A combination of circumstances


So trust had been a tentative visitor to our workplaces at best, but what finally whacked it firmly on the head was a powerful combination of circumstances. Those circumstances have not changed. We have to accept that they are still there and deal with them as best we may.

Trust lost the battle for hearts and minds to a real mixture of circumstances:

  • the ˜fat-cat' payments scandals

  • the ˜fatter-than-fat-cat' corporate meltdowns that are still happening and most probably will continue

  • the re-invention of the hire-and-fire society

  • the export of jobs to emerging economies

  • a round of bruising acquisitions, with more due any day now, creating a culture of fear amongst millions of employees worldwide

  • the inability - or simple unwillingness - of employers to invest in their people

  • the ˜ realignment ' of pension, medical and other benefits

  • a total lack of communication skills at top management level: worse still, no listening skills either

  • the short tenure of many senior managers, creating instability and inconsistency in thousands of corporations

  • the seemingly incredible ability of a large number of organisations to hire talentless people at the top and reward them for failure

  • many mid-level executives hired for an extremely narrow niche of expertise and lacking in any type of ˜people' skills.

There are more criteria for trust's demise than these, but just how depressed do you want to get? Suffice to say that the list above shows clearly why no one trusts anyone anymore.

But there are two other factors, not in the same type of category, but they seriously affect the way we will manage corporations in the future, and who will be doing the jobs. It is these two that are going to make or break our businesses in the next decade . Deal with them successfully and you might just survive. Get them wrong and your business is history.

The first is simple; too bad that a lot of otherwise bright managers haven't noticed it yet. But they need to soon .

Your employees don't believe you!

There are a lot of self-deluded guys and gals out there who think that their staff still believe and trust them. Take it from me, they don't. They may have done so in the past, but they don't anymore. Reason? They have finally worked out the Enigma Code of the employee/employer equation, that in this chaotic , fast-paced world their manager has no more of a clue than they do about what will happen next. So if you as a manager call a meeting and say, ˜Things are really looking good, we are on time, on target, under budget,' they know that this optimism can be swept away in a nanosecond. This is especially true of knowledge-based industries where employees are bright, intelligent and able to work stuff out for themselves .

And it gets worse. Because they not only have worked out that you - their beloved manager or supervisor - don't really know what is going on, but also that your boss doesn't either. And that, by extension, can go to the very top of the pile, right up to the chief executive. In this complex world, no one knows quite what will happen next. Your US subsidiary admits a problem with filing its accounts: the share price falls off a cliff and people's jobs with it; there is a hostile bid for the business. Instead of following through on the grand plan, the CEO and his team spend the next six months fighting a rearguard action, while productivity plummets, as everyone speculates for hours on what happens next. And what does happen is never, ever, what you are told. Think about it. Bright employees, those life/work balance exponents I introduced you to in the Introduction (and they are the ones we all claim to want in our businesses) know stuff and they know how to find out stuff. They are way ahead of the official line and are most likely leading the race for the exits and new jobs in a more secure environment.

So, accept right away that in most cases employees don't believe HR professionals who, they assume, never get told anything until it's too late on the spurious grounds of so-called ˜confidentiality.' Face up to it, everyone in a society awash with information: working from the basic premiss that there are no secrets anymore is a good, intelligent and practical concept on which to base your decision-making processes.




The New Rules of Engagement(c) Life-Work Balance and Employee Commitment
Performance Tuning for Linux(R) Servers
ISBN: N/A
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 131

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