Jaluch Limited

As BA cabin crew announce their desire to hit Christmas flights in their longstanding argument with their employer - the origins of which have probably been forgotten by most - we have no doubt all read about the 33 Chileans stuck underground in a collapsed mine.

They have now been told they will not be paid whilst stuck underground, thereby leaving their families struggling to survive. In this article it also says the government claims its labour laws prevent the government from paying their wages and they must get redress through the courts. A clearly clued up and empathetic government spokesman did say though that to help the miners, they would be offered retraining to help them apply for other jobs when they do eventually emerge from underground!!

The enormity of their crisis inevitably belittles any employment battles going on in the UK, but I felt I had to comment on any government hiding behind its own laws at a time of crisis. In the UK we have been overwhelmed over the past 20 years with laws for this and laws for that, and at times it feels like you can hardly move without tripping over some new law. And to many of us, new laws take the guise of a hammer to crack a nut, which just leaves most of us frustrated rather than proud of our progressive modern society.

But saying the government can’t find a way to pay the wages of 33 miners who are stuck underground for months to come? Is the concept of ‘humanity’ disappearing? Are new silly employment laws so important that they must still be upheld in times of crisis, or could we possibly suggest that all too often the bureacrats employed by governments to help build and manage society, have lost sight of the bigger picture?

I don’t know them, but my guess is that those 33 Chileans are currently going through hell. They are isolated, worried, stressed, fearful for their lives, fearful for their families, they have lost their jobs, if they get ill there is no hospital to turn to, they are trapped and no doubt scared witless much of the time. How much would it really take for either their former employers or any of the powers that be to remove some of their anxiety by addressing the financial needs of their families waiting at ground level for them to return?

Laws should not be allowed to take over our society. Sensible laws are a tool for maintaining the fabric and standards of our society. With this sort of nonsensical statement about laws preventing payments to families, it has got to be time for the tables to turn and common sense to make a re-appearance.

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This week I read of a drive to fit sensors to cop cars to help needy police officers with their parking. Apparently too much money is currently spent on fixing cars that have been crunched during parking manoeuvres.

On the face of it, parking sensors on police cars would seem to be a sensible blues and twos response to the current spate of RTAs but if your sales guy kept breaking his lap top as a result of yanking it around the desk by its flimsy lid, would you choose to fit an anti yank sensor to prevent damage? No, you’d give him a dose of verbal pepper spray, show him your truncheon and tell him not to do it again.

And if said sales guy kept on breaking laptops even after his caution, you’d escalate things by giving him a written warning reminding him of a possible spell in the slammer and confiscate his most precious tech gadgets to show him you were deadly serious.

So why do the police have to be given parking sensors when what they really need is a major slap on the wrists and a fine that hits their pockets hard when they needlessly crash into a wall or other car?

If I can manage to drive onto my drive, reverse back off when I want to make a quick getaway, do a three point turn on a narrow road when trying to escape a road block and successfully do a wheelie around a car park without killing either myself or someone else, why can’t police drivers also learn to drive with the same expert skill and amazing dexterity? I know I am Formula One trained, but they think they are, so what’s the difference?

If employers have employees who have a problem, I just wish employers would stop taking over and fixing the problem themselves. Employees are not like children who need stabilisers on their bikes, so I think the Police Force ‘powers that be’ should start to treat its Officers like adults responsible for their own actions.

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The other day I was reprimanded for apologising for being late when I had in fact turned up to our meeting one minute early. I was reprimanded (politely) for immediately relinquishing control of the meeting to someone else by acting in a subservient fashion - even when that was not necessary.

Ironically, I can think of hundreds of occasions when I have admonished others for apologising when apologies were neither required nor helpful. But clearly I too, have adopted this bad habit.

Not sure if it is an English habit though, or just a habit adopted by certain individuals, or perhaps is more common to women than men. Perhaps one of my readers can tell me.

What I do know though is that my behaviour was remarked upon by someone I had only met once before and she felt that my demeanour started the meeting off on the wrong foot – sufficient enough for her to comment on it.

Non verbal behaviour in business is something quite frequently talked about and analysed, but far less common is for us to analyse our verbal behaviour and assess whether that gives the right signals for what we are trying to achieve.

Just reflecting back on a few meetings in recent weeks I have observed:

• Excessive bad language that gave me the impression of macho rather than business behaviour
• A queue in a hotel where a business traveller did not even attempt a hello, please or thank you in the foreign language
• A meeting where someone said ‘no’ when asked to do something whereas in fact what I think they meant to say, had they not been panicking, was ‘let me consider it and I’ll let you know whether it is feasible’

So... a macho impression, a disinterested impression and a negative impression.

It may well have been that the guy being macho was just covering up nerves, the business traveller was inwardly embarrassed for not even knowing the basics of the language and the negative person was in fact just anxious about whether they could deliver. But that’s not what we see, is it?

In all the training I have seen and experienced over the years I can think of only one course that specifically sought to educate me better on the language I use, the art of diplomacy, the choice of words and the impressions given by poor selection of language. (Yes, I know what you are thinking... I clearly didn’t make a very good student did I!!)

In my early years, I learnt to how to speak as a toddler. As a young girl I learnt manners. At school, I learnt a few foreign languages plus English grammar and how to spell.  At university, my personal experience was that due to their total focus on their specialism, lecturers appeared to lack any interest in the wider aspects of education.

And now, in employment? Well, I think there is scope for employers to seek to continue our learning to achieve greater levels of knowledge, sophistication and awareness in all aspects of our communication.  And I think that if that can be achieved, it could just be what sets us apart from the crowd.

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Its taken a while, but eventually this summer I got around to reading (Dragon’s Den)  Deborah Meaden’s book of common sense - Common Sense Rules.

What I find intriguing is how a business that is started by an entrepreneur can maintain its entrepreneurial spirit long after its become established in its market place.

A few years ago at Jaluch, we ran a seminar on Creative Thinking in HR. What we hoped to achieve was to open up a few minds to different ways of doing things in HR. To find different ways of motivating and managing staff. To learn how to approach age old issues from a different direction.

I have to admit though that the seminar bombed somewhat. But was it because HR professionals are just not really interested in finding the next new idea or is it because those who attended were more process and procedure types who struggled with creativity generally? I’m not sure.

So how can you create an HR function that has its own entrepreneurial spirit? That has fire in its belly. That sparks and buzzes with creativity and energy?

Deborah Meaden suggests that some of the elements of entrepreneurial spirit include:

• The ability to seek out an opportunity and then seize it. (ie not just wait for one to present itself, but to actually go out there and find opportunities)
• To have passion, focus and an insatiable desire to succeed
• To be quick minded and bright (and by this I understand that you need to feel comfortable with quick decision making and be nimble on your feet when thinking things through)
• To have confidence and self belief
• To be self reliant and have the ability to get on and do
• To be committed
• T o not be overly risk averse
• To have a strong dose of realism

I like her list and think many HR and other function heads would benefit from scrolling through and identifying a few areas to focus their teams on in order to bring back into the business the buzz and energy derived from a true entrepreneurial spirit.

And if every function head in a business did this, just imagine the total energy that would emerge.

In my mind just a few of the clear benefits would be:

• A ‘can do’ culture
• Employees feeling comfortable with taking calculated risks and operating out of normal comfort zones
• Staff who are self reliant and who are less demanding due to their own self belief.
• Increased energy as a result of bringing in the passion and enthusiasm

Furthermore, if the only function that regularly demonstrates “passion, focus and an insatiable desire to succeed” is the sales function, just imagine how de-motivating it is for sales people when other departments seemingly do nothing but hold them back and sap their energy due to an over reliance on process, procedure and risk aversion. You don’t have to be in the sales function to be proud of having an “an insatiable desire to succeed”.

So to bring in a little entrepreneurial spirit into your business, what’s the one thing you are going to focus on this coming month?  And how are you going to introduce this concept to your staff? What are you going to do to ensure it becomes self perpetuating? And finally, how are you going to measure your success?

Go for it!

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