Of inner compass and uncertainty

“Do what you think is right!”, said the HR leader. I had gone to him to seek his advice on a complex issue where there were multiple courses of action possible and all of them contained significant risk of failure. Somehow, this comment impacted me profoundly.  

I am not sure if I interpreted this comment in the way he intended it to be. May be, the that is exactly the way it should be. The impact of these conversations are often similar to what happens when we read a great book. The meaning often runs in parallel with or is even independent of what is written/spoken. These books (and conversations) create some sort of a ‘field’ that helps us to derive our own meaning.

I guess, the current uncertain environment made this comment emerge from the ‘back of the mind’ to the ‘day to day mind’! To me, what is great about this comment is that it helps in decision-making under uncertainty. 

To maintain integrity (in the sense of integration of thoughts, words and deeds), our actions should be in alignment with our values (what we consider as important, see ‘Of values and competencies’). In an uncertain situation, evaluating the various courses of action based on whether they are likely to work becomes even more difficult. 

So in such situations, one’s inner sense of right and wrong or the inner sense of fit or inner sense of beauty (one’s inner compass) becomes the only useful guiding force. If one hasn't paid enough attention to this inner compass, then one's actions might be driven primarily by fear, in uncertain situations. Use of this inner compass also ensures some sort of affirmation/intrinsic reward even if the course of action that one chose doesn’t succeed to the expected level or ‘pay off’ in the external sense!

This 'inner compass' is somewhat like a muscle. The more one uses it the stronger it gets. In a way, this creates a bit of a 'chicken and egg problem' and hence this involves some sort of 'leap of faith', with the word 'faith' being used in its original meaning of 'trust' (from Latin 'fides').'  While external validation has some relevance, the most important question is if one beats oneself up if the choice made using the inner compass does't succeed as expected. This brings to mind the following quote/story: "From the morning, I have been standing in front of a house begging. Only now I realized that it was my own house!".  

Note: It would be interesting to examine if the concept of 'inner compass' is applicable at the organization level also. To me, the 'inner compass' is applicable - for those organizations that have done successful 'soul-searching' efforts and haven't 'bartered away the soul' after that. In a way, the 'real values' of the organization (not necessarily the ones that are pasted on the walls) are the closest organization equivalent to the inner compass. One must differentiate between values and competencies. Something qualifies as a value only if it is so important (so core/so valuable) to the organization identity that it would be demonstrated even if it leads to a competitive disadvantage. Also, values are discovered (through a deep soul-searching process) and not designed. Competencies are about how to win whereas values are about how to live! 

Any comments/thoughts?

Career development and 'sublimation'

Since the words ‘career’ and ‘sublimation’ have many meanings/interpretations, let us begin by defining these terms - for the (limited) purpose of our discussion.

Career – pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement where one takes up positions of increasing responsibility, complexity & contribution

Sublimation - change directly from the solid to the gaseous state without becoming liquid (so we are using the 'Chemistry' meaning of 'sublimation' - as opposed that in 'Psychology')

Now that we have got the definitions out of the way, let us come back to the issue at hand. These days, it is quite common for people to skip some of the steps in (what used to be) the 'typical career path'. That is, they jump from a particular position to another position that is more than one step away/higher. So they transition directly ('sublimate') to a significantly 'higher' position without going through (what were considered to be necessary) intermediate positions.

These kind of career moves make a lot of sense in today's scenario - where many organizations are in state of flux - making traditional 'career paths' and 'career ladders' less relevant. Again, organizations are more open to this kind of career moves these days, especially where this results in cost saving and lower time to fill a vacancy. Of course, it makes eminent sense also from the individual's point of view - in terms of faster career growth.

So, if this 'sublimation' seem to make sense - from the points of view of both the individual and the organization - what is the issue? I think that this 'sublimation' can create problems - for the individual and for the organization.

For the individual, skipping intermediate positions in the career path can result in loss of learning opportunities - and some of these 'missed learnings' can prove costly - in terms of the adverse impact on long term career success and on personal effectiveness at work. Some of the intermediate positions might be key from a 'career & professional maturity' and perspective building (and wisdom development!) points of view. While the 'higher' positions will also provide valuable learning opportunities (may be even learning opportunities at a broader/'higher' level), they can't always substitute for the learnings provided by the intermediate positions. I would even speculate that time spent in the intermediate roles might have a positive impact on the 'ability to learn' - including the ability to learn from opportunities at a broader/'higher' level. The situation is not dissimilar to that of children who are 'forced' (e.g. by life situations) to grow up too fast. They manage to act like grownups - but often they have hidden flaws in their (psychological) development.

Often, after one has taken up a 'higher role' (in terms of organization hierarchy) it becomes difficult* (see the note below) to take up these intermediate roles - unless one moves to another ('bigger'/'more reputed') organization. So it is possible that these necessary learning opportunities are lost forever for the particular individual. Let me give a personal example. I moved to a global/corporate role in the Learning and Organization Effectiveness (L&OE) domain without spending time in a role that involves handling complete operational responsibility for the L&OE function/team at the business unit/country level. At this point, I don't really know what exactly have I missed because of this 'sublimation'. While I have tried to find this out by speaking to people who have handled such jobs (some sort of 'knowledge engineering'), I do feel that there could be significant gaps in my understanding! After all, there is a difference between understanding/wisdom (that is developed from actual experience) and knowledge.

This brings us to the problem of 'unknown unknowns' -a key side effect of 'sublimation' - which can create problems for both the individual and for the organization. Usually, 'unknown unknowns' are more dangerous than 'known unknowns'. Based on our discussion above, it can be seen that the 'sublimated individuals' can create serious risks for the organization. While the 'sublimated individuals' are usually very confident, their confidence often stem from 'simplicity on this side of complexity' as opposed to 'simplicity on the other side of complexity'. These 'unknown unknowns' can seriously undermine the quality of decision making. This becomes a major cause for concern when these individuals are in positions where their decisions can have high organizational impact. From the individual's point of view, a key risk is that of self-destructing their fast track careers! Other risks for the individuals include becoming too big for most of the roles available in their domain too early in their careers (limiting their options for changing jobs - see here for a related HR specific discussion) and of course that of 'reaching their level of incompetence' too fast/too early in their careers!!

So there can be problems/costs involved with 'sublimation'. But there are also potential benefits (as we have seen earlier). In addition to this, we should keep in mind that there are approaches like job rotations, stretch assignments and action learning projects that can provide accelerated career development while avoiding some of the problems associated with 'sublimation' - at least to a large extent. Hence it comes down to a cost benefit analysis - which can be highly context specific - both for the particular individual and for the particular organization - making a standard solution/recommendation difficult. But the awareness of the options and the possible problems/benefits can facilitate better cost benefit analysis and more informed decision making.

*Note: The difficulty in moving into a role that is 'lower' in the organizational hierarchy could be in terms of the possible adverse impact on salary, organization level etc. I do feel that the degree to which the difficulty is felt by an individual also depends on his/her outlook towards salary and career growth. The two extremes here are 'shape approach' and 'area under the curve approach'. It is essentially a matter of what one is trying to optimise - 'shape of the graph' or 'area under the graph'. Let me explain using salary progression as an example. Let us visualize a diagram ('salary graph') with salary on the y-axis and time on the x- axis.

Those who take a 'shape of the graph' approach/philosophy want to ensure that their salary goes up each time they make a job change (either within an organization or across organizations). So they want the salary graph to have a nice shape - with a positive 'slope' at all times. These kind of people will not want to take up a very high paying job if they feel that the salary growth is not sustainable and that they might have to take a pay cut later when they move from the very high paying job.

If we go back to our salary diagram (with salary on the y-axis and time on the x- axis), the area under the graph signifies the total earnings over a period of time/over the span of the career. It is apparent that what the people who take a 'area under the graph' approach/philosophy are trying to maximise is their total earnings/salary. These kind of people will take up a very high paying job even if they feel that the salary growth is not sustainable - so long as their total earnings (over the span of their career) are likely to be higher.

Of course, the above approaches ('shape of the graph' and 'area under the graph') apply not only in the case of salary but also in the case of other dimensions of career growth like 'size of the role' , 'position of the role in the organization hierarchy' and 'learning experiences provided by the role'. It is interesting to note that 'shape of the graph' approach/philosophy is reflected in many of the typical definitions of the term 'career' (even in the one that is given at the beginning of this post - as it talks about ' pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement' and about 'taking up positions of increasing responsibility'). But we have seen that this not the only approach possible or even the most effective one in today's environment. So if one takes the 'area under the graph' approach(which is more attuned to today's scenario), the 'difficulty' mentioned above can become much less significant.

Now over to you for your comments and suggestions!

Strange case of 'wrong' HRIS reports

As far as I know, there are only a few things that HR leaders (at the corporate level) across companies agree on. One of them seems to be that the reports from Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) that they receive/generate are often misleading and/or wrong. Fortunately, in most cases, nothing really bad happens because of these 'wrong reports', as they are not used for making any serious decisions. They just get converted into charts and tables and land up in presentations. These presentations are used mainly to describe (or even rationalize!) the past and not to predict the future. So no real damage happens ! Of course, if one tries to use these data to support decision making (i.e. as the basis for Human Capital Analytics), then it can lead to wrong decisions. Since Human Capital Analytics seems to be one of the key opportunities to create significant organizational value in the people domain*, we need to look more carefully at the reasons that make these reports wrong/misleading - so that we can fix them in a sustainable manner.

When errors are discovered in HRIS reports, the most common tendency is to view it as a 'data entry mistake'. While errors do creep in at the data entry stage, often the main issue lies at the levels of 'data interpretation' & 'business rules'.

Often there is no common understanding of how different data elements/terms are interpreted. Let us look at a very simple example - a request to pull out a 'list of all the staff in IT'. While this seems simple, there are many possible interpretations here (especially in a global organization). For example, this could mean a list of

(a) all staff who are doing an IT kind of job' and/or
(b) all staff whose are being paid from the salary budget of the IT department and/or
(c) all staff who are in the reporting-tree of the Head of IT

Now, to get this simple report correct, it is not enough just to use the correct definition of the term 'IT team' while generating the report. The real challenge is to build that definition into a business rule that covers all staff staff movements in IT (e.g. hire, transfer etc.) and to ensure that the rule gets followed correctly across all the countries in which the firm operates. For example, if the definition of 'team' is along reporting lines [as given in (c) above], then whenever an IT person gets hired in the firm in any country, it has to be ensured that the new hire reports directly to someone in the reporting chain of the global head of finance. In a global firm, this simple business rule might not always be that easy to implement as there could be scenarios (e.g. in a country where the size of the firm is very small) where it might seem more appropriate to make the IT person report to a business person. Of course, there are other factors (e.g. 'double-hatting') that could complicate this further. It is possible to use complex definitions to take care of complex situations. However, this would also imply more complex business rules, making the communication/implementation of the business rules difficult.

Another dimension that is relevant here is the variation in HR practices across countries. For example, let us look at a case where there is a decision to make a staff member, who has been working with the firm on a 'contract basis', a member of the regular staff. In this case the practice in one country might be to do a 'terminate and rehire' while that in another country could be just to change the 'employee class' from 'contract' to 'regular'. Thus the staff would show up in a 'new hire report' if he/she is in the first country and it won't happen if he/she is in the second country. Now, if we generate a global report, we would get misleading data on the number of new hires. Another similar issue could be 'what is a promotion' (e.g. 'increase in job level' and/or 'change in pay grade' and 'increase in pay' etc.). If we look deep enough, a large number of such issues are likely to surface in any global firm.

Any attempts to 'clean up the data' on a one time basis would be useless as the data would again go out of shape very quickly (as the problems at the data interpretation/business rules level would keep on producing 'data errors'). It is also useless to try to 'reverse-engineer' a report generation criteria (by combining a large number of HRIS fields to form a complex condition) which if applied on the current data in HRIS, would produce a result similar to a target list (e.g. a list of staff names given by the Head of IT as the list of 'his staff'). Since the data/target population (e.g. IT staff) is dynamic, the 'reverse -engineered criteria' (that captures target population at this point) might not be able to capture the target population accurately at a future point of time. So even if there are hundreds of data fields in the HRIS, need for business rules still exist !!!.

Thus to generate meaningful HRIS reports

(1) there should be a set of Business Rules & Data Standards that are clearly understood and consistently applied across geographies and businesses (which would lead to 'patterns in data') AND
(2) the report generation criteria should be aligned to these Business Rules and Data Standards (so as to capture the relevant patterns in the data) AND
(3) it should be possible to express the report generation criteria in terms of HRIS fields AND
(4) the query tool should be able to pull out the data as per the criteria

In practice, the above 4 requirements/steps might not always happen in a neat sequential manner especially since the business context and the analysis requirements keep on evolving. Usually the above requirements would also mandate significant amount of selling (and even pushing!) on the part of HR to secure buy-in from the business leadership and it is easy to get carried way by the immense opportunity to provide great information/analytics to support decision making. We should always keep in mind that the purpose of HRIS/Human Capital Analytics is to enable the business to function more effectively and not the other way around !!!

*Note : The objective of Human Capital Analytics (HCA) is to provide information and analytic support to enable better people related decisions. HCA could include, inter alia analytical reports, trend analysis, dashboards, benchmarking, predictive models etc. Analytical reports analyze people related issues (e.g. attrition) from multiple dimensions (e.g. various combinations of dimensions like tenure, age, experience, gender, performance, potential, location, job family, level, salary band,time since last promotion etc.).

Depending on the context developing HCA in a particular organization could involve a wide range of tasks. These could include requirement analysis, finalizing specifications, setting up the IT/ analytics infrastructure, benchmarking, report generation,maintaining dashboards and even building predictive/multiple regression models (e.g. to predict attrition). Since people related decisions might require various types of data that might be held in different information systems (that might not 'talk' to one another) and since many many of these systems are optimized for transactions/data storage and not for data retrieval (as required for HCA), setting up of HCA usually involves developing some sort of a data warehouse/data mart.

It is interesting to note that since developing and operating HCA involves a wide range of tasks, this would also require a wide range of skill sets/roles - Business analysis, IT/HRIS, HR specialist/consulting, statistical analysis, report generation, presentation/decision support, change management, project management etc. Now, some of these tasks/roles can be outsourced to a vendor - and hence some of the skill sets could come from the vendor. If the organization decides to staff some of these roles with internal resources - for cost and context understanding reasons, this could create new challenges. These could include issues like -'would the organization be able to hire these people easily?' - even if the organization manage to do so would it be able to provide these resources career paths within the organization (as some of these are quite specialized jobs - that could be very different from the mainstream jobs in the organization).

Apart from these staffing related challenges, there could be other significant challenges involved in developing and operating HCA. These include a avilability of data (if the current HR systems/benchmarking process don't already capture all the data required for analytics, you might have to put systems/processes in place to collect the data -this would take time and resources - also it would limit your ability to do any trend analysis as previous data would be missing), Mindset change (even if you make information/analytical support available would the managers use it in the decision making process?) and ensuring investment and sustained focus (- setting up and maintaining data collection process, analytical & reporting/ data presentation infrastructure etc. could require a lot of money and resources - is the organization ready for that - it is one thing for the leaders to say that they need information - the question is whether they would pay for it and whether they would continue to do so !)