You might have already guessed that I’m pretty passionate about HR. It’s challenging but I am just so interested in making it a career to be proud of, because that’s good for all of our wellbeing right?

So what this means is yep, I’m all about HR Club Sydney and getting people together to share ideas about HR.

This year, I’ve also had the opportunity to take on the position of the AHRI Young Professionals Group Convenor. Some people have asked me about this recently and yes, my story is still the same- I’m about anything interesting in HR and learning as much as I can.

So I hope to be able to share and communicate ideas from both AHRI and also other neat stuff I find. This way, we all have access to everything and we can all kick ass.

Speaking of kick ass. Few things happening in September that I wanted to mention.

1) HR Club Sydney drinks- 13th September 2011- register via LinkedIn It’s been too long between drinks so let’s catch up to see who has joined the network and what the pressing issues are in HR in Sydney.

2) You may have read a post that I wrote ages ago about the book “Your Brain at Work”

Well I'm jealous of anyone who's registered to go to the AHRI Sydney Leadership Conference on 12th September, because he's speaking! Check out the program here.

If anyone is going and would be happy to write some blog posts to be shared on HR Club Sydney I would be extremely grateful!

So last week was a busy one with the AHRI National Convention on, and with my last post being about making some time for networking you might be wondering how I went. Even though I could only pop along to one of the convention days, I met so many other people along the way- it was great!

At the Welcome Reception I caught up with Damon Klotz where we met up with some young professionals in the AHRI networking hub. Young professionals like Theo Winter, Ruth Carey and Sarah Nguyen. I also met Larna Warren for the first time and funnily enough- the ‘how-to’s’ of networking in Human Resources was a hot topic in the hub.

The next evening was the Gala Dinner and as always it was loads of fun. I wasn’t assigned a table so I just wondered on in and made friends with some of the NSW AHRI Councillors which was fantastic. I sat next to Noel Pearse who is the NSW AHRI State President and also Paul Whalen who is a Councillor. You can find out more about who is on the Council in NSW here. There were belly dancers, a band and plenty of food and wine to ensure the dancefloor got started.

While disappointed that none of the exhibitors were supplying berocca and cuddles after getting home from the Gala Dinner at about 1am, I rocked up the next day pretty excited for the speakers that were to come. I’ll be posting about them over the next week or so, so stay tuned.

Last night I was reading ‘HR Monthly’ and again Peter Wilson spoke about the issue of sexual harassment. Yep it’s in the media a lot at the moment due to recent high profile cases and deserves the attention that it’s getting. Any form of bullying and harassment is not ok in my books and I can’t believe that it still happens to the extent that it does.

Peter says that there are four best-practice principles for managing sexual harassment:

1) Communicating a clear policy position
2) Providing supportive training programs
3) Conducting a sound review process on complaints
4) Taking prompt and effective remedial action

The impacts on individuals are clear.

In the case of the two female air traffic controllers who accused their government-owned employer of allowing “extreme” sexual discrimination and bullying, the allegations included:

• being refused access to training and professional development
• being abused and belittled for being pregnant
• being told that part-time employment was not welcome
• the spreading of false allegations
• being exposed to pornography distributed by management

On one occasion, when one of the women was in the early stages of pregnancy, an Airservices manager expressed he was not happy she may need time off and allegedly told her he had a “coat hanger in the back of his car”.
Mrs Macdonald, who fought back tears as she spoke, said she had worked for more than 18 years at the organisation and the harassment had caused her and her family great distress.

It had affected her health, sleep and mood and she had to explain to her three sons why she was so distressed. She blamed managers for the harassment and praised peers who worked alongside her.

I read on further in ‘HR Monthly’ and I notice that the topic of the Agenda is “Is the mental health of employees a priority in Australian workplaces?”

While both Barbara Hocking (Sane Australia) and Professor Patrick McGorry (Orygen Youth Heath and Australian of the Year) note that ‘it’s becoming a priority’ and ‘it’s starting to get people’s attention’ I think if we are being completely honest and brutal, I think we are making a huge assumption that employers actually care and want to take this seriously.

Mental health and sexual harassment is getting some good air time, and I hate to be negative about this but many of the options at the moment are still seriously limited in ensuring it doesn’t happen and a lot of the emphasis is on the employee to fix it rather than the employer.

For example in the David Jones sexual harassment case “Ms Fraser-Kirk alleges she informed David Jones management about Mr McInnes’s unwelcome advances on several occasions, and on one occasion was told: “Next time that happens, you just need to be very clear and say ‘no Mark’ and he’ll back off.”

Now when we in HR talk to people about what they should do if they think they are being bullied we tell them to:

• Keep detailed records about the incidents- this could be jotting down something in an email or on paper
• If you feel comfortable let the bully know that their behaviour makes you feel uncomfortable
• Talk about it with someone who can provide assistance such as your manager, Human Resources, or EAP
• Seek resolution – informal or formal process

In reality this just isn’t enough. In reality this doesn’t work. This is how it often goes.

• You think you are being bullied and you talk to your friends and/or family about it.
• You start taking notes and keeping track of what is happening as your anxiety builds.
• It becomes unbearable and your friends and/or family encourage you to do something about it.
• You agonise over it and finally you build up the courage to speak to a Manager, someone in HR or EAP (if they have one).

While EAP might help you deal with the harassment, the response many employees get from the business is less than what is needed. As Peter says “It’s no surprise that the results of such an internal investigation exercise are likely to be heavily compromised and corrupted by organisational power structures”.

Likely responses could be:

“Just be stronger and he’ll leave you alone” (as in David Jones case mentioned above)
“Oh, he doesn’t mean anything by it”
“We are employed in a ‘work hard, play hard’ culture and sometimes these things happen”

Further to this, in order to avoid dealing with the problem some companies will then move the employee, pressure them to leave, offer mutual separation or even terminate them.

Life is too short and mental health is a serious issue in this country. We need more than this.

Perhaps we need an authority that individuals can call (anonymously from their workplace) and report serious sexual harassment and bullying issues and be assured that something will be done about it. Sort of like WorkCover or even the Food Authority- with the power to publicise poor employers and impose penalties. Someone that has the power to walk into a workplace independently and conduct an audit and help those who need it.

As Peter mentioned there are four best practice principles for managing sexual harassment, although I bet the worst offenders have none or maybe one of these (a crappy policy which does absolutely nothing).

I don’t know what the solution is, and the above solution is possibly a mindless rant but I just know we need to do a whole lot more.

If you follow me on twitter you might have noticed that I’ve been doing Dry July. This means that I have had much more time in the day over the weekend so I thought I might spend some time catching up on some reading and one I have been meaning to spend some time on is the AHRI people@work 2020 White Paper.

It come’s as no surprise that the report articulates that “the issue of talent attraction, development and retention remains the number one priority in Australia, and projections of skills shortages through to 2020 by Skills Australia (2010) confirms this is still likely to be the top issue for HR professionals in business and government over the next decade”.

Later it then states that “Skills Australia reports that by 2025, 45% of the workforce will change employer every three years”.

In a HR generalist role there is often the competing pressures around what you should focus your time on, because lord knows there certainly is not enough time in the day for the average HR Generalist/Business Partner/Manager etc.

Do you do all the small, urgent requests or requests made by senior management/partners in the business? Or do you put these behind the more strategic things, knowing that things like talent attraction, development and retention will continue to be a high priority for the better part of the next decade?

Do you commit to long term planning because you think it will pay off for the business overall, or do you jump in and get the quick wins under your belt knowing that you’ll probably only stay 2-3 years and move onto a better opportunity if it comes your way?

It’s a delicate balancing act, and a debate in which many in the profession would probably argue differently.

Something to consider in terms of where to focus your efforts to be as effective as you can be, is the CLC research which talks about the four roles of the HR business partner:

The Strategic Partner collaborates with the line leader to create HR solutions for business unit needs. In this role, you might need to help your business leader surface talent gaps or identify important HR metrics.

The Emergency Responder fixes acute problems when they arise and, finally, the Employee Mediator helps to manage through conflicts and politics that arise in the organization.

They all seem important right? Which ones do you normally place as your first responsibility though?

The interesting thing about the research is that although most of us probably find ourselves in the Emergency Responder and Employee Mediator a great deal of the time and while we may be able to get quick wins or impress senior management in the short term, it’s actually not the place that we can be the most beneficial.

The CLC research proves that the Strategic Role provides the greatest impact to HR-Line support effectiveness. In fact, strategic partner activities, such as developing the next generation of leaders, understanding your business unit’s talent needs, and identifying HR metrics, have an average impact of 33%. This is three times higher than the next largest category, the Operations Manager.

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What this means is that while you can’t completely ignore any one of these four parts of your role, it does put things into perspective when you think about where most of your time and effort should go in order to maximize your effectiveness.

Which roles do you mostly work in and does the fact that you might be moving on in 2-3 years impact your thinking around this?

Marshall Goldsmith recently spoke about how most of his coaching classes over the years have been a bunch of rich, old men. With a laugh, he said that there is a common misconception that rich, old men don’t mind losing small amounts of money. Funnily enough, rich old men HATE losing money. Any money, even small amounts. They just hate losing and Marshall says it is shocking how well this works around the world.

Marshall’s quick lesson in how to use small amounts of money to create large changes of behaviour in a leader.
Destructive comments. In HR we often talk about breaking down silos, creating a one-(insert your company here) approach to the business and about working harmoniously across divisions and functions in the organisation. But what happens to all that fluffy HR talk when we go and stab another employee in the back? Destructive, negative comments have no positive impact whatsoever so how can you break the bad habits of destructive comments?

Marshall said that it was something that he wanted to work on himself, so he said to his staff “if you ever hear me say a destructive comment about someone, I want you to come to me and I will pay you ten US dollars”.
He gave them a pep talk about how important it was because he didn’t want them to feel uneasy about asking for the money. Turns out the speech was unnecessary as they even went as far as tricking him into saying nasty things to get the money!

In the first hour he’d lost about $50 so he locked himself in the office and refused to speak to anyone. Steep learning curve hey?

He then asked us if we had made any unnecessary, negative comments about anyone in the last month. If we had, we were asked to put $1 on the floor (which was then donated to the Breast Cancer Foundation).

Surprisingly, Marshall said that he has raised over $450,000 for charity over the years playing these games with clients.
I think I’m going to place a jar on my desk at work and/or start a tally with my partner. It’s something I’d like to work on myself. I’d like to think that I’m not a huge gossip in the workplace because quite frankly I just don’t care enough, but I do like to vent when I am cranky. That’s where I have to learn to settle a bit and consider exactly what my destructive comments will achieve. Although I am fairly reliant on my eftpos card so I’ll probably have to write a lot of I.O.U’s lol.

Barry Schwartz’s talk at the AHRI National Convention ‘The Loss of Wisdom’ is all about finding an anecdote to the excesses of bureaucracy amongst other things. Barry argues that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire and that real practical everyday wisdom will help you rebuild our world.

Barry Swartz is a Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. He is the author of “The paradox of choice: why more is less” which explains the risk that too many choices can essentially paralyse people into inaction.

He was a pretty cool speaker (also he had a tough gig being first cab off the rank on Day 2) and it was interesting to learn that he’s working on another book (due out later this year) on the topic. It does seem a bit out there and fluffy, but after I walked away I thought that it did make an awful lot of common sense.

Barry says that we as human resources professional have the opportunity to transform the workplace, so read on and hopefully I can do a good job explaining what he said.

Initially he started off talking about the recent troubled economic times the world has been experiencing, and how people have been collectively wringing their hands trying to figure out what went wrong and what do to so that it doesn’t happen again.

People are asking ‘how can we make better rules to control the bankers? How can we create smarter incentives so that bankers will do things that actually serve the common good? What Barry’s talk suggests is that although we need better rules and we need smarter incentives neither of these is enough. He says that what we need in addition to good rules and smart incentives, is virtue. We need character and we need a particular virtue one the Philosopher Aristotle called “practical wisdom”.

He argues that:

• Virtue is something we can’t do without
• The one virtue that is the key, is practical wisdom
• Despite our best intentions to make things better we are inadvertently collectively engaged in a war on wisdom; making it increasingly difficult for people to develop wisdom and to display it
• And that this is a problem that can in fact be solved, maybe even by people like us!

I’ll share a few stories that Barry spoke about with regards to practical wisdom.

The Hospital Janitor

Across the screen, Barry had a list of the job responsibilities of the hospital janitor at major teaching hospital in the United States. He wanted us to note two things: that there is a long list of duties and not enough people to do it, and also that not one of the items on the list involves another human being.

Basically, they are saying that hospital janitors may as well work in a morgue because there was nothing mentioned about the interactions they have with other people. However some psychologists have studied these janitors in the United States and come across people like Mike; who described how one day he stopped mopping the floor in the hallway because Mr Jones, a patient, was out of his bed getting a little much needed exercise post surgery walking slowly up and down the hall and Mike didn’t want Mr Jones to slip. Then there was Sharlene, who ignored her supervisors and did not vacuum the visitors lounge because there was some family members in the visitor’s lounge who were there all day everyday keeping a vigil for a sick relative. They were at that moment taking a moment to get some rest and she didn’t want to wake them. There was Luke who washed the floor in a comatose young man’s room twice because the man’s father who had himself been keeping a vigil for 6 months hadn’t seen Luke do it the first time and the boy’s father was angry.
Barry said that behaviour like this from hospital juniors, from technicians to nurses (and if we are extremely lucky once in a while even from doctors) doesn’t just make you feel good- it actually improves patient care and it enables hospitals to run better.

Not all hospital janitors are like this, but the ones who are think that these sorts of traits are an essential part of their job, even though their job description contains nothing about it. Barry argues that the janitors have the moral will to do the right thing, to do right by other people. Beyond this they have the moral skill to know what doing right means, moral will and moral skill together they are what Aristotle meant by practical wisdom.

You can check Barry’s TED Talk out below to hear the story for yourself.

In continuing on from problems that smart, successful people have, Marshall Goldmith talked about adding too much value as a leader recently at the AHRI National Convention.

He said “I’m young and smart and enthusiastic and I come to you with an idea. You think it’s a great idea. Rather than just saying ‘great idea’, our natural tendency is to say ‘That’s a nice idea, why don’t you add this to it’. The problem is the quality of the idea may go up 5%, my commitment to executing this idea may go down 50%.”

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Interesting thought isn’t it? Many people often do this with their kids, but it is extremely common in the workplace with younger staff.

Marshall said a good thing David Ulrich has taught him is that the effectiveness of execution is a function of a) What is the quality of the idea? Multiplied by b) What is my commitment to make it work?

We get so wrapped up in trying to improve the quality a little bit, we may damage the commitment a lot.

Something to consider in the way that you mentor staff.

Again, testing out my Flip Video camera and video editing skillz. I think I’m getting better but I hope you get the gist of how much fun the AHRI National Convention was. A special shout out goes to my friends from CSIRO who welcomed me onto their table and showed me a crazy, fun time. For the record- we did not start the conga line either. In case you are wondering who Wayne is, he is another awesome CSIRO employee who could not make it- so we’re hoping he comes next time

Also keep your eyes peeled for a certain Melbourne HR celebrity giving his monkey suit a workout on the dance floor!

Apologies that my notes from the Seminar has taken some time, but I promise my in-depth notes on a few of the speakers will be headed your way this week.

To get things started, here are my notes from the bestselling author and world-reknowned thought leader in leadership development, coaching and human resources, Marshall Goldsmith.

NB. He spoke for a quite a while so these will come in a couple of posts!

In 2009 Dr Goldsmith was recognised as one of the 15 most influential business speakers in the world in the Global Bi-Annual Study sponsored by the London Times and Forbes. The American Management Association named him as one of the 50 great thinkers and leaders who have influenced the field of management over the past 80 years. Dr Goldsmith teaches executive education at Dartmouth’s Tuck School and frequently speaks at leading business schools. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources and that is America’s top HR honour and his work has been recognised by almost every professional organisation in his field.

Marshall started out by introducing himself. He’s from Kentucky, went to school in Indiana, got a PHD at UCLA, was a College Professor and Dean, and for 45 years- did three things.

1. Speaking or teaching (the part of his job that he loves the most)
2. Coaching Executives- for clients like CEOs or could be CEOs of huge companies and that is really where he learns everything-having the privilege to work with these people.
3. Writing/Editing Books & Articles- His website is called www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com and he encouraged everyone to visit his website as he gives everything away. He joked about how people criticise him for putting up word documents in case people use and change them. He doesn’t care- he wants you to have them!

He then went on to explain that he had the privilege of spending over 50 days with Peter Drucker before he died and was on his advising Board for 10 years. According to Marshall, Peter Drucker was the world’s greatest authority on management.

“Drucker said we spend a lot of time helping leaders learn what to do, we do not spend enough time helping leaders learn what to stop. He said half the leaders I meet don’t need to learn what to do, they need to learn what to stop”.

Pretty interesting concept but you’ll all know what he is talking about when he goes into some examples.

Using “what to stop” as a coaching tool

When Marshall was interviewed by the Harvard Business Review and asked the question “What is the number one problem with successful people that you work with?”, his answer was simply: “winning too much”.

What does this mean? Marshal says “if it is important we want to? Win. If it is meaningful, we want to? Win. If it is critical, we want to? Win. Trivial, we want to? Win. And not worth it, we want to? Win anyway.
Winners like to win!! It is very difficult for smart, successful people who constantly go through life winning, not to win”.

He then gave us a case study in which he said that 75% of his successful clients fail.

Here’s the scenario:
You want to go to dinner at restaurant X. Your partner or significant other wants to go to restaurant Y. You have a heated argument. You go to restaurant Y. It’s not your choice. The food tastes awful. The service is terrible.

Option A: Critique the food. Point out your partner was wrong. This mistake could have been avoided if they had have listened to you.
Option B: Shut Up! Eat the stupid food! Try to enjoy it and have a pleasant evening.

What would you do? Most of us say truthfully that we would critique the food. What should we do? Shut up. Is critiquing the food smart of stupid? Incredibly stupid.

Marshall then goes on to give an example which he says is so hideously stupid, it will make the previous example pail in comparison, and he predicts that half the people in the room have done this.

Scenario Two:
You have a hard day at work. Bosses are so mean: push, push, push. Your muscles are sore. You go home and your partner is there. Your partner says, “I had such a hard day today. Such a terrible day”. To which you reply “Do you have any idea what I had to put up with today etc. You think you had a hard day etc…”.

Marshall says we are so competitive, we even have to prove we are more miserable than the next person.

Lesson Learned: Help leaders (and high achievers) to stop having to win. You’ve probably heard this one before in the phrase ‘pick your battles’ etc. However, most of us don’t practice this very well in our professional or personal lives. As you may remember, I am a huge Dr Phil fan also and he would similarly call this ‘right fighting’ or describe it as ‘fighting to win’. Bottom line is, we need to help leaders to stop doing it.

That’s ok there are a few ways you can keep in the loop.

You can search twitter to monitor the back channel about what people are saying. Just head to Twitter search and type in the hashtag for the event which is #AHRINC

You can then follow some of the people and see what they are saying.

For example:
@AHRIevents
@mspecht

or follow me and I’ll try and tweet what I can

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