 The Invisible Bond By Michael Willard |
I am a cuddly curmudgeon. I believe that there is an unwritten contract - aside from any written contract - between professional employees and the big chief, or whatever the CEO
or owner is called.
This unwritten bond has various off-the-road rules, primarily dealing with mutual respect. This road is paved with good intentions carried out and not the potholes of mistrust.
I realize this sounds rather high-minded, even Biblical, but somewhere along the line - particularly in public companies - there has been a breakdown in responsibilities from employer to professional employee and from professional employee to employer. Everyone is on the make, and for the wrong reasons. This has little to do with ambition, which is a good thing, and everything to do with greed, which is over-rated.
Right now I am thinking of Enron's Kenneth Lay, and the perp walk I saw him take on television, his hands firmly cuffed behind him. The one thing about false loyalty to a company, as we saw in the Enron situation, was how quickly senior employees turned on one another. It is interesting as well, that right up until the fall, Enron's leadership was still exhorting their employees to hold on to their stock; manipulative and conspiratorial to the end.
Hence, the most common discussion over the water cooler is who has the best executive recruiter. Everyone is looking to be traded to the Yankees. Employees have become more consumed about moving up than about moving toward the company goals. This, however, is not just the fault of the employee. It is the fault of the boss, the company, the CEO, the Board of Directors, the Chairman, the Chairman Emeritus and maybe even the long-dead founder.
Corporations, by and large, have the collective intelligence of a pet rock. They show a lack of loyalty to professional employees that would be alarming if it were not so ludicrous. They look at the smallest of details and not overall talents. They institute medieval systems like Quartile-ing, asking other senior professionals to judge every employee below the highest levels, putting them into quartiles as to fitness for executive assignments. This is cruel and unusual punishment. It often leads to legions of Uriah Heeps, as talented but less political employees are tossed aside after sitting in the final fourth quartile for several months.
Age also is the great eliminator. Anyone 50 or over in the professional work force is in what I call the portfolio bubble. They are heading to the red zone, which is roughly defined as 60 and beyond. Even though surveys say these are the most loyal people to the company, the same surveys suggest the company doesn't return that loyalty. They are expensive, and are perceived to have lost a step or two. Younger employers, often those on the verge of entering the portfolio bubble themselves, feel the need to trade the veteran for the young southpaw out of Toledo. Hence, when the Fortune 500 alphabet names begin layoffs in a downturn, they look first to the aging managers.
The invisible bond between professional employees and the company is not created in the first month on the job, but builds up over time. At my company, as you can see from some of the ideas put forth from time to time in these columns, we don't live in the real world. We live in the Willard World. It is a little wacky, sometimes inefficient, but one in which a fair profit is made.
Capacity and Billings
Many corporations talk in terms of capacity and billings and not value, and apply test tube formulas developed by business schools to an employee's performance. They substitute the human equation for a mathematical one. The most unpardonable sin is to let a recent business school graduate run rampant in your human resources department. Hire a successful football coach or maybe a circus clown if you want real results.
The international company with which I worked eight years ago in Ukraine would have never let me provide a pension for the family of a colleague who died suddenly while on the job. This is the Wild East. I did so anyway, and raised it when I bought the local office of the company. If we were owned and not tethered through franchise agreements to various international companies, we would have far fewer employees, due to business school formulas about excess capacity versus billings.
Recently I came across a release from a corporation seeking employees.
It spelled out the need for qualified human capital. I don't know about you, but to me qualified human capital sounds like something you put on plants and that is sold in burlap bags. I wouldn't want to work there. Like Rick Nelson crooned in his signature song, Garden Party, "[i]f memories were all I had, I'd rather drive a truck." No wonder a 2003 study by the Walker Group suggested that only 30 percent of U.S. employees are loyal. Their bosses are confusing them with turnip seeds sold by the ton.
To make up for all these really unpardonable sins, the corporation has a company picnic, or maybe a night out at a ball game. Of course, there is also the annual Christmas party. This is like a serial killer confessing his sins to a priest after every deed. It makes them feel good, but it really doesn't accomplish much. The campaign for loyalty is an everyday one, beginning at first light and ending when the lights go out. And, strangely enough, while money is a factor, we are told by virtually every employee survey imaginable that it is not the main loyalty motivator. But, don't be stupid, it's right up there at the top.
After communication, I would have to list remuneration as the glue holding employee loyalty. We're not talking just salaries here, but the benefits employees receive, from vacation time to employer contribution to 401(K) plans. The more creative you can be, the better, and it has often been said that a menu approach to benefits - where the employee picks his own perks - is a creative approach.
However, the trick is in demonstrating to the employee that benefits are not entitlements. They are, in essence, extra pay for extra value. Those not giving the extra value in a professional atmosphere should probably be working at the Exxon station. That extra value is what sets one professional firm apart from
the ordinary one, and it is the only way to win the competitive race.
So, the formula goes: communication + remuneration + X = Loyal employee. Okay, what's X? It is the most important element of loyalty and employee retention. It stands for worth, or, more precisely, a feeling of worth, accomplishment and career progress.
Chances are, if you are afraid of heights like I am, you would not bungee jump from the world's highest suspension bridge for a pay raise that, after taxes, meant you would only take home an extra couple of hundred a month. However, if the Bungee Jump God were to raise the ante, telling you that with one jump you would not only set a world record for bungee jumping, but would collect the Medal of Freedom and be enshrined in the Country Music Hall of Fame, you might have second thoughts. Hence, we have our 'feeling of worth' standard of loyalty.
People need to feel wanted. They want to feel needed. They need to feel that the big silverback gorilla of a CEO thinks not just about the entire team, but also about them individually. And the only way I know to do this is to tell them, and tell them often.
This goes contrary to that old-fashioned rule about giving praise sparingly. When I wrote an early novel, a person in the entertainment business for whom I have great respect read it and said that he really liked it. In fact, since he was in the movie-making business, he event hinted at future commercial possibilities. Because of this praise, I was encouraged to flail away at the typewriter and had dashed through a third of a second novel before I received the first rejections from publishers. Neither book has been published, but a little praise had sent me into a writing fury.
Why, Why, Why?
Have we always been this unenlightened in the professional services field? Yes, or at least so it seems.
How is it that you know all the answers? I don't, I'm guessing. But don't you think something has to be better than Neanderthal to the third power?
I blame a lot on that golden idol known as the stock market, a place where everybody wins or loses by the 4 p.m. bell. The market is a wonderful institution. It is a barometer that measures the health and strength of businesses. It is where people like you and me pull a chair up to the table each night and gamble that our chosen companies will end up winners at the end of the day. It is one of the most ingenious inventions of the ages. It can be more exciting then a horse race.
However, we abuse and misuse the market. We see it as a sprint when we need to look at it through the eyes of the long-distance runner.
When one's eye is constantly on the quarterly earnings report, one gets myopic. To cheer or to jeer a single report in the tableau of a 50-year old company seems rather silly. It also seems rather goofy for that company to make decisions based on three-month, six-month, nine-month or even annual intervals. The British won virtually every skirmish in America's Revolutionary War, but the war itself was won by the colonists at Yorktown six years after Bunker Hill.
The leadership in most corporations simply has not sufficiently articulated long-term strategies. Sometimes they are challenged to think beyond the current day, even the current hour. On the other hand, employees want more from the corporation than the corporation is generally willing to give. He or she has no sense of delayed gratification. The note left from the executive recruiter is like a siren call. In essence, in many major corporations, the professional manager and the professional employee are at undeclared war with one another.
Some time ago I wrote out for a publication what I felt were necessary ingredients to good management of a company. For lack of a better business name, I called them Beautiful Business Bromides and I list them in the nearby sidebar. They have worked for me.
When others are retreating, yell, "Charge!" An economic downturn will send most companies scurrying like prairie dogs for the nearest hole. This is a big mistake, and it is a blunder made often by companies that can't see beyond the length of a blind man's cane. Think of the story about the frog in water that is slowly brought to a boil. Because the change in temperature is so gradual, the frog does not move. Eventually, it is too late, and the frog has, literally croaked. This is what happens to companies when they retrench or stand still in a time of crisis.
Crisis, by its very nature, forces some change. Make it positive change. If one is to toss a Hail Mary pass, it's best done when the defenders are off the field. Double your advertising and PR budgets, he said, self-servingly. The fact is, though, that the payoff is generally always greater than the expense. Besides, you'll have more fun and your employees will admire your spunk.
When an employee says he is leaving if he doesn't get a pay raise, suggest that he not let the door hit him in the butt on the way out.
Over the years, no matter how good an employer you are, people will leave. It is a sun-coming-up happening. If it is a valued person, and they are moving on to a non-competitive environment, wish them well and say you will keep their job open for a certain period of time should they have a change of heart. This is being overly generous, but at least they are not leaving to a competitor - with your trade secrets on a compact disk.
However, if they are going to a competitor, tell them the company was the Last Chance Saloon. Then go out find and hire someone better to fill the job, and pay him or her more. Believe me, it will make you feel good, even superior. Obviously, you would have (or should have) been paying the current employee his worth. Eventually, you will feel like a genius for getting rid of the guy.
Value ideas. Give credit.
The boss is often the boss because he can elevate others' ideas to a higher level. He can, in fact, turn an idea into a solid business platform. Be liberal in giving credit to an idea's originator. You're the boss - King of the Mountain. You look petty when you don't advocate for your employees' ideas.
“Hire personally. Fire personally.
Hiring is rather easy, but a crapshoot. Generally, you take the advice of someone who knows the potential employee, and you also look at his or her track record. Forget the resume, except for a cursory glance that shows no great interruptions for prison time. The literary license that goes into a resume - which by the way is read on the average for 15 seconds - would put novelist John Grisham to shame. If the professional job candidate was successful in previous positions, chances are they will keep on churning like the Energizer Bunny.
But with hiring comes an equal responsibility when it comes to firing. This is something that really can't be delegated to the vice president in the human resources department, no matter how many warm and fuzzy courses he took to make giving the axe seem no more painful than buying snow tires.
Respect both old and the young.
I would be just as suspicious of a business run by 20-somethings as I would a business of only 50 or 60-somethings. Age is to be valued in business, likewise youth. I discovered a great filmmaker when he was only 20, giving him the opportunity to direct commercials in our company.
Tolerate an occasional lapse into perceived incompetence.
This may seem a strange statement to many reading my writings for the first time. But there is a second part to that equation. Never tolerate an ethical lapse. Mistakes are fixable, competence teachable. Unethical behavior can be fatal, and can rarely be rehabilitated.
Business is simple. If you make more than you spend, you are winning.
This one is even obvious to the folks in the human resources department. But, I will note it here because this is the second time I have written these passages, and I included them in a less ambitious project. But, the fact is, the only game one plays with a balance sheet is Russian roulette. Be honest with yourself. Don't hold on to a write-off until it and you grow old, gray and wrinkled. You will eventually die, but the overstatement will become that lie writ large.
If you consider your job to be work, then find another job.
Life is too short. I have had many jobs, but the only work I ever did was bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly. News reporting. Politics. The PR and ad business have always been like school recess. You spend half your life on the job. Do you really want it to be work?
Finally, hire people who are better than you are.
And then don't be paranoid about it. This is called leadership.
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Read also previous issue' articles:
"ASK THE LAWYER!"
The Achilles Heal of Management: Employee Communication
Ukraine Gets Image Makeover
Lateness, and Other Crimes
Hookers, Cotton Gin Workers and Other Professionals
Dial M for Mobile
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