Enlightened Self-Interest

Capitalism runs on self-interest.  Although the management of your company may be enlightened in their people management skills, it has a fiduciary responsibility to protect the company’s shareholders.  Also, if you are in a position that is affected by politics; i.e., the bailout or investigation of malfeasance, remember that politicians have to get reelected and will keep their contributors’ interests ahead of yours.

If you are at all anxious about your position begin now to think about what you can do to weather the unemployment storm.  If you are not anxious about your position, think again.  Today, no one is safe…unless you have incriminating pictures of the CEO from the last company party.  Just kidding. 

But, speaking seriously, there is no job security today.  You are only as good as you are perceived to be by upper management.  I am not suggesting you should spend more time kissing up.  But you do need to seriously think about your own self-interests.

Taking Care of Yourself
So, how do you take care of yourself?  There are two ways:

1. Make yourself more valuable to you.  Learn new skills, take on new projects and solve problems you can point to on your resume if it comes to that.  If you are not yet looking for a job pull out your resume and study it.  What needs to be strengthened?  When or if you enter the job market you will be facing heavy competition.  How can you honestly put yourself above the crowd?  One tip:  if you are in HR learn analytics and become financially literate.  You don’t have to be a statistician or a CPA but you must understand and be able to converse intelligently in these disciplines.  If you can show the interviewing manager that you speak the language of business rather than just HR you will be ahead of 80 percent of the people in line for an HR job.

2. Make yourself more valuable to your employer.  What are the major sore points with your company today and tomorrow?  What is keeping the C-level up at night?  Is it cost reduction, marketing, new technology, the competition, new regulations, product obsolescence?  How can you help solve those problems?  If push comes to shoving someone out the door you will need allies at different levels in the company.  Who will support you if the axe is about to fall?  The answer is that the people who you have helped sort out their thinking, make themselves more valuable and move up in the organization will go to bat for you.

New Fields
What can you do if you are looking at a job in an industry in which you have never been employed?  Years ago I was coming from banking and competing for a job in a computer company.  My competitors were people from the electronics industry.  I could barely spell electronics.  My pitch was that I was going to bring in fresh perspectives to the company.  If they hired someone from another computer company they were just recycling someone else’s old ideas.  It worked.  I got the job.

Golden Advice
When I came out of the navy and was seeking my first job I recall that I had over 20 interviews without success.  One day I was at American Airlines talking about employment.  Toward the end of our interview the nice man gave me a piece of advice about interviewing.  He said something like, “I know this is a tough job market and you probably have suffered through a lot of interviews.  Let me tell you something that might be helpful.  No matter how tired and discouraged you might feel – smile.  Show yourself to be a very positive personality.  We can teach you our business but we can’t teach you to be positive if you are not naturally upbeat and energetic. “

I never forgot that.  Throughout the rest of my career I went into interviews with a very positive aura about me, no matter how I felt.  Thereafter, I won every job I interviewed for.  You can too if you just remember to smile, inside and outside.  By the way, it also works for any meeting you go into.  It gives you an aura that people want to follow.

New is Old
You’ve heard that there is nothing new under the sun, and to some extent it is true.  All innovations are updates or extensions of something that has gone before.  Manufacturers add another ingredient and call it all new.  Consultants take an old concept and put a new title on it.  How do you tell if something is truly an innovation?

Is outsourcing an innovation?  No.  In 1949, 22-year-old Henry Taub started Automatic Payrolls, a manual payroll preparation service in Paterson, New Jersey.  Today, ADP provides outsourcing services for 585,000 clients and earns nearly $9 billion annually doing it.

Is talent management an innovation?  No.  It is simply a label for a more holistic view of managing the organization’s human capital.  TM is composed of many well-known individual acts and processes.  They are simply applied to new circumstances.

The central question is not what’s new; it is what difference will it make?  The focus must be on new value, rather than on being innovative for its own sake.  Doing something differently is only useful if it adds value.

The Impact Test
All organizations, profit and not for profit, have four focal points: quality, innovation, productivity and service (QIPS).  The first question should be which of the four are we trying to affect?  They are interactive.  If we do something innovative it has value only if it improves quality, productivity and/or service.

Next comes the question of where is the need and what is its sibling impact?  Obviously, we act in order to better serve customers.  What are the customers demanding or, is there something new we could introduce that they don’t even know they would like to have?  An example of the latter is the personal computer.  Computers have been in use in primitive non-electronic forms for hundreds of years.  Think of abacuses, Babbage’s difference engine and slide rules.  When Jobs and Wozniak developed the first Apple personal computer they were building on those earlier principles.

In human capital management what can you do that would be innovative and where do you expect to find its impact?  I submit that shifting your attention from reporting past outcomes to predicting future probabilities qualifies as an innovation.

Predictability
With the exception of R&D and market research, most data collected in organizations focuses on the past.  Accounting results, production data, sales records and customer reactions are all lagging indicators.  That is, they tell us what happened in some past period.

Which is more useful, to report on the past or predict the future?  When you plan a trip to a distant place do you study their weather history or do you look up the weather forecast?  You might do a bit of the former, but you will make plans based on the latter.  In management it is the same story.  We need to review our lagging indicators to learn from the past.  But we need the best possible view of the future to manage tomorrow.

How to Be Predictive
The first step toward anything innovative or predictive is to study the past.  The scientists who design new products stand on the trials and errors of those who have gone before.  Edison designed his light bulb based on 75 years of previous research that started in 1802 when Humphrey Davy created the first incandescent light by passing the current through a thin strip of platinum.

You can access one hundred years of management research on the internet.  If you want a short cut read Peter Drucker.  His seminal writings give you great insight into the fundamentals of organizational effectiveness.  Bolster that with the work of Maslow, Herzberg, Collins, Christensen, Charan and the current heavy thinkers.  Don’t take the bait offered by self-proclaimed gurus who parrot the work of others and put their name on it.  Remember what Drucker said, “The reason journalists call people gurus is because they don’t know how to spell charlatan.”

Don’t buy the latest panacea just because it sounds enticing.  Always start with a specific goal in mind. Think customer needs and work backward through QIPS to employee behavior.  What can you do to support more effective human capital performance that is traceable through your organization to the customer?  If it is innovative so much the better.  But the real test is does it add value?