Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
—Henry David Thoreau
I have recently finished writing another book, which examines the role of capitalism and human capital in our economic life. Whilst researching for the project, I was struck by the way in which the capitalist system is based on the notion of ‘price’ while being associated ideologically with freedom. The conclusion I came to during my research was that capitalism really does place a price on freedom and it is a lot higher than you might think. For too many of us, we spend our lives in servitude to others. Whether it is our corporate masters, our creditors, or simply the system in which we live, we have a veneer of freedom, but are restricted into selling our labor to people who charge a very high rent on our productivity. I realize this makes me sound like a Marxist. I’m not, I’m a Temperatist, but the point I’m making is that the system in which we operate means we have an illusion of freedom and we have a price on our heads.
In organizational life, our value to an organization is also based on price. Our ability to get a job, and get paid a salary that reflects our worth is based on the market economy. If the markets says sports stars are worth millions and nurses mere thousands, then that dictates how much a health care professional will get paid regardless of the number of lives they save, or indeed the value of saving the life of the millionaire sports star. How much we are paid and how much we cost the company to employ us is recorded in minute detail on workforce spreadsheets and on an outgoing line on the profit and loss (P&L) account. Just think about that for a minute, the marvelous complexity of a human being with all their potential, knowledge, skills, and talent boiled down to a number on a spreadsheet. Your life reduced to dollars and cents.
The problem with a person being reduced to a number on a spreadsheet is that when an organization is faced with cost cutting due to economic pressures, leadership teams and accountants scour the ledgers to see where a reduction can be made in cost. Inevitably, they come to rest on the cost of human capital, one of the biggest variable costs that an organization will have, but the number itself hides all the complexities of human interaction within the organization. A simple calculation will be made of what cost needs to be trimmed, a number will be determined, a line is put through the head count figure, and the conversation moves on to other cost savings, marketing budgets, training budgets, capital equipment, stockholding etc. It may be that the process is less mechanical than that and some manager will take care to avoid delayering and redundancies, but many seasoned senior managers will have become hardened to the realities of the process and accept the inevitability of the process. They may not relish the uncertainty, unless of course the organizational restructure will be an opportunity to get rid of the deadwood in the organization.
The nefarious process of business re-engineering then filters down the organizational structure like slow moving volcanic lava, catching fire and bringing heat wherever it sets its path. Senior managers will instruct middle managers as to what their new revised budget for headcount will be and are told to get on with it, possibly with some support from Human Resources. The managers then get on with managing the impossible, carrying on with business as usual while seeing a reduction in productivity as the change program forced upon them demotivates staff. On their own, or with others, the manager will pull together a restructure plan to decide how to reduce the headcount while still being able to get the same amount of work done without any detriment to customer service and quality, and a redundancy program begins.
A simple line on a P&L sheet, collateral damage, and lives are boiled down to a number.
Inevitably, what happens is a few months down the line, when the dust has settled, the senior management team are tearing the hair out because someone vital to the smooth running of the organization, the person with the know-how to solve that particular problem has gone. The result is that all that intrinsic knowledge, specialist skills, human touch went walking out the door with their redundancy notice in hand. Ex-colleagues become consultants who charge more for the same work they were doing for less as an employee and before long there is a recruitment drive after another senior management team meeting where it is decided that a new division or project team is required. This time the number on the spreadsheet is crossed out and made bigger and the middle managers are required to spend time creating job specifications, interviewing for key strategic positions, and inducting new employees. And so the numbers game continues, up and down, down and up, and all the while people, with hopes and dream, bills to pay, kids to feed are added or subtracted in line with the vague notion of business performance.
The Misuse of Statistics on an International Level
In geo-political terms, this process of humans as numbers plays out as government statistics and blaring headlines in the media. In the last ten years, the scale of human tragedy reduced to numbers has, I believe numbed us to what the reality really is. Following the fall out of the 2008 credit crunch, the Greek government debt crisis caused a storm to erupt among members of the European Union. Hundreds of families have been forced to abandon their children because they can no longer afford to look after them and unemployment is running at 23.5 percent, double the Eurozone average. For the Greek youth, unemployment is running at 47.9 percent (Trading Economics, 2017), while the European Union insists on austerity measures and reforms in return for a bailout.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy, in regards to the human toll, at the time of writing this book is that of the civil war in Syria. Since the Arab Spring in 2011, more than eleven million Syrians have been killed or forced to leave their homes. There are 4.8 million Syrians who have sought safety in neighboring countries, making them the largest refugee population in the world, while 6.3 million are displaced within Syria itself. These numbers represent half of the population of Syria before the war began. Of the 2.5 million child refugees, 50 percent have lost everything; family, their home, their school, and their friends (Mercy Corps, 2017). Whether it is the need to find shelter, food, or being kept safe from human traffickers and exploitation, a whole generation of the Syrian child is being left to fend for themselves.
I doubt that a single person will look at these figures and not think that this situation is awful, and yet in the West we argue about immigration figures, the number of nondomestic nationals that should be allowed into the country, and the perceived threat to our way of life if we let these people in. There is a genuine and real concern about the possible terrorist threats posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). However, because ISIS operates in Syria, there is an assumption that the refugees are Islamist extremists and that Muslims are a threat to our country. During the Second World War, 60 million people were displaced because of the War, including 12 million Germans. Syria is the second-largest migrant crisis in human history. Fear means that instead of extending a helping hand, we are erecting barriers and check points. To put the international response to the Syria crisis in context, the 1983–1984 Ethiopian famine killed 400,000–500,000 people (de Waal, 1991). The international community bought millions of records of two charity singles, one recorded by Band Aid and the other US for Africa and the Live Aid even raised £145 million.
The crisis in Syria has been met with disdain and suspicion, and yet these are people, just like you and me, with hopes, dreams, and desires. For many, they have gone from a life where they were getting up, going to work, and worrying about the kind of things you and I worry about, to fleeing for their lives, uncertain of where the next meal will come from, and scared for their family and friends. The politicians and the policy makers reduce these people to a number of immigrants that need to be controlled. They devalue their very humanity by recording them as a number on a spreadsheet, a statistic to be discussed around a boardroom table. Many spreadsheets have columns that report larger numbers as data ranges to remove zeros. That removes the person. Their skills, knowledge, and abilities are ignored, and their potential is reduced to a number. What the world measures and determines as being really important is the wrong way round and yet every day we continue to take part in a system, making decisions that ‘devalue’ people to a number.
The Value of People in an Organization
In corporate life, this anachronism is played out daily. Ask a manager what an extra day’s holiday is going to cost the business and he’ll reel off a number. Ask him what value spending time with family and friends has to his workers and you’ll get a blank stare and possibly a response about “What has that got to do with the price of eggs?” If I were to ask you to find out the cost of training in your organization, it would be a simple case of looking in the right ledger. If I were to ask you to find out the value of human potential and talent in your organization, the answer would be impossible to find. We simply do not have the ability to create a metric, which will provide a measure of a person’s potential and value. Instead, we focus on what we can measure, which is cost. The reasons for this are simple. Human potential is subjective, and even to the human whose potential is being examined, unknown. We might know what you are capable of now, because of what you are able to demonstrate in terms of skill, knowledge, and ability, but we cannot know for certainty whether you have reached the limit of your potential or whether we are just glimpsing a small proportion of something truly marvelous.
The problem is of course that we don’t recognize that people have potential that might have a value. If I were to ask you to give me a value of your capital equipment—then you could tell me the cost and the benefit associated with the plant in your business. What is more, you’ll be able to tell me the utilization of the capital equipment, how much of its potential you are actually tapping into. So we do value potential, just not that of people. The end result is that people are reduced to a resource in a machine, a cog in a wheel, and in this reductionism, we lose something that makes people more valuable than capital equipment, or acceptable statistics and results. We lose a contribution that can only be found in humans. Creativity, innovation, collaboration, and that something that enables us as a species to develop beyond what our ancestors thought was humanly possible. What makes us fantastic is all the stuff that can’t be measured, that precludes us from being in the box that stops us being like others. It is the quirks, the unique traits, the off-kilter thinking and the singular, one of the kind-ness that reaches beyond a skill that can be learned, knowledge that can be experienced or abilities that can be developed.
I want to challenge you to adopt a different perspective, just for a few hours to begin with. I want you to observe people, look around your organization, and ask yourself not what the people are costing the business, but what value they are adding. Conduct a thought experiment whereby you ponder what value they could add to the organization that, to date they have not yet been provided with the opportunity to release. You’ll find that your P&L account is missing an important line in assets—people potential value or PPV for those who like three-letter acronyms. The next steps are obvious;
- What would it take to release the full potential of individuals within your organization?
- What opportunities do you need to create to make that happen?
- What conversations need to be had with managers and with individuals to make room for releasing potential
- What role and responsibilities do you have to make that a reality?
- What responsibility does the individual have in making the most of that opportunity?
- When are you going start?
We all need to step away from the salary we are paid and stop measuring ourselves by the number that the market, corporation, or government gives to us. We need to start thinking about the value that we can all add in regards to our very own performance potential. Challenging others and ourselves to think outside of the managerial constraints of easy metrics requires that we adopt a new attitude, which puts people first. Adopting this attitude will lead to a discovery that you can deliver a value far greater than the number you have been allocated. The change that is required is that you must be prepared to be more than what you do.
You need to be ready to act as if you are a value-adding asset beyond the market rate that forces you allow to be merely a cost to the organization. It’s time that price was replaced by value in our economic system and people rather than capital were given priority.
Manage Your Career Tool #2 – Focus on Your Strengths
Adapted from (Buckingham, 2010)
In my early career as a People and Organization Development practitioner, I read a book by Marcus Buckingham called “Now discover your strengths” and it was a revelation. The basic premise of the book is that we need to identify our strengths and we will be more productive if we develop our strengths rather than focusing on correcting our weak areas. Today, it is perhaps one of my greatest frustrations with people development processes in organizations that there is an insistence on focusing on people’s weaknesses that need fixing when it comes to people development planning. Why do that? If an organization invested its capital resources in stuff it was rubbish at, then it is obvious to anyone that it wouldn’t take very long for the business to be out of business. I, therefore, cannot understand why this practice is the approach taken when it comes to identifying learning and development needs. Therefore, when it comes to your own personal development, there are two rules:
- Focus on your strengths. At least 80 percent of your personal development plan should be focused on developing stuff you are really good at, to make you even better at doing them.
- Only develop your weaknesses so far as they don’t get in the way of you playing your strengths, but realize that overplaying strengths can make them into weaknesses. So develop a self-awareness of when that happens.
Identifying strengths is probably the hardest thing we need to do, partly because, if we are working within an area of strength, we will feel like we are in a natural flow and, therefore, we don’t notice that it is something we are good at. Being able to do something without difficulty is usually an area in which you have a talent but we don’t see it as a talent, because we can just do it. Get feedback from others and notice the things that you can do that you can’t explain how you do them. You can just . . . do them. These are possible areas of talent potential. The next step is to articulate your strengths. There are 3 tasks to do this:
- Log activities
- Articulate strengths
- Write a strengths statement
Writing strengths statements can seem a bit laborious, but it is important that you do this exercise on a regular basis. Changing context and circumstances mean that we have an opportunity to discover more strengths that we did not know we had. For example, I didn’t know I had a strength as a facilitator until I was moved on to a project at work, which gave me that opportunity. The end result was I loved the satisfaction that developing people gave me, that I changed career.
Over the course of a week, log any work tasks and activities that you have been involved in. Concentrate on activities and tasks that you do yourself. Think about how it felt when you were doing the tasks. Consider whether the task was one that enjoyed doing (liked), or one that you perhaps procrastinated about, and tried to avoid (disliked).
Having identified those activities that you liked, consider how it is those activities make you feel effective. Rewrite the tasks listed in the liked column to make it identifiable as strength
For example, I feel strong when I write.
Task 3 – Write a ‘strengths statement’
Buckingham (2010) states that you can “write a strengths statement by taking the verb (the doing word) and then drill down into what context you feel most strong in.”
For example, I feel strong when writing about ideas that I have in areas in which I am knowledgeable and are connected to my passion for releasing people potential.