Here is a great question to use in understanding an organizational role. It is a illuminating for market pricing a job; for OD diagnosis; or for talent management questions.

Who does the person in this role affiliate with within the organization?

Let’s take for example you are focused on the “Chief Engineer” of a technology company.  When you ask where the Chief affiliates you are asking, is this person the member of the top executive group who has responsibility for engineering (top down management – flowing management into Engineering); or is the Chief the senior most engineer who then liaisons with the executive function (leads the group from within; an “engineer’s engineer”, a technical leader).

Affiliation tells you a lot about the person in the role; how to pay them’ what support that team may need to balance the affilitation choice; and how others at the level of the Chief may percieve them and their department.

Market Pricing:          Assume from above that the person affiliates with the Engineering group.  Market pricing might then be best seen as classic “Chief Engineer” with an internal reference to a gap between the person and the tier below.  However, if the affiliation is as an executive, the balance of market pricing might be on what executives as a whole are being paid.

Organizational Effectiveness:   Is the engineering group linked directly to competitive customer activity, or is the group more of an infrastructure support.  I don’t know that the answer does or does not make one or the other affiliation ideal.  However, it does seem to me that affiliation with the engineering group would be more typical in an infrastructure group.  In the even that engineering is directly creating customer value, there would need to be another strong executive outside of engineering able to play the watershed role to pull together all of the customers’ interests.

Recruiting:     When thinking about making a placement on a team, exploring the history of affiliation for the person, and thinking about what affiliation the current situation calls for, can make for the difference between a good and a great selection.  A candidate whose passionate affiliation runs downstream is less likely to want to be promoted out of the group.  Is that what you need in your internal labor market?

Executive Direction:   Executives love to use the “my team” phrase.  What is the difference in focus for managers below an executive if she explicitly tells them that they should be affiliating with the group they manage, as oppose to the affiliation being “I am on Sally Smith’s team.”  I think that it comes down to the “who says I’m sorry.” 

Every team has bad days and makes mistakes.  Because we live in an imperfect world, “bad things happen to good departments”.  We all have to say “sorry, we did not get that done”, from time to time.  When an executive allows a subordinate manager to primarily affiliate with being on that executive team, I think it makes it easier for the subordinate manager to “take the I’m sorry” from the folks doing the work below.  When the subordinate manager affiliates with the team, it is the subordinate givingthe I’m sorry to the manager.  This is important not because it is about accountability.  That can be pressed in either scenario.  It is important because it sets the subordinate manager, and the executive up for a different view of risk.  When I think that I an accountable for all risk – planned and unplanned; reasonable and unreasonable – I act differently than if I think that I have pushed that done a level and I am only accountable for risk that is reasonably known.

So, this is not a silver bullet question – it does not answer all of a companies questions or instantly make you the smartest HR wonk in the room.  However, I think that it is a useful lens to look through to understand roles a bit better.  Understanding how the risk is being allocated in your organization, on a de facto real life basis, makes you a better market player.

Make sense or is this a bad case of too much time on my hands?

No Comments | In: HR Strategy, Professional Development, Recruiting, Talent Management | | #

What makes someone competent to be an executive compensation consultant? 

Everyone from   Henry Waxman (D – Cal), Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, to the SEC, academics and the media have had their say on what they think the appropriate relationship is between executive compensation consultants and public companies.  Unless I have missed it however, one of the most troubling questions to me about EC consulting has never been asked.  Who are these people and what credentials them as expert consultants?

Maybe we are relying on the market to self-regulate.  Incompetent people just don’t get hired and go off to do other things.  Competent consultants get more referral business and prosper.

Those of you that follow the thrill a minute world of executive compensation consulting know that change is in the air.  The SEC is demanding new disclosure of the relationship between public companies and their compensation consultants.  Different, but related, compensation consultants have for a few years now been blamed for “spiraling executive compensation” and the so-called “ratcheting” effect of peer group benchmarking.  More and more scrutiny is being applied to consulting. I am not  particularly critical of executive compensation consulting; I spent 10 proud years being one.  This is not consultant bashing.

Here is the point – at some point, some of the being executive compensation practices of the big consultancies, or some boutique is going to be asked about the backgrounds of people who are functioning as consultants to the boards and or management of publicly traded companies.  Some of the academic and professional credentials are going to sound thin.  There is essentially an apprentice system in place.  Someone is a executive compensation consultant, because someone more experienced in calling themselves an executive compensation consultant has hired them.  It is a self-perpetuating credential.

Those of you familar with the Christian church concept of “Apostolic Succession” – essentially how the Pope gets to be Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury gets to be the Archbishop – will recognize this system.  I am the Pope because bishops who can trace their bishopric back to Peter, say I’m the Pope.  Here if Pearl, Peter, Ira, Fred, or the other Apostles of Executive Compensation appointed me, or if I was appointed by someone appointed by them, I am in.

The system has worked reasonably well – again, I generally support the quality of consulting that exists in the market.  However, as the environment gets more complex and more adversarial, the consultants involved would be well served to formalize their credentials.   Like ir or not, Executive Compensation consultants are moving closer in the regulatory mind to auditors and accountants.  There is a growing appetite for accountability.  (Not surprisingly when the Executive Compensation consultant charges the same hourly rate as an Audit partner.)

If World at Work, or SHRM was smart, they would get agreement among the big guns that a form of an “advanced CCP” or its equivalent would be created that the consultants would all recognize as a required credential to consult to a public company.  This would create minimum standards for methods, ethics, and other professional standards.  This is more important now because many of the big consulting houses have either voluntarily or involuntarily shed executive compensation consultants who specialize in Board clients.  Many small shops are springing up.  Hiring and development of people in the ranks is going to get more diffuse.  It would be good to know that certain minimum skills and training is in place across the Board.

To date there have been more executives in front of Congress than individual, practicing consultants.  If you have been in consulting for 30 years already, that is your credential.  Some day there is going to be a report or a body of work linked to some situation in a public company that is going to be used by a Congressional committee in a hearing.  Someone more junior than the 30 year consultant is going to sit at the table with the green felt.  Their credentials and background is going to be used to batter the whole profession.  Let’s try to avoid that day from coming to pass.

2 Comments | In: Compensation, Ethics | tags: Executive Compensation Consultants. | #

Source: America.gov

Ok, so this is a bit cliche. But I have to say it. A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in a very nice restaurant on West 51st –  past St. Pat’s, but before the Waldorf. I was having a nice glass of wine, a good steak and enjoying the conversation with a colleague.

We were taking about the growing relationship between our two organizations – about 130,000 employees and over $40 billion in revenue between the two of them.  High stakes HR work.

We were also talking about our backgrounds. We discovered that both of our grandfathers were coal miners. Hard working, uneducated men who set in motion a series of events that took the two of us from hard coal regions in West Virginia and Pennsylvania to global enterprise, steaks and Cabernet in Midtown in two generations.

Maybe not “only” in America, but I am pretty damn sure, “most likely” in America.

Thanks Granddad.

8 Comments | In: Multiple Markets | tags: America. | #

This set of graphics appears in the New York Times Business Section, February 21, 2010.  It highlights that unemployment is a heterogeneous and complex dynamic. (Click and it should expand for you.)

Here’s my thought – has the HR community thought about how to deal with the long-term unemployed?  Will we shun them?  Will we continue the natural selection perspective that the unemployed are always poor performers and deserve to be passed over for jobs?

Source: NYTimes.com

If you go back prior to the great recession, the big concern was how are we going to back fill the retiring baby boomers.  (See representative article from Inc.com)I get that right now the issue is a lack of jobs, not workers.  At some point however, that will change.  The new jobs are likely to even more service oriented than now, and more super-sophisticated than now.  In other words, low end and high end jobs – the have and the have nots.  (See HumanMarkets: “Two-Tier Society”.

At some point the long-term unemployed will look like an attractive pool of candidates for something.  They may need more training, they are likely to need more acculturation.  Importantly, they may not respond well to conventional management techniques – not having a boss for a couple of years can change a guy.  It is also possible that they will need personal rehabilitation to internally convert in way to become competitive in the new labor market.  See: Human Markets: “I Am Going To Hell.  No, They Are Not Hiring.”  Frankly, I don’t know.  Yet.

It is not too early to think about what is the range of approaches and your best thinking about engaging, or not, the long-term unemployed.  It may be a good way to spend some time so that it does not become an exercise in self-reflection.

No Comments | In: Uncategorized | | #

Villanova University has had an Human Resources Master of Science degreefor about 30 years.  The program is a traditional classroom based program in one of the several outstanding physical facilities in the Philadelphia area.  Nova is also one of the leading providers of first class, full degrees in an online setting.  This year the University is combing these two  experiences by offering its M.S. in HR Development in a fully online format. 

I am co-creating the Compensation course and will be doing the instruction in the first offering of the course, scheduled for August 2010.  We have recorded 8 hours of lectures in a very sophisticated learning management system.  In addition to the video/audio lectures (available in multiple formats including streaming and DVD) there are eight weekly online sessions.  Students participate from literally all over the world.  The program looks great and I proud to be part of it.  I have met faculty for the other courses as well and fell confident that this is a high quality and innovative way to get a nationally recognized graduate degree in HR.

The Compensation videos are not mere recitation of what is in a text book.  I tried to give insight into the thinking behind high level compensation and HR strategy.  There is plenty of “real world” experience communicated in the videos.  The weekly sessions will be more “right now” information with up-to-date references to business, legal and market environments. I think that the course will be both interesting and illuminating.

Shameless plug time – if you are considering a graduate HR degree, I encourage you to consider the M.S. HRD at Villanova.  It’s Human Markets in the academy, multimedia style. ”Tell’m HumanMarkets.com sent you!” For more information link to:

www.villanovau.com

No Comments | In: Professional Development | tags: Shameless Promotion, Villanova M.S. HRD. | #

Many years ago (Ronald Reagan was President), I was the Employment Manager in a Macy’s in East Brunswick, NJ.  The Store Manager called me in one day and asked for an analysis of our Jewelry business.  Could I make the quantitative case that more staffing would result in more business and more net revenue (sales less selling cost).  I could and I did. 

It took hours to get the numbers right.  The analysis needed to show our sales productivity at different levels of staffing.  As I recall, I did offsets for the time and day and for day of the week (some times are busier than others); I offset for weeks of the year (simplistically more jewelry is sold the first half of February than in August).  I offset for the quality of the staff (vetern vs. rookie).  After many late nights doing this analysis after I had done my “day job”, I had it.    Retail is a quantitative driven environment – even in this context, this was a tour d’ force.

The day came.  The store manager was scheduled to be in New York at Herald Square meeting with the President of the company.  He was going to review my analysis, make the pitch and see if he could could sell at the same high level that I could crunch the numbers.  I only hoped that he could.

The next day, I wander over to the Store Manager’s office.  I was half waiting to hear if he was able to explain the numbers enough to make the case and half waiting for the flood of thanks that was sure to usher forth from his lips.

“How did it go?” 

“It went great, we got budget to hire the staff.”

“That is excellent!  What did he think of the analysis?”

“I never took it out of my brief case.”

The look on my face must have been one of the great expressions of dumbfoundedness and self-pity ever shown by a human being.  It must have been bad because as I began to ask why, he launched into a lesson that I try to remember, and frankly, relearn, to this day.

 

Bill, I got there and we talked about a lot of things.  We have known each other a long time.  At some point, I told him that we could improve our jewelry business with more staffing because I thought we had customers bailing out without purchasing.  He said fine.

 

 

Bill, when you go to an executive and ask for something, and they give it to you, sometimes, all you do is say, “Yes sir.”  Thank you sir.”  “Good-bye sir.”

The lesson I learned is that being smart is not usually the objective.  Getting it done is.  Sometimes, you need to put the ego show away and focus on winning in the market for resources, or policy or whatever.  It is not about you; it’s about your objective.

Thanks Jeff.

13 Comments | In: How to do HR | | #

Source: OfficeMax via YouTube

This commercial has been running for a couple of months but will likely need to be retired soon.  I am going to miss it.  I just love the energy and I love the message of it.

2 Comments | In: HR Strategy | | #

Source:wnbafanclub.com

I have heard a 53 year old woman (born in 1957) suggest that she is right on the horizon of two groups of women.  The groups break down as those that have been raised in a “Title IX World” (younger) and those that were raised in a pre-Title IX World (older).  She is convinced that the experience of competitive athletics have shaped the women that have come behind her.  She admires these younger women and believes that they are better for having had the pervasive experience of competing, striving, winning, and losing in athletics.  With a complete straight face, she likes the younger women, because, well… they are more like the men she likes.  She like that they speak up, they don’t demure from confrontation, they want to compete and win in all things – kids sports, fund raising, neurosurgery and politics.

You clearly can’t put people into buckets as big or as monochromatic as this idea would suggest.  I think the idea has to do with broad tendencies in the “average temperament” of the groups, not an absolute rule.  But even still, isn’t this like the Gen X, Gen Y, Boomer kind of theories?

I think that there is something here.  The impact of women’s improving equality in the employment market generally and in the executive labor market specifically has been largely attributed I think to EEO legislation.  Legal change in employment discrimination has clearly helped, but maybe Title IX and its change in schools and gyms has created as much if not more change.

Environment among peers socially and in the market for success shapes personality, skills and perspective.  I have to think that have more women more pushed to public, obvious competition in an adversarial setting – sports, has to help those women, and all women raised in that environment in business.

When someone wants to cut athletics in your school, look down the road 20 years – how do you want your kids prepared for the market?

Is this too simplistic?  Misogynistic?

4 Comments | In: Talent Management | | #

Look for a post in a couple of days about women who are about 50 to maybe 53. Born in 1957 to 1960. Compare them to women who are younger – do you notice anything different in their collective behavioral tendencies.

I know someone who does and it is an interesting theory.

2 Comments | In: HR Strategy | tags: 50 Year Old Women. | #

After how many years, I still can’t reconcile myself to the name “World At Work”. It is without a doubt the most stupid name for an organization ever.

I just referenced some WAW material (which was great) in a memo to executives. Now I am spending the rest of my day using the phrase “it used to the American Compensation Association.”

6 Comments | In: Uncategorized | tags: Stupid Names, World At Work. | #