Much Shorter Reflections on the CIPD Annual Conference and Engagement

Picking up on the previous blog, a key theme of conference was employee engagement, which ran through a number of sessions I attended. Perhaps the most important was the presentation of the MacLeod Report by no less than David MacLeod himself and Nita Clarke. I've previously expressed a mild form of disappointment with this work during an earlier blog on Saturday 18th July, to which I want to return in the spirit of critical friendship. David McLeod encouraged this during his presentation, so I'll try to oblige.

To focus on the positive, firstly, these two advocates have turned into evangelists for their work and cause, and this can only be to the benefit of the British economy and for HR professionals seeking ways in which they can add strategic value. Secondly, they have also enlisted and marshalled an impressive set of fellow travellers and evidence to support their cause. Thirdly, they have produced a highly readable and informative report, which they outlined with vigour and dedication during their presentation.

However, they still have not yet nailed down the concept for my liking, nor shown how this consultancy-generated idea is an advance on what academics have been talking about for years. Indeed, listening to the presentation, a harsh reading might question - what's new! If you have any sense of history in the field, you could justifiably argue that the same message and mode of enquiry has re-surfaced at least five times in since the 1920s and 1930s, beginning with the reporting of some dubious human relations experiments by the arch-evangelist, gifted self-publicist and, some would claim, charlatan, Elton Mayo (I've written about this in the Managing People book) and most recently popularised by Peters and Waterman in the early 1980s when they began the culture-excellence movement with some sketchy research on so-called excellent companies. As many readers will know, half of these excellent companies experienced a significant fall from grace five years after they did their initial research. You can guess where I'm going with using only 'excellent' case study companies as the basis for providing long term predictions - not very clever, and a trap the McLeod report is in danger of falling into.

That said, just like In Search of Excellence, we should be careful of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, as some academics did and are likely to do with the MacLeod report. Instead, we should be building on its positives and its capturing of the zeitgeist. What David MacLeod needs to do, contrary to his dismissal of fifty-plus definitions as a way of avoiding the problem, is to begin to get some definitional clarity on the concept. For it is only by doing so that we will be able to measure engagement's impact and understand its drivers. Paul Sparrow's group at Lancaster are beginning to do just that; so are we in some forthcoming papers, where we have begun to disentangle the conflation of engagement into four related but distinct sets of ideas about what workers can engage with (and, just as important, measure them with valid and reliable scales with known drivers and outcomes) .

In the corporate reputations book I examined a number of consulting approaches to the concept and found them to be inconsistent in what people were supposed to be engaged with and just plain wrong in confusing correlations with prediction - are engaged workers likely to create high performance organisations, or are high performance organisations likely to create the conditions for engaged workers?. These are not just academic niceties but have important practical implications. Unfortunately, David MacLeod's presentation gave the impression of falling into into both traps.

To conclude, we are now at the stage that engagement is too important a concept for academics to dismiss as yet another consultancy-generated fad. It has a lot going for it and needs to be treated a little more rigourously; otherwise the MacLeod Report will loose a lot of its relevance - just like its predecessors!

Reflections on the CIPD Annual Conference and The Future of HR

I've just spend an enjoyable and highly informative two days attending the CIPD annual conference in Manchester as one of their guests. The invitation to spend time with the senior team of the CIPD was, in part, a result of my involvement as a judge on the technology and HR awards. So, first of all, I've want to congratulate the team at Intercontinental Hotels for their leadership learning portal and two extremely able guys at Beds and Bars - both of whom read this blog - who have created something new and practical in the field of e-HR and Web 2.0 with very limited resources and good use of iPhones.

My involvement, along with some good academic colleagues, was also to provide academic input and feedback into the CIPD's future initiatives and suggest ways in which the academy and HR professionals can get the best from each other. Again, this was a very welcome and excellent initiative on behalf of the CIPD. So with this last point in mind, I suggest that one of our most important jobs is to act as 'critical friends', though there are additional roles for us in helping contribute to 'thought leadership' (I'm not keen on that term), as advocates of rigour as well as relevance in producing actionable knowledge about HR , and in helping ask the right questions for the CIPDs future research and knowledge agenda. On this last point, for the most part we're typically dealing with 'wicked' problems for which there is no real solution, programme or end point; instead we are only able to resolve inevitable tensions, especially at the strategic level (see earlier post on leadership and negative capabilities) by distributing ownership to those people who have either a better grip on the issues or who have to live with the consequences.

So with the critical friend role in mind, I would like to offer some comments on two very important initiatives launched by the CIPD and one that they actively support. The first was the launch of the HR Profession Roadmap, which is one of the most important exercises in competence mapping and building HR capability ever undertaken - at least as far as I'm aware - (download here). The launch breakfast meeting was poorly attended because of heavy rain in Manchester but deserves greater publicity (which I'm sure it will get) because of its potential impact on shaping thinking and practice in HR and building current and future capabilities of the profession. My advice is that any organisation seeking to build HR capacity, and there can't be many not seeking to do so, would be well advised to take advantage of the thinking, frameworks and evidence produced by this project team. I'm working with a number of organisations on capacity building in HR projects and I know I'll be using these standards to help build strategic leadership capacity among senior HR people. Which is where I want to begin my critical friendship!

In a piece of work we completed recently on developing a model of strategic leadership for HR directors in NHS Scotland, we cautioned senior HR directors on the limitations of 'atomistic lists of competences. To paraphrase Henry Mintzberg, even when joined up in a circle (or triangle or other geometric shape)', competence models do not provide testable models of relationships among the complex range of factors that produce effective strategic leadership in HR. This is an important cautionary note for practitioners because it is really only by devising causal models (or, dare I say it, theories) of effective leadership that you can truly evaluate the impact of competences, knowledge, attitudes, EQ/ IQ etc) on performance. These causal models should show how,why and what people bring to a job, the styles of leadership they choose, the attitudes and behaviours they demonstrate, etc., result in effective performance (itself a contestable issue). In addition, practitioners also need to understand the complex range of so-called moderating factors which influence this line of sight. By moderating factors I mean how market or stakeholder context, business models of how to create value, values and leadership aspirations, HR architectures, and the capacity of the HR team to create and leverage networks for innovation, combine to influence the process of strategic leadership in HR.

Sarah Miles, Organizational Effectiveness and Development Director, and her team at the CIPD have done an excellent job in bringing us so far with the new mapping exercise but were ready to admit they don't have all of the answers. If they are able to build on what they have achieved so far by devising better causal models and setting out the full range of contextual factors organisations need to take into account when implementing them, they will do the profession an even greater favour - a direction we're certainly travelling in.

The second major initiative, discussed by Jackie Orme and Lee Sears at the conference and on a recent CIPD podcast, was the results of the Next Generation HR Study. Again this initiative is extremely important because it aims to build a picture of future strategic leadership in HR based on research into what leading firms in the UK are thinking and doing. You can read about it in People Management in the November 19th edition or download reports/listen to discussions from the above links, but basically the project has highlighted three trajectories along which organisations are moving - creating greater organisational agility for sustainable performance, (re)building a culture of authenticity and trust, and demonstrating a balanced approach to risk management.

Again, I'm really pleased to see this work because it is important for the profession to understand its role in resolving the tensions created by shaping the innovation or 'agility' agenda while focusing on the legitimacy agenda. We've been researching and writing about these agendas and tensions for some time now, and these have been the subject of a number of posts, our book on corporate reputations and HR, a forthcoming one with Ron Burke and Cary Cooper on corporate reputations, some academic papers, and a new chapter on HR's role in contributing to better staff, innovation and financial governance. Our approach has been to discuss them in terms of the wealth creation role of corporate governance (innovation by doing different things and doing things differently) while managing the wealth protection role of governance (developing corporate reputations for being excellent and trustworthy employers, providing effective and ethical leadership and governance, and exercising corporate social responsibility).

In other words, both the CIPD and our agendas seem to converge on issues that strategic HR leaders need to address, which is both comforting for us and, if they ever needed it, a degree of validation for the CIPD Next Generation project. Furthermore, I suspect our agendas are likely to become even more important because HR has not only to find ways of adding strategic value but also contributing longer term reputational value to the nowadays somewhat tarnished business sector and its senior leadership teams (at least in the eyes of many). It also has to find ways of contributing to public value in an under-threat public sector, which is having to deal with decreases in public spending because parts of the financial sector have been unable to manage the tensions between the wealth creation and wealth protection roles of governance.

I'm going to leave the third sets of comments on the engagement agenda and the McLeod report to a separate post. This one is getting far too long!

Putting People Back into HR Strategy

My apologies for the time I've had off from posting. I'vebeen very busy participating in some events which have provided me with excellent examples of how to 'put people back into strategy', the subject of some recent posts

I've recently written a paper with Paul Gollan and Kerry Grigg on HR strategy, suggesting that a strategy-as-action approach has much to teach us as practitioners and academics about strategic management in general and developing workable HR strategies in particular (see the strategy-in-action website). Over the last couple of weeks I've taken part in two health service-related events which have demonstrated the benefits of a strategy-in-action perspective, although participants didn't use this label as such.

The first was a large event run by the leadership team of Dumfries and Galloway Health Board, facilitated by an ex-postgraduate student of mine, Sharon Millar, and colleagues from the CIPD, Drs John McGurk and Jill Millar. This event was one of a series they have run aimed at developing workable strategies for building dynamic capabilities in the health board as it moves closer towards partnership working. What was impressive about this process was the volume, intensity and numbers of people involved in the leadership and strategy-making process. In other words, the emphasis at this event and the others which preceded it was very much on strategising and human resource development as much as strategic content.

The second was an event I participated in yesterday, run by the Allied Health Professions of Scotland to develop an integrated professional and educational strategy for a group of key workers in the NHS in Scotland. Drawing on a methodology to creating a consensus around the principles and content of such a strategy, it was fascinating to watch how they used inputs from internal and external speakers to develop a progressively more refined series of consensus statements. The process was driven by discussions during previous events where questions about what mattered to staff were posed by about 180 participants at all levels from all Allied Health Professions in all healthboards in Scotland. These questions were then turned over to 'experts' to write research-based papers on the issues raised by participants (of which I was one). During the actual consensus event at Murrayfield Conference Centre in Edinburgh, experts fed back their findings, which were fully discussed by the conference participants and their views were summarised in the form of a progressive series of consensus statements by a panel who acted as facilitators rather than directors of the process. Though the process may not be without its flaws, as a methodology of developing strategy for a group of rather disparate set of professional groupings - around which there was a strong need for consensus - it was a real lesson in how to put people back into strategy and in how to use the strategic journey to develop workable strategies that have much more chance of buy-in.

There are important lessons from these events not only for organisations in healthcare, which are dominated by the need to gain the consent of influential professions to survive, but also for the private sector. For example, I'm currently being asked to think about how a large multinational organisation gain insight into values that stakeholders can understand, agree on and draw on to shape their future direction and current actions. I think there are lessons from these two projects that help address this question.

Explaining Dissatisfaction with Senior Leaders

I'm faced with a little problem on a major research project we are conducting, and that is how to understand why staff in a public sector environment find their senior leadership teams to be disconnected, more interested in politics and government targets and not particularly focused on clients. It's also the subject of a 'provocative' commentary I'm writing about on the need for a leadership 2.0 for Skills for Health in the UK.

As you can imagine, senior leadership teams see the problem quite differently from so called followers. They see themselves as caught up in having to resolve, often conflicting demands from a variety of stakeholders, including the increasing need to meet public value objectives, and having to make tough decisions about resource allocation, which inevitably clash with the single-minded aims of powerful professional groups such as physicians and other clinical grades.

I’ve tackled this issue before in an earlier blog on a report Keith Grint and I did on the 'wicked problems' of leadership in the public sector for the Scottish Government. In that report, the issue of distributed leadership (DL) as an important new(ish) theory was raised as a possible panacea, and such is the head of steam behind it in organizations such as the NHS and other public sector bodies in the UK and elsewhere, it needs to be treated seriously, whatever it might mean. Peter Gronn, an ex-colleague at Glasgow University, has written extensively about this issue, and he often provides the starting point for a stimulating conversation. And he certainly did that at an excellent symposium at the British Academy of Management in September on this issue, which attempted to get under the skin of DL through four insightful presentations that have caused me to re-visit my recent thinking on the subject.

Jackie Ford from Bradford University pointed out that DL has come to the rescue of our unrealistic implicit theories of hero managers in the public sector, point out from her research what most public sector senior managers often feel, i.e. frustration and inordinate levels of stress because they have so little autonomy as a result of agendas being set for the over which they have no control. Leaders, as it were, become arenas for competing narratives and expectations, which they often seek to deflect by laying off responsibility to the centre, or, increasingly look to the language and promises of distributed leadership to others throughout the organization to help them resolve.

This was pretty much the message of Jon Gosling and Richard Bolden from Exeter following their recent research into leadership in Higher education. They found that distributed leadership existed in the sense that certain responsibilities and decision-making authority were delegated but only within bounds, and that power remained at the top, often linked to control over key resources. They argued that there were four dominant discourses of leadership and DL – as an alternative to management and administration (re-labelling), as a bridge between previous collegial styles and new theories of executive behaviour, as a reality (or appearance of reality) towards encouraging responsible followership, and as a rhetorical device to draw attention to some problems and solutions but mask others.

Annie Pye, also from Exeter saw ownership as an important missing link, reflecting Barbara Kellerman’s call for responsible followership as a way of thinking about distributed leadership, often operationalised in simple ways such as going the extra mile to help others or offer suggestions on how to improve things. However, in the private sector at least, this was less likely to be the case (unless you worked for a John Lewis organization that shared responsibility, ownership and rewards among all staff) because of the increasing gap between upper and lower eschalons.

The session was opened by a good colleague of mine, Paul Iles, from Leeds Metrapolitan University. His contribution was to set out some useful two-by-two matrices for comparing and contrasting the various features of leadership. Two of the most useful were to see leadership in terms of being a planned or emergent phenomenon and essentially an individual or collective phenmenon, with celebrity leadership and tradition leader development typically planned and individualistic while DL was typically emergent and collective. One of the best examples of this perspective of DL is work by David Buchanan and colleagues on the UK healthcare system, demonstrating that, under certain circumstances, 'no-one in charge' can lead to highly positive outcomes critical areas such as cancer care. However, another matrix has provided me with a perspective to criticise much of this work - that is to see leadership and the assumptions underpinning it either in rational-objectivist- unitary terms or in political/ pluralist terms. The first assumes that organizations among other things are essentially characterised by common cause and common spirit, amenable to rational solutions such as leadership and sophisticated HR. The second is more traditional in industrial relations teaching, seeing organizations made up of legitimate but competing interests, which frequently come into conflict, and are usually only resolved through compromise and negotiation to allow everyone gets something of their aims.

I've recently used this last perspective to provoke an arguably more realisitic discussion on the potential of leadership in healthcare to incorporate doctors into management, a popular solution in the UK NHS but one fraught with difficulty. This is because many hold a pluralist perspective and seek to remain a 'loyal' but necessary opposition to ensure that patient care is not submerged in the welter of politically-inspired changes and financially-driven targets. More of this in a later post. The main point, however, is that much of leadership's popularity is rooted in optimistic but innappropriate assumptions about organizations. Criticisms of this arguably misplaced faith in unitarism used to be the recieved wisdom thirty years ago in a more pluralist Britain before Thatcher, when opposition to power was sees in a more positive light, and when social engineering through culture management, HR and the 'cult of the customer' to discipline employees was less prevalent. Are we about to return to these pluralist assumptions with calls for a new leadership 2.0? I don't think so, but the zeitgeist is changing. The 'romance with leaders' is definitely on the wain - even in football, the subject of a forthcoming post.

Evaluating the Impact of HR by Evaluating the Signals they Send

There has been an enormous amount of academic and consulting research on the impact of so-called high performance work systems (HPWS) on organizational performance, which has generated great interest in complementary ‘bundles’ of usually high commitment HR practices, including comprehensive recruitment and selection procedures, incentive compensation, performance management, extensive employee involvement, training and career development . Much of this work has linked the mere existence of such practices, particularly when integrated with an organizations business strategy of business model, to positive organizational outcomes. This work has been used by by academics and maybe should be used by practitioners to evidence the credibility and impact of the HR function through the substantial benefits resulting from high commitment HR.


However, as anyone who has been the recipient of the mismatch between the ‘people are our most important asset’ and the actual implementation of such practices will tell you, it is not the existence of such practices that are important but the consistency and vigour with which they are implemented, whether or not employees actually expect and value what they deliver and whether their experience of these bundles of practices is a coherent, beneficial and fair one. This was the subject of a symposium we took part in at the British Academy of Management’s HR in Healthcare track, the papers in which were all characterised by a simple but powerful idea, initially put forward by Greg Bamber from Monash. He drew on thinking from a chapter in a forthcoming handbook from Sage on human resource management which suggested that what is important about high performance work systems is not their existence but the signals they send to employees and whether these signals are interpreted by staff as strong - intense and consistent - or weak. This is based on so-called signalling theory: strategies, policies and practices are really signals and it is employee perceptions and behaviours resulting from these signals that really predicts organizational outcomes.


Our paper on the employer branding in the Scottish healthcare system could certainly be interpreted in this light. Like much of the other research in healthcare, re-interpreted into the language of signalling theory, we found that staff in healthcare often exhibit low levels of identification and/or engagement with their employers, despite the existence of well intentioned HPWS. This is due, in part at least, to the weak and mixed messages they receive from senior leadership teams, which sometimes see themselves as the 'meat in the sandwich' between at least two forces. The first are government initiatives and targets (often developed to satisfy the needs for politicians and the media to tell and sell simple stories to the general public and the media that shapes their interests). The second is the professional power of certain clinical groups to block their reforms. These mixed and weak messages were core themes of Greg’s paper on the key role of ward managers in fostering high performance and, indeed, as pointed out by Stephen Procter, the chair of the symposium, one of the themes of our own paper.


Perhaps the most demonstration of the impact of signals and HPWS was made by Jody Hoffer Gittell from the US, who has written extensively in the field of relational coordination for academics and practitioners (see her website for a full explanation of her ideas). Jody's paper was, for me at least, one of the most impressive of the conference because of its rigour and relevance to practitioners. She and her colleagues put together a very well constructed study that demonstrated a strong and positive relationship between staff reports of their experiences of HPWS in healthcare and positive organizational outcomes, which included, among other measures, variations in patient experiences and actual results of a particular kind of surgical operation in different hospitals. The line of sight was not a direct one but mediated by staff perceptions and experience of other team members' levels of collaboration and relational coordination. Her findings suggested that a small increase in the experience and reporting of relational coordination among healthcare teams led to proportionately very large increase in patient outcomes. The importance of relational coordination, one key measure of social capital, however, was less apparent among physicians, who tended to be less impressed by the idea or were reported to be less involved by others in relational coordination. This could be put down to structural problems, ie. they operated across a number of hospitals and were less integrated into hospital-based teams. Or perhaps maybe because of their lack of professional training in such issues? One of the implications of the study is that by having physicians more integrated into the care teams in hospitals, so sending signals about the importance of relational coordination, such a change would pay off markedly in key patient outcomes.


These ideas have important practical consequences for HR and assessing the impact of HR. Not only should we concerned with the design of HR strategies and architectures but also the signals they send, how they are interpreted and what intervening factors influence the messages received. Our argument is that there are two key ones, which don’t require a great deal of rocket science to understand. The first lies in the skill, will and, importantly, the opportunity (removing blockages and introducing enabling structures) of line managers to implement HPWS. The second is for senior leaders to signal and follow through on the messages of HPWS and, increasingly, on higher values in more ethical, innovative and caring forms of leadership 2.0 (see earlier post on management 2.0).

Employee Impact on Corporate Reputations and Web 2.0

I spent a very pleasant day on Wednesday with the HR team of Standard Life, one of Europe's major insurance and asset management companies as part of their 'Big Conversation' on the future of HR in the organization. It's great to see companies like this engaging in a serious way with outsiders who can bring something to their conversation to help them reflect on what they do and, hopefully, do things differently. The aim of the day was to help them enhance their own reputations and that of the company, and this was certainly what my co-presenter, Bill McEwen from the Gallup Organization, did.

One of the benefits that good consultants can bring to the table is often large data sets, which Bill certainly had at his fingertips. His theme was the relationship between employee brand advocacy and a range of customer satisfaction/ enagagement scores, which he demonstrated through close correlations. It was also interesting to see his data on the low levels of brand advocacy among government and financial services employees. However, perhaps the most powerful messages he put across were contained in two little stories. One was of the multiplicative effects of employee advocacy and engagement, e.g. great hotel buildings with disengaged employees equal zero customer satisfaction, according to Ritz Carlton's CEO. The other was the story of Dave Carroll, which appeared in Forbes magazine. To quote Bill:

'Dave Carroll was sitting in a window seat on a United plane at O'Hare airport in Chicago when he looked out and saw baggage handlers hurling guitar cases (Dave and his colleagues' guitars) through the air. He pointed it out to flight attendants; they responded with indifference. When he arrived in Nebraska, he found that his instrument had been smashed. After months of complaining to the airline and getting no response, he wrote and performed a song, "United Breaks Guitars," and posted it on YouTube. It was viewed more than 3 million times in its first 10 days'.

Bill's point was that it was the United flight attendant indifference and the indifference of the follow up staff that has caused probably United a great deal in terms of loss of reputation - a great deal more than the investment in effort to promote better customer service among flight attendants and/ or the $3-400 it would have cost United to replace the broken guitars and prevented the posting.

Talent Management, Football Teams and Metaphors

Following up on the last blog on investment in human capital and social capital, and the example of football teams, I was taken with a little article in this week's edition of the Economist (August 22nd, 2009, p. 32) on the economics of Real Madrid's strategy for re-gaining their competitive position in world football by recruiting a new clutch of gallaticos - a metaphor for what many companies have done in the past and, apparently, one that finds support in the Harvard Business School study by Jose Luis Nueno of the soccer industry in emerging markets such as the USA, Japan and China.

For those people less engaged by football (soccer) than I am, Real Madrid have spent many millions this summer in re-applying a strategy first tried nearly ten years ago by their then president, Florentino Perez. He has has just been re-employed to help the club regain their former pre-eminent status in Spanish and world soccer from their arch-rivals Barcelona, who, interestingly, have followed much more of a 'grow your own', social capital approach to world domination of soccer.

The Real Madrid strategy is not just based on the ability of the new gallaticos to turn their considerable individual talents into results but to generate merchandising revenue in the way David Beckham did during the first wave of this strategy. It is also based on the ability of Perez to convince banks in Spain to supply sufficient credit to a club operating in one of the worst hit countries in Europe in terms of GDP growth and decline. Finally, much lower levels of income tax on players coming to Spain than in other European countries helps explain that the real costs to Real Madrid in paying wages is lower.

The point of the article is to contrast 'cheque book power' with Barcelona's largely 'home grown' strategy as a route to success. Metaphors, however, such as make or buy strategies are partial - they hide as much as they reveal. What the article fails to mention in Barcelona's strategy of building social capital not only through its attempts to create 'bonds' among the team by its development strategy but by its building of 'bridges' in the community it serves and the wider world through its ethical approach to promotion. So, like all, rather lazy, single factor theories of strategic success, of which sports team metaphors are among the most popular, are likely to be found wanting. Perhaps the secret lies in complementarity among different forms of capital investment. It certainly lies in developing better mid-range theories of success in industries like soccer; otherwise we will end up repeating this make or buy argument in football, which has a long history going back a century or so but has generated little light in what makes for sustainable success.