Millennials in the Workforce: Presentation Info

Thanks to everyone at St. Mary’s Hospital who welcomed me on my first trip to Camrose since I was a kid. It was a very enjoyable afternoon and I loved the questions and conversations afterwards.

As promised, I have uploaded my slides from my presentation. Feel free to download it/share as needed by clicking on this link.

As well, if you want to read more on the subject, you can check out an article I wrote on Millennials and Organizational Design. I contemplate how Millennials willimpact organizaiton design in the future. It was published in Proficient magazine last year and you can download this article here.

David Burkus (the leadership scholar who co-wrote the presentation with me) also wrote a great article that was published in Leadership Advance Online. We based some of our presentation on this article and he elaborates on a few of the points I made today. You can download David’s article here.

If you have any comments/questions/thought, feel free to call/email me. For Covenant Health employees, my contact information is listed in our email database. For anyone else, email me at vanderpyl AT gmail.com.

Leading HR: Excelling in Administration

HR leaders, in their quest to be strategic, must not forget about the administrative tasks that still must get done accurately, effectively and efficiently. The scope of HR typically includes managing the HR Information Systems, overseeing contracted services, ensuring compliance with applicable labour and human rights laws, coordinating and delivering on projects and many other things. These mostly administrative tasks are an inevitable aspect of the bureaucratic organization that Max Weber described. If HR departments did not oversee these areas, who would? The role of the HR department does not stop with administrative tasks, but HR leaders must continually find ways to present the data they have in useful ways to leaders.

(I know your mortgage payment bounced last week because we forgot to pay you. Just fill out this form and we’ll fix that in a month or so. While you are here though, check out the itinerary for the Christmas party we’ve been working on!).

HR leaders diminish the importance of administrative and transactional tasks to their own detriment. No matter how ‘strategic’ an initiative might be, no employee will trust HR if the payroll department is unable to get their paychecks or benefits right. Operational leaders will not trust HR if the department constantly bungles their transactions. These transactions and administration are a necessity from HR departments, and HR leaders must ensure their teams excel in all aspects of performing them.

Some companies attempt to outsource as many administrative aspects of HR as possible. This may work for some organizations, but can create its own difficulties as well. For instance, healthcare workers in Calgary, Alberta filed a $50 Million class action lawsuit against Telus Sourcing Solutions Inc. in 2009. Telus was hired by a number of healthcare regions to perform administrative aspects of HR for the HR department. This lawsuit alleged numerous errors and issues with the processing of payroll and demanded damages and became a publicity nightmare for government, executives, and their HR department. Outsourcing does not abdicate responsibility and requires unique leadership competencies by HR leaders who must still be responsible and accountable for the services provided.

Metrics are important but must be delivered in a way that serves and benefits the rest of the organization. These metrics must not simply create more work for other departments. Unfortunately, many HR leaders do this inadvertently and diminish their own credibility in doing so (sure I’ll help you, just fill out this 13 page form first and we’ll add it to that pile over there). HR leaders must take a servant leadership approach to the rest of the organization, in order to be truly effective. Few people would argue that administrative tasks are glamorous, but they are necessary to help the organization function, and for the people in the organization to thrive at whatever they were hired to do.

HR departments may not directly deal with customers, but their ability to excel in administration directly impacts the employees who do.

CBC News. (2009, May 21). Health workers file lawsuit over Telus payroll system. Retrieved from link.

Leading HR: Harnessing Social Power

HR Departments are often seen as the enforcers of the organization; the unbendable glue that protects it from litigation and unscrupulous employees. This is important, but HR also needs to see their role as one of building and valuing personal networks (Galbraith, 2000). The power of these networks cannot be understated. They form an invisible structure that is more powerful than any formal structure imparted by the organization’s leaders. Employees who effectively understand and navigate the social structure of an organization are the most influential employees, for better or for worse, in the organization.

Jay Galbraith describes the “reconfigurable organization” and argues that this type of organization must be able to reconfigure itself by forming teams and networks across organizational departments. As organizations continue to globalize, this ability to form partnerships becomes more and more complex. Galbraith also wrote that “the long-term human resources role is to build social capital by creating richly connected interpersonal networks across the organization.” Strong social networks within organizations can be a valuable competitive advantage in organizations and HR leaders are perfectly poised to ensure those networks remain strong. They are the people department after all.

This social power is especially important as Millennials continue to infiltrate workplaces. Millennials utilize technology with ease, and regularly engage and connect with their social networks. Thirty Percent of Millennials write openly about themselves online (Accenture, 2010), and I suspect that percentage is higher in 2012 than it was in 2010. The technology is a means to connect to them, not the actual connection itself. Most are unable to fathom life without these social networks: real or virtual. They were raised in a world where social media allowed them the freedom to interact with anyone they wanted to, and where the quality of a person’s ideas determines a person’s status, not their job title. They fundamentally believe that digital assets and knowledge are free. Other generations merely wish to believe this. HR leaders must learn to ride these trends, not just attempt to regulate them. Truly effective HR leaders will use these networks to the organization’s advantage, and increase its overall effectiveness by doing so.

Accenture. (2010). Jumping the boundaries of corporate IT: Accenture global research on Millennials’ use of technology. Retrieved from link.

Galbraith, J. (2000). Designing the global corporation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

This is part One of a series I will be doing this summer on leadership by and from HR.

Engagement: One (free) Story at a Time

How much do engaged employees cost? My wife and I recently stayed at the Courtyard Mariott in Calgary. We chatted with the front desk person as we checked in. He was nice and very helpful and did his job checking us in. During our conversation, it came up that it was my wife’s birthday that day. We weren’t expecting anything, it just came up in our conversation. We checked in and about 20 minutes later, the front desk attendant knocked on the door and dropped off three cupcakes and a handwritten birthday card. It made us laugh and of course, we thoroughly enjoyed those cupcakes.

What struck me the most was the simple brilliance of the gesture. It cost the hotel next to nothing, yet it made my day. They didn’t come up with some elaborate way to recognize us or discount our room. The front desk employee just found a way to do something simple. In doing so, he engaged us as customers. I have stayed at dozens of hotels in my life, and most fall into the boring and forgettable good category. I have never had a hotel horror story, but neither have I ever had a service story worthy of sharing. Until now. I am now an engaged customer of this hotel. And a simple gesture tipped me that direction.

I think sometimes we overthink engagement as leaders. We strategize, ponder, form committees, hire consultants, do surveys and all kinds of other things—most of which cost money. But sometimes the best engagement strategies are the simplest ones. I used to work for an organization where the CEO read every performance evaluation of employees in the company (we had about 500 employees). He would put a handwritten note on the back of everyone one congratulating the employee and thanking them on their work. For many employees, that note was the best part of the review. I know I can’t remember most of my reviews, but I do remember his notes.

Spending money on engagement might help, but don’t be afraid to step back in time and use “old” strategies too. Cupcakes and a handwritten card made me an engaged customer of a hotel. Perhaps similar tactics—if they are truly genuine—will help engage your employees too. Write a note. Say thank-you. Pour coffee for them. Say thank you again. Congratulate employees on accomplishments. Brag about your employees’ great works, to your boss. Get your boss to say thank you to your direct reports. Send flowers. Send cupcakes. Create engaged employees one (free) story at a time (Note: Getting your EA to do the aforementioned for you is not the same as you doing it).

Note: I have no affiliation with this hotel, nor did I receive any remuneration for mentioning them in this post.

Book Review: The One-Week Job Project

After finishing university, Sean Aiken embarked on a tour of North America working one job per week for 52 weeks. The One Week Job Project describes his journey over that year and what it’s like to work at 52 different companies. I heard Sean speak a few weeks ago, and loved his stories and ideas. You can learn more about his project here. It’s a great read, and subtly brings us back to the question all of us–leaders and followers–face at some point in our lives: what will my job mean in the end?

This book encapsulates Millennials more than any other book I have read. It describes a typical Millennial’s life journey and overt desire to find our passion, no matter what that passion pays us. It is like an anthem of this generation. Not that all Millennials will work one job a week like Aiken did, but they will strive for meaning in what they do choose to do. Bruce Tulgan uses the term “tapestry” to describe the Millennials career paths, where they want to paint a picture, or create a beautiful work of art with their lives, rather than just climb a corporate ladder to nowhere. Aikens’s book describes that journey, but also previews an intriguing twist with the Millennials: they might actually inspire other generations to question “why” and give up pointless quests for status amidst the rat race as well.

From a leadership perspective, this book is a great reminder that the people I lead have dreams and ambitions. We easily lose sight of that as leaders. In a perfect world, those dreams coincide with their job. But many times, they don’t. Why should I be surprised if they leave my leadership if I don’t care about that meaning? Aiken also gives us numerous examples of how new employees often get treated by companies. If you are an HR leader, this is an especially great book to read to help you understand the mindset of a new employee starting at your company. The little things do matter.

Our followers will not be content with mundane and pointless jobs with no meaning or direction. They see life as being too short to put up with ridiculous demands by leaders. Those domineering leaders will eventually run out of followers willing to put up with them, and they will not be able to compensate for their leadership ineptitude by throwing money at people. 21st century followers will laugh and quit when that happens, rather than stay and be miserable. That will change our workplaces substantially.

I loved this book. Aiken’s writing style reminds me a lot of Donald Miller, and he does a great job of telling the story of his 52 week adventure. Through these stories, he becomes an inadvertent leadership philosopher. It may be a stretch to add it to your leadership bookshelf, but I loved it, and would highly recommend it to anyone feeling a bit restless in your current job. You will soon realize that you are not alone, and many people feel that restlessness. Few of us will create an adventure like Aiken did, but you might be inspired by Aiken’s adventure. As leaders, we might also inspire our followers to find their passion too.

Note: I have no connection to the author or publisher. I did hear Sean speak in person in March 2012. All attendees at this event were given a free copy of the book.

Strategic Plans: $100,000 Coffee Coasters?

Last May, I wrote a post entitled “Save a Tree, Stop Strategic Planning.” My sarcastic post generated more interest than I ever thought it would. I thought I might generate hate mail, or at least have a bunch of people disagree with me, except most people actually agreed with me. Now, 10 months later, I was pondering this week if my views have changed.

Nope.

I still think they are boring and borderline useless. I still think consultants make too much money off of organizations’ planning efforts (it’s only okay if you hire me as your consultant). I still think they might do more to stifle creativity than inspire it. I still think those plans look really pretty on bookshelves. I still think Greenpeace should protest the number of trees killed each year by producing strategic plans. I still think they make great coffee coasters.

The next time you are in a strategic planning session, start adding up the salaries around the room, just for fun. For example, twenty people X $100/hr/person = $2000/hr. Is that planning session worth $2000 per hour?. That’s a rough estimate and it might be significantly more in many companies with high-salaried executives. It also doesn’t include consultant fees, travel costs, administrative costs, and production costs. If it takes a few days to generate, without even realizing it, a company can spend $100,000 or much more developing a strategic plan. Does that plan even recoup the cost of making it? Are there better things to spend $100,000 on?

I read books about Facebook and Google in the last few weeks, and I realized something. Both companies didn’t seem to spend any time, money, or effort strategic planning when they started. Ideas came first, action second. Where was strategic planning? Ummm…maybe the authors just forgot that part where the founders hired a consulting firm to map out their future and they produced a fancy document that outlined all the steps they would need to take to be extremely successful. Yep, I’m pretty sure the authors just forget that part. Or not.

As I wrote last year:

In our enthusiasm about the next fad in planning, do we forget to actually measure the value in strategic planning itself? How many dollars are wasted each year by planning exercises begrudgingly done by those involved? Does anyone dare ask whether we “Should” be planning and risk being labeled an organizational anarchist?

My questions still stand.

The Evolution of HR

I have been reading a lot about HR lately, and am a bit perturbed by the negative perception of HR in management writings. Peter Drucker wrote that personnel administrators are preoccupied with “gimmicks” and consistently complain that they lack status. Drucker wrote that almost 60 years ago and many other authors have echoed his assertions in the decades since. Dave Ulrich edited a book a few years back that compiled essays on the future of HR. Just look at some of these essay titles:

• “Does Human Resources have a future?” (Jeffrey Pfeffer)
• “‘Don’t send me one of those typical human resource people’: A true life adventure story” (Harold Johnson)
• “Judge me more by my future than by my past” (Dave Ulrich)
• “Human resources in the future: An obstacle or a champion of globalization?” (Vladimir Pucik)
• “Is the human resource function neglecting the employees?” (Bruce Ellig)

I would love to say all those titles are outdated, but I am not so sure they are. Has HR actually evolved in the past 15 years?

I think it has. We’ve seen rapid growth in HR being recognized as a legitimate profession over the past couple decades. We’ve seen some exceptional HR leaders be recognized as leaders (without the HR caveat). We’ve seen companies such as SouthWest Airlines flout the importance of their head of HR as being the second in command. We’ve seen legitimate research and journals emerge that study HR practices. I think we still have a ways to go as a profession, but at least we’re not being asked why we’re at the dance in the first place. Now if someone can just teach us how to dance, we’ll be ready to go.

Drucker, P. (1954). The practice of management. New York: Harper Row.

Ulrich, D., Losey, M.R. & Lake, G. (Eds). (1997). Tomorrow’s HR Management: 48 thought leaders call for change. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Do CEOs get paid too much?

I love this infographic from PayScale. Fascinating that one of the best CEOs in America has the lowest ration of the Fortune 50.

My latest article in the Journal of Healthcare Leadership

I have had the privilege of working under and beside some incredible leaders in my career, and I decided to write about one of them. My latest journal article, entitled Servant Leadership: A Case Study of a Canadian Health Care Innovator was just published in the Journal of Healthcare Leadership. This article describes the leadership of Kevin Cowan as he led a remarkable turnaround of St. Michael’s Health Centre, a Lethbridge-based healthcare facility. We can learn a lot from Kevin’s practical approaches to leadership.

To read this article, click here.

My hope is that this article inspires others to find and write about more Canadian leaders, who have done remarkable things in their career. I am sure we have many in our country; we just don’t write about them enough. I hope to change that, starting with this article. I hope you enjoy it.

Book Review: Pension Ponzi

Pensions. Bring that up at a party and watch everyone’s eyes glaze over. It really is more exciting to talk about paint drying than about pensions and actuarial tables, but bear with me. Pension Ponzi by Bill Tufts and Lee Fairbanks is actually a mostly interesting book.

The book is actually about two core issues: public sector pensions and public sector salaries. The issues are intertwined, but actually are two different issues in my mind. Tufts and Fairbanks combine them and rant about both issues throughout the book, and repeat themselves many times in doing so. The book specifically analyzes the Canadian public sector pension and compensation system, but as far as I can tell, the issues apply to other countries as well.

The authors cite many examples–which I do appreciate–but make a crucial error in stating over and over that public sector wages are too high, without adequate comparative data. What is a police officer (or fire fighter, or military officer) worth? How exactly do you compare those jobs to any other profession to determine their profession. Simply stating they get paid too much or too little only works when you compare the salaries. The tough question is what do you compare them to?

Unfortunately, the authors don’t make any attempt to compare public sector wages to private sector counterparts. For example, they laud CEO salaries in Canadian government as being too high. But are they really? Maybe they are, maybe not. What is the CEO of a Billion dollar organization worth? In the private sector, s/he might be paid millions of dollars. So is $XXX,000 too much in the public sector? I don’t know. Maybe it is, but to simply say a salary is too high implies a comparison, and you must present the other side of the comparison to complete the argument. The authors don’t do so unfortunately.

Pensions are complicated and the authors to a pretty good job of explaining the issues and why they believe most pensions are in dire straights. Baby Boomers are living longer than expected. There are not enough Gen Xers and Millennials working to support the retired Baby Boomers. The market is volatile. All of these have created a perfect storm that may see many of our pensions go bankrupt without substantial changes to our system.

What does this have to do with leadership you ask? The pension issue is not merely an economical issue; it really is a leadership issue. Public sector leaders, corporate leaders and union leaders must all step up and address the simple fact that our public pensions may not last as they are currently structured. The pension issue has been at the centre of recent bailouts of GM, Chrysler and other major corporations. It is a major issue in government-union clashes in Wisconsin, California, and many other locales. Tufts and Fairbanks unfairly lay most of the blame for pension unsustainability solely on unions, but it takes two parties to negotiate. That can’t be forgotten. Political and governmental leaders must take both a short and long-sighted approach to this issue. Few leaders are able to do this, and ones that do may become the most important and influential leaders in the next couple decades. The pension issue will not go away quietly.

Overall, I did enjoy this book. It’s funny at times, wanders off track at others, but overall, addresses a mundane topic in an interesting way. They are very biased in their disdain for unions, but do raise many interesting facts and history about labour relations in Canada. I wish they spent more than 11 pages proposing solutions, but that may not have been their purpose in this book anyways. The book succeeds in bringing a complicated issue into everyday language, and out of obscurity and complicated language. It is an intriguing book for any leaders looking to reward their employees today but who also want to create a long-term sustainable future for the next generation of employees. Their (my) retirement future depends on those choices.

Disclosure: I paid full price for this book and have no connection to the authors. I also work in the Canadian public sector and contribute to a public sector pension.

Tufts, B. and Fairbanks, L. (2011). Pension ponzi: How Canada’s public sector unions are bankrupting Canada’s health care, education and your retirement. Mississauga, ON: John Wiley & Sons.