Did you read that the CIPD (Chartered Institute for Personnel development) conference discussed how HR should become more business savvy to increase their impact.

Too little influence
For years the CIPD have been moaning that HR has too little influence at senior levels in so many businesses. One solution given to the conference was to “Discuss business challenges as opposed to HR Issues”.

Changing attitudes
The problem with this strategy is to persuade CEO’s, Directors and other Executives that HR is able to discuss “Business issues” when they have been used to discussing only HR and as a reaction to events as opposed to a developer of strategy.

In my experience such a change in emphasis would be easier for a “New Hire” HR Director or manager rather than a current incumbent!

A survey has found that UK’s leaders aren’t impressed with the work that their own companies are doing to develop their next generation of managers.

Management Today writes that figures by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, just four in 10 leaders think the measures their company has put in place to coax out their employees’ inner CEO is ‘highly effective’ – which means six in 10 don’t.

The survey asked 367 leaders about their leadership development programme and found that two in 10 actually think the LDP’s in their own company are downright ineffective. As MT so rightly asks: “Considering they’re the people in charge of their companies why they sort it out?

In the long run it’s likely to be a costly error but then again few people in charge have the vision to find and develop the person who will eventually replace them. Instead the tendency is to get rid of the threat!

Much of my time is spent working with executives on increasing their personal impact and team productivity. An important area is social intelligence.

Social intelligence includes the ability to read people and predict behaviour. I’m not talking about body language.  am talking about how one can influence other people’s behaviour through observation and creating appropriate actions as a result.

Let’s take an example: During our career we have used our understanding to predict our boss’s, colleagues and even life partner’s reaction to certain situations or news. The result is that we know, or think we can assess, the right time to deliver bad news.

Another example of when we heighten our use of social intelligence is at the job interview. The candidate tries to identify where the interviewer stands on certain topics by reading the reaction to answers. Generally this involves detecting negative responses to what’s being said and then to modify or alter the answer accordingly. It’s called self-preservation.

However, many executives don’t use their social intelligence most  effectively despite there being many occasions when they want to influence their team to undertake a new project, accept company targets and then looking for buy-in versus compliance.

When this happens the executive will rely on compliance. The problem with compliance, however, is that it’s often destined to fail or achieve only fleeting short-term gains. Using Social Intelligence increases the chance of long term buy-in and project success. TOne of the main keys is understanding normal human traits. 

• People are natural pleasers: They will try to look good to those that lead them 
• People like simple solutions: So managers should reduce the number of alternatives when outlining a new project. 
• People want results “Now”: The Latin term is Myopia Temporal and it’s where poeple will discount future consequences in place of a  result that looks good for them right now. (Supermarkets use this to get people to buy sweets at the checkout, even when they are on a diet)
• People will follow a crowd: This is useful to a manager to persuade others to buy into a system 

Command and control cultures have a tendency of delivering only short-term results. Alternatively Social intelligence is a process that most managers should find easy to develop with practice. Two keys include: 

1) Identifying with the team the actions and values that generate success. Then support those that are considered valuable and move away from those considered less supportive.

2) Sharing decision making with the team. That is not to say that they share in the decision making just that they understand the route to the decision process. This allows for dissent but in the face of a majority a dissenter will generally align with the majority. This style of consensus management creates creativity and innovation and is used with considerable effect at Google and Apple. 

Creating buy-in with a team used to command  and control systems isn’t always easy. However, using the techniques above eventually creates teams that will begin to operate in a more incluse manner.

As Mahatma Ghandi suggested to one observer “I must hurry, for I’m their leader…and there they go”

This information is taken from the new event: “You’re Here…But How To Get There” that shows Executives how to utilse their personal presence to deliver outstanding team results.

If you would like more information on the event “You’re Here…But How To Get There” or on this article please contact me at Stephen@assimilating-talent.com or phone 01727 838321. 

Increasing team productivity will be the mission critical task of most businesses over the next two years. See Here for more details on an event that you need to be attending.