A Frank Discussion HR Must Have With The C-Suite
Posted by: Stephen Rock in Change Management, Leadership, tags: Assessment, C-Suite, Change Management, HR, Human Resources, LeadershipI was recently asked by a Human Resources professional how he could help their company become better at managing change.
I felt a little bit like the doctor answering the question, “I have a bad headache, what’s wrong with me?”
Without a lot more information, the answer will be simple, “Take two aspirin, and call me in the morning.”
Resisting the urge to encourage him to call my office, I gave my diagnosis-free prescription: “Improve senior management leadership capabilities.”
Without a doubt, the approach will help. As detailed in a prior post, CEOs believe senior manager skills and experience stand in the way of implementing change. Not only are senior manager skills an opportunity, but improving their capabilities will give you leverage in future initiatives.
The better diagnosis would come after some frank conversations in the C-Suite. Six topics should be covered:
1. Please tell me about the largest change initiatives you have gone through in the last five to seven years.
2. What went well with those initiatives, and what did not go as well?
3. How likely are we to go through large-scale change in the next three years?
4. How likely are we to repeat the positives and negatives of your previous experiences?
5. How well prepared are our senior and middle managers to lead future changes?
6. What should we do now to best prepare for the future?
After having this conversation with each member of the C-Suite, I would identify the common themes and report back to them as a group. The report would have three elements:
- What did they say?
- How does their collective view compare to best practices and experiences in other organizations?
- My recommendations to address the opportunities.
Those recommendations could cover a wide range of options, but people-related opportunities are likely to dominate. The best part of approach is that the go-forward plan will be largely of their creation. They will give you a charter to prepare for change and become your guiding coalition in that journey.
Perhaps I should give my acquaintance a call and give him some new advice. He needs to go have a frank conversation with the C-Suite.
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What is needed is a change of mindset in the C-Suite.
Most of them use the traditional top-down command and control approach to managing their employees. Top-down concentrates on producing goals, targets, visions, orders and other directives in order to control the workforce and thereby achieve organizational success. Focusing on giving direction prevents these managers from doing much of anything else. Thus top-down treats employees like robots in the “shut up and listen, I know better than you” mode, and rarely if ever listens to them. By so doing this approach ignores every employee’s basic need to be heard and to be respected. In addition, not listening to employees makes top management ignorant of what is really going on in the workplace thus making their directives misguided at best and irrelevant at worst.
In this way and others, top-down demeans and disrespects employees sending them very negative value standard messages. The standards reflected in this treatment “lead” employees to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with the same level of disrespect they received. No one can become committed to company goals while being treated so poorly.
This is the road to very poor corporate performance as compared to the results that would be achieved using a better approach. Authority is not the problem, but misusing authority as in the top-down model is a huge problem. Top-down managers are their own worst enemies simply because by their actions they “lead” employees to the very worst performance. (In “The Human Side of Enterprise”, author Douglas McGregor named this “Theory X” and named the other extreme “Theory Y”, but he did not provide how to achieve it.)
I could go on, but anyone wanting to understand the right and wrong ways to manage people might read the article “Leadership, Good or Bad”
Best regards, Ben
Author “Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed”