Four Groups

I think the realisation that the informal organisation, i.e, the one that is in people’s heads, rather than that which is posted on the org. chart, is of equal or greater value is a good thing. What is even more exciting is that we think 4G gives people the ability to measure and manage it! A number of people have been commenting on a study in ComputerWorld to this effect. This extract is taken from Jim Ware’s The Future of Work

The study, reported recently in ComputerWorld, found that informal groups that developed around informal experts and communicated openly about a problem generally outperformed formal experts who were attacking the same issue.

Jim goes on to ask

Why do organizations seem so oblivious to the intelligence and expertise of so many of their members? Sure, it’s messy and often time-consuming to get everyone involved - but the results are often astounding.

I think the key is that such an informal approach has traditionally been hard to measure and manage in a conventional sense, not to mention the issues around privacy and big brother. Stowe Boyd has also mentioned that

Management will continue to believe in the decision making powers of formally designated decision makers, even when there is increasing evidence that the distributed intelligence in social networks is smarter than the org chart.

From our own perspective, we believe that giving people access to tools like 4G and Visible Path then enables them to get the most out of such situations and turn an unknown into a known.

Over at George’s Employment Blawg, George Lenard draws our attention to various personality tests and different takes on them.

For newer readers of this Blawg who may have missed it, we’ve previously posted some fairly detailed (and in my case somewhat goofy) stuff on the general topic of personality testing and employment.

I’d just like to add to the list with our own, newly validated instrument 4G Our own special sauce is predicting relationships and culture and introducing a series of optimal team and OD structures. We’ve got some examples on the applications of 4G in recruitment and team building amongst others.

Some more wordology! I found these charmers via Thad at the Monster blog. I’ll just repeat the phrases themselves, feel free to visit the post for the definitions.

“At the end of the day”
“The 50,000-foot perspective”
“Pushing the envelope”
“Making lemonade out of lemons”
“All things being equal”
“All people being perfect individuals…”

I’ve never heard of the 50,000-foot perspective though?!? On the same subject, Zef Hemel wrote a post looking at the deployment of such jargon and how smart people ensure that…

Their convincing strategy consists of firing relevant and irrelevant facts at you at an unbelievable pace. They continue doing this until you give up and you say “ok, you’re probably right.”

Hopefully we’re all now better off to combat such oral assaults

I read a great story in Personnel Today looking at the HR function at Home Depot - Home Improvement. The two juicy bits are the rapid rate of growth and the pay of the HR director. On the subject of company growth;

The company’s rate of expansion in recent years has been huge. When Donovan joined in 2001, Home Depot had 1,319 stores and 251,488 staff. These figures have since grown by 44% and 29% respectively.

Looking at the rewards of Dennis Donovan, the CEO who hired him, Robert Nardelli is

reported to have paid Donovan a whopping $21.5m (£11.3m) for his first year at Home Depot, in line with the ranking suggested by Peters (a recent survey of HR directors’ pay estimates Donovan’s total annual pay package is now $6.4m (£3.4m) - the second-highest of any HR director in the US).

How does Donovan do this? The answer seems to be driven by his personal influence, the value that he contributes and the fact that this is recognised by others in the business, not least the CEO.

His value is also reflected clearly in the amount of influence he enjoys at the company - more like that of a traditional chief operating officer than a traditional HR director. He helps to mould and disseminate company policies; he involves himself in everything from the financial performance at store-level to supply-chain management, to the procurement of new IT systems; and he meets major shareholders every eight weeks and addresses a conference of analysts twice a year.

If you want to look under the covers, here are some interesting perspectives on Home Depot and how they do it.

Commentary on the Home Depot HR strategy - The Home Depot Goes for Gold

For The Home Depot, focusing on employees and their success outside the big-box store powerfully delivers several key messages: (1) we respect our employees and their individual skills and pursuits; (2) the people you find working in our stores are passionate and driven about what they do; (3) price is not our differentiator: our service and experience and support will carry you through your own DIY effort.

The fly on the wall perspective - Home Depot Bet Bet Weblog

Many people asked what it was like to spend 16 hours in the home depot. For those who want to know I provide you with a transcript of the journal that I kept during the event.

The Home Depot brand - Do you have a Home Depot problem?

Walk into the store and you can see which worldview the story is tailored to. It’s not for the homemaker or the occasional do it yourselfer. No, the store is clearly designed by, stocked for and organized around people who buy in volume and, even more than that, hardware geeks.

I stumbled across Ken Thompson’s blog which looks at Bioteams. This is a new idea to me, but I like the sound of self organising teams, developing some of the biological metaphors and applying them to organisations and teams.

Ken’s posted a glossary on bioteams which outlines some of the core ideas. The entry for Bioteams reads

A Bioteam is an organisational team which operates on the principles embodied by natures most successful teams including ants, bees, geese, cells. micro-organisms and termites. All these teams share common traits which have emerged through millions of years evolutionary experience and include self-organisation (autopoiesis), indirect communications (stigmergy) and emergent behavior….

I’m looking forward to learning more and to see how the Bioteams idea overlaps or connects with 4G, or not, as the case may be! If nothing else, it looks like a great metaphor though.