#hrevent16 blog #1 of many

Here I am at #hrevent16, the fourth year I have attended this and my first as a speaker. I'm excited about this. I'm going to blog from the event too and share some of the key points from the sessions I have attended. 

The first keynote speech was by Howard Webb, ex Premier League and World Cup final referee. I'd never heard Howard speak except in soundbites before, and he proved to be a brilliant speaker. He focused on the areas he feels are critical to achieving success and high performance. 

His first point was about preparation. Howard advised us invest in your personal skills and knowledge bank account so that it is topped up ready for use whenever you need it. He gave examples of how he uses downtime in between his public performances to top up his skills. 

His second point was teamwork and Howard gave some excellent examples about how his support crew, linesmen, needed to be at top performance as well and how he worked with them to ensure they would provide the best possible support to him, and how his success was as a result of their performances rather than his own. 

His third point was about dealing with pressure. A referee is clearly a very visible component of a match but seeks to be anonymously successful by making no mistakes. A strange concept. He talked about dealing with media scrutiny and about performing under the pressure of millions of people watching, and ensuring he trained for such things. 

His fourth point was decision making. A leader needs to make decisions, and have courage to do so knowing they are expected to do so, have trust in their team and take the time to do so (even if that time is only seconds). His advice was to trust ones gut instinct, as he feels you only get to the top in leadership by trusting your gut instinct. Howard showed some excellent video footage to back up this point, and advised us to watch and learn from, react to, other people's reactions, in order to seek evidence that your gut reaction is right or wrong. 

His fifth point was about reflection and learning. It's easy to attach yourself to a decision emotionally, but very important to sit back and reflect and evaluate on the entire performance. Don't just focus on what went wrong and learn from that, but focus on what went right and learn from that too. 

His sixth point was on communication, and using the full range of communication signals particularly non verbal signals. Eye contact and body language are exceptionally important for a leader particularly when, as with a referee, there are often significant language barriers preventing good verbal communication.

Howard's speech was funny, entertaining and full of interesting and relevant lessons for any leader who has to act under pressure. 

Gary

Moving on

So I'm leaving my current organisation. I'm moving on. In this blog I'll look at some of the emotional and practical implications of this.

I've been in my current organisation, in its various forms, for nearly 12 years, and aside from the last ten months I spent the other eleven years in the same (but evolving) role. It's longer than I've been anywhere else. At the end of February I take up the role of HR Director at Trafford College, one of the leading Further Education colleges in the north west.

Telling your organisation that you're leaving is not something that is supposed to happen regularly across your professional lifetime. In my career, a mere 19 years, this will be only the fourth time I've done this, and the first in 12 years. So it's not something you're supposed to be good at. Not something you're supposed to know how to do properly.

And yet…

…we all have this vision of ourselves walking, John Wayne style, into our managers office, giving a grandiose speech or maybe having some controlled explosion, slamming a piece of paper down on their desk that tells them exactly where they can stick their employment relationship, and walking out like you've just won the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, perhaps only stopping to kiss that girl you have always fancied on the way out.

Or is that just me?

Well, let me tell you, it's nothing like that. My notification to my manager came in a very tame, one line email. Nothing sexy, nothing explosive, and almost apologetic.

It seemed somehow anticlimactic.

And so it should, because leaving ones employer is a big step. Aside from leaving ones partner or spouse, it's probably the biggest breakup you'll go through, and can often have a similar impact.

In my case, although I joined my current organisation thinking I'd only stay 3 years and then ride off, arrogantly, into the sunset, I've stayed a lot longer and until the last year I couldn't envisage any circumstance that would cause me to even think about moving on. The organisation had grown, changed and developed and taken me with it. I felt at home.

But things have a habit of changing and so do ones feelings towards your loved ones. If you've been through a divorce, like I have, you'll recognise how one day you're happily in love and the next you don't even recognise the person next to you in bed. Maybe I'll explore that concept more another time.

But sometimes these things happen and all of a sudden I wanted out. As luck would have it, there was a voluntary redundancy programme underway at the time and I was able to request this and had it approved. My plan at this point was to consider my options but in all likelihood I was going to go self employed. I'd worked out a business plan, and a business name. I'd figured out what kinds of services I'd offer and to whom. And I had a good feeling about it all.

But what I couldn't figure out is whether my good feeling about it all stemmed from what I was running towards (self employed freelance work) or what I was running away from (current work). And then I saw a good job advertised, went for it, was offered it, and suddenly faced a choice. I have obviously taken the job, having concluded that my happy feeling was coming more from running away from something than running towards it. But now I've got the happy feeling also of running to something I want to do, somewhere I want to be.

So I ought to be happy, right?  Well, mostly.

And that's because it's still an emotional wrench to leave somewhere you've spent most of your career to start afresh in a new environment. It's a bit nerve wracking, really, and no textbook or webinar or conference or qualification I've done, not one piece of learning I've had, adequately prepares you for this or even comes close to describing it.

Type in a Leaders First 100 Days and you'll get hundreds of results on Google. You can look at what President Obama did in his first 100 days and get lots of advice from other notable leaders about what they think you should do. So I've got lots of advice from multiple sources about what I need to achieve in my first 100 days, and I'm mulling a lot of it over. The important things are about visibility, engagement and taking your time it seems. I will cover this in a later blog also.

But type into Google a Leaders Last 100 Days and you'll get few results that are any use. Yes, there are some pieces of advice, but not many. Why is this? Is it because fewer people are concerned with ending a relationship than they are with starting one? Surely final impressions of a leader count just as much as first impressions?

So I'm also mulling over the important things in my final 100 days. The important pieces of advice are to prepare any successor(s), continue to operate and make decisions as if you were staying (as opposed to winding down) and to consider the legacy you want to leave behind, even if said legacy isn't apparent in the short term. I'm also focusing on smiling a lot more, and connecting with people on a more emotional level -some of these people may actually miss me when I'm gone.

I've also concluded that it's right to have a leaving do or two, so have been arranging these. I didn't have them when I left my last two places but somehow it feels right this time. Other things I have to arrange are things like a new car to replace my company car (done), new phone/tablet to replace the company versions I will hand back (done) and thinking who I need to inform of new contact details etc (not done yet).

And I'm having no break in between. I finish at one place on the Friday, I start at Trafford on the Monday. Mostly this is because I've no leave left to take but mostly because I don't want to dwell on things at home for a week or so -I'm already excited about getting started at Trafford so the sooner the better from my perspective.

I'll be starting anew. It's an opportunity that comes our way rarely, and I want to make the most of it. It feels strange and exciting and scary all at once, and after 12 years in one place it's probably more needed than I realise.

I may talk some more about my preparations for starting anew, but for now it's getting slowly closer and becoming more real every day.

It's an exciting time.

What's your experience and/or advice for surviving your last 100 days and making the best start in your first 100 days?

Till next time…

Gary

Ps if you are going to the HR Directors Summit in Birmingham 2-4 February then why not come along to my talk Bracing for Change -Preparing your organisation for a transformational shift… And say hello!

Elsewhere

I haven't blogged on this site since Xmas Eve and a bit of a rant about a dilemma I had. It's the longest I've gone without putting up a new post since I started this blog last year. 

But I haven't been lapsing. I've just been elsewhere. 

I've been branching out and blogging on some other sites.

My first foray into guest post blogging happened on 26 December with a post as part of the superb Advent Blogs series by Kate Griffiths-Lambeth. I had been inspired by some of the posts last year and this, and decided I wanted to share something myself. So I wrote THIS post on my experiences being interviewed for jobs in the last year. It was very personal, as many of my posts are, and received really nice feedback from people who read it. It sits well with the overall theme and I'm pleased I was able to contribute and offer something. I hope I'll be able to do so in future too. 

My second foray was for theHRDirector magazine where I'm now one of their regular bloggers. I did a post that went live on 5 January covering mergers and acquisitions from the HR, and specifically the human, perspective. You can find it HERE. I enjoyed writing this too and it was a more serious and less personal post than some I've recently done, and in some ways plugs a talk I will be giving on 4 February at the HR Directors Summit on this subject, something I'm looking forward to immensely. I hope to be able to write more posts for TheHRDirector in the coming months. 

My third recent foray into guest blog posts went live this week on Gem Reucrofts' excellent fitness blog. It's only loosely related to HR but it covers a large part of my non HR life and my passion for fitness training. I hope that it shows how my mind works and showcases how I regularly make links between fitness training and HR work, as well as highlighting my availability for personal training advice in the future! You can find the post HERE and I'm grateful to Gem for giving me the opportunity and the platform on her developing new blog. 

And that's it for now. My next set of posts will be back here on the usual range of topics, including my thoughts as I prepare to take up a new role in February.

Till next time. 

Gary

The Dilemma

This is a very personal blog about a situation for my family that I am finding very frustrating on a professional level.  One that I have the answers to, but which I am unable to do anything about.

Its a bit of a rant.  Switch off now if you're not interested, but be sure to come back for my next post.

So my fiancee is unhappy at work.  She works for a professional services organisation that only has three employees.  A husband and wife duo who happen to own the business, and my fiancee.  Both the owner-managers appear to lack interpersonal, leadership and management skills of any kind, and put no stock by employment rights or any kind of good practice HR.

And its making her unhappy.  She comes home and tells me about it, and with my HR hat on I know what she should do and what should happen.  With my coaching hat on I know how I can help the owner-managers too.

My fiancee qualified in her profession around 12 months ago, but at the time was on maternity leave.  Wanting to return to work part-time but unable to, she found what looked like an ideal part-time role close to our home, that allowed her to work just three days a week and spend time with our daughter too.  From a work-life balance standpoint it was, and is, a perfect job.  In other ways though its not a perfect job - she took a significant pay reduction to move there, and as the company is only small it only offers statutory minimum terms and conditions, whereas previously she'd been on a good salary and generous terms and conditions.

In general though it was a case of prioritising the various factors, and work/life balance came top, to the exclusion of everything else.

She found it difficult to move from a company employing hundreds of people, to one employing just four (later to become three when one employee was dismissed).  I think this is probably an adjustment many people struggle with.

And yet what does one do when one has a personality clash and problems relating to one's fellow employees?  In a large company there are lots of things that can happen - mediation, moving jobs internally, even just a physical move away from each other, and more.

But what if the employees you have problems with are the ONLY other employees there?

And what if those employees, those ONLY employees, happen to be the owner-managers?

Its a tough one.

The owner-managers do appear to place little value on good employment relations or even good management practice.  For a start my fiancee has had only ONE lunch break in six months (her Xmas meal) - she simply daren't ask to leave her desk during the working day, and even feels guilty getting up to go to the toilet, as if such breaks are monitored.  She eats at her desk, carrying on working.

I've had a go at this from an HR and H&S perspective but to no avail. The owner-managers are that intimidating that she will not assert her rights, fearing punishment if she does.

She's found evidence that her work emails are routinely checked by the owner-managers, and whilst this isn't an unheard of practice in some larger organisations, it is being done seemingly to search for mistakes and create opportunities for criticism and that's a worry.  Again, I've commented on this from an HR perspective but got nowhere.

With only statutory minimum annual leave you'd think it would be relatively easy to book, but its not.  She's never had any confirmation of holidays booked or taken, and requests to obtain this have been vaguely brushed away.  And has holidays left to take at the end of the year but has been refused opportunities to take them.  Again, I've commented on this from an HR perspective but she daren't do anything to assert her rights in case her life is made worse.

She has been quite ill this last month and did not dare take any time off sick not just because of the financial consequences, but mainly because of the way in which the owner-managers would view sickness absence and out of fear that she would be dismissed for taking sick leave.  In the end she was so ill she was unable to physically drive to work and DID take sick leave, and thankfully there were no consequences, but the fear was still there.

There are lots of examples of poor interpersonal skills too, from being shushed when asking a question then criticised for not asking questions, to regular and unjustified criticism, to vague and conflicting sets of instructions, and a general lack of care.  From a coaching perspective I sense the owner-managers are genuinely unaware of the impact they are having and have probably had no development in a leadership or management perspective, and I want to intervene.

But I can't.

And its having a horrible effect on my fiancee.  When she gets in from work, she has to get it all off her chest and ends up moaning at me, which impacts our relationship.  Even during the working day I will get a message from her saying she hates her job, or that she is crying in the toilets.

And I can't do anything.

But from an HR perspective I know exactly how I'd sort this out.  I can see exactly what's wrong, and how to put it right.

From a coaching and leadership perspective I know exactly how I could help the owner-managers to improve their leadership skills and to create a better working environment for everyone.  

From a fiance perspective I'm a man with a typical male problem solving mind.  I hear issues presented to me by a woman in my life, and I immediately start solving those problems in my head, and then out loud.  I suspect its not required, and that my fiancee simply needs to get things off her chest, but I can't help it.

I want to do something besides rant on here.

But she won't let me.  She is afraid to say anything to them because of a fear that it will make the situation worse - that complaining will somehow bring about punishment or more unfair treatment. That her working life will become hell.

And that sounds a likely outcome.  At just six months service, we all know that they could dismiss her with no reason and as long as it isn't discrimination, there's little we can do about it.

I've told her to leave, but because of the impact that would have on our childcare arrangements (still having to pay for a nursery space but without the salary to pay for it) she can't afford to leave until she has another job.  So she's looking around.

Ultimately, this highlights a few problems with our workforce and its rights in the UK.  Owner-managers in particular in small organisations can more or less run the organisation as a dictatorship.  One could say that they have earned the right to be able to do so by creating or buying the company, but it seems wrong somehow.  It seems that our hard-fought employment rights offer little protection in such situations, and so one wonders how many other people work in such situations, hating their jobs and the owner-managers and not being able to stand up for their rights.

It also surprises me that there are people out there in leadership, and business ownership, positions who have not had ANY development in a leadership sense and who are simply uninterested in good management practice.  As someone who has spent a good % of his career developing leaders and managers and implementing good management practices, I find this incredible but disturbing in equal part.

And it also makes me wonder what use my own professional knowledge and skills are when I can't help the person I'm closest to?

Finally, it also highlights that sometimes people make choices to stay in a certain organisation based on one overwhelming positive (work/life balance) and despite multiple overwhelming negatives (as described above).  Everyone will be different, but should such sacrifices be allowed to be made?  From an employee engagement perspective, surely not?

I wonder what can be done about all of this in a general sense, not specifically about our situation?

Is there a way to bring owner-managers to account and to enforce better employment rights?

Is there a way to protect employee's rights and provide better experiences in small organisations?

I hope so.

Send me your ideas.

Till next time...

Gary

PS Merry Christmas

HR lessons from...That's Not My Duck

This week I've read an excellent series of posts by esteemed HR people covering the HR lessons from films and books they have watched and read this week. So far there has been analysis of Star Wars The Force Awakens (credit Doug Shaw), Love Actually (credit Pete Monaghan), and A Christmas Carol (credit Gem Reucroft). 

These posts have been, in equal part, inspiring, witty, analytical and terrifying. 

And now it's my turn. 

I thought I'd pick the most recent book I have read. 

It's called That's Not My Duck, and it's a searing insight into the world of recruitment and selection and talent management, with plenty of lessons for us all. 

In reality it's a Xmas present for my one year old daughter, but she saw it pre wrapping and insisted I read it to her, and we both enjoyed it so much we decided we wouldn't wrap it after all and read it again. 

So here are my thoughts on it. 

The first lesson in the book comes on the cover page, where it alerts us to the fact that this is NOT the duck we are looking for, as its beak is too shiny. In fact, the author here is telling us not to accept CVs, or to be dazzled by someone's LinkedIn profile, as these are words the candidate has presented themselves in order to make themselves look good, and we should delve beneath these initial facades to make our own minds up. In short, have a thorough and robust selection process. 

The second lesson is overleaf, warning us that this, too, is not the duck we want as its feet are too bumpy. This is a lesson to examine personality and fit in an organisation, as someone who is too bumpy may ruffle too many feathers and not fit in with the culture at all. 

The third duck is also not the duck we want as its tummy is too fuzzy. This, I would assert, is about the importance of taking up references to avoid any fuzziness or ambiguity about the suitability of the chosen candidate. Indeed, it is also a lesson to stalk a chosen candidate on social media to see if their fuzziness is a common theme. 

The fourth lesson regards the duck whose wings are too soft is surely one we all already know. It's so obvious, in fact, that I don't really need to tell you here what it is, because you've worked it out for yourself. Good on you. 

The final lesson in That's Not My Duck from an HR perspective is when we find the duck we want, and notice here that the duck is gender specific. It's a female duck, and she has children who, the author points out, are so fluffy. The lesson here is about equality and being mindful of discrimination. Too many managers and organisations will choose a man, or someone with no family commitments over a potential better candidate purely because their circumstances may be less complicated or the perception of being more committed. This book blows that right out of the water and tells us in no uncertain terms to think widely and inclusively about talent. 

Hear hear. 

And there ends the HR lessons from this book. I am imagining you will now all be updated your learning logs, PDPs and other such records. Please give me credit when you do. 

Till next time. 

Gary

Do as I say, don't do as I do

This post covers my experiences and views on being coached in recent months. As someone who does a lot of coaching, being coached myself was a new and unusual experience, but one that was highly relevant and useful. 

I've done a lot of coaching, and mentoring, so am comfortable with the process of coaching and almost always both enjoy and get a lot of energy from it. I know how individuals can benefit from coaching, and have been able to help individuals benefit from my own coaching in the past. The ability to step outside a situation and analyse it with someone independent, to question ones own assumptions and behaviours, to analyse performance and it's inhibitors, is tremendously useful and I always "sell" coaching to any leader or aspiring manager. 

As someone who does a lot of personal fitness and sporting work, both for myself and occasionally for others, and who has held management and coaching roles for sports teams, I can well understand the benefits of structured coaching and feedback in a personal as well as a business sense too. 

But until this summer, I'd never been coached myself. 

It had been a case of do as I say, don't do as I do. 

And that changed this year. I was given some feedback as part of an interview process that was brutually honest and direct, and which took me a while to recover from. I couldn't really argue with the feedback, but I'd never viewed myself in that way before and needed to process the information and didn't feel able to do that on my own as I was hurting too much. 

So I obtained a coach. I'll not talk here about who it was, or the details of what we covered, but my coach helped me to talk through how I was feeling, the detail of the feedback, how it affected me both at work and at home, and what I could do about it in the short term and longer term. 

Key to any successful coaching or mentoring relationship is the ability to build rapport and connect with each other, and the experience of working with my own coach underlined this. Not only were they someone I had immense respect for beforehand, but during the sessions they worked with me in a way that enhanced that respect and developed into a challenging yet friendly relationship. The coach was not someone with any kind of HR or OD background either, which at first I thought wouldn't work but was immediately proved wrong on. 

So being coached made me reassess the way I could coach others, and the way I viewed the coaching relationship. That doesn't mean I was unaware of the importance of those things, but I certainly expanded my understanding of them during the process of being coached. 

And the coach used simple frameworks that I knew, and which I knew that I knew, and which I would use with people I was coaching, but which I'd failed to use on myself. 

Maybe it was my ego, which had taken a severe bruising. Maybe it was the way I was perceiving things, which was definitely negative and needed reframing. Maybe I was too close to the situation and couldn't detach myself and the emotions involved.

Maybe I thought I knew it all. I was wrong. 

When I look back at the specific things I changed, the actions I took as a result of being coached, I'm astonished that I didn't see these things myself and just do them, that it took someone else to point them out. I know if I'd been coaching someone else I'd have pointed them out, asked the right questions and so on, but was unable to do it for myself. 

So for the experience of being coached, I'm grateful. It's made me a better coach, as the next person I coach will find out. It's helped me understand myself better and so be better at being me. 

Coaching gave me clarity about my situation this year, and allowed me to focus on what I could achieve in the short term and what my goals might be, and have become, in the long term. It gave me an outlet for my emotions and was cathartic in that respect too. 

In short, coaching helped with my healing and recovery. In the same way a good coach would help an injured athlete back to full training and performance, so my coach helped me. And that's why I enjoy coaching so much. 

I'm glad I realised that coaching could benefit me. I'm still surprised it's taken me so long, but hopefully I can now begin to coach myself in a better way both in business and my sports and fitness endeavours. I've certainly seen an impact in my triathlon training, which I may cover in a future (non HR) blog. 

Ultimately, there's a link here to The Power of Three as explained in my first few posts and in the About Me section above. If an individual can get the right focus in the right areas of their life, they can achieve great things. 

Having worked my way back to "full fitness" in every sense of the word, maybe there's great things beckoning for me?

Watch this space.

Till next time...

Gary

#leadingtheway part 4 of 4

The final session today was delivered by Emlyn Williams, from ACAS. Emlyn had the hard job of concluding the session and handling the potential embarrassment of people getting up to leave early before the session ends. Good luck to him, and he made a good start by establishing he's not your typical lawyer and is a good, wisecracking speaker. 

On a side note, one can tell that the Museum of Liverpool don't handle conferences of this nature often. They tried hard and were friendly enough, but they need a lot more experiences of the types of demands a conference of so many people can have. 

Anyway, back to Emlyn. He had a good choice of slides to make his points, and a good selection of jokes also to back them up. 

He started by sharing the well known secret that shared parental and shared grandparental leave have been met with resounding indifference by the UK workforce, yet the government has plans to expand the rights re these. As someone who could have benefited from shared parental leave I can say there is no way we would have gone ahead and done it, so I can well understand the resounding silence. 

He then briefly covered the developments in equal pay legislation where it is predicted that changes will mean little on a practical level and more potential litigation if anything. 

The introduction of the National Living Wage was briefly covered also, with Emlyn explained that, to my surprise, it only applies to those aged 25 or over, effectively making it an extension of the current National Minimum Wage and not a replacement to it. That was glossed over in the recent government publicity surely? Emlyn also explained how enforcement of the new NLW would be handled by tribunals. 

Emlyn showed a graph that showed the startling rise in zero hours contracts, which have more than doubled in ten years. However he pointed out that recent publicity around them has only uncovered how many there already were, not necessarily prompted an increase in their usage. He talked about the impact of recent legislation around the use of zero hours contracts, which only went so far.

The cap on public sector exit payments is expected to come in next April, bringing a cap on payments (in their widest sense) of £95,000, which Emlyn noted will affect MOST public sector payments due to their inclusion of pensionable pay augmentations. He was surprised at how little outcry there had been about this, and I think it's because many people haven't worked it out yet and those who have are busy negotiating an exit before it comes in. 

A sensible measure though is the proposal to introduce a "fine" for those who take such exit payments then return a short period of time on a consultancy basis. 

Using Gary Barlow as an example, Emlyn then talked about the ongoing consultation around changes to tax free payments eg redundancy. There will be a sliding scale in effect that could apply from £6,000 but change with length of service, which would affect almost every redundancy payment in the future. 

Emlyn then covered the changes to ballots for industrial action. It's clear that the changes will make it FAR harder for trades unions to get a successful strike ballot. 

And then he closed by talking about the recent MBNA vs Jones case focusing on misconduct on a works outing. This prompted LOTS of hilarity as he described the details of the case. You really couldn't make it up. The nuances of employment law, the balance of probability and the concept of reasonable belief sometimes work, and sometimes they don't. This case covers the ways in which it can work in sometimes unbelievable ways quite well. 

Emlyn closed by giving his best typos of the year, and had the audience rolling in the aisles. 

I've really enjoyed this event and must thank Pete Monaghan for inviting me to cover it on social media. It's been quite tiring, again, to be multitasking for so long and to be scanning lots of media and listening and writing at the same time. 

But it's been enjoyable. 

I look forward to using the knowledge gained from this conference in the near future. 

Till next time...

Gary