Tag: Human Resources

Why should they trust you? Restoring Relationships Should be Top Priority for Today’s Business Leaders 

Posted on by Maya Mehta

Building trust is imperative for organizations, especially during times of economic uncertainty. When trust is present, it can help to stabilize relationships, foster cooperation, and increase confidence amongst teams, clients, and key stakeholders. While trust is the bedrock of team success, there is no doubt that building it is especially important during times of economic turbulence, where uncertainty and risk can cause team members and stakeholders to become cautious and resistant. 

Leaders should prioritize building trust because it’s good for morale. Even more so, it’s good for business. Trust generates resilience and confidence within any company, organization, or community among those key to its success. 

Trust strengthens relationships 

So here’s what is obvious: trust is the foundation of any healthy relationship between organizations and their stakeholders. When those with a vested interest also trust a business, they are more likely to be supportive and authentically interested in its success. This can lead to stronger partnerships and boosted collaboration. 

Trust fosters resilience 

Building trust can help businesses weather economic uncertainty by creating a sense of ownership and belonging. When stakeholders have confidence in the relationship, they are more likely to remain committed and engaged, even during difficult times. Trust allows an organization to maintain momentum and overcome inevitable, unpredictable obstacles. 

Trust boosts confidence 

Economic uncertainty can create fear and doubt for businesses and their stakeholders. By building trust, leaders can help alleviate these concerns and boost confidence, increasing investment, stronger partnerships, and more significant growth opportunities. 

As many of us know, trust is not easily won by everyone. Part of being a leader is to engage your team and those with whom you collaborate in a way that demonstrates a genuine effort to connect and foster a positive relationship. If you are a leader, there are some concrete and specific steps that you can take to build trusting relationships in your organization. 

Step One: Identify the levels of trust in your relationships 

Let’s face it; some people are more complicated to work with than others. That’s okay. That’s life. Without playing the blame game, take time to note down mentally those relationships where trust is not there, whether it’s an adversarial one or one of indifference. 

Also note where the relationships are solid, those who you go to with ideas, possibilities, doubts, and concerns. Those are high-trust relationships, and it’s essential to put effort into maintaining them too. 

Step Two: Develop an approach and strategy for different relationships based on the level of trust 

Relationships with different levels of trust require different approaches. For example, strategies and methods exist to build trust with people with whom we do not connect or agree. It starts with connecting with people without judgment, valuing others’ points of view, and finding instances of agreement and similarities instead of differences. Part of any strategy that must deal with trust is an acknowledgment of what role you play within the relationship. Leaders who wish to approach building trust with intention must start with a willingness to let their guard down and be vulnerable. 

“I can create a high-trust environment any time I want. All I must realize is that I am creating the environment in which I live,” explained Peter Block in the article Trust in Whom. ”We are afraid of being naïve and a fool if we continue to trust in the face of others’ betrayal. Well, what is so great about being strategic and clever? And what is so wrong about being a fool? Maybe being willing to be a fool is the exact means of creating the high-trust world that we each long for.”

Step Three: Plan and practice conversations that matter

The starting point for action and change is conversation. The quality of how you are with others matters even more than the expertise you each bring. That said, holding trust-building conversations requires authenticity, vulnerability, and a learned communication skillset that takes practice. 

In a time of uncertainty, trust is an invaluable resource, and it requires action and intention from the side of leaders who depend on it to achieve successful outcomes. In Flawless Conversations: Building Trusting Relationships, learn how to plan for conversations that inspire not only a shift within your one-on-one relationships but can even empower broader transformation within your team, organization, and beyond.

Facing the Virtual World

Posted on by Maya Mehta

We now work in a virtual and digital world, with all of its joys and sorrows. Technology is credited with bringing the world closer together, spreading democracy, changing the nature of business, and supplying round-the-clock connectivity. Geography has been made irrelevant. It is mesmerizing to grasp the world in a handheld device, much smarter than we will ever be.

Here are some aspects of this life that Human Resource (HR) practitioners deal with every day:

  • Teams are made up of people who have never been in a room together. This gives rise to the question, “How do we build a team that never or rarely meets face-to-face?”
  • The well-defined workweek is no more. People are online and in touch and reachable most of their waking hours. And expect you to follow suit. If you ask people to leave their cell phones at the door, 40 percent say that this is not possible.
  • We work at home. Our bedroom has become our office. Technology allows us to move our residence/office anywhere and have more control over our time.
  • Speed is a value in and of itself. If something is quicker, it is attractive. If we are quicker, we are attractive. Slow food is considered a revolution. Fast food is a value proposition.
  • Controlling costs is now the dominant value for most organizations, replacing the priority once given to the customer and the employee. Almost every job and function (except top management) can be outsourced to reduce labor and benefit costs. Travel and training are cut on the rationale that current audio and video technology approximates the sights and sounds of being in the room together in real-time.

The virtual world is sold on these features. More individual freedom. Work at home, learn at will, and control your own time. Get the information you need on demand. Be a global citizen.

The challenge is to address the human and workplace consequences of the technological and cultural forces that constantly drive us toward speed, control, efficiency, and short-term results.

Choices for the Future

Organizations that will truly thrive over time are creating a future that transcends these pressures. They will focus on making the choice to (1) act in service of the long run and (2) act in service to those with little power. In this way, they create an alternative narrative, one centered on creating high performance by putting the future in the hands of each member of an organization.

HR can help leaders transcend these pressures by developing leaders who give priority to building relationships with peers. Real relationships, not virtual ones. HR is a stance for leaders that gives more choices to people close to the work. It is the realization that human values take priority over shareholder values. HR clients are all members of the organization, not just top management.

There are more important values than speed and scale, and costs. Organizations are human systems first and technical processes second. Important learning requires face-to-face relationships where all learning is social.

Adapted from Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest, 2d ed. (San Francisco: Berrett-Kohler, 2013). 

Learn more tips in our eBook Engagement By Design: The Virtual Hour found on our articles page. 

The Deadwood Dilemma: Reframing the “Low Performer” Problem

Posted on by Maya Mehta

There are few things that incite feelings of injustice at work as the perception of “freeloaders”…low performers, reaping benefit from other people’s work. There is at least one team member who is not pulling their own weight.

This is an accountability issue.

And we’ve found that early in every discussion about accountability and institutional reform, what follows is someone who will ask what they should do with the “deadwood.”

How do you handle low performers under this new world order?

In situations like these, the consultant’s task is to reframe the question to reveal the underlying issues rather than just deal with the surface-level…what we call the “presenting problem.”

The Presenting Problem: Deadwood

A member of the team is underperforming and dragging the whole team’s performance down. The rest of the team is frustrated that this low performer is benefitting without contributing their fair share.

If You Acted On This Definition

If you focus on dealing with “deadwood” then you’ll look at the issue as a performance management issue. You might:

  • Proceed by developing competency models to create objective measures to evaluate the lowest performers
  • Move to make performance improvement targets more clear and self-evident
  • Talk about offering exit packages to aid in “clearing the deadwood.

Reframing the “Low Performers” Problem

There is an embedded irony in channeling your focus on fixing the low performers or underachievers.

Why? Because if you’re successful in converting a low performer into a top performer, then another member of the team will have to become the lowest performer.

Oops. The end result is a self-perpetuating cycle.

You see, “deadwood” is really not the problem.

So what’s the real “Low Performers” problem?

When you focus on fixing the low performers, you merely shift attention away from the team’s performance.

Sure, individual team members need help at times. But the reality is that if the team was performing well and working well together, then it could easily afford to bring along some “freeloaders.”

The truth is that the problem-person, the low performer, the “deadwood,” is likely to be the victim of projection.

Scapegoating may make us feel better, but goats are rarely the real issue.

“Et Tu, Brute?”

You may be told that the low performers need to get “on board.” That’s an interesting judgment. Why do they think they’re “on board?”

Who is to say the people having you deal with the “deadwood” are not also in that category themselves?

Low Performers reflect the Team

In family therapy, the child who gets all of the negative attention is called the “identified patient.” And that “patient” carries the symptoms of what is really a family problem.

So, when you reframe the “deadwood” dilemma as other than an individual performance management issue you’re able to see that whatever issues are prevalent in the low performers indicate issues in the team as a whole entity. And addressing the dysfunctions in the team will serve to raise the bar for individuals within it.

[Adapted from Peter Block, ‘Twelve Questions to the Most Frequently Asked Answers,’ The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion: A Guide to Understanding Your Expertise, 2001, pp. 396-397]

The Three Consulting Roles: How to Stop Fixing and Start Collaborating

Posted on by Maya Mehta

As a Human Resources (HR) or Support Services professional, you have expertise that is critical for the survival and growth of your organization. You have expertise, and you can offer it by playing anyone of three consulting roles at work.

Unfortunately, you may often find yourself being underutilized, overworked with transactional tasks, and being told to “fix” things and people. Is this true for you?

Do You Find Yourself Frustrated When…

  • Your leaders come to you at the last minute and tell you to implement something?
  • You aren’t involved early enough in the process to influence decisions and share your ideas?
  • Most of your day is spent putting out “fires” and expending energy on non-strategic issues?
  • You have so much more expertise to offer the organization, but they don’t appreciate it or even ask you for it?
  • You are asked to “handle” tough conversations, “problem” people, and fix them?

This is probably not the way you want to be treated. Instead, you want to have your expertise utilized, and be treated as a trusted advisor.

The issue is that others, including managers and clients, don’t know how to best utilize your expertise, so they default to the quickest option: tell you what to do.

But There Is Good News

You may be able to dislodge others from a default way of treating you at work. You can adjust your own approach by leveraging the three consulting roles to have your expertise better utilized.

But before you do, be aware that you may have unintentionally trained your leaders to treat you the way they do.

Here’s what I mean.

Many leaders, in the spirit of customer satisfaction, often operate with the mentality that “the customer is always right.” In this frame, they utilize you for “fixing” things and implementing their ideas in order to resolve problems.

Leaders then create conditions where you end up agreeing to do what clients tell you to do, even when it’s not the best thing for them or the organization. And if you attempt to push back or disagree with your clients, they get upset and even escalate a complaint to your boss.

There is a better way

You have the power and opportunity to change the conversations you are having with clients and the leaders in your organization. You can start by discussing the topic of how to best utilize your expertise by intentionally establishing the role you’ll play in the engagement.

We have found that HR and Support Service professionals can fall into three consulting roles.

The 3 Consulting Roles

The Three Consulting Roles

  1. Expert Role – They count on you to fix things with your expertise, and they don’t want you to be involved in the diagnosis or solution. “Make it go away” is their mantra.
  2. Pair of Hands Role – They come to you with their solution, and they want you to implement it. “Don’t ask questions, just get it done for me.” You end up being an “order taker” and implementing suboptimal solutions. Sometimes these solutions can cause harm to people and the organization.
  3. Collaborative Role – You share the responsibility and accountability with the leaders to diagnose and develop solutions. Your expertise is equally utilized along with their expertise.

Learn More

If you want to know which of the three consulting roles you and/or your teams are playing at work, then we invite you to take our free Role Orientation Quiz.

Much of the growth of consulting has been riding the wave of the technology explosion combined with the trend toward downsizing. Most large organizations have found it more profitable to shrink and merge and outsource jobs. This creates the challenge of having fewer people doing more work, and the consulting industry has been the beneficiary of this movement.

The demand for consulting services has also grown because of the interest in quality improvement, better customer service, and changing cultures toward more engaged workplaces. All of these goals are worthy, but what I want to explore is how the commercialization of our services ended up subverting their intent.

Reengineering is a good example of an area of practice that had power and relevance. Its intent was inarguable but something shifted when the idea became commercialized and popular. Reengineering became the rage and consulting firms began to make promises that were unsustainable. After a good run, the work fell of its own weight.

The reengineering craze reached a point where whatever change we had in mind was called reengineering. Every department thought it was reengineering itself. The energy was more about becoming modern than becoming better. Reengineering became synonymous with restructuring and was sold by the large accounting and consulting firms with promises of a 30 to 50 percent return on the investment.

The dark side of reengineering, which threatened the whole profession, is that the promises made to sell the work either were never fulfilled or could finally be achieved only by eliminating jobs on a wide scale. The goal of restructuring the work process for the sake of the customer was more often than not unrealized. In fact, many of the users of reengineering began to reverse their efforts because they found the concept unworkable.

Reengineering,  like the more current desire to be lean and agile,  is a good example of two larger consulting complexities: how consultants take advantage of what is in vogue and how we pursue covert purposes.

When an idea is fashionable it becomes, almost by definition, a cosmetic solution. When we offer a service primarily because clients want it, we have chosen commerce over care. If we were strictly a business you might say, What’s the problem? The customer is always right. We only gave them what they asked for. Being also a service function, though, means that something more is due to the client.

Jeff Evans is a Vice President at Designed Learning and oversees delivery, product quality, and managing our team of international consultants. He’s been partnering with Designed Learning for over 25 years. He’s delivered training in more than ten countries to a diverse set of organizations and participants, including engineers, managers, manufacturing executives, healthcare professionals, human resources and IT.