Uncomfortable Seats (aka The Table is Bare) - Day 46

Day 46 (15th January 2015)

46% of UK voters this January think health is the most important issue
facing the country, up 13 points in one month.
The UK election is on 7th May 2015. 
I am a Governor for a leading National Health Trust, Guy's & St Thomas' in London
and can vouch for the need for awareness of health issues.

Today's post is anonymous - the individual who wrote it has made the brave decision to change career paths and hence does not want their identity known. I suspect that their experience of life at the top table is not unique, but few are prepared to speak out.

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I recently walked out on my senior HR role.  It was something I thought long and hard about but, after many years of "doing HR" in various organisations, industries and countries, and talking to lots of people I respect, I came to the conclusion that I just didn't want to do it any more.

I decided I wanted to follow a different path. Don't get me wrong, I'm still as passionate about HR, culture and change as I have ever been. That hasn't diminished and, if anything, it's even stronger. But something has changed for me.

HR spends a lot of time talking about having a seat at the table. But the senior executive table is not a particularly nice or productive place to be. You aspire to be there for many years and then, when you get there, you realise decisions rarely get made. Nothing important gets done. They barely function as teams and egos always get in the way. That's the reality of life at the top table.

My perception looking back over my various roles is that 95% of organisations around the world have largely dysfunctional, ineffective and unproductive leadership teams.

Have you ever wondered why the staff/engagement survey scores for HR teams are always the lowest in the organisation (and in my experience they always are)? That's because we see and hear all the in-fighting and positional/political nonsense first hand and spend a lot of time cleaning up the mess, making excuses for and lessening the negative impact these so called leadership teams create.

Frankly, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of senior leaders who have inspired, motivated or impressed me in the last 10-20 years and still have a couple left over. I have worked for far more bad C-suite leaders than I have good ones. And that includes HR Directors, the people who should be modelling good leadership skills. I don't throw that statement out there lightly but, hearing the horror stories that other HR people share, I don't think I am alone in that experience. 

I don't believe people set out to be bad CEOs or poor leaders, but somewhere along the way something happens. They either lose touch, or they are so hands on they can't let go. They either can't make a decision, or they want to make all the decisions. They hire brilliant senior people and don't empower them. Or they hire crap senior people and give them too much power. Very few instinctively get the balance right and fewer still seem to care much about the process of being a good leader.

I understand that a CEO position can be a very lonely place. It shouldn't be. CEOs have so much opportunity to inspire, enthuse and engage. If you are lonely in a leadership position, you've already blown it.

As a people professional, if you are working with one of those rare and different humanistic, enlightened, cohesive leadership teams, or with a CEO who makes a positive difference every day then stick with them like glue as long as you can. You've got gold in your hands.

Gold nugget

As for me me? Well, I have simply had enough of the backstabbing, aggressive, positional, win at all costs leadership styles so I'm consciously taking a different career path.

You see the other thing I have come to realise is that often it is the lone external perceived "expert" voice suggesting change is needed that gets listened to and heard by senior executives, not the many clued up internal voices who can tell you exactly what is wrong in an organisation, but whose views are ignored.  

Executives often ignore advice if it comes from someone inside the business

So I am going to come at it from the other direction. From outside looking in. I want to work with and advise leaders and organisations who know and understand this leadership stuff and want their organisations to be different, who are open to change. I want to work with HR and people leaders who want to know how to tackle these problems head on proactively and not just be those compliant and battered policy pushers we all love to hate. I'm not wasting any more time on game players.

Do you really want a seat at the table? Be careful what you wish for.

and finally - a song for a person who know's who they are "gonna be" going forwards...

The Proclaimers - "I'm Gonna Be"

New Paths - Day 27

Day 27

27 Club is the term that refers to a significant number of singers
and musicians who died aged 27 (a statistical spike). The list
includes Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Ron McKernan (Pigpen), Brian Jones,
Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain.

Today's piece is written by the talented Matt Ballantine, who is currently the Interim Product manager for the UK Government's Digital Service. Prior to becoming a consultant, respected writer (he is a regular contributor to CIO magazine) and digital guru, he was the former Head of IT at brand marketer Imagination and had also worked as an enterprise and solutions architect for the BBC. Matt crosses the divide between Technology, Management and Marketing and has a keen interest in collaboration, connections and content. He writes an interesting blog on the topics that interest him. Or you can catch up with him on Twitter (his handle is @ballantine70)

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In December I’m running an event for a HR group in a big telecoms company on the theme of modern career paths and planning. It’s been an interesting commission - an area in which I’d claim interest and active practice, but not necessarily “expertise”. And that’s one of my main points for the day - in a world of unknowns, looking for “experts” is a natural human instinct, and deeply flawed. I hope that they’re not expecting me to give them all the answers.

The idea of a career path is something that has changed, I believe, pretty radically in the two decades in which I’ve been working. When I started in the 1990s there were still a many in the workplace who thought that they had an anchor in “job for life” working. That decade saw the last phases of the dismantling of the nationalised industries, and the rise of the global corporations. The social contract between employee and employer was broken, but with expectations of loyalty and trust remaining on both sides.

Times have changed
LS Lowry's Coming From The Mill, 1930
Picture credit to estate of L.S.Lowry

Technological change has also radically altered the workplace in those 22 years. Work is no longer necessarily a place where you go, and can be anywhere. The same technology has shaped and formed the nature of jobs along the way - swathes of clerical and administrative staff no longer exist, yet new roles have replaced them. Not one of the job titles that I have had since 1997 would have existed when I had careers advice at school a decade before. But to be fair, some of the dafter ones I have made up…

One of Matt's job titles is Angel of Disruption!!
Picture: Angel of the North, by Anthony Gormley

In this world developing a career path that involves job titles is a risky business. The next one might be there for you, but having a sense of direction much into the future becomes a challenge. I spoke recently to a friend Matt Desmier who has been living a free agent career for a few years now, and when I asked how he described what he did to others he said he took the lead of another mutual connection John Wilshire in outlining:

• The last thing I did;
• The current thing I’m doing; and
• The thing I have on the horizon

That helps in answering the “What do you do?” moment at a dinner or kid’s birthday party, but doesn’t provide anything more substantial to plan one’s life around. Maybe that’s it - maybe we can’t plan in the ways that we traditionally have done. Do we need to throw ourselves to the wind and see where our careers take us?

Tibetan "wind horses" (called Lungta): pieces of paper, decorated
with a bejewelled horse, tossed into the wind for good luck.

That would be a reckless approach.

I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that what I need to help us through this dark maze is a narrative, a story. A personal career story that spans my past, my present and sometime into the future. The nice thing about stories is that whilst they might not necessarily be completely factual (and anything into the future by design isn’t factual), they can contain truths that give us anchors around which to make decisions in the future and make sense of our past: a path trodden and a path ahead.

My own story starts with some of my grandfather’s achievements, which in turn tie into some of my earliest childhood memories. They then in turn weave into the education and training that I have received, the jobs I have taken, and why some of them worked and some of them didn’t. Looking forward I have some aspirations that in turn become the way in which I assess what pieces of work I should take both in terms of short term needs and longer term goals.

In sharing this story with others, funnily enough I’ve found a wonderful prop in that very 20th Century corporate artefact, the business card. On one side of my cards are contact details. On the other, a photograph. A photograph I can use to be able to tell my story in a way that hopefully makes sense to whomever it is I am talking. Telling and retelling the story helps me to navigate through the maze.

Longleat House maze, UK - photo BNPS
Google Earth, technology is helping people navigate faster than a decade ago

What's your story?