Middle Managers Deserve More Respect

strategy+ business, Feb. 13, 2019

by Theodore Kinni

Middle management don’t get no respect, to steal a line from Rodney Dangerfield. In popular culture, middle managers are often the butt of the joke — picture the oily sleazeball in Office Space or the pointy-haired cretin in Dilbert cartoons. Their position betwixt executives and employees has been characterized as “an impenetrable layer of suck.”

Gary Hamel of London Business School thinks middle management should be eradicated; Bob Sutton of Stanford doesn’t like it but grudgingly acknowledges its inevitability — death, taxes, and the branch manager. The New York Times isn’t publishing a “Windowless Office” column about today’s most interesting managers, nor are business book readers clamoring for bios of the manager of a Tesla store or the director who runs a portion of iTunes. None of us looks to managers for leadership lessons. But maybe we should.

Most of the leaders I knew in my short career as a full-time employee weren’t CEOs. In more than a few of those jobs, I didn’t know the CEO’s name. It turns out that I’m not unusually oblivious: A 2017 survey found that 23 percent of Americans who work at companies with more than 500 employees are unsure of the name of the CEO. Thirty-two percent aren’t sure they could pick their CEO out of a lineup — a task that they will never be called upon to perform, hopefully. But we can all reel off the names of our managers.

That’s because managers are our leaders. They direct, coach, and appraise us. They play an outsized role in the quality of our work lives and work–life balance. They provide us the opportunities to grow and advance professionally. Aside from a few self-made founders like Mark Zuckerberg and scions like Donald Trump, I’d bet that almost all CEOs of large enterprises owe their positions to managers who recognized their potential early on and encouraged them to realize it. Read the rest here.

How to design a collaborative rewards strategy which improves profit margins

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Inside HR, January 30, 2019

by Pete DeBellis




You’ve probably heard the ancient Indian fable about the blind wise men and the elephant. In it, each of the men touch an elephant in a different spot – trunk, tusk, ear, leg, tail, etc. Unsurprisingly, each comes away with an incomplete and inaccurate description of the beast. Trying to design and manage employee rewards from a functional silo presents a similar challenge.

When rewards professionals isolate themselves in a silo, they are, in essence, choosing to work with blinders on. They can’t see the full picture – missing critical details and nuances regarding how rewards can support talent acquisition and retention, and drive employee productivity and business results, among other things.

Consequently, the rewards that they design, which often add up to the largest expenses on a company’s P&L, don’t generate the return that they could and should, and their definition of “rewards” may be missing key elements of their employer’s value proposition, such as learning and development opportunities and much more.

Is this the case in your company? Bersin’s latest research into High-Impact Rewards suggests that approximately 80 percent of organisations are struggling to meet the expectations of their employees around rewards and are failing to drive high levels of maturity in their rewards function.

In many of these organisations, there is no or little collaboration between the rewards function and other HR functions, including talent acquisition, people analytics, learning and development, and diversity and inclusion. Moreover, when cross-functional communication does occur it tends to be unidirectional, with rewards functions sharing data, program, or policy information as needed and in a manner that does not generate or support true collaboration.

To help remedy this, the HR suite as a whole should look to embed regular communication across the suite, whether that means check-ins between functional leaders on a recurring cadence or, for more fluidity, deploying an online collaboration space.

The other 20 percent of organisations have more mature rewards functions. In these companies, rewards professionals collaborate consistently with their colleagues in other HR functions – especially talent acquisition – and throughout the broader organisation. Information sharing is a two-way street through which rewards teams not only share information, but also receive it from these other functions. Using such an approach with collaboration as a regular practice helps surface insights that can help rewards professionals design and deploy a compelling rewards offering, while also supporting the strategic mandates of other HR functions. Read the rest here.

Will Manufacturers Rule the Global Economy Once More?

strategy+business, February 1, 2019

by Theodore Kinni

We’ve been treated to various versions of manufacturing in the past couple of decades. There’s manufacturing as an exercise in financial arbitrage — a link in a global supply chain that is reforged whenever and wherever people will do more work for less pay. There’s the maker movement, populated by hordes of entrepreneurs laboring away in shared shops. There’s Industry 4.0, where we inefficient humans need not apply. There’s the revitalized rust belt, polished to a mirror’s shine with tariffs. And now there’s Tuck School of Business professor Richard D’Aveni’s vision of manufacturing, detailed at length in The Pan-Industrial Revolution, a book that starts out strong but eventually bogs down in speculation.

D’Aveni’s version of manufacturing could be labeled “when dinosaurs rule the Earth once more.” He thinks that hulking tyrannosaurs like battered General Electric are going to rise up and roar in the years ahead. If he’s right, the Dow Jones Industrial Average might actually become industrial again.

D’Aveni weaves this new vision on an intricate loom. Its weft is composed of additive manufacturing (AM), which includes all the evolving forms of 3D printing in combination with other production technologies, such as lasers and robotics; its warp is digitized, AI-powered management systems and platforms.

AM is a game-changing family of technologies, and D’Aveni illustrates them with a host of gee-whiz examples. Lockheed Martin can 3D-print the entire body and interior of its 12-ton, 50-foot-long F-35 fighter jets in about three months, compared with the two to three years it takes to make them using traditional technologies. (It’s now working to cut production time to three weeks.) Electronics parts supplier Lite-On is using 3D printers to make 15 million smartphone antennas annually, demonstrating the technology’s potential for cost-effective mass production. The medical device company Stryker, which is already 3D-printing joint implants, is developing machines that can be installed in hospitals to produce customized implants while surgeons and patients wait. Local Motors has demonstrated its ability to 3D-print a car — reducing the number of parts needed from 30,000 to 50. Read the rest here.