you?  If all you can say is that you exist to make a profit, then in essence you’ve got nothing to say.

I think every organization should have to answer questions like that periodically; not just organizations that are applying for government assistance, but every organization.  And they should have to answer the questions as if a very important cash infusion depends on the quality of the answers.

How would your organization answer?  Do you serve a need, or do you only exist to make a profit?

If you want to get inspired to change your life for the better, read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.   That’s assuming you haven’t already read this much-talked-about bestseller.  While it’s certainly full of practical tips for cutting the clutter in your life and making more money in less time, its best feature is that it makes a solid case for the philosophy of carpe diem.  Why on earth do so many people slave away at a job they hate in order to save for that far-off retirement in which they’ll finally enjoy themselves?  You don’t know how you’re going to feel when you’re 65; you may no longer have the energy or physical ability to do all those things you’ve dreamed about.  Heck, you don’t even know if you’ll still be alive!

Ferriss talks about how important it is to define what you want to do now, and then figure out a way to finance that freedom now, whatever age you might be.

I did it when I was 36.  I quit my job, sold my car, put my furniture in storage and let my rental house go.  Then I took off and traveled around the world for seven months; I got scuba-certified on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, went on safari in Tanzania, trekked in Nepal and studied Thai cooking and massage in Thailand.  When I came back, I moved up into the mountains in Colorado and became a ski instructor, a freelance writer for adventure sports magazines, and a volunteer mountain rescuer.  A few years later I began consulting in what I would describe as a partial return to the “real world,” but I emphasize the word “partial.”  Having the freedom to have many different experiences remains important to me and I focus on keeping that capability in my life.

When you talk to people about things like this the response is usually, “I’d love to do that but _____.”  Insert the appropriate barrier in the blank:  I have kids, I have a family, I have a mortgage, I have too much debt.  I’m not dismissive about these things; I have to admit, they are challenges that I didn’t have when I did it.  What’s neat about Ferriss’ book is that he addresses some of these challenges with real examples, like the family who saved for a couple of years and figured out how to sail around the world with their three children.  I’m not saying it’s easy, but if you’re willing to question some of the “needs” you take for granted and able to think a little creatively, you might get there.

It’s certainly not a new idea, but it’s a timely one given the current job market.  Are you one of those job seekers beginning to get frustrated?  Go get this book.  It might help you to think differently about how to move forward.

During a teambuilding session this week, I led a leadership team in an exercise to identify style.  I asked them each to work in groups to identify three words that described each person’s leadership style; then they had to switch groups and try to match the words with the correct person.

As we were debriefing, someone made the observation that they hadn’t really come up with words to describe leadership style, but rather words to describe personality.  There were descriptors like sense of humor, compassion, energetic and steady.  We had some debate about that.  Some people said, what’s the difference, really? Some argued that the difference was significant, that personality was innate and leadership style was learned.  Others said, the exercise is too simplistic; you can’t describe a leadership style in three words anyway.  There is so much more to be said.

Finally, we said that personality characteristics influence leadership style to such an extent as to perhaps make them inseparable.  And that what really matters is the three words that get through loud and clear to those we lead.  When one employee asks another, “What is your manager like?” that question usually gets answered with about three descriptors.  “She’s harsh.  She barks orders at you and doesn’t listen.”  Or, “He’s great, everyone really feels like he gets where we’re coming from.  But he expects results.”  We can sit in leadership classes and talk about complicated theories and models all we want—and I’m not saying it’s without merit—but in the end, our employees will distill us down to a few descriptors that arguably describe personality more than anything  else.  And because we all have blind spots, it’s important to get a handle on what those descriptors are likely to be.  Ask your colleagues, your employees and your spouse.  Use a 360 instrument.  Search for clues in your interactions with others.  Until you really understand how you come across to those you lead, you’ll find it hard to assess your leadership effectiveness.

Harvard Business’ tip of the day this morning was to put culture before strategy in a turnaround.  “To right an organization headed for trouble, you need to build a culture that supports strategy implementation.”

How true this is!  Not just for turnarounds, but for any type of major organizational event.  Early in my career, the hotel company I worked for merged with another.  There were about nine of us working in corporate HR from both sides of the merger, and we stumbled just integrating our own team never mind the rest of the organization.  The VP of HR from the other company, Cynthia, was infatuated with efficiency, centralization and standardization.  I still remember how proudly she presented some of her systems for a new hotel takeover to us: she had pre-made files that could simply be installed in the new hotel’s HR office, and ready-made employee handbooks, and pre-programmed takeover presentations.  On our side, we had always spent three times as much time and effort as she had on a takeover; we’d tried to understand the previous systems of the new hotel, and created customized documents and presentations that reflected the need for the hotel’s staff to keep some of their old ways and make still enough changes to fit in with us.

Cynthia couldn’t understand why we weren’t thrilled about her time-saving ideas.  She tried to sell us on her systems over and over, touting the benefits and talking about how it would free up our time to focus on other things, like training and employee engagement.  She was right that we would have loved more time for developing and engaging employees; what she didn’t understand was that we felt her systems would have worked at cross-purposes to the goal of employee engagement.  We valued individuality and freedom of expression, and she valued efficiency and standardization.  We believed that employees who are forced to follow a corporate SOP for every procedure will lack opportunities to develop their managerial skills and thus will be less engaged; she believed that supervisors wanted to have things be simpler and easier on the administrative side so they could focus their time elsewhere.

Who was right?  It didn’t matter.  Until we aligned the values, and then aligned “the way we do things around here” based on those shared values, we weren’t going to get anywhere with anything else.  And if HR can’t align, what about the rest of the organization?

I wouldn’t say the merger failed.  It just took a very, very long time to take the speed bumps out of the road; many years, in fact.  And we lost a lot of good people in the process.   Eventually, I was one of them.

If you’re going through a turnaround, acquisition, or merger heed Peter Drucker’s warning: Culture eats strategy for breakfast.