Evaluating Investments in HR

For many HR practitioners being able to provide a logical business case and proper evaluation that links HR investment to key financial outcomes would represent a huge step forward for their credibility. Yet, it is a fact that we typically spend large sums of money implementing leadership development programmes, talent management, employer branding etc, and almost nothing on assessing their strategic impact. In part, this is because we believe that it is impossible to measure intangibles - what's meaningful isn't measurable and what's measurable isn't usually meaningful. So we justify our actions on the basis of acts of faith or attempt to persuade senior managers with arguments along the best practice, 'everyone is doing it', so 'we don't want to be left behind' lines (often following attendance at some networking event). Unreflective copying and jumping on the bandwagon, alongside legal requirements (themselves often based on 'best practice'), are the main drivers and justification for spending vast sums of money on 'soft' initiatives. This is why institutional theorists argue most organizations and their HR architectures end up looking the same, and, as the more perceptive strategists point out, where is the competitive advantage (or even best practice) in that?

So it is with some relief (not total) that I've picked up two recent American books. One, the Differentitated Workforce' by Becker, Huselid and Beatty, I will leave for a later post because it is more mainstream and I'm currently testing some of their ideas with a group of great HR managers from Getinge as we speak. The other is Wayne Cascio and John Boudreau's 'Investing in People: Financial Impact of Human Resource Initiatives'. This book is probably the best I've read in the field, in part because it deals with measures in a sophisticated way, in part because it not so much a book about measures but about understanding the logics that link strategic decisions to human capital initiatives and their outcomes. John Boudreau is a 'name' on the HR circuit following his book in 2007 on 'Beyond HR', while Wayne Cascio I know from my time working at the University of Colorado where he teaches and researches. Wayne wrote one of the first books on measuring HR and this works represents the culmination of a long career in introducing rationalism into the HR profession.

For me, the highlights of their book are three-fold. The first is the LAMP framework, which states that you can only use HR metrics as a force for strategic change if you have the right logic (that link your measures to competitive advantage, pivotal points through causal modelling, etc), the right measures (timely, reliable and available data) the right analytics (good questions and analysis of data) and the right processes (good knowledge management in the organization and a culture that supports learning, not just assessment, from measurement).

The second is the use of yield curves to examine the types of jobs (and people) where firms should invest their money for the greatest return. Boudreau tackled this in his earlier book and the book by Becker et al also make great play of this very important point that it is the range of performance variation in jobs (the difference between best performance and poor performance) that helps determine this yield. The most quoted example is Disney: where do you put your money for greatest return ie satisfied customers, Mickey Mouse or the street sweepers who are key customer relations people? The answer is for a small extra investment in selecting and developing street sweepers you get an enormous yield in satisfied customers because their performance varies so much; investing more in the characters playing Mickey Mouse etc is unlikely to yield such returns because the performance variation in these characters has been effectively drilled out so that one Mickey Mouse is no different to another. You can apply this analogy in healthcare, education and many other jobs - well worth thinking about.

The third key element is the focus on causal modelling and logic. This is fast becoming de rigeur among sophisticated HR functions and forms part of a project we are conducting for the Scottish Governement and ESRC. The core argument is that organizations need to develop the right logic linking their HR practices to business unit or strategic peformance. Sounds logical but it is not what most organizations do, judging by the use made of engagement models and engagement data in the firms I observe. So if you are involved in assessing employee engagement, just reading the chapter on the logics of engagement (derived from sound evidence-based academic research) will be worth your time and money alone.

Two words of warning. This is not an easy read for the more mathematically challenged, but don't be put off because the arguments are the most important element in the book (and you can always employ a statistician). Second, it begins to sound a little like best practice by railing against best practice, just like the Becker et al book I'll discuss next. I'm always worried by the idea there is only one way or the highway approaches to HR, which this is close to becoming. There are some important assumptions and simplifications in this book that just don't stand close scrutiny. For all that, this is one of the HR books of the year for me, and I will use it extensively in teaching and consulting.

Past Transgressions

I have come across some information at work and I don't know what I should do about it. Please help!

I work in a sales environment. I have been there for over one year now and I love all of the people for the exception of the one person I work for most directly -- I will refer to her as Andrea from here on. She is loud, obnoxious, dresses far too casually, and lies about every single thing that she does, yet still seems to be the apple of upper management's eye no matter how badly she errors or how much money she costs the company.

I was searching online last week to make sure a popular search engine would direct visitors searching our names to our company website. While searching, I came across some information about my co-worker's past. It was not something I was looking for or something that I ever would have imagined that I would find. The websites that I found were public websites containing detailed information about her prior arrests and convictions of drug trafficking, drug possession (crack cocaine), and carrying illegal tools (i.e. a crack pipe). I have verified this information to be absolutely accurate and is definitely related to Andrea without any doubt whatsoever.

I have not told a single person at work about this information because I assumed that she disclosed this information on her application for employment. However, I was able to view her application (which I was allowed to do for reasons not relating to this incident) and it was not disclosed.

Here is my dilemma: I am worried as to whether or not I should bring this information to the management's attention. I do not want her to get in trouble or lose her job even though I do not like her. Everyone makes mistakes in their past (and this was ten years ago) and I truly don't think that she deserves to have all this brought up again after she's started a new career (she lost her last job and ended up in the news about it because of the nature of her previous career path), but I am worried from a liability standpoint. What if she is still consuming illegal substances and ends up injuring someone at work because she cannot control herself (or her driving, which is a huge part of what she does every day) in a particular situation? One other person at work found out about this information within one day of when I found out about it because we were both checking to see if our names were directing people to our website through a popular search engine. This person brought it to my attention but we did not discuss any of the details because I did not feel that this was appropriate, but now it is known that I, too, have this information.

If I bring this to the attention of management I do not want them to think that I am bringing this up to damage her reputation or get her fired. It is well known that we do not like each other and that we work together only for the better of the company. I simply want to do the right thing but I'm not sure what that is. I could be making this into a huge deal over nothing and perhaps the best thing to do would be to keep the information to myself. Our company policy is that we do not hire people who have prior criminal backgrounds due to the nature of the business. She signed waiver forms to have a complete background check, police report check, credit check, fingerprint scan through a national database, and a drug pre-screening (four years ago), but obviously something was overlooked somewhere. Please share your thoughts on this situation. Your guidance is appreciated.

You know, I'd really like to believe that you are altruistic and only have the company's best interest at heart.

But, I don't. Not for a second. You don't like Andrea, and dollars to donuts, neither does your co-worker who also found out about Andrea's past.. (What on earth does googling your company name have to do with googling all your co-workers? Not saying you can't do that, but puh-lease. Don't try to pass off your "what's our Google ranking" with "I wonder what I can find out about Andrea.")

You found out some nasty stuff and have "authenticated it." (How? Asking her? DNA samples? Just wondering.) And further more, I'm trying to figure out how on earth you got access to her application file? I can count on one hand the number of times I've needed to reference someone's application and I'm HR. I can't figure out what information a salesperson would need from her co-worker's application. I can't come up with a legitimate reason. (I'm sure someone has one, I just can't think of one.)

If Googling your co-worker's names was a legitimate assignment, then you would have written up a report summarizing your findings. Then it would be allowable to say, "When you Google Andrea + Company name you get police records for someone with the same name. When you google John + Company name you get a link to "who we are" page on the company website. When you Google Katie + Company name you get a link to a weight loss forum." If the offense is ten years out (and I know there wasn't anything more recent because I know you tried to find more dirt), then they probably couldn't have even considered it when they hired her. Sure, the lying on the application part is reason not to hire someone, but they did and I don't care how you authenticated the information, unless your brother was her actual crack dealer you didn't authenticate it.

You will be the person who looks bad. Andrea will look like the victim.

Leave it alone. Do not discuss this with your fellow dirt digger. Get back to work and stop surfing the web. If this information comes to light and someone comes to you and says, "how come you didn't tell us about Andrea!?!?!?!?" you can simply reply, "Our company policy is to run a background check on everyone before they are hired. I assumed that management was aware of this information. Additionally, Andrea's past is not relevant to her current performance."

My Top 10

Blogs.com takes top 10 lists from various bloggers. Now they've posted mine!

It's probably not quite what you'd expect from me, but I hope you find it amusing.

Why Leaders Change Things, Often with No Impact

The leadership seminar we did for the ESRC and Scottish Government yesterday provided me with an excellent explanation for why leaders’ desire to change things often results in no significant progress (but plenty of change fatigue and rewards for leaders). I’m grateful to Keith Grint for pointing me in the direction of this interesting piece of research over a cup of tea prior to the seminar.

(By the way, if you want access to what we talked about, here’s the publication we produced for the seminar with the help of Chris Blunkell, the ESRC and Scottish Government. It will be posted shortly).

Back to the story - a group of Israeli researchers shed new light on these issues, drawing from the art of goalkeeping in soccer [Bar-Eli, Michael, Azar, Ofer H., Ritov, Ilana, Keidar-Levin, Yael and Schein, Galit (2006): "Action bias among elite soccer goalkeepers: The case of penalty kicks," in: Journal of Economic Psychology].

Here’s how one blogger, Elli Malki, from the financial services industry described the research because the analogy has been used before (and she summarises the article well saving me from doing it).

‘ The researchers examined a very unique situation in soccer games—penalty kicks. From a behavioral point of view, penalty kicks have several unique characteristics:
ln most cases, the penalty kick ends with a goal being scored, thus having a significant effect on the result of the game.
An experienced goalkeeper has faced many penalty kicks and thus is expected to know how to react to them.
From the moment of the kick, it takes 0.2-0.3 seconds until the ball reaches the goal. Thus, the goalkeeper cannot know in advance what will be the direction of the kick and must choose the direction of his jump based on his past experience.
As a result of these characteristics, a penalty kick is a type of a "natural experiment" in which it is possible to examine the choices made by the goalkeepers under uncertainty. Since soccer players' compensation is dependent on the performance of their team, the result of the goalkeeper's choice will not only affect the result of the particular game, but also the long-term prospects for himself and for his team.
The researchers examined 286 documented penalty kicks from games of top soccer teams. For each one of the penalty kicks, a group of three qualified referees was asked to determine: (1) the direction of the kick; (2) the direction of goalkeeper's jump.

The results are presented in Table 1 and Table 2 in the original paper.


To summarise, Table one showed that the directions of the kicks were almost uniformly distributed. About 1/3 of the kicks were aimed to each one of the directions (left, right or center of the goal). On the other hand, the decisions of the goalkeepers were biased toward jumping to either the left or the right side of the goal. Only in just over 6% of the penalty kicks did the goalkeeper choose to stay in the center of the goal.

Were the decisions of the goalkeepers rational? To answer this question, the researchers examined the success rate of the goalkeepers to stop the penalty kicks. Altogether, goalkeepers succeeded in stopping 42 penalty kicks—14.7% of all the kicks that were examined. The overall success rate of stopping penalty kicks is very low and most kicks result in a goal being scored. The results showed that there is no connection between the success rate in stopping the kick and the direction of the kick. The success rate is very similar regardless of the direction of the kick.
On the other hand, an analysis of the 42 successes showed that the success rate of staying in the center (e.g., doing nothing) was more than double than the success rate of jumping to either direction.

Thus it seems that the decision made by the goalkeepers in 94% of the cases—to jump either to the right or the left—was not rational, since it decreased their chances of stopping the penalty kick.

Why does it happen? The researchers provide the following explanation:

An identical negative outcome (a goal being scored) is perceived to be worse when it follows inaction rather than action. The intuition is that if the goalkeeper jumps and a goal is scored, he might feel "I did my best to stop the ball, by jumping, as almost everyone does; I was simply unlucky that the ball headed to another direction (or could not be stopped for another reason)." On the other hand, if the goalkeeper stays in the center and a goal is scored, it looks as if he did not do anything to stop the ball (remaining at his original location, the center)—while the norm is to do something—to jump. Because the negative feeling of the goalkeeper following a goal being scored (which happens in most penalty kicks) is amplified when staying in the center, the goalkeeper prefers to jump to one of the sides, even though this is not optimal.

And this explantion was confirmed by subsequent interviews with top professional goalkeepers

The researchers call this behavioural phenomenon an "action bias." (Elli Malki, http://www.indexuniverse.com/sections/research/4801-what-can-investors-learn-from-goalkeepers.html?start=1&Itemid=7)

Elli’s concern was the relationship between and action-bias and investment decisions. However, the authors of the article also point out implications for management, the most obvious one being why leaders change things (even when doing nothing would be the right course of action). When an action-bias is couple with significant rewards for changing things, as is often the case under modern day performance management, appraisal and pay systems, this action-bias is likely to be magnified substantially – ‘ leaders change things, they do not maintain’ goes the clarion call and is given further credence by the often made distinction between management (who do maintain) and leaders. Yet, often this action bias, motivated and sustained by the rewards system, leads to little else other than the creation of further problems, which, yes, you’ve guessed it, requires a further action bias. The result is, as Keith Grint pointed out, 25 years of constant structural change in the NHS has resulted in no change. We’re pretty much where we were at the beginning.

Bruce Ahlstrand made a similar point in a book many years ago revisiting productivity bargaining at the Esso Fawley Plant, made famous by Alan Flanders book in the 1960s (for the old industrial relations scholars). Twenty-five years of productivity bargaining from 1960 onwards implemented by frequent changes in HR leadership resulted in Esso Fawley remaining bottom of the productivity league table, exactly where it began in the early 19060s. He attributed this to a performance appraisal system that rewarded change, a failure to monitor the results of the changes but people being promoted on the basis of introducing change. New appointees were stuck with the same problem (because the unions learned new tricks to re-invent them) so naturally they came up with the same solution, albeit in a different guise. So, there's definitely something in the old saying, "the more things change, the more they remain the same'.

Counter Offers

I work in California and have recently been offered a similar position with a new company. I turned in my resignation letter today and my boss asked me what it would take to make me stay. I told him that if they increase my salary to match the new offer I would stay.

After he talks with his boss and HR, he tells me that they will match the offer but they want to see a hard copy first.

I'm wondering if this is violating my privacy rights to salary information. I'm also hesitant to provide a copy of the new offer because I do not want to jeopardize this new position if the negotiations fall-out. Perhaps I could mark out the name and contact information of the new company....

I think you should thank your boss for his confidence in you, and take the new job and leave.

Why?

Because you went looking for a new job for a reason and it's highly doubtful that that reason was money. Oh sure, we all want more money. Me too. But, money is rarely the reason why people start looking for a new job.

I hear screaming from the crowd. The crowd is saying, "But I just went out looking for more money! I didn't have any other reason for looking for a new job. I love my job! I do! I just want more money.!"

Sure, fine. So, why did your boss not offer you more money before you presented him with an offer from a new company? Hmmm?

I believe it was because the company you worked for did not value you any higher.

Sure, your boss would love to give you more money but company policies prevent it.

Stupid company. They need to be watching out for their best people and meeting their needs. And if you truly loved your boss you wouldn't have been out looking for a new job in the first place.

There is another reason why you went out job shopping. Think about that. Most people who accept counter offers leave within a year anyway.

If you decide you want to continue on with the negotiations, go ahead and show them the offer letter. If you are concerned that doing this will jeopardize your job offer, that means you don't trust your boss or the HR person. Why on earth are you staying with a company where you don't trust your boss not to actively screw you over?

Think about that for a moment.

Take the new job and good luck.

Bad Science

A good colleague of mine, Robert MacIntosh, has just created a blog for PhD students in management. He's developing it as a resource site for them and has included a number of books that might help those people learn about what consitutes good research. I'm going to suggest he recommends Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, a wonderfully funny and well written book with serious messages on what comprises knowledge in the field of healthcare, nutrition and much of the nonsense that gets acres of press coverage by all branches of the media.

Goldacre, a medical doctor, writer and columnist in the Guardian, has brought together ideas from his website to do a demolition job on popular treatments such as Homeopathy, Brain Gym, much of Nutritional 'Science', Pills that solve social problems such as Omega - 3, etc., and people who promote them, including Gillian McKeith and Professor Sir Robert Winston. He does so from the perspective of a trained experimental scientist, used to applying the rigours of controls, placebos, probablity sampling, etc to the evaluation of research. For the most part, these are not the kinds of rigours that some PhD students in management are used to, nor are they necessarily sympathetic to the positivist assumptions underlying this form of knowledge production - at least in the UK. However, it's probably best that they learn about them, if only to defend their methodologies and methods against those examiners with a scientific disposition - and I've come across a no more amusing nor sharply intelligent way of doing so than by dipping into this book.

Reading it has helped me understand where my class of surgeons, physicians and dentists are coming from when they looked at us with some astonishment when introducing them to the 'rigours' of action research in clinical leadership. It's a world away from their world, though as the author frequently mentions, what is often the most interesting aspects of the findings are the complex social issues that often have the greatest impact on treatments.

The book has also taking me down another path to explore the metaphor of 'leadership as placebo'. This is not a new idea: it was first 'discovered' nearly a century ago during the Hawthorne studies when productivity progressively increased during the so-called experimental stages even when benefits given to the girls in the Relay Assembly Test Room were removed (at least that's the myth). Mayo, the father of Organizational Behaviour at Harvard, explained these findings in terms of the bad science of the Hawthorne effect, sympathetic leadership and the development of 'appropriate norms' rather than the treatment (increased lighting, rest breaks, etc) - itself an explanation that was based on bad science. Nevertheless, placebos in the form of sugary coated pills (read leadership) can produce some extraordinary effects because people want to believe in their efficacy, as Goldacre points out in a stunning set of findings by Braithwaite and Cooper in 1981 on research into headaches. 835 women were given either aspirin or placebo pills, packed in either bland boxes or flashy, brand name packaging. They found that aspirin did have a positive effect on treating headaches, but more than that they found the packaging enhanced both the effects of the aspirin and placebo pills.

Just like some nutritional and pharmacological treatments, the evidence on leader impact on performance isn't strong, yet the belief in leaders is high, especially when they come well packaged and branded. Goldacre argues his medical case in the context of the highly dubious claims that fish-oil pills improve childrens intelligence, which are accorded no support by good science. Yet belief in these pills is widespread and the main reason for this state of affairs lies not just with the hucksters and snake oil salesman but with the media in the form of the news values of journalists and how stories are pushed. What is also evident is the invention by pill salesmen and some unethical pharmaceutical companies of new diseases because they cannot find new treatments for the diseases we already have. A parallel exists in the business field, because power lies in the ability of leaders, according to the leader-centric explanations of business performance, not because the facts support this explanation but because of the media's need for celebrity and their search for heros (and more recently villains). And because some leaders become almost deified by the business and popular media, they are encouraged to search for new problems (or diseases) to solve, often in contexts for which they have no previous nor relevant experiences. Such is the case with the system of pantouflage in France, whereby public sector leaders can easily transfer to positions in the private sector because of who they are, not what they know. It also occurs in the reverse direction in Anglo-Saxon countries such as the USA and UK. Leadership as craft it seems is not important, where leaders learn to lead with followers; instead it is the art of leaders and their charisma that dominates popular imagination and the expectations of many followers.

It is just such an unhealthy view that has led to the problems we currently face in many of our companies. Am I onto something here with this metaphor, and can our PhD students learn more from reading serious 'airport books' like this one on medical research than some of the material we pass off as knowledge about management?

Avoiding the Mistakes of the Past: Downsizing and Corporate Reputations

I've been asked to address an audience of executives on Tuesday in Glasgow on dealing with the recession and people management, so I've turned to the lessons of history and, increasingly on these occasions to CV Harquail's blog, Authentic Organizations, for some lessons from the present and excellent insights into all thing organizational. On her blog there is an excellent threaded discussion on the layoff/alternative to layoffs debate and references to an old (1999) but recently updated study of Downsizing the company without downsizing morale,which has recently appeared in the Sloan Management Review by Aneil Mishra, Karen Mishra and Gretchen Spreitzer. I won't repeat their findings because you can get easy access to them by clicking on the above discussion ( (hello to the CEED group in Glasgow in anticipation you'll read this blog and apologies to those fortunate enough not to be present to hear my second-hand account of this line of argument).

I'll also be drawing on another recent study that appeared in the recent edition of the august Academy of Management Journal (not the kind of thing that many practitioners would read; nor, it seems, do many academics, but this article has caused some interest since it was reviewed in last week's Economist). In the article, by Geoffrey Love and Mathew Kraatz on '...how and why downsizing affected corporate reputations' (AMJ, 2009, Vol 52, No. 2, 314-335 for those interested), the authors draw on three sources of literature to explain why an audience attributes positive and negative reputations and why these attributions may change over time.

The first is the corporate character explanation that explains why people value organizational personality traits such as trustworthiness and reliability (my colleague Gary Davies has written extensively about this). These traits essentially explain how and why firms can create differentiation and novel EVPs. The second explanation begins from a different place in that it explains why firms tend to become similar (for the initiated, institutional isomorphism). Audiences tend to value actions that show conformity to cultural norms - of society, industries, professions etc. The third is more basic, at least in its simplest version, and is rooted in exchange theory - people assign reputations based on the answer to the question: what does it do for me in relation to my material and emotional needs (and, as we argue, valued expectations of psychological contracts)?

One of the novel aspects of their study is that is was carried out on financial analysts' assignment of reputations and those of peer firm executives to a sample of Fortune 500 companies that had downsized over the period 1985-94. The conclusions were complex but to summarise:

• Downsizing resulted in a signifcant negative effect on reputational change, even among financial analysts,


• But only early on in the study time frame, because planned downsizing fitted well with the analysts' and executives' perceptions of legitimate actions, especially if it led to valued results for them.


• Thus, the conclusions the authors draw, is that it seems that violating commitments to employees and the community is more permissable when there is a 'clear and present danger', but that reputational assignment changes over time

A similar argument is made by previous study in the Sloan article in that the layoff/alternative to layoff decisions may be less important to employees than being active participators in the decisions - see the outcomes of the process as fair (procedural justice) and feel empowered to address the additional problems created by the solutions. However, these positive outcomes are contingent on them trusting management to draw on higher values and long term interests rather than use recession as an exercise in opportunistic cost-cutting or to get rid of people they see as poor performers (often those who speak truth to power but who may be seen as destructive actives in the language of the Sloan diagram?).

These are US studies, and I've made the point on CVs blog that the Employment Protection legislation introduced in the UK many years ago when I had to deal with layoffs for real, more or less instiutionalised the notion of firms seeking to avoid layoffs asa first port of call and widespread consultation over alternatives to redundancy with staff. Nowadays, there is certainly current evidence of firms embodying spirit not just the letter of this legislation in the UK, which is contained in a recent CIPD survey on talent management and in article in People Management. But is this the norm, or do firms still privilege analysts' attributions of reputations in the long run, regardless of the clear and present danger?

Team Building

A friend had to go to a mandatory "team building" event. You can probably guess my opinion of such things, but some people like them. Wasting time "building unity" by doing a silly activity such as building a raft, making a dinner or negotiating a ropes course is bad enough during business hours, but this event was held in the evening.

You remember the purpose of evenings, don't you? It's time to be at home.

During this team building activity, a nice HR person (who undoubtedly had a hand in organizing the whole event) talked about how they were having a turnover problem. The theory was that by building cohesiveness everyone would start to love their team so much they wouldn't dare leave.

I think HR should have thought, "Gee, maybe it's that whole work-life balance thing creeping up on us. Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't require people to spend their evenings at team building events!"

Sometimes we get caught up in the latest fad or program and we think, "gee, won't this be fabulous!" and we forget to ask if this is actually helping the business by truly meeting the needs of the people. Yes, the activity you came up with might be "fun," but most people consider work, work and want to find their fun elsewhere.

Or we think that for a team to be effective they need to be bonded in some significant fashion. And that perhaps trusting my coworker to catch me as I fall backwards will improve performance all around. Frankly, I'd rather trust my coworker to get her part of the project done on time. That builds team cohesiveness better than anything else, in my humble opinion.

So, next time you go implementing some sort of program, stop and think about how this will really affect business performance. Is it helping or inadvertantly hurting?

Vacation Micro Management

Need an opinion. I am an owner of a small-mid size consumer and auto finance company. We currently staff 6-7 full time employees. I was having a recent conversation with my office manager/supervisor regarding our policies on vacation. In a nut shell we offer 2 weeks of paid vacation from April through October. The supervisor has just earned a 3rd week for reaching 5 years (anniversary date) with the company. The only stipulations other than the months vacation can be scheduled is that 1 full consecutive week be taken and for those having 2 weeks, the second week can be split into a 3/2 or 2/3 day format allowing for some flexibility. I’m not a fan of that and would prefer that all vacation be taken in full one week increments M-F. I have kept the split format for the second week as a perk for my employees. Previously we also did not allow vacation to be taken at “month end” either because of the process we go through to close out our month. Due to some better and more efficient software the process is cut to a 1/3 so now we allow vacation to be scheduled around that time. Another perk in my opinion that I agreed to at my employee’s request. I also ask that vacations be posted by April 15th of each year so proper planning can be accomplished.

We recently had an employee to schedule his full week’s vacation Wed-Tues kinda screwing up two weeks if you know what I mean and now has two other split time vacations scheduled. This was an oversight on my supervisors part for not catching it but not intentional. At explaining “again” why we keep this format I restated that this is the reason I am a proponent of consecutive weeks not splits. Other wise if you’re not careful you’ll have folks out every week of the summer doing these mini vacations. I made the off color comment that it kinda goes back to them being a bit spoiled. She made the comment that this was the strictest vacation policy she had worked with before.

Sorry for the verboseness of this but I wanted to paint you a picture. In your experience as an HR professional does it sound like my vacation policies are “strict”? Being the owner and knowing that I try and perk them as much as I can in other areas too; I was quite offended at that comment and I guess am looking for an outside opinion. THANKS for your time!

I think you are thinking about this a little too much. What's the point of vacation? Honestly. Why give vacation at all? Well, because people wouldn't work for you if you didn't and because, drum roll please, people perform better if they have a break from time to time.

Now, I know nothing about the auto financing world, but I can't imagine that the winter months are so furiously busy that no one can take a single day off. So, why limit vacation time to the summer only? If part of the problem is having people out of the office, spreading it out over an entire year should help with that problem. Then you have less of a chance of two people wanting to leave at the same time.

What do you do when someone's brother-in-law decides to get married in February? Or someone's first grandchild is born in December? Are they not allowed to take any time off? Now, avoiding a gathering of inlaws might be a perk to the job, but what grandmother is going to want to hold off visiting the new baby, who happens to be in Keokuk Iowa?

On the number of days at a time, taking a week off consecutively does have some benefits, among them being an opportunity for fraud detection and a true chance to rest and relax. Requiring people to take the remaining vacation in one two and one three day chunk seems pointless.

You state that one employee "screwed" up two weeks by going Wed-Tues. Again, not knowing anything about car financing, but I can't see why this is. And what's wrong with a mini vacation? In fact, if my job is to cover for you while you are out, I'd much rather have you gone one day at a time than 3 days in a row. If you are just going to be out on Friday, most likely you'll work extra hard on Thursday and then anything that's not pressing I can just hold for you to do when you get back on Monday. If you're gone for 2, 3 or 5 days in a row, then I'm forced to do more of your job, which puts pressure on me.

I don't like more pressure on me, and neither do most of your employees.

If I were you, I'd loosen the hold on vacation. Let people take their vacation when they want to. (Although I do agree with a no vacation for the last week of the month/quarter/whatever super busy time you have, rule. That's good business sense and responsible employees wouldn't ask anyway, except in extreme circumstances.)

I think you'll find that it won't be nearly as disruptive as you fear. Most people want to do a good job and appreciate being given control over their own lives, as much as possible. You say that you spoil them. Excellent. Spoiled employees are happy employees (as long as you are also providing feedback and improvement plans and goals and all that other fun stuff that comes from being the boss). You want spoiled, but not rotten employees.

Have a marvelous vacation yourself. Switzerland is nice this time of year.

Random Swiss Fact

My computer is fixed. Yeah! It took a little longer than I thought because our friend did not have the right part. He knew what part I needed, though, so he wrote it down for me. I took it to the computer store and presented the written part number to the nice man behind the counter.

This man, by the way, spoke English, and apologized to me for his subject/verb order. "I need to work on my English!" he said. I thought that if I could get both a subject and a verb in German I wouldn't care about the proper order, I'd just be thrilled I'd communicated something.

Anyway, the computer store (and I find this amazing), does not accept credit cards. Cash or debit only. They sell computers! And big screen televisions! And fancy computer equipment.

I can only imagine that a place like that in America would go out of business if it didn't accept credit.

Fortunately, my part was only 29.90CHF, so not buying on credit wasn't a hardship. Still, I was amazed. They definitely have a different attitude towards credit over here.

Kaboom!

So, you are all wondering, what in the heck is she doing? Just sitting around and eating chocolate? Where are the posts?

Well, I am sitting around and eating chocolate. But, the reason for the lack of posting is that I blew up my computer.

Yes, smoke was coming out of the back. Yippee. Normally I would borrow my husband's computer, but he was on a business trip to New Jersey, of all places. Sigh.

My computer will (hopefully) be functional tonight. (I'm using my husband's right now.) Let's hear it for super-friendly-computer-savy computer people from church, who when he heard about my plight came over and volunteered to attempt to fix it. (He said if he's attempt doesn't work, then I would be wise to just buy a new computer as the cost to fix it would be more money than it would be worth.) I just have to say that this experience just adds to my opinion that the people of Switzerland are just so incredibly friendly.

Of course, I still don't know what people are saying to me 90% of the time, so for all I know they could be insulting my hair style, but they do it in a nice tone and with a smile, so I presume niceness all around.

Critical Perspectives on Leadership: A Little Night Reading

I've just spent extremely stimulating three days facilitating a group of HR practitioners from the Swedish-based multinational, Getinge, in Lund. They came from Sweden, Poland, the UK, the USA, Germany and France to learn about the problems of leadership and the difficulties of establishing common values in a complex organization. In a week's time, I'm tasked with a related set of problems, this time examining the relevance of leadership theory to public sector policy makers in Scotland. With these projects in mind and having written a text which deals with the topic a few years ago, I recently picked up a fascinating little book by Brad Jackson and Ken Parry, entitled ' A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Leadership', published by Sage ( a companion to an earlier text of the same ilk by Chris Grey on organizational studies). Written as an introduction for students, the authors hope that academics like me who skirt around the subject will learn something from it. I certainly did, and I would thoroughly recommend it to any of my students, the HR group at Getinge and the public policy group I'm about to meet.

The book is a gem and to boot is well written and short, although it is much more than the kind of an annotated bibliography that you might find in similar sized textbooks on the subject. Along with Keith Grint's 2005 book on the limits and possibilities of leadership, the authors provide an up-to-date critical review of much of the extant leadership literature and way of integrating different strands of leadership thinking in a very helpful and practical way.

After an introduction on why leadership matters, a not uncontested debate given the evidence on the lack of positive impact of leaders on organizational performance, the authors make the now conventional distinction between research on leader-centred persectives and research on follower-centred perspectives. They outline and discuss the research findings on transformational leadership, charismatic leadership, gender and leadership, and the personality of effective leaders. These are followed by a critical evaluation of these approaches, especially narcissistic leadership and the dark side of charisma - both very topical. The balanced treatment of these leader-centred approaches are followed by an excellent summary and evaluation of the perhaps unnacceptably labelled 'follower centred' theories, made popular by Barbara Kellermans new book on why followers matter. These include theories on how leaders are socially constructed by followers, the romance of leadership which fulfils important needs for many people, psycholanalytical theories that emphasise how we learn to be leaders and followers from early childhood, and social identity theory, which proposes that leaders will be acceptable to the extent they fulfil prototypical expectations of leadership of a particular group. Taken together these theories have great power in explaining why senior public sector leaders are often seen as ineffective, weak, politically driven, etc, in large part because they aren't able to meet the expectations of employees for the kind of leadership that is portrayed in the business press as the private sector ideal.

The next chapter s especially relevant for firms engaged in devising leadership frameworks in international organizations since it deals with cross-cultural leadership. Especially relevant here is the brief but fair evaluation of the GLOBE studies, probably the most extensive research to-date into cross-cultural leadership research. This is followed by a chapter on critical leadership, including newer theories on co-leadership, distributed leadership and team leadership, which have become very popular in the new public sector environment, and among organizations seeking to flatten out hierarchy.

In producing a chapter on research into leadership with a higher purpose, the authors have provided some insights into the now popular calls for leadership 2.0 (see earlier posts), post-transformational/ post charismatic leadership, leadership as art and drama, and leadership as sense-making and the exercise of wisdom. The Half Moon Bay discussions led by Hamel and Birkinshaw reflect many of these ideas and are likely to provide much of the agenda for the reform of leadership/ new directions of leadership debates.

Finally, not content with discussing research only, the authors have an excellent chapter on leadership development, and the strengths and weaknesses of various methods of leader development and leader/ follower development. They also provide some links to resources to help practitioners do further work in this field.

All in all, this is likely to be one of the most profitable three-to-four hour periods that leadership development specialists could spend in understanding the limitations of leaders and the importance of linking leadership to followership. Hopefully it will encourage them to read some of the other authors mentioned in this blog and in the extensive bibliography they provide.