Turn off your cellphones, for God's sake

Fowl, or foul

Whenever my Mom (Constance) would cook chicken for the family, she always asked my Dad "how's the chicken, Pierre Elliot?" Dad would always answer, "it's fowl, Constance".

At Christmas I was home in Moose Jaw (Canada) and Constance (who is losing her memory) told me that "your constant preoccupation with your cellphone is a foul habit, Gloria. Show your mother some respect". Then she would ask me time and time again "are you still in manpower?"

Today, CEO Stan started off our management meeting with a positive statement. Yesterday Stan watched a webinar on "The Power of the Positive". Stan said, "Turn off all your god damn phones during our management meetings. All of you suffer from a foul attention deficit disorder, for Christ sake. Comrade Carl, especially you! I think your foreign nerds might have been sending whatsapp messages while they were writing our software code".

I told Stan that HR business partnership is based on my responsiveness to text messages. Stan countered "but Gloria you are in the meeting with all your constituents. Turn off your Blackberry girl. Better than that, give it to me" And he came over to me, looked at my legs, and took away my Blackberry phone, noting it was "Canadian crap".

I did not panic. True, my hands did shake, but I did some breathing exercises and said to my self, "HR Business Partnership carries a price".

Workforce on demand

Ms Axe is displaying initiative

Miss Cynthia Axe is studying Human Resource Management, level 4, at a night course at a publicly funded trashy community college. 

Level four focuses on downsizing, restructuring, efficiency, agile process improvement, managing human inventory levels, mid size data, and agile people skills. 

Last week, Cynthia told me that they had an agile guest lecturer (with a posh British accent) who spoke about "workforce on demand". Axe told me she had been up all night after the lecture, thinking about "how much more popular I would be if I did not need to fire people all day".

Never to be overtaken by my underlings, in line with my core value of agile talent management, I read a few texts and articles about "workforce on demand". To be frank and earnest, I think the idea makes no sense, unless my boss Stan indicates otherwise. (Stan is busy with the banks).

There are 2 reasons I am opposed:

1. What would I do with our engagement plan?
2. Who would respect HR as business partners, if all the staff were freelancers....although I like the "free" part.

I instructed the ambitious Ms Axe to take initiative on downsizing process improvement, in line with my core value of efficiency.

Talent is my middle name

Toxic leadership is not resilient, but it is common

Let's end toxic leadership

Warning. This post should not be read by minors, or people new to HR. 

Chief nerd Comrade Carl Marks was caught with his pants down, as it were, in our management meeting today. Comrade Carl had entered the meeting 20 minutes late, having smoked a joint in the parking lot with a few of his nerds from the Internet of Things team. At first, he was jovial as a lark.

Little did Comrade Carl know that our CEO's brainy wife (Wifey) had read an article on toxic leadership by a certain Dr Joseph George. Wifey had grilled her husband Stan all night, saying "get rid of toxic leadership Stanley, before they get rid of you. And I want you to distribute this article to all your staff. This article should be classified as big data, or internet of things". 

To make things worse, CEO Stan has had a few bad interactions with our investors who he claims are "a bunch of goons". To make a long story short, CEO Stan has seen better days.

Needless to say, the entire team read the article before we started our management meeting. When Comrade Carl entered the meeting room, Stan said,

"Why the fu-k are you late Comrade Carl? Is that the way to lead by example, for Christ's sake? This entire management team is toxic, and if it were not for me, we'd all be down sh-t's creek with no paddle. I want point out two glaring examples of toxicity. 

Gloria,we all know that HR is god damn toxic. HR is about people, girl. And I want to emphasize to you Gloria, that kissing my arse is not enough. The nerds need to love you. Or you're out on your pretty ass, women's day or no women's day. 

And Comrade Carl Marks. You are the worst of the worst, from a toxicity perspective. Your team produces software products which are as useless as t-ts on a bull. All our clients think we suck, Comrade Carl. You invented toxic management". (My Dad Pierre Elliot used that red expression, almost word for word, all the time despite my mother's protests.)

The room was silent. I thought of how I could convey this message to my team in a positive fashion.

Comrade Carl stood up took of his shirt so we could all see his T shirt with the emblem posted below.

Then Comrade Carl swore at Stan in Russian. 

The meeting ended with the following action item:

"HR will drive out toxic leadership in a week." Owned by Gloria, supported by Comrade Carl.

Carl's T shirt

More than 3 corporate values cause confusion and lack of focus.

                             

Three is better than five. Trois. Mais oui

                           

As we end the first quarter, it is clear that we need to consolidate floor space, costs and head count. This wow wow consolidation will enable growth in 2021. The only thing we will not consolidate is the amount big data and sloganeering about Internet of Things.

HR has many wow tools to consolidate, two of which are Ms Axe's Early Bird Retirement Plan and our core values. This post is about values in service of consolidation.

Values (holy and sacred) are one of the key strategic tools of HR. 

We have all of our 5 key values plastered all over elevators, in English and other tribal languages. We even have one poster in Russian and French, neither of which are the languages of global business.

In order to lead consolidation by example, HR will trim the number of values from five to three. 

Three values appear more eloquent, more resilient and more sustainable than five.

"People company" will be included as a one of the three values  but will be renamed as "engagement driven people company".

Our other 2 values are

• Functional transparency
• Flexible ethics