Another Reality

I Love It

At the beginning of last year, my friend Neil Morrison wrote HR: A 10 Point Agenda for Change. At the time I thought it was a powerful, challenging and hopeful piece of work. I retweeted it and referred to it often through the year, I even used it as a jumping off point for an unconference I helped to organise. A key reason why I like the piece so much is because it feels inclusive to me. It invites challenge, it invites participation, it invites.

Another reason I love it is this.

We need to accept that you don’t get influence through control, you get influence through other people’s positive experience of you. Get influence through people wanting you involved not by telling them you have to be.

Another reason I love it is this.

We need to be more human. We need to get out and talk, interact, spend time with people, we need to be empathetic and understanding, we need to feel. Sitting in the HR department bitching is not going to change anything.

Another reason I love it is this.

We need to stop focusing on cost and start focusing on value. These two things are not the same. Even if cost reduction is on the agenda, look at the value you can get from the budget, the resources. Cheaper and faster do not equate to better.

The whole post made me feel like this change was something I want to be a part of, and it even gave people who don’t want to play, the offer to leave. I love it.

I Hate It

At the beginning of this year, my friend Neil Morrison wrote Back to Reality. Neil is in a position of influence, so this is again a powerful piece, only this time I think it’s for the wrong reasons. I may be wrong, I often am, but the piece suggests that if you’re a practitioner, you’ve got something worthwhile to offer other practitioners, and if you’re not, you haven’t.

The dictionary defines practitioner as ‘a person actively engaged in an art, discipline, or profession’ and often, though not always, the term is used to differentiate between someone directly employed by a company, and someone employed on a more ad hoc basis.

In the context of Neil’s article, the term is divisive, and I also think it’s unhelpful, particularly when making sweeping statements like this.

As an outsider, you can talk. You can make proclamations. You can enthuse and criticise, propose and deny. You wake up and all that is left of the previous day’s noise are the final echoes reverberating around the empty stadium of your mind. You rarely see the results and never accept the failures.

Maybe I’m just taking the bait, but who is an outsider? Is it someone outside the organisation, outside your department, outside where? And when it comes to comments about outsiders having empty stadiums for minds, and never accepting the failures, I don’t believe these shortcomings are the sole preserve of the outsider.

Neil’s blog goes on to say:

Innovation, revolution, chaos and new agendas are so much easier when you only have responsibility for your self image.

If I have a wish for 2014, it is for an honest, open conversation, practitioner to practitioner, about how we can make the working lives of our employees better and at the same time improve the performance of our organisations. Without the guff and the noise of those that have no responsibility other than for themselves.

I want to hear about how we might incrementally improve things for real, not rip the rule book up in our dreams.

The fact of the matter is that through my working life I have been fortunate to meet stellar people both inside and outside of organisations. They do great work, sometimes quietly, sometimes noisily, often working on small and big things. Their position, either hierarchically or in relation to their employment status, doesn’t matter to them. They’re just doing their bit to make work as good as it can be.

The fact of the matter is that through my working life I have been fortunate to meet awful people both inside and outside of organisations. They do poor work, sometimes quietly, sometimes noisily, often working on small and big things. Their position, either hierarchically or in relation to their employment status, doesn’t matter to them. They’re just doing their bit to screw things up.

In both instances I am fortunate, because in both instances, I learn stuff.

From my experience, the world of work seems to be shifting, often to a more project based way of doing things. As this approach grows, and I think it will, then I think the value of outsiders will grow too, for a time at least. Work is becoming less about the long term job, more about pooling the right skills and experience whilst the project gets done. Then that team will likely disband and regroup in different forms to achieve different ends and outcomes. Not always, but often enough to make a difference. And of course in that mix we need excellent practitioners. So the value of an excellent practitioner is high, and should remain high too.

I share the basis of Neil’s wish, in so far that I too am interested in honest open conversations about how to improve performance, how to make work and working lives better. I don’t think that is best achieved by dismissing outsiders en masse, whatever your definition of an outsider is.

Some of the strongest people I’ve stood by and worked with have come from all walks of life, as have some of the weakest. I don’t recall ever judging someone simply on whether or not they hold a particular position in a company or otherwise.

That’s not the reality I want, nor one that work needs.