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Posts Tagged ‘Differentiated Workforce’

GROWTH Step 6      Harness Your Strengths and Release Control

Make the change stick by using your natural strengths instead of overcompensating for your weaknesses

There’s some meaty stuff in the heading for this step. Let’s carve into it.

At first sight, the name of the step almost doesn’t make sense. How can you harness your strengths and release control?

As ambitious, achievement-oriented people, she says, we sometimes get caught in the vicious cycles of trying to control situations, and often what we think works is the opposite of what does. Control is paradoxical, and letting go of ineffective control is the key to change. If you’re unwilling to experience discomfort,you’ll probably have more discomfort because you’ll try to control it with actions that end up increasing it. If you try to make sure that something will not happen, it is more likely to happen.

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HR Sacred Cow 5     All Staff should get the Same Bonus based on Company Performance

Another Toyota why?

Professors Becker, Huselid and Beatty, authors of The Differentiated Workforce, are very forthright about this situation, as shown in the quotation used in the last posting.

They – and I  – would criticize the practice on at least three grounds:

• It does not discriminate between positions – “A”positions and position holders get the same as “C” positions and position holders
• The practice of one bonus for everybody fails to recognize the fact that some positions are vastly more important than others in the achievement of organizational strategic goals
• It does not account for variability in performance of various jobholders

• Not all accounts supervisors supervise equally well, nor do bank tellers all tell equally

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HR Sacred Cow 3     There should be a Standard Approach to Evaluating and Rewarding Jobs and Jobholders.

Let’s borrow directly from our authors on this one. On pages 53-4 in The Differentiated Workforce, under the heading of Traditional Approaches are not the Answer, they say this:

‘Conventional approaches to job design use attributes of employees and the environment within which they work (in contrast to the strategy that must be executed) as the primary criteria to determine job structure. Historically, most large firms have used complex job-evaluation systems to allocate points to jobs, rank them, then locate these jobs in the firm’s pay system on the basis of these points. For example, the Hay system for job evaluation prices jobs based on the relative value of skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions of a particular job. The typical job evaluation process allocates points to benchmark jobs, then the remaining jobs are placed in the hierarchy. This process drives a number of organizational decisions, most notably compensation … … the conventional approach looks both internally and to history for its definition of value; what we need is an approach based on future value creation and strategic job worth.’

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HR Sacred Cow 2     All Staff at the Same Level Should be Paid the Same.

The first of my Toyota ‘whys?’ again.

The larger the organization – and as organizations grow, the HR department seems to grow accordingly – the more paranoid it becomes about equality. Professors Becker, Huselid and Beatty put it this way in The Differentiated Workforce.

Many HR leaders have spent their careers ensuring that all employees are treated equally instead of equitably (p121) [Emphasis is theirs, not mine]

They emphasize that a differentiated workforce stresses equity ahead of equality. [Their emphasis again]

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