The Peter Principle states that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” It was formulated by Dr Lawrence Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book by the same name.

 

I call them “the brand dead” or “brand spectators” who fur up the organisation’s arteries. Most MDs tolerate a Peter or two. But when conditions change, Peter and pals can very quickly poison your brand from within. When the big battalions are mobilised and change is demanded, the Peter’s, not the market conditions, are your worst enemy.

 

Consider the impact a Peter can have on your recruitment drive.

“Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it . . . ; Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.” The late David Ogilvy, advertising executive

“If you pick the right people and give them the opportunity to spread their wings—and put compensation as a carrier behind it—you almost don’t have to manage them.” Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric

 

Ogilvy and Welch point the way towards recruitment nirvana – making the most of the fact that it’s an employer’s market to recruit experienced; challenging; maverick; game changers who will stimulate the innovation you need.

 

But the Peters will desperately cling onto the status quo, recruit in their own image and reinforce the employer brand which failed to spot the issues which have since marched all the way around the corner and into your boardroom.

And if you’ve encouraged Peter-style behaviour within your intermediaries and recruitment agents, you’re in deep trouble as they will doubtless perpetuate a protectionist culture.

 

When you get a moment, just take a look at the various recruitment and blogging forums and consider how many really good people are out there at the moment. Listen to what they’re saying about the recruitment practices of the Peters. Ask yourself whether you know who your Peters are and whether Peter can be motivated to change?

But most of all question whether your recruitment strategy is paying Peter by robbing Paul and the impact this is having and will have on the performance of your brand.

 

 

 

 

I was at a dinner party thrown by a former HR director friend recently and as I arrived at his house was struck by the number of high performance cars on the driveway and then, once I was introduced to his guests, was equally surprised by the fact that most were from the HR community.

Now, I’m not deriding folk for their success. It just took a little getting used to, especially as most of the conversation revolved around the financial benefits associated with acquiring a reputation as a downsizing expert and “being the last one to turn out the lights” before moving on.

It’s clearly wrong to claim that re-sizing has become the raison d’etre of the modern HRD. But this perception wasn’t helped by the dinner party conversation about what it really means to trust and whether trust has any place at work?  

One premise was that the last two years has seen employees’ trust in their organisations fall dramatically and that organisations need to work at ways of re-engaging and re-establishing the psychological contract. The opposite - and prevailing view - was that there are certain things in business that have to remain secret, that being open and honest is often impossible and people should be mature enough to accept that.

The concensus was that trust has no real place at work any longer and that a healthy scepticism should prevail recognising that the employer/employee relationship is “a marriage of convenience”. Neutrality was seen as preferable but is it possible or even desirable to remain neutral in a vocational environment you devote the largest portion of your life to?

I appreciate that many of the HRDs I seem to meet these days are vassels for the process re-engineers and have become de-sensitised to emotions in a similar way to soldiers on the frontline. But is this a reflection of behaviour born of survival or how they really believe things should be?

Trust is a fairly fundamental emotion. If there’s no trust there’s no psychological contract between employees and the employer. Without that there’s no “extra mile” and no relationship development.

I guess you can have a relationship or marriage of convenience based on neutrality, without passion; empathy and drive. But then you can also join Victorian role playing societies to escape from reality.

 

A client, let’s call him David, works for a formerly blue chip multi-national.  Their core HR or people processes, post SAP, were re-designed by teams of Big Four consultants to maximise efficiencies and drive out non-conformances arising from human error.  In short, HR has, in effect, been replaced by systems, standards, Helplines and KPI’s. Managerial learning and development has been re-focused on technical rather than soft skills.

 

David, by his own admission, is a relatively old school, line and customer service focused manager. He’s a believer in sustaining relationships and in resolving interpersonal differences before they become formal issues (often over a coffee or a beer). He has worked for his company for two decades and has received awards for his work on a number of occasions.

 

Recently David encountered issues in his personal life which compromised his 8am - 9pm working routine.  As pressure built he started to struggle and turned to his recently appointed executive line managers for support. They responded by citing due process, changed his reporting line from 1:1 to 2:1 and offered him the option of submitting formal Grievances and visiting Occupational Health if he had a problem. They also placed this loyal middle manager on a series of Performance Contracts when they believed his standards (loosely defined) started to slip. Unlike David, they documented every conversation.

 

Sleepless nights led to longer hours; stress led to Psoriasis and eventually to depression and medication and now to extended absence on health grounds. He eventually submitted a grievance but the 2 and sometimes 3:1 micro management has seen the organisation close ranks and he faces the invidious choice of turning on his own company via tribunal or falling on his own sword. 

 

David is passionate about the organisation and his job. He has the experience and people skills which customer and staff surveys suggest are needed to help turn the organisation around. Yet David, and it turns out, many of his contemporaries, have become the victims of “due process”.

 

The growing number of Davids remain voiceless despite the CEO Town Halls and surveys. Yet the organisation flounders in a short-termist backlash, woeful line management skills and mismanagement freefall.

 

The CEO may understand the need for culture change but what’s to become of these invisible FTEs in the meantime when the HR offices are empty and the day to day processes don’t have ears?

I was in the City, London’s financial district, for a meeting the other day and found myself in Pudding Lane.  For those who don’t know, this modest little street is infamous for being the source of the great fire of London, heralded by historians as the most tragic event to have befallen London as well as its saviour.

 

But “how can this contradiction hold true?” I hear you cry.  Well London had been in the grip of another epic threat at the time of the fire, namely the plague or black death. Many believe this cataclysmic malaise to have been caused by rats. In truth it wasn’t the rats, but the fleas that lived on the rats that caused the spread of the infection.

 

Ironically it was the catastrophic great fire that finally purged the City of the disease.

 

Now what has this trip through London’s history books got to do with matters in CEO land?

 

As we all know, the corridors of CEO land are populated by a nodding, bowing and scraping populace doffing their caps to the demi gods. Yet it’s increasingly the ceos or chief engagement officers i.e. the line managers, who do the real work.

 

It also can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the financial districts are being targeted by the worldwide press as the source of the current economic disease that is infecting world markets.  Indeed the high profile figureheads, the CEOs of a select number of those organisations within those financial districts are being demonised for seemingly single handedly bringing about the collapse of those institutions and indeed, spreading this economic plague to related markets and economies.

 

This is where history and imagination collide.  But if we allow ourselves to believe tabloid caricatures of “Fred the shred” and his peer group we undermine the core philosophy on which this column is based.  While I do subscribe to the notion that the CEO can wield exceptional power, he doesn’t do it alone. The iniquity of the CEOs themselves and problems the City faces are just the symptoms of a much, much more insidious infection.  The disease of selfishness, short termism and winning at all costs has become a plague which has arguably spread throughout Western commerce. Simply getting rid of the CEOs isn’t going to cure the problem.

 

Would anyone reading this column deny that they feel uncomfortable about the way many of their customer service interactions, regardless of industry, are handled these days? From the volumes of unsolicited cold calls we receive, the cost cutting off-shoring of our intimate data, the proliferation of mistakes or the relentless emails can anyone claim that customer service has improved in the last decade? Can you picture the last time you received excellent service which exuded empathy, humility and pride?  I bet you can think of several examples when a frontline employee called you “mate” instead of by your name, was clearly following a pre-determined script or appeared to have had an authenticity bi-pass, however.

 

The risk we currently face is that in a desperate attempt to fight the current economic disease, the focus is going to be exclusively on the high profile figures, forgetting that the disease has already spread and infected the culture of the organisations they headed up. 

 

Unless we can whip up a firestorm of people centred change that will:

-         reinvent HR

-         proactively manage employer brand

-         professionalize communications

-         respect and prioritise organisation development

-         focus on the development of line managers as a priority

-         forge more effective relationships between the external manifestation of brand and the link to the organisation’s values and the employees who keep the promises

this disease is going to spread and spread.

 

Food for thought, but lean times are quite possibly causing you to consider postponing that employee survey; to cut back on your training budget; to force through more “push communication” or prioritise that pile of  impressive looking resumes of former “big hitters” who seem to hop from company to company every two years above appraisals of existing employees. 

 

If you’re considering “re-sizing”, pause for a second before you reach for the axe, and consider your existing employees once again.  What more can you do to re-connect them with the brand they’ve been loyal to for so long? How can you re-focus them on the next phase in the evolution of the company, to re-energise them?

 

Now look again at those cvs. 

You may think you know who the rats are…. but remember the humble flea!

Still struggling to make the business case for employer branding? 

Ian@by2w.co.uk

Available now: Brand Engagement - How Employees Make or Break Brands (Buckingham, Palgrave/Macmillan 2007)