I just returned from Las Vegas where I worked with a group of sales professionals and sales managers.  They work in a very competitive industry and their company culture values loyalty. 

 We had a very interesting discussion over my concept of “cautious loyalty.”  By that term I mean that no-one wants to work for or with a one dimensional mercenary who is loyal only to her or him self.  On the other hand, it is not a good financial or psychological decision to blindly trust that loyalty is always reciprocated by employment security.

 Unless an employee works continually to keep their skills honed and marketable and networks outside their employer they are setting themselves up for big problems because, in the new psychological contract, no employer can guarantee employment security.

 Some HR people and a few managers had difficulty with the concept.  They liked the loyalty idea but not the “cautious” adjective.  Difficult though it may be, organizations can’t have it both ways and it is not fair to ask employees for their trust and loyalty without also cautioning them to hedge their bets.

 Like other paradoxes, “cautious loyalty” requires the ability to keep two, seemingly contradictory ideas alive at the same time.  One way of looking at it is that you can be loyal to your job, your customers, and, to some extent, your career.  You, however, begin to run into trouble when you are loyal only to one firm because, in today’s environment, that is a very fragile and unpredictable relationship.

Wayne Turmel has a well known podcast show with the interesting title, “The Cranky Middle Manager.”  In my experience, middle managers today are very stressed and “cranky” is a mild adjective for their current state of mental health.  Wayne is a great interviewer and mixes humor with insight and useful content.

 My interview with Wayne just came out.  It covers a lot of what I’ve talked about in this blog in about 20 minutes.  Check it out Cranky Middle Manager Podcast  and pass it on to some of your own middle management friends.

There are two purposes for survivor team building: (1) to build camaraderie so that when things turn around, employees are bound by the group and (2) to keep morale up during difficult times.  These can be “traditional,” organized by the company and professionally facilitated. I have found that when they are spontaneously developed by surviving employees themselves they can be much more fun and effective. Here are two examples:

 A group of computer programmers formed “The Dead Career Society,” a take off of the film starring Robin Williams, “The Dead Poet Society.”  They had regular meetings, shared rumors, “war stories,” and productively vented their survivor emotions. They are a tight group and, unless one has an exceptional opportunity, they will probably stay in the same firm when things improve.

 A group of HR people in Minnesota who survived several rounds of layoffs found an old duckboat – they were, after all, in Minnesota. They took it to an offsite retreat, put it on the lawn of the conference center, and crammed six people at a time – all the boat would hold – inside.  The remainder sat in a circle outside the boat. They all engaged in a spirited and sometimes physical – trying to pull people out of the boat – discussion.  The result was a much stronger team and the birth of the “We are all in the same boat – don’t forget to ‘duck’” metaphor.  Again, the group felt better and the members were able to be more productive in difficult times, and were also “bonded” so that they were attracted to the organization by their group affiliation and were less likely to leave.

Today’s organizations are populated by angry, demoralized, and risk averse layoff survivors. The skills it takes to re-recruit and help these wounded survivors move back into productivity and help them focus on customer needs instead of their own survivor symptoms are not the traditional planning, directing, and organizing skills of the past. In order to be relevant to the needs of layoff survivors, managers need to move beyond the analytical and quantitative skills they learned in MBA programs and become proficient in helping skills.  Facilitating the acquisition of “soft” skills represents both an exciting opportunity and a significant challenge to training and development professionals.  The opportunity is that by helping managers develop intra-personal insight (self-awareness) and inter-personal competence (the ability to coach and form empathetic relationships), training professionals can directly contribute to organizational recovery and individual productivity.  The challenge is that moving managers into helping relationship in tough times is an against-the-grain activity with some significant cultural barriers.  Here are the top four.

Barrier of Macho, Controlling Cultures.    In many organizations, “real” (non-staff, line managers) did not reflect feelings, deal in empathetic dialogue, or ask for feedback. They made decisions, analyzed, and controlled. This was particularly true in financial service and marketing oriented organizations during the past boom.  Some – not all – HR and training specialist were culturally sanctioned and adept at using helping skills.  Even though these skills were clearly valuable, they were the tools of “staff types” and not found on the tickets that needed to be punched on the way to the top.

 Trainers need to make a direct connection between helping employees overcome layoff survivor symptoms and the bottom line. That perspective is supported by a growing body of research.  They then need to make a connection between managerial helping skills and the alleviation of survivor symptoms. I have found that once managers make this connection they embrace a skill set that will help move the organization forward.  

The Barrier of Left-Brain Bias  The right side of the brain controls our emotional and intuitive perceptions and behaviors. The left brain is involved in analytical, rational thought. In the United States and most other Western cultures, organizations have a strong left-brain bias that results in an overemphasis on formal logic, analysis, and rationality.  In most organizations, even with the increasing evidence of the utility of emotional intelligence, IQ trumps EQ and helping skills are much less valued than controlling and analyzing skills.

 Training interventions that help develop intra-personal insight are very helpful.  Whether it be a workshop built around an EQ or a 360 instrument or a refresher in basic helping skills, once managers understand that they can improve their effectiveness by changing their behavior, they are willing to move out of their comfort zone.  Training professionals can greatly reinforce these efforts by ongoing coaching and feedback. 

The Barrier of Management Science  This is not scientific management as defined by Frederick Taylor (people can be taught to work systematically and can be factored into the production equation similar to machines). Rather, it has to do with the inferiority complex felt by business schools and management training institutions in relation to scientists and their subsequent overreaction as they tried to be “scientific”  There was, and unfortunately still is in many institutions, the idea that you can study humans the same way you study rocks. Anything that was intuitive, feeling, or smacked of our unique human spirit was driven out of business education for fear that it would look weak and not seem scientific.

 In an era of downsizing, corporate training functions need to focus on equipping managers with helping, not controlling or evaluating skills.  Although it may smack of “bait and switch,” one very successful program that teaches helping skills is not labeled that way; it is called “performance improvement.”  The training director found that it attracted more participants and once they got there, they found the skills exceptionally valuable.   

The Barrier of Fear of Softness  At the zenith of the old paradigm there was a reaction to anything that was deemed “soft.” This included feelings, relationships, empathy, and anything that was “touchy-feely.” If you think about it, this is a strange norm, because being alive and human involves relationships, feelings, and connecting with others. However, the value was facts and figures—“hard” stuff! Even though such rock-ribbed disciplines as physics now report that facts are relative, the bias continues. Organizations still talk about human resources and training as the “soft” side of management. But not only are people issues as real as financial and production figures, they require just as much skill and strength. In addition, they require authenticity and the risk of self-disclosure. This is much “harder” than hiding behind a memo, a stack of figures, or a quantitative decision matrix.  

The current economic environment is helping with the realization that “soft” is “hard.”  The most effective managers are those who have the ability to engage in authentic helping relationships with their employees. This is not unnoticed by their peers and training professionals can reinforce the message both by their course offerings and their encouragement.

 Even though there are significant barriers, the pain is defiantly worth the gain.  By helping managers develop the “right stuff” to deal with alienated survivors, training professionals can directly influence organizational recovery and individual productivity.  This is a double win.  The organization improves and, in a time of belt-tightening;  the training function demonstrates its relevance.