Perfect Labor Storm 2.0

Egypt's Civil Disobedience Offers 4 Lessons for Business Leaders

The ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak wasn’t just a political event on far-away soils. It was a sign of the times that unfortunately many executives missed.  Others chose to dismiss it.  They will be sorry.

If ever there was a time of extraordinary uncertainty, we are living in it today. In the last four decades, we have seen the rise of the Internet and the explosion of information technologies. Much to the chagrin of millions of overwhelmed people, this data deluge isn’t cyclical but exponential.  If you are a manager or company owner, probably the greatest challenge you face is positioning your company to address the tsunami of change that is upon us.

We are now on the cutting edge of a social revolution that neither business executives nor political leaders can control.  We are looking at the convergence of the aging Baby Boomer and Mature generations with the Millennials – the largest U.S. and global cohort ever to inhabit this earth. President Barack Obama’s election just a little over two years ago gave us a sneak peek into how a social and political movement can leverage social media to successfully influence an outcome.  Mubarak’s ouster opened a new chapter. 

It provided us an extended glimpse about how a new generation will initiate social upheavals as well as causes like the environment that are--for the first time in history--
global in scope.

The riots in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention in 1968 made international news but remained an isolated domestic event. The Tiananmen Square demonstrations in China 20 years later again caught the attention of a global audience until the government eventually shut down outbound communication. They momentarily kept their response local when they silenced the protestors. But the cat was out of the proverbial bag and soon after, people began to demonstrate on the streets of eastern European countries. Only six months later the Berlin Wall fell down, and 12 months later, the Soviet Union was gone.  The events that unraveled in Egypt over the past two weeks demonstrate how local demonstrations – once easily contained by government and media - can go global almost instantly and dramatically shape social upheavals.  It took 5 years for the young adult Baby Boomers to force an end to the war in Vietnam, less than a year for students to accelerate if not force the fall of communism, and under  2 weeks for a relatively peaceful youth-led protest to oust a powerful and intransigent leader.

Embedded in these events are four powerful lessons for leaders in business.

1. When people complain, listen.  Management and political leaders must not be lulled into thinking that “Father Knows Best;” that protests, demonstrations, and just plain old negative comments are the result of youthful energy and disrespect for tried and true traditions; and that today’s youth will eventually come to their senses and accept the world the way it is or was.  That’s not – I repeat N-O-T – going to happen.   Many companies ignore the complaints of customers, employees, or business partners because, after all, you can’t please everyone. When executives plug their ears, they make the same mistake as the Mubarak. You may be able to stifle or ignore complaints for a long time. But eventually customer displeasure can grow strong enough to compel people to strike back.  Lesson Learned: The Millennial generation is a force to be reckoned with.

2. Don’t confuse dissent with adversity.  While the Boomers disagreed on nearly everything with their parents—clothes, hair styles, politics, values, and music, Gen Ys enjoy their parents as people. Young Baby Boomers in the 60s built a defiant counterculture. In contrast, many Millennials call out their parents as their “bff” (in text lingo, a “best friend forever.”)  Mobarek as a man wasn’t the enemy. It was his policies and leadership style. The Egyptian youth weren’t ousting the government but the people running it.  Lesson Learned: If the Millennials don’t respect you or support your cause, they now have the power to do something about it.

3. Followership is the new norm in leadership; partnership is the new business strategy. While the Gen Ys may not be challenging their parents as people, they certainly are challenging the institutions the Boomers are running.  They disrupted the 2008 Presidential race by participating in Barack Obama’s utilization of social networks to overwhelm Democratic frontrunner Hilary Clinton and later negate the experienced Veteran John McCain. They’ve disrupted the music industry with Napster and iTunes.  Unlike the Baby Boomers who clashed with the military in the 60s, Chinese students who clashed with the military in the 80s, the Egyptian students and the military partnered with each other. The students didn’t have a beef with the military. In fact, they had a common goal – respect and dignity for all the Egyptian people, not just those in power. They weren’t enemies in the protest but allies. Lesson Learned: If a youth-led but leader-less protest can peacefully overthrow an established government, a company’s brand and/or strategy can be easily toppled.

4. The Internet changed everything. Social media is not a fad but a communication revolution.  The new Web 2.0 is distributing power and democratizing the economy. The Google executive who launched the Facebook page said to have sparked the original protest said: “If you want to liberate a country, give them the Internet.” Technology is the air that young people breathe and it is beginning to leave more experienced workers gasping. The voice of one can almost instantly be heard by a billion people. The mere volume of information and speed at which it flows is overwhelming.  Author Don Tapscott described what’s happening:

“People no longer have to follow the leaders and do what they’re told. Now they can organize themselves, publish themselves, inform themselves, and share with their friends —without waiting for an authority to instruct them. This unprecedented access to power has already rocked the music and newspaper industries and it will roll over and through every other world this generation enters.”

The information highway and especially social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter allowed a generation to take what seemed like a local protest and transform it quickly into a global public forum.   Wael Ghonim, the Google exec, tweeted, “Revolution can be a #Facebook event that is liked, shared & tweeted.”  A TechCrunch article asserts that the revolution was about the Internet as a whole. When the government attempted to shut down the Internet, people worldwide pulled together cell phones, home phones, Facebook, and other methods like Google and Twitter’s collaborative phone-to-twitter application to “essentially create the largest flashmob ever.”  Al Jazeera employed YouTube to make its coverage available to U.S. audiences. The news was filtered by or through the government or media. We saw it as it happened. Lesson Learned: You can’t control the Internet, just learn to manage and leverage the information available through it.

The Millennials are now entering the workplace (or at least trying despite high unemployment). They are ready to take on traditional corporate hierarchy and many established precedents. The Millennial generation won’t follow the “it’s us against the world” road. Instead after years of playing digital games and networking online, many Millennials are experts at visioning outcomes, working collaboratively, and rallying quickly and impressively for a cause.  Egypt, and earlier Iran during their demonstration in 2009, couldn’t shut down the Internet. 

With all that has happened in the last few weeks, every leader needs to ask these 3 questions:

1.  
   1. What human resources policies do you have in place that ignores or dismisses the Milllennial generation?
   2. What strategies and business practices do you have in place that will engage the Millennial generation?
   3. What makes you think they can shut down the Internet during working hours and survive?

Staying power doesn’t come from trying to pin everything down. Instead, it is the result of listening, flexibility and responsiveness.

Interviewing Tips for Hiring the RIght CFO

The economy is picking up steam and opportunities for CFOs to hire, as well be recruited by others, seems more likely.  An article posted last week in PC World and CIO offered interviewing tips for and from CFOs to help hire the right person the first time.

Nearly all the CFOs interviewed agreed: they wanted “a highly motivated self-starter not afraid to make an occasional mistake, with a strong commitment to collaboration and being a team player, a willingness to take responsibility for failures and successes, and the ability to keep focused on goals while maintaining passion about their work and the company.”

But wanting, finding, and then confirming those traits and skills requires more skill than ever before on the part of the interviewer. The hiring insights included interviewing tips from quite a few CFOs, recruiters and management experts.  Thanks to Focus, a business research site, I had the opportunity to participate and contribute to this article.  You can read the full article at “Hiring Insights From, and For, CFOs” or continue here to read the highlights.

One of the biggest challenges confronting managers hiring for any position, not only CFO, is that out of work candidates have plenty of time to prepare for the interview, often more than the managers doing the interviewing.  And at the C-Level and senior management levels, nearly every out-of-work exec has had some outplacement counseling which includes … yes, that’s right – interviewing skills training.  Little if any time is invested by hiring manager to update their hiring skills. When it does happen, it’s generally a few minutes here or there or one bullet on the long list of annual HR training updates. That puts many human resource professionals and especially the senior managers interviewing for the new  CFO at a distinct advantage.

In addition, many interviewers tend to do most of the talking.  “A good rule of thumb is that a good interview is 70 percent listening and observing,” was a point I made for the article.  Vibrant Mobile CFO Jeff Babka agreed and offered his own interviewing tip: “I first make sure that they understand the job, the company, our culture and my style. Then, I say, 'Look, tell me what you think I should know about you that would make me want to hire you. Start wherever you want in your life, end up wherever you want….”

Another common mistake is that managers use recommended interview questions as a checklist.  They ask one question and evaluate the candidate’s response. Then they move on to question 2 and repeat the process.  Then comes question 3. When the run out of questions or the candidate stops talking, the interview is over.

But an interview isn’t a test.  It can’t be scripted.  An effective interview should be dynamic.  It’s a conversation where the candidate should be doing most of the talking. “Interviewers have to keep probing….Interviewers tend to stop when they hear the right answer…[when] I'm looking for is to have someone tell me what some of the challenges were during that process, were you able to repeat that, did other departments repeat that success? I can go into an interview with one question and keep asking more questions about that question."

Hiring the right CFO is part science, part art.  Interviewing remains a critical component of hiring for open position. The uptick in hiring is a good sign for our economy but it will put undue pressure on the managers who are doing the hiring. In many situations, the candidate is a much better storyteller than the manager is a listener.  The article on hiring insights for CFOs offers several additional recommendations.  Read the full article here.

Lack of Employee Mobility Puts Kink In Skilled Worker Pipeline

Modest growth in the economy has employers seeking skilled workers to stress out. Not only is finding candidates with the experience and/or skills to do the job comparable to finding the proverbial needle in the haystack in many industries, but a lack of employee mobility has slapped handcuffs on the few available skilled workers.

Posting jobs to online job boards such as Monster and CareerBuilder is a popular technique to reach a large number of potential employees quickly.  Starting a career page on the company website requires little cost or effort.  Getting the word out about a job opening is no longer a big deal for most businesses.

Online career sites also make it easier for the jobseeker to find a job that fits his skill set just about anywhere whether it is local or hundreds of miles away.  Getting candidates to apply for a job, especially with high unemployment, using online recruiting seems like a marriage made in heaven.

But as many companies have learned the hard way, posting a job online can inundate a company with dozens, if not hundreds, of applicants - many of them unqualified, an effect I've called the resu-mess.   Many employers are shifting away from job boards and putting more effort in working connections on networking sites such as LinkedIN.  More aggressive recruiters – both internal and external – are even seeking out employed workers and poaching these passive, but talented, candidates from competitors.

Unfortunately regardless of the recruiting source, mobility – or the lack of it – is putting a significant crimp into the talent pipeline.  

The current housing market is one factor putting a hitch in sourcing talented candidates to fill skilled jobs.  In order to relocate, a potential employee may need to sell or arrange to rent their home if they accept the new job.  With so many potential workers owning “underwater” mortgages, loans that are worth less than the property is worth, a company’s candidate might be qualified but unavailable.  Renting too might not be a option. Finding tenants who can afford the rent to cover the mortgage are few and far between these days.

There is second potential hurdle facing employers seeking hard-to-find skilled workers.  It’s the “blended” family.  Remember the Brady Bunch?  Just a few decades ago, the step-family was an exception. Today over four out of every ten American adults have at least one step relative in their household. There are all sorts of combinations that might fit the modern family, but the most typical is the couple who each have children from previous relationships.  Moving the family to another area may mean getting the blessing of not one but two former spouses or family members with whom they share parenting responsibilities.  Changing schools, sometimes even just a few miles away, and the status of state specific college savings funds, precludes relocation.  In addition, many households today rely on dual incomes. The relocation of one spouse for a job means the other spouse may be left hunting for a job. 

The third hurdle facing employers is the increasing number of workers that find themselves caring for parents.   With people living longer, it is possible that a qualified candidate might be the caregiver for four aging parents.  That is certainly the case for many working Baby Boomers. Perhaps these aging parents live in the same town or just up the street and depend on their adult children just for occasional help with groceries, snow removal, or lawn care.  But time marches on and many candidates may not be comfortable shirking what they feel is an obligation to be nearby when their parent(s) might need them.   If the parents are already in an elder care facility, and the children have confidence in the facility or other siblings in the area, this concern is reduced.  Of course, it is possible the candidate could move the parents with them, but that too can be troublesome and expensive.  Step-parents also can hinder employees from relocating.   According to the Pew Research Center study, 56 percent of adults feel very obligated to help out a stepparent.  That means if all the parents are alive, a step-couple could have 8 aging parents to care for.

The Perfect Labor Storm has many facets converging on the workplace.  A shortage of skilled workers is just one of them.  Finding qualified candidates who have the experience, skills, and mobility is becoming increasingly more difficult.  Thanks to a widespread shortage of qualified candidates in many industries, recruiting employees has its inherent challenges. Other factors like mortgages, step families, child custody and elder care hinder many candidates from accepting jobs in new places. With the economy heating up, finding qualified candidates is only the beginning of the challenge facing employers.  Unlocking the many handcuffs that might be holding a limited supply of skilled workers hostage will make recruitment even more difficult in the coming months.

Simon Sez: Could This Be The Future Of Training?

Many of us remember playing Simon Sez as a kid.  Now imagine playing the game on the computer where you try to outsmart an avatar on the computer screen.  Unlike current virtual worlds like Second Life or MMORPG’s like War of Warcraft,  this new software allow you to control your avatar with your gestures, not a joystick. The avatar waves, you wave back. If the avatar didn’t say Simon Sez but you move,  he tells you that you lose!  That type of software is what Andrew Tschesnok, founder and CEO of Organic Motion, believes is the future of training.

On the day I interviewed Tschesnok, his company announced an agreement to deliver what he calls “a multi-soldier tracking platform capability” to the U.S. Army. Translation: Organic Motion’s technology can now provide a more realistic training environment where the movements of soldiers in training are tracked and displayed in real-time. “Old mechanized training doesn’t work anymore,” says Tschesnok, “in a world where warfare is asymmetric. New technology will embed the individual in the process.”  Organic Motion’s software can help reconstruct a marketplace in a village in Afghanistan.  Actors play the enemy; the soldier can interact.  What’s been missing up to this point was getting the other person immersed in the simulation.  Now the participant isn’t just controlling a joystick but he becomes the joystick.

The implications for this in business are enormous. Let’s say you want to purchase a shirt and slacks.  Instead of running to the mall, you sit in front of your computer screen, enter a virtual store, and are greeted by associate.  The associate knows what size your wear because the bi-directional monitor “sizes” you up. 

Are you thinking this is years away?  Think again.  Microsoft’s just released Kinect for Xbox 360 just in time for the holiday season.  Kinect is a "controller-free game based around a webcam-style add-on peripheral for the Xbox 360 console. It enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller through a natural user interface using gestures, spoken commands, or presented objects and images.  In other words – it converts a computer display into a bidirectional screen where you see the computer and it sees you and responds back.  According to Tschesnok , Microsoft’s technology will be considered primitive soon but currently serves as a great example of what’s coming. 

Bill Gates once said that “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” The advancements and technologies available to employers and schools, along with many others that don’t even exist yet, will revolutionize how companies train and employees learn.  It’s quite likely that the speed of change in learning systems and models will follow Gate’s slow-start, rapid-shift scenario as  the economy recovers and lost business opportunities accelerate due to severe skilled worker shortages.

Tipping Point: Technology Disrupts How We Learn

Just as Amazon offers you new book titles based on what you’ve bought in the past, training systems will be able to make relevant suggestions for further learning based on your ability, your pace, and your work process.  By tracking individual employee decisions and behaviors, new learning systems will make unprompted recommendations.   The recommendations could be content to view or subject matter experts in the business or online.  Customized materials can be generated on the fly to recommend a better way to do a task and satisfy the particular learning styles of students.  Advertising works this way already.  Borrowing technology from Google, Amazon, and Facebook, employees could learn more quickly and effectively from the behavior and knowledge of other people than any number of workshops or books.

Steven Flinn, founder and CEO of ManyWorlds, Inc, believes the tipping point in how we learn is just around the corner.   Flinn, who is also the author of The Learning Layer: Building the Next Level of Intellect In Your Organization, says “the biggest breakthrough is that instead of you learning about how to operate the machine (or computer), the machine learns about you. Rather than the system being hard coded, the system learns from your behaviors and the behaviors of other people.” While this technology is just becoming available, “by 2015, it will be mainstream. By 2020, employees will have no patience for systems that don’t have social awareness.”

Just as blogs and Web sites have disrupted traditional media, collaborative learning and peer-to-peer education will disrupt conventional colleges.  Experts will complain about the creation of user-generated educational materials, but a vibrant community of students will evolve that can literally teach itself, because when each individual has something different to offer, the whole is greater than the parts.  Members of online learning communities will seamlessly leap between beginner, enthusiast, and expert, depending on the learning context, and they will be able to find and create content that is more relevant to their lives than anything schools or publishers can provide now.  Companies that take advantage of this adaptive learning technology will have a competitive edge, even while saving money on their own educational initiatives. 

Great Minds Thinking Alike Doesn't Foster Innovation

"Great minds think alike" - I don't know how many times I've heard that in my life. In fact, I probably spoke those very words dozens of times.  But new research is questioning how effective sameness is as a competitive strategy.  One recent study suggests that similar minds might make management easier, but it doesn't breed innovation.   

 

IBM learned that lesson over a decade ago. In the 1980s they had an ad that said "Great minds think alike." IBM changed their ways.  They eventually changed the ad to "Great minds think unalike."   

 

Unfortunately many other organizations, and especially the managers within them, still see the same light. They still tend to hire people who think like them.  They build teams of people who agree with them too.  Individuals who challenge them or the status quo are hushed and encouraged to give up their personal identity for the good of the team.  Diversity is rhetorically supported at hiring but in practice it is often just an effort to meet quotas.   

 

An article published in Inc. magazine highlights a recent study, which set out to discover how employee diversity within workgroups affects the group's overall performance.  According to Bill Swann, a professor of psychology at University of Texas at Austin where the study was completed, groups with members who "externalized their personal identities" (i.e. students who expressed individuality) were more successful than groups with members who tended to downplay their personalities. 

 

A few experts offered advice how diversity within a company can be used as a strategic advantage to "create better innovation, better products, and ultimately, a better company." 

 

1. Culture. Before an organization will reap the rewards of a diverse work environment, it's essential to have an infrastructure set up that not only supports diversity, but also celebrates it. You just can't offer training and expect change.  Diversity must become part of the organization's DNA. 

 

2. Hiring.  Creating a successfully diverse work environment that fosters innovation comes down to one thing: hiring the right people. It's important to find out what that person values, and how they, as an individual, can bring a specific skill set to the organization. 

 

3. Diversity. Diversity can be a loaded term, filled with connotation about race and gender, but that's not always the case. Personality, talent, and experience are also important traits to consider when creating a diverse work group. And an increasing challange and opportunity is age or generational diversity. By integrating the experience of Baby Boomers and Generation X with young technology-savvy Millenials, process can be improved and productivity increased with diverse perspective and new skills.  

 

4. Leadership. The major challenge of achieving an effective diverse pool of employees is not filling quotas or hiring a certain amount of people from a specific demographic. The hurdle managers face is creating the environment where people feel comfortable expressing diverse opinions. The catalyst for fostering innovation falls upon the shoulders of managers and CEOs.

Can Employees Learn Using Online Games?

Educators have long known that games are good models for teaching teamwork. Employers however often view these games as ice-breakers and entertainment – in other words, a waste of time.  But MMPORGs- Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game - do a better job of teaching teamwork, problem solving, analytical thinking and collaboration skills among adults than do traditional classroom workshops because they more closely replicate the complexity of a typical office environment. 

It's easy to know what's best for the team when everyone is wearing the same color shirt, climbing a rope, and trying to kick the ball in the same direction.  But it’s much harder to be an effective team player in an environment with competing priorities, limited resources, divergent goals, and a whole slew of personalities.

MMPORGs force participants to make choices.  To be successful, the first thing a participant needs to do is select a team.  Choosing which team to join or which team members to recruit, and knowing when/if/how to leave that alliance or individual, has interesting parallels with the workplace. 

For example, consider The River City project. Recently developed at Harvard, River City has the look and feel of a multi-user video game. The idea behind River City is to create scientifically literate citizens who are able to think critically, make sense of complex data, and solve problems. The training is also designed to teach collaborative skills. Students who use River City enter a town that is beset with health problems. They then form research teams to figure out what’s making people sick. They can track clues, develop controlled experiments to test hypotheses, and make recommendations based on their lab work.

River City represents a new trend which has significant implications not only for schools but for business training as well. The trend is built around what online application developers call a MUVE, which stands for multi-user virtual environment.

In this intersection of business, education, and technology, there exists another looming trend of equal importance:  how the Web itself is going to disrupt the conventional training models. 

A whole generation of young people, the next generation of workers, has grown up with iPods, iPhones, and computers.  Many, if not most, need training on the spot.  In fact, many tenured employees need re-training today – not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, but now.  They need answers and skills when … well, when they need it.   The once a year or once a month sheep dip model of training just doesn’t work anymore.  Multi-day and even one-day trainings, what I like to call “drive-by workshops,” are costly, disruptive, and ineffective.  Companies are so lean that removing employees from the workplace for extended hours to train them literally halts business productivity dead in its tracks.  Unfortunately the alternative - not training employees - is a poison pill.