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.

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.

Celebrate diversity – Leverage the unique aspects of your employees.

I live in a densely multicultural city.  The benefits are too numerous – wonderful varieties of restaurants and food shops, people from different cultures norms, different ways of doing things, different religions.  It makes for a rich existence.  I can go down to my local shops and buy any herb, spice or specialty from just about anywhere in the world – Africa, Asia, India, Germany, Italy, Vietnam, the middle East, Greece or South Africa – you name it.   I feel spoiled and indulge in the wonders of the world outside may front door.  I seek recipes and talk to shop keepers to learn how to use the different ingredients and create the unique and create magnificent dishes. I go to different restaurants and marvel at the diversity.

In my  time as a manager, I could never get over the differences in the values, behaviours and attitudes of my staff.   Companies can be like little  microcosms of the wider world.  People  never seem to do what you might expect – to assimilate information, or react to situations, to understand  or see the world as you might anticipate.  It is the bane of the young manager – the multi-value workforce.  They will consistently surprise you with their human-ness, their capacity to perceive and deal with the world in a unique way.

So many young and inexperienced managers are hell-bent on achieving their goals that they  often try and prize people into conforming to rigid behaviours.  Try and enforce values on them – and if they don’t think or appreciate circumstances to their expectations, they cast them aside – start pushing them into corners where the only escape is to seek alternative employment.  So rather than letting them create a curry or masala – they force them to make steak and chips and then complain that it tastes bad.

Of course, the objective is to be well fed, and whether you achieve this by eating steak and chips or a sumptuous curry doesn’t matter.  As you mature as a manager, you learn that you can leverage the different approaches of your staff to create a more diverse competitive approach to getting the job done.

The greatest success I have had in business was founded on bringing together teams with diverse skills and perceptions about a problem.  In many cases, they were more able than I at their specialty and used different recipes – but the banquet was magnificent.

Understanding the individual value of your employees can be create enormous competitive advantages.   If you try and push them all into the same deep-fryer, your’ll be eating soggy fish and chips instead of a delicious bulgogi.