Sebastian Perrier

The bed-rocks of a winning organization:

Mission: announces exactly where you are going; shows direction into profitability. Every decision should be linked to the mission. The mission should be concrete and specific. The mission should be stated by the top management. The mission is the defining moment of the leader.

Values: describe the behaviours that will take you there, to the mission. Values should be stated by everyone in the company. Welcome debate, feel ownership.

Candor: be direct and honest – speak your mind. This is the biggest secret in business – forget about competition when your worst enemy in the way you communicate with one another internally. Gets more people into conversation, generates speed, cuts costs because it eliminates meaningless meetings. Lack of candid is selfish, because it makes your life easier to avoid conflict. Instead, to get candor, reward it, praise it, etc. Complacency can kill you.

Differentiation: companies win when their managers make a clear and meningful distinction between top and bottom performers. Cultivate a culture of strong and weak. Companies suffer when every person is treated equally. Managers have to take hard choises and live with them. 20 – 70 – 10 rule (bottom 10 has to go). For this you need to meassure performance.

Voice and Dignity: let people give the oportunity to speak out their opinion (not necessarily make a decision, but yes to speak out). And always respect people for their work, effort and individuality. GE implemented the Work-Out sessions. A 2 or 3 event days with everybody talking with a facilitator. Managers would commit to give an on-the-spot yer or no to 75% of the recommendations that came out and resolve the remaining 25% within 30 days. Manager will be present only at the beginning of the session and then disappear until the end of the session; returning only at the end to make a decision.

Nevertheless, a company is not a democracy. It is not that every idea should be put into practice; that is the managers role. But with these brain-storm sessions you get better ideas and suggestions. JW Book Quoted: “Why are you only paying your employees for their hands, when you can count on their brains too for free”. They need it and you too.

How he came to define success…

Three different categories of job characteristics have been studied by researchers and play an important role in people experience of their jobs:

TASK CHARACTERISTICS

• Autonomy
• Task Variety
• Task Significance
• Task Identity

SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS

• Interdependence
• Support and Friendship Opportunities
• Interaction Outside the Organization
• Interpersonal Feedback

KNOWLEDGE CHARACTERISTICS

• Complexity
• Specialization
• Skill Variety
• Creativity

There are 5 main characteristics that define a persons personality. Ranked from the one that comes with genes to the one that can be more manageable. You can rank yourself from 1 to 5 in each of them:

1. Extroversion (5 extroverted / 1 introverted)
2. Neurotic (5 neurotic / 1 emotionally stable)
3. Agreeableness (5 agreeable / 1 disagreeable)
4. Openness to Experiences (5 open, creative / 1 closed, focused)
5. Conscientiousness (5 conscious, organized, responsible / 1 care-free)

Form, Storm, Norm, Perform

When teams come together, they typically go through 4 developmental stages. This process can take a few days or stretch over a much longer period. It can easily take six months for a team to settle down.

Form

Forming happens when people first come together. They are initially polite and the conversation is mostly exploratory, finding out about one another and the work that is to be done. People here are typically in the ‘honeymoon’ period and are quite excited about the newness and potential of being in the team. Some also may be more fearful and timid, whilst others are less gregarious, observing from the sidelines more than getting in there and exposing themselves

Storm

As the initial politeness fades, people start to get more into the work and their roles and so start to argue about things that were left unsaid or not realized when they first met. Storming can be fiercer if one or more conditions exist: more than one dominant person who wants to be the leader (formal and/or social); unclear formal roles; unclear objectives; little or large external threat; among other.

Norm

As roles and personal conflicts are sorted out, the focus turns towards the task and what needs to be done. Objectives are clarified and the detail of work is laid out. Feeling more as a team, people start to help one another more. Socially, group rules develop and are refined. People begin to feel like they are members of the same team and form a clear sense of identity. Internal conflict may be replaced with external conflict as the human focus turns to ‘us and them.’

Perform

Finally, a steady-state is achieved, where the team reaches and optimal level of performance. A good team will feel like a happy family whilst other teams reach working agreements where personal differences are managed and largely kept under control.

What motivate us as human beings? New esearches suggest that people are guided by four basic emotional needs:

• Obtain: scare goods, including intangibles such as social status.
• Link: form connection with individuals and groups.
• Undersand: satisfy our curiosity and master the world around us.
• Protect: protect against external threats and promote justice.

What should managers do? In practical terms, these findings suggest that for each of the four emotional drivers that employees need to fulfill, managers can utilize a particular organizational tool to motivate them. First, the drive to obtain is most easily satisfied by the organization’s reward system. Second, the drive to link is most easily satisfied by creating a strong sense of camaraderie – create a culture that promotes teamwork, collaboration, openness and friendship. Third, the drive to understand is best addressed by designing jobs that are meaningful, interesting and challenging. Finally, to meet people’s drive to protect managers should rely on designing and implementing transparent processes within their organizations.

To conclude, the secret to catapulting employees’ motivation is to improve its effectiveness in fulfilling all four basic emotional drives, not just one. Each of these drivers is independent; they cannot be ordered hierarchically or substituted one for another. To fully motivate employees, managers must address all four emotional needs.

Reference: Employee Motivation: a powerful new model, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2008

Employees behavior is discretional and cannot be ruled by a contract. In order to influence behavior, attention to employees own interests should be considered. As in any relationship, trust is the basis for good human resources practices. One basic role of the human resources department is to provide the company with the availability and ability of resources in order to accomplish its goals. Anotherone is to manage workforce in-flow, through-flow and out-flow. The procedures and strategies developed in managing this flow should be aligned with the company’s mission, vision, values, strategies and goals. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’, different approaches to human resources management can work for different companies. The important thing to take into consideration is to be consistent. Coherence and consistency are key in sending the right ’signals’ to employees that will determine the overall company’s cognitive framework.

Each organization has its own culture and cognitive frameworks which have been developed through its history. People expectations and perceptions are developed from what the company’s signals are. The correct design of coherent policies and the efficiency and consistency of their application are key in driving people’s behavior within an organization. Human behavior cannot be bought, cannot be driven by power, authority or money; human resources cannot be managed just by ‘numbers’.

Managers should acknowledge that the employee relationship is a conflict between employees and company’s goals. Their role of managers is to ‘manage discontent’; it’s to continuously work on establishing a balance between effort and reward. In this interaction, employees should have a voice. Achieving harmony in employment relationships is not natural or automatic, on the contrary. This relationship needs proactive action to get cooperation from both parties.