Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:06 Well, here it is, 2021. We're entering a new year, and that always gives you a chance to think about things a little bit differently. And what I'd like to do is talk a little bit about politics without taking sides. I think there's a lot of lessons to learn and issues to consider in the year ahead. And the big lesson, of course, during the last four years, and of of course, many generations before, is that politics is the peaceful method of resolving differences. It isn't just a way to argue without politics. We would have civil war every time somebody disagrees with someone else. So we vote for our elected representatives. We trust that the system works. They act on our behalf. They resolve differences through compromise. And the country, that society, the institution, is changed as a result. And we feel that at least our voice was heard and the cycles move in roughly the direction that most of us want.
Speaker 1 00:01:04 And if it goes well, the society stays at rest, and the country evolves in a positive way, but it doesn't always go well. And we go through ups and downs in the process. And we just had four years of, I would consider to be downs, to be honest. But many people may disagree with me on that. But what's very clear about politics is a couple of things. First of all, people don't agree on issues. So as a business person or as a business, it's very dangerous to take sides. Uh, although you may feel very personally responsible for certain things, if you do take sides, you may alienate a large percentage of your workforce, your customer base, or your entire stakeholder population. Now, some companies have taken side in politics, but most have tried to stay neutral except being on the side of business in general.
Speaker 1 00:01:52 And there is obviously often an argument that the Republicans are more business-centric than the Democrats, but I don't really believe that's true myself. So that's a consideration for you. But on the personal side, people will come to work and talk about these things. So we need to give them a place to discuss them in, in a free and policy driven approach so that if a disagreement rises up, people in the workforce don't bring it into their work experience. But the bigger issue is number two, which is that we as business owners, leaders, HR professionals, supervisors and managers are part of the political process. And that's because we are citizens as individuals. We're citizens. As leaders, we're citizens. And as companies, we are citizens, as institutions, companies are a very, very important part of society. People come to work for our companies and vote with their lives.
Speaker 1 00:02:48 They spend their time with us. They give us their energy, they give us their ingenuity, and they expect a return that helps them personally, but they also expect it to be positive. So we play a role in the political sphere as a citizen of society. If income inequality or racial injustice or environmental or immigration or any other political topic impacts society, we as a business actually are a participant in that topic. Do we hire or move immigrants into roles? Do we have a diverse workforce? Do we pay people fairly? Do we believe in women and minorities in leadership? Do we take care of the environment? Do we put our facilities and locations in low income communities to help society? Do we train people? Do we educate people? It goes on and on and on. And what I've learned over the years of growing up in the business community and as an HR analyst, is that we are as impactful or more than the government in all of these topics.
Speaker 1 00:03:55 The business community and all of the economy of private and public companies is a massive force on society. And if we behave poorly, we are impacting society. And that's why there's so much backlash on some of these tech companies, these social media companies. By the way, I don't think of them as tech companies. Google and Facebook are not tech companies. They're advertising companies. They just use tech to sell advertising. You are not their customers. Advertisers are their customers. And so they are not acting on behalf of users or society in general. And I think the federal government is going to get very involved in their business as a result of that. Amazon's a little bit of a different story. And so citizenship is a theme that I believe we have to consider from the CEO on down. Now, the reason I like the word citizenship is it really connotes both internal citizenship and external.
Speaker 1 00:04:54 Internal means inside of the company. As an institution, we need to take care of each other outside. It means we as an institution have to take care of society. Now, interestingly enough, we are in the middle of finishing up a massive research study on diversity and inclusion and equity, and it's actually very, very surprising. What we've found, and it's probably gonna be controversial, what we've come to the conclusion is that diversity in particular has been backsliding for decades. It has not gotten better. Income inequality has not gotten better. It's getting worse. In the United States, the number of minorities in leadership is not improving. The number of black CEOs is down, and we can blame ourselves for that. We can blame society, and we can blame police forces and we can blame the president. But actually, companies have not responded well, and we've not stepped up.
Speaker 1 00:05:45 And I think we need to think, feel responsible, and to some degree, a little bit guilty about things in society that are not going well. And that goes for pay income, diversity, racial justice, the environment, global warming, whatever you want to pick as your favorite political topic, you have much more impact on it than you realize in your company strategy, in your management strategy and your strategy as an individual and as a supervisor. The third thing I wanna talk about is the fact that the political process, which we observe in the public sector, which many of us find to be sort of painful to watch, actually, is very illustrative of what goes on inside of our companies. Now, you know, I've been in a lot of companies myself, and I do a lot of consulting. And despite the fact that many, many companies are very successful, there's a lot of noise going on inside the company.
Speaker 1 00:06:39 There are people that disagree. There are projects that are failing. There are people that are underperforming. There are businesses that don't achieve their potential for a variety of reasons. So you will have essentially many, many situations at work that are similar to the situations in the public sphere. There will be vested interests, people with more power than others that will make decisions on behalf of others. And sometimes they'll be accurate and sometimes they won't. And so we need a process very similar to the public process, where we listen to people, we honor their opinions and perspectives, and then we use them to make collective decisions. Now, in the political world, the most successful countries have some form of collective thinking. The Norwegian and Swedish and countries in northern Europe that have a little bit more of a socialistic attitude tend to have happier citizens. The world happiness study can prove that, and I can prove that to you because human beings do thrive on social values.
Speaker 1 00:07:40 We do enjoy having friends, we do enjoy seeing other people be successful as well as ourselves. We like to give to other people, but we feel a sense of common responsibility. So inside the company, we have exactly the same drivers that are going on outside of society. Are we listening to people? Are we doing things in a collective way? Are we embracing policies that will help everybody in the company and not only a few? And am I helping you get your job done and are you helping me get my job done? Those are very, very big topics that go on companies all the time. And we get involved in them HR on a very regular basis, on every policy we have. If the pay policy is based on individual goals, there won't be a lot of teamwork. If managers who outperform their numbers are promoted, but they're not very good to their people, you're not gonna create a culture of sharing and common growth.
Speaker 1 00:08:30 So many of the things we're observing in the political sphere, but just take a little step back and think about how does that apply to me? And the final topic on bringing politics inside the company is the issue of collective versus individual decisions. I remember in one of my presentations four or five years ago, I was talking about this topic at a tech conference, and I really didn't think very many people were gonna, oh, but actually the room was packed, and we were talking about the relationship between purpose and mission and employee engagement and the need for collective thinking. And I was giving people a bunch of examples of different situations where collective thinking outperformed individual thinking. And at the end of the presentation, a bunch of people from IKEA came up to me, the Swedish retailer, Ikea is a, I think a 40 billion company, very, very successful company.
Speaker 1 00:09:19 And they said to me, based on the socialist attitudes from Sweden, we use collective thinking inside the company. And I said, well, how do you do that? And they said, for example, at a store or a district office that wants to change a policy for how we're gonna deal with customers or inventory or marketing or whatever, we don't just get to do it. We have to go to a committee of peers, not executives, but actually line people who have to review operational decisions. And these committees are national, so they're all over the country in the United States, and they look at these policy and procedure differences, and they review them as a group. And I said, well, isn't that kind of slow? And she said, yeah, it's really slow. Um, it sometimes takes months and months for us to make decisions on these things. But she said, that's actually why we're so successful.
Speaker 1 00:10:07 Because A, we get better decisions because of the process, and there's more input of course B, although we may not make them quickly, once we make them, they're made and we quickly move into action and we don't have change management issues and we don't have adoption issues because everybody agrees. And I use them as an example of one company that, uh, runs a culture. Uh, if you, if you've ever read the competing Values framework on different kinds of cultures, it's more of a clannish culture where people want to get along and they want to contribute to the greater whole. And of course, IKEA also believes in the environment, and they believe in sustainable products, and they believe in making the world more beautiful and more healthy and safe. So this kind of collective thinking goes through their whole culture. And I think right now, because people are so tired of the political fighting and the anger and the discourse that's been going on in the public sphere, they're coming to work and they're looking for a refuge.
Speaker 1 00:11:07 So if your company isn't as collaborative as you'd like, if the collective thinking theme hasn't really stuck well at your company, or maybe you didn't design it that way, I think in this particular year, 2021 might be a good time to think about it because we're going to be entering a tight labor market this year. I have no question that you're gonna find it harder to hire this year as the economy heats up. And so your ability to create a compelling employee experience, employment and a positive experience is really going to be essential. And one of the ways to do that is to make sure people feel like they're being taken care of, that you're listening to them, and that they have a voice, which is exactly the problem we have in the political sphere. One more final point while I'm thinking about it. We spent a lot of time last year talking to hundreds of you about the pandemic response and wellbeing and leadership and learning and growth and careers and job mobility and workforce transformation.
Speaker 1 00:12:09 Many of you went through enormous amounts of work on all of those topics. And we did a series of research studies, and we're doing a lot of research now. And in every single study we did on pandemic response, the one we just are finishing on, d e i, another one we did on employee experience, what we found is that among the many, many practices and ideas and innovations that companies are doing, the one that keeps scoring the highest as having the most impact of all is listening. And it sounds silly to even say that, but what we're, what we're basically learning is that only by listening will you understand what the right solution is. Yes, you as a leader might be very, very smart and very experienced and have all sorts of perspective on what the right answer may be, but you don't know what you don't know.
Speaker 1 00:12:58 And so this humility of accepting the fact that the answer may not be clear and that we need to get other people involved and that we will listen and we will hear, and we will pay attention, and we will respond to people's input, is really essential to the year ahead. It's interesting when some of the books I've been reading about this year on epidemiology and response to the virus, a lot of senior public health officers talk about humility as a core strength of public health leaders, because these viruses are unpredictable and no one knows how they work. So you have to always be open-minded to some piece of information that you didn't expect. And that's basically the way business works. We are building and running and growing institutions and companies and large organizations that are in a sense, combinations and collections of human beings with many, many different perspectives, many coming from customers and their own personal experiences inside of the company.
Speaker 1 00:14:00 That's basically what societies do. That's what political systems do. If you are able to harness that information and hear it in some coherent fashion, you will be an enduring company. You will grow, you will adapt, you will thrive during difficult times, and you will outperform your peers during good times. If you don't listen, you know you're kind of taking your chances. Yes, maybe you have a brilliant CEO or a brilliant head of tech or a brilliant head of research, and well, maybe that person really does hit it out of the park every time they come to bat, but I guarantee you there's things they're not hearing or paying attention to. And this goes back to really the principles of great design, the principles of great management and great leadership. Finding a way to listen and understand and pay attention to the data and the information and the signals coming from your employees, who by the way, are reflecting what they're hearing from your customers and supply chain partners.
Speaker 1 00:14:55 That is one of the most important things to do. I know I drifted a little bit from the beginning of the conversation, but that's really what political systems are all about. When I was very frustrated about the election, as many of you were, about all the things that were happening and watching NPR one day, one of the senior political editors who just retired, Mark Shields made a comment that one of the reasons he loved politics was that as noisy and difficult and frustrating as it seemed to be, it was the best possible reflection of how to resolve differences and different opinions and different perspectives on the world in some organized fashion. And I was listening to him say that, and I thought, you know, that's basically what we do all day at work. We are trying to make decisions that are the best possible decisions in every, every minute, every hour, every month, every quarter. And we never have perfect information, but we have lots of data. And so I would just learn a little bit lesson from the political experience that, that we can both be good citizens, contribute to society in our organizations, and use the lessons of politics inside of our companies as well. I hope this was an interesting set of thoughts. I'm not gonna get involved in actually what's going on in the political environment, but as always, I'm always interested in your feedback and comments. Thank you.
Speaker 1 00:16:18 If you like what you heard, please join the Josh Buren Academy, the world's professional development academy for hr for less than a cost of a nice dinner in a town near you. You can have an entire year's access to hundreds of courses, articles, research studies, case studies, and an entire community of more than 10,000 HR professionals all collaborating with each other to help you learn and solve the problems in your particular company. We call the Burson Academy, the world's home for hr, and you'll find it to be one of the most important parts of your career and your company's HR strategy for the years ahead. Thank you.
