Corporate Fashions – Suit Down Unless You’re Part of the Industrial Age

If you look around the office, do you see men and women in suits. Some are daggy, worn and crumpled and unkempt (reflecting the way they feel about the grinding job which pays the mortgage)  while others perhaps higher up in the organisation are a little smarter, perhaps trying to make a power statement.

For many years I suited up for the office. It was an unspoken law. As I rose up the ranks I had to spend more money on suits to look a bit flashier and fit in with the higher management tiers.

I even recall that in one (strange but listed)  company I worked for at the end of the last century they actually put managers  through a training program not just on dress codes but which suits to buy, how to match ties and look suave,  powerful and influential.

When I look back on it, the suited office is one of the strangest norms in the world of business. For some reason, someone somewhere, sometime years ago decided that it is appropriate for everyone to conform to a set of dress rules.  And the rule was the suit…. and unless you had money to wast, it was a bad idea.

Men and later women would suit up to signify their knowledge, power and influence.  Or if you were lower down the corporate ranks, to indicate your willingness to conform and work your ass off for the company.

But if you think about it – that’s plain stupid.  You end up in a room with your client and you’re all dressed up together; all trying to overpower and influence each other, and all nullifying the others effect.  you just end up looking like a bunch of conformists and in the end the deal just comes down to the value and the money.

Interestingly, in the noughties it has become fashionable for entrepreneurial companies to throw away the suit unless its with an open neck for the males.  Immediately, this defined the suited companies as old and conservative.

Now it’s banks, insurance companies and lawyers who do the power dressing suit thing and  modern (and often) entrepreneurial companies who do the smart casual and comfortable thing.

So  now the suit has become a symbol of the industrial age, when work was about getting the staff to conform and a status symbol for those with power and influence.  If you wear a suit you work in an old industry doing business with other old companies.

A suit doesn’t mean you’re  knowledgeable or trustworthy. It just means you’re conservative and old school.  In fact today when I see a banker or financial expert dressed in a suit I assume their incompetent based on the past couple of years of economic mishaps.

Now of course, I have the luxury of not having to wear a suit except to meet with those old industrial age clients from whom I am seeking fees for service. In fact, I have the luxury of spending most days in jeans and a t-shirt.

Get Your Employees Participating to Help Steer the Business Through the Tough Times

Employee participation is a tried and true path to enhancing productivity. All (and I mean all) staff have ideas about their job. OK, so some of them might not be so good but others are good and some might be fantastic. Chances are they will also have ideas about how other staff in the business can contribute more effectively, and probably about how the managers could get on with it.

In my experience, there’s buckets of value in staff ideas. The challenge is getting the constructive ones out in the open. It’s not just a matter of putting a suggestion box on the wall prefaced with a big announcement. You actually have to work hard to get valuable ideas.

Fundamentally, there needs to be a culture which supports participation. People need to know that their ideas are important, and that their ideas MUST be important.

And important contributions must be valued by the company .  When found they must be moulded into concrete outcomes – processes, actions and behaviours which change the way work is done.

Sometimes managers are afraid that encouraging employees to contribute ideas about work will undermine their own status.  These managers are control freaks who want to be seen as the sole responsible driver of their business outcomes.  They put themselves under a lot of pressure to all the decisions without real coal face knowledge.  If your a control freaks are often perceived as arrogant when they really lack perspective and confidence.   And in the end they lose control.  When staff learn that their manager is a control freak they start side-stepping him/her to get the things done vital to their job.   

The best managers in my experience searched their staff for issues and ideas, recognised the good ones and set about moulding them into concrete action.  They quizzed and prodded staff with problems, what ifs and vital outcomes.  Sometimes things would get pungent as staff argued the pros and cons of every detail.  The great manager kept them on track, sometimes road blocked stupidity and enforced rigorous goal directed thought.  In the end they always gave credit to the staff who divined and nurtured the idea.  Idea ownership was a secondary issue for them.  Their ego and survival depended on outcomes.

Most importantly, the staff loved making a contribution – it gave them purpose, made them feel valued – that they belonged.

So if the your business is finding tough, reach in and share it with everyone.  Get them to take responsibility for coming up with the solutions and coach their participation to success.

Adventures in Making a Business Profitable Part 2 (The Maverick Lessons)

A while back I talked about the influence of Al Dunlap on my early management experience (see Adventures in Business Part 1).  The cut and burn approach to making an unprofitable business thrive.  This of course was a very 1990’s approach – primarily a reaction to the extravagence of the 1980’s globalisation evolution which placed an abundance of capital in the hands of often un-talented entreprenuers who pursued growth by building massive and usually unprofitable conglomerate businesses, of which they new little about.  It was about making the hard decisions that restructure resources and strategy back to a core business which is in demand and costs less to run than the revenue it generates.  Obviously this is an ongoing process but if the business is in poor shape then it can be necessary to take a more acute approach.  As is common with most periods of economic decadence, when money is too freely available it gets into the hands of people who lack the talent to use it wisely.  So eventually the market draws its sword and the whole mess gets cleared up – be it often at the expense of many innocent members of society (another issue).

Shaping a business to operate profitably is one foundation of sustainability.  The next challenge is to motivate your staff working effectively to achieve the new business goals.  Not uncommonly, following a restructure, when you’ve set new goals, changed peoples roles and farewelled some of your employees, the culture is hit what I call post restructure traumatic disorder. Commonly, staff are overwhelmed with uncertainty about  their and the company’s future, may become afraid to speak freely, mistrustful and focus on doing what is necessary to keep their jobs.

My search for useful ideas on how to inspire these circumstances led me to Ricardo Semmlers extraordinary Maverick which is today one of the most easy to read accounts of a real life adventure in employee management at the company SemCo – owned by the author.  You need to read the detail to understand how and why it worked  but the gist of it is that Semmler handed the operational decisions to the employees in an extraordinarily democratic and open framework.  Employees set their own salaries, chose how to distribute the profits amongst each other the management structure was flattened, employees were handed joint responsibility for the manufacturing process and chose their bosses. Semmlers overarching premise is that company survival in a volatile economy depends on the quality of life for its employees and the rest – productivity, profits, product quality will follow.  Not surprisingly, the employees  had to learn how to work in this environment but less intuitive was the success the company had once they got the hang of it.  (Yes, I’ve vastly over-simplified it which is why you should read the book).

 

Semmler’s story is a slap in the face for much leadership theory, basically because rather than assuming that employee motivation and performance is the responsibility of a few select managers, it assumes that employees respond productively when they are allowed to organize and participate democratically in decisions about business operations.  The idea is of common to western Governments, but quite intuitively unbelievable in the context of a business where survival depends on risky decision-making must occur efficiently.  Its is all the more extraordinary that the owner of the business would conceive and place their capital at risk enacting such a plan. 

 

The problem with this as a manager in a traditional hierarchical company is that you don’t have the power to give the power away.  The Semmler solution started at the top and was largely designed by the owner who had total control over the decision.    In my case it was impossible to rid the shackles of the company’s rules and procedures, which govern the hierarchical reporting structure, the salary and bonus rules, and the human resource processes which govern much of employee management  (union agreements hiring and firing, performance and promotion etc.). 

 

I realized quickly two key facts.  Firstly, the extent to which the traditional organization frameworks contain and impede the way management is practiced to the extent that it suffocates flexibility and enforces a numb acceptance of the framework.  Employees lumber along the path set by the framework, and if they climb any part of it do their best to reinforce and preserve their position.   The second is that just how hard it is to change such a framework.

 

The only approach was to take from Semmler what I was able to, within  the constraints of the organization.  In retrospect, this involved some pretty fundamental ideas.   Firstly, legitimizing the opportunity and responsibility for everyone to make a contribution.  Getting rid of the inherent class system which ordained those  further up the management hierarchy with the right to be right.  The managers ego is often fragile because they just aren’t exposed to disagreement – the people below are just two scared to say what they feel (check the comments in well designed anonymous employee survey), and the manager is kind of enjoying the respect which she/he thinks they deserve.   Getting everybody to be unafraid to say what they really think is the first step to good decisions.  Getting managers to confront the critics and justify their decisions is critical to making sure the people in those positions (if you have to have them)  are actually make good decisions.

 

The second thing was to actually get people to think about their job rather than just do it.  To achieve this, I had to go hunting for good ideas in the beginning, and then back those ideas to become a reality.  When people saw that they were allowed and could take control they wanted to in many instances (though I introduced some training and discipline around the process.)

 

I was able to introduce a more equitable merit based salary structure and fought and one a performance based employee bonus.   We increased the transparency about our true performance, argued a lot about how to fix it from the mail room to the IT department to the customer service people and the accounts.  Staff who had never contributed anything started sharing ideas and resourced projects. 

 

 It was a long way from the Semmler strategy  but definitely inspired by the great man.   In the end customer retention and acquisition went up dramatically the business’s profit increased by about 200 per cent and employee turnover rate went down below 10 percent.

 

 As time went on the more I was in awe of his approach. I remain convinced that while many companies talk about leveraging the potential of their employees, few if any take the risk.  As a consequence, the true capacity of human ability and ingenuity  becomes lost amidst the mayhem of bureaucracy, politics and survival.  Most people end up coming to work just to pay their mortgage, and miss out on the exhilaration of being part of a successful winning company.  And in the end, the company matures, withers and dies, or goes up in a puff of smoke the next time the economy takes a down turn.

Does the Economic Crash Really Spell the End of Staff Satisfaction and Engagement? (Nothing’s Changed You Idiot)

I recently came across an article interviewing several human capital specialists about the implications of the economic crash for employee management. The gist of their collective views was that the power balance had shifted from employees to employers. Apparently – according to these wise consultant folk – employers no longer need to worry about wether their employees are satisfied and engaged. In these dire economic times, they should just be grateful to have a job.    

 

It goes something like this.  IQ has replaced EQ as the key employee management strategy so employees ‘… just sit down shut up and get on with it’.  Generation Y – you’re in for the shock of your life.  The days of picking and choosing are over.  Don’t expect you’re employer to care about you’re training and development.  Forget coaching and participating – just behoove to your authoritarian masters and be thankful they put the pittance in your bank account each month.  Don’t ruminate about the latest i-thing you can’t afford as you sweat it out in some back room for the man…  (OK – a little bit exaggerated but you get the drift..)

 

I never know how this sort of tripe gets into the pages of my daily city news paper.   As I see it, the balance has changed for those who have lost their job – no question.  But for those still in the job the balance has just become a bit misshapen – contorted.  This is because when after an employer   has decided who to keep and gone through the harrowing process of “disengaging” (i.e. sacking) the unfortunate employees no longer required (who were most likely employed as a result of poor decisions anyway – but that’s another story),  the employer is probably left with less staff to do more work. Now to get these now stressed and torn people to work more productively than ever, the last thing you want to do is reduce their engagement and  satisfaction levels. 

 

The ability to harness employee motivation and creativity  will more than likely be the differentiating factor which separates the winners from the losers in the current economic environment.  Getting your people to work harder at being more efficient, solving more problems and creating new solutions is a recipe for opportunity. growth and prosperity – just the same as it always has been, but even more so right now.  And if you can’t pay them for it properly at the moment, link their efforts to the company’s future prosperity at least so that when it all pays off they will get some reward. 

 

So if you think that getting tough on your staff is just natural and justifiable reaction to an economic downturn – let me tell you – your lawyers won’t care when you’re down at the insolvency court.