A Successful Walk

Thanks so much for your support! We had a wonderful day! I am certain that it will make a great difference to those who have fallen victim to this disease or who might in the future...

In Canada, one in 70 women will get ovarian cancer. Each year 2400 Canadian women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer and 1700 die of the disease annually, making it the most fatal gynecologic cancer. Even though the statistics surrounding the disease are bleak, the good news is that when diagnosed in the early stages, the long-term survival rate is up to 90%. Funds raised through the Winners Walk of Hope will go to supporting women living with ovarian cancer and their families, educating well women about the disease and funding ovarian cancer research.

If you would like more information about Ovarian Cancer Canada please visit www.ovariancanada.org or for more information on the Winners Walk of Hope please visit www.winnerswalkofhope.ca Thanks again for your support.





Your donation to the Winners Walk of Hope on my behalf is greatly appreciated!

Diane

HRSB Concepts Inc. Announces New Website

Dear Colleagues,

I am very pleased to announce the new HRSB Concepts Inc. website which was officially launched August 1, 2008. The website has a new modern look with simplified navigation, a collaborative software for clients, a time zone world map, a photo gallery, updated links, a featured book every month and of course a matching theme for the weekly blog.

The site also provides a sign up to a quarterly newsletter which will feature topical subjects of interest to clients and colleagues to complement resources and tools available on the website. The first issue is scheduled to be released September 1, 2008. Featured articles, photos and tools will continue to be added. Plans are to include articles written in French in early 2009.

This bold, freshly designed site (www.hrsbconcepts.com) provides information about specialized consulting services in strategy and accountability, performance management and employee development, integrated business and workforce planning, recruitment and retention and succession planning.

One of the main features of the new Web site is a secure collaborative software available to HRSB Concepts clients called Basecamp http://www.basecamphq.com/index which offers a novel approach to project collaboration. Projects can be supported by charts, graphs, stats, or reports, and a series of tools tailored to improve the communication between people working together on a project – no matter where they are located.

I hope that you will visit our website regularly and that you and your colleagues will find it a useful workspace and reference point.

Winners Walk of Hope

This year HRSB Concepts Inc. is participating in the Winners Walk of Hope, a remarkable event designed to create a sense of community for women living with ovarian cancer and their family and friends.

All funds raised through this event support Ovarian Cancer Canada's mission to: support women and their families touched by ovarian cancer, educate well women and healthcare professionals and to fund ovarian cancer research. It's a day filled with hope and support, creating a greater awareness around ovarian cancer. To date, the Winners Walk of Hope has raised over $3million.

For more information on Ovarian Cancer Canada's many programs, please visit www.ovariancanada.org Secure online donations can be made with your credit card and an official charitable tax receipt will be sent to you by email within five minutes! You can make an online donation now:

http://my.e2rm.com/personalPage.aspx?SID=1902194

For more information about the Winners Walk of Hope, or to join us on Sunday September 7, 2008 at 9am, please visit www.winnerswalkofhope.ca

Thank you for your generous support!

Diane

New Orientations in HR

There is much talk about organizational alignment and the need to cascade strategic goals down the hierarchy. However, there is still limited attention given to reverse cascading: an alignment led by individual employees. Practices that focus on the development of operational standards or far reaching strategic objectives is no longer enough – especially as recruitment and retention become more and more of a priority. Innovative human resources practices that recognize the needs of individuals to stimulate superior performance are gaining importance.

This new orientation does not necessarily have people climb ladders to manage their career or deal with steps to calculate their salary, but rather provides a very different reference point that seeks to redefine the relationship between the individual and their workplace. Recently I came across a couple of novel human resources practices that did just that:

The North Broward Hospital District information services department came up with a compensation system for their information technology business unit that replaced their ladder with a personal dashboard. It is called career banding. Individuals within the career band groups are paid according to their competencies in a number of areas such as technical skills, problem solving skills and people skills as opposed to a set of position-based factors attached to narrowly set pay scales and steps.

The Finnish company, Nokia, maker of cell phones has engineered a way to design meaningful and fulfilling jobs by setting up highly "modular" structures so that instead of moving people around, they move teams around, thereby capitalizing on working relationships that have proven to be working well for its members – and in so doing reduce the amount of anxiety associated with difficult projects.

There are many more such breakthroughs and I’ll try to highlight some of them in future blogs. In the interim, if you have a few you would like to share please feel free to contact me or attach a comment to this blog.

A Tribute to Hadi

Every once and a while you get to know people that mark your path. They inspire you, change you, share interests with you or bring hope where little exists. Such is Hadi. Barely 25 years old and fully bilingual (Dari and English speaking), he is not only my driver in Kabul but he is also the person I count on for identifying when car and radio repairs are needed; where best to go for medicine and other supplies; how best to get to a destination and avoid bottlenecks - but mostly for taking daily precautions for my safe passage while travelling on the city roads of Kabul.

Six days a week we set off to various work locations – and we talk. Conversations with Hadi connect me with life in Kabul and the effects are like drops of water on a dusty counter top. He explains historical events and cultural norms, he gives me a few more Dari words for me to practice, he informs me of National Holidays and local Afghan news and events; helps me plan my daily travel needs and at times, even supplies me with a scarf to cover my head when mine is still at the guesthouse.

It is also during this time that he often shares with me little tidbits of information that sparkle my day. Here’s a bit of Afghan folklore according to Hadi.

1. If you cough while drinking – someone is thinking of you
2. If your right eye twitches – you will get good news or someone from far away will come and visit
3. If your left eye twitches – you will get bad news
4. If there is a tickle in the palm of your hand – you will receive riches

...and riches are indeed made up of people who mark your path.

The 3 C's

Once more I have come to the end of an assignment in Kabul. To cap it off, I thought I would share with you what I call the 3 C’s of civil service reform: Change management, Capacity building and Cultural dynamics.

Change Management is comprised of approaches, processes and techniques most commonly referred to as change management “tools” that facilitate the acceptance and integration of new ways of doing things. These tools might help create new structures, competencies, processing systems, policies and leadership within a civil service; they may either create traction for change, mobilize for change, reduce resistance to change, and even keep the change long enough to see it improve over time. The management of change is not a “one size fits all” therefore it is important to explore the wide array of “tools” available to organizations to ease their change effort. I would like to recommend a change management book written by one of my favorite authors, Lynda Gratton. The title of her book is: “Hot Spots: Why Some Companies Buzz with Energy and Innovation - and Others Don't”.
Similar ideas also exist in W. Chan Kin and Renee Mauborgne’s “Tipping Point Leadership”.

Capacity Building: Yes, the knotty capacity building makes its way at the top of reform work priorities. Here, it refers to the institutional and individual development that must occur to improve or alter results produced by a civil service. Let me emphasize that it is not just about “training”. Too often we see resources and time dedicated to this activity without any effort put into establishing the framework within which individuals will practice what they have learned. Developing a capacity building strategy must take into consideration everything that needs to be changed in order to bring about different results. This strategy should make reference to the systems, performance goals and indicators, the operational processes, the policies, templates, methods of communication, relationships… and the form they should take to produce desired results.

Cultural Dynamics: We all have a pair of lens through which we see our world and changing the colour of these lenses can be an incredible process of concessions, negotiations and assimilation within individuals and across groups. Bringing changes to a workplace often challenges beliefs and values held by a “culture”. Cultures are everywhere. There are national cultures, ethnic cultures, organizational cultures, regional cultures and generational cultures – all of which have their own set of values and beliefs. They may have the potential to move mountains or build walls. Learning how to work with diversity to plan and build a reform can make a great deal of difference.

To explore the world of cultural diversity, here are a couple of my favourites:
Riding The Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business by Fons Trompenaars

International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior by Nancy J. Adler

As well here is a great website produced by Citizenship and Immigration Canada
http://www.cp-pc.ca/english/index.html

A Silky Connection

Once the threat of cold weather is decidedly over and the picnic season is well underway, the mulberries make their apparition in Afghanistan; falling from attractive mulberry trees to adorn the ground with a pearl white, lace pink or dark purple hue. According to local experts, the mulberry is a primary fruit crop, originally brought to Afghanistan to support a highly specialized silk industry.

As it turns out, the sole food source of the silkworm is the leaves from the drought resistant mulberry tree. The silkworm cannot survive without the mulberry tree, producing an intimate connection and finest example of one species’ complete dependence on another for its existence. In Afghanistan, it also provides an example of how a society can benefit from such symbiotic arrangements.

While delicious fresh or dried mulberries are sold at the local bazaars in Kabul, the delicate work of collecting cocoons from the mulberry tree and producing silk by hand continues in cities such as Herat situated in the northwest part of the country. According to Wikipedia, mulberry silk is the finest and the most valuable variety of silk.

Photos from left to right: Afghan picnic summer 2006; Safi the Chef at Justice Sector Guesthouse June.08; Dish of mulberry June.08; silk scarf woven by master silk weavers in Kabul using ancient silk route traditions and purchased at the Zardozi shop, Kabul, Afghanistan.

Packaging the Machinery

The training function within a civil service at any level of government can be a complex machinery. For example let us look at training delivery mechanisms. There are centre-of-government institutions dedicated to training and education; ministries or departments with their own specialized training programs; institutions with training mandates at the sub-national level as well as elaborate multi-partnerships with educational institutions, associations and the private sector. Yes, governance and delivery models abound.

So, when asked by clients, especially in developing countries, to conduct training needs assessments, develop training strategies or create new training programs effort is made to consolidate and understand the training “machinery” of government. This helps build standardization and compliance while hopefully strengthening what works best within this machinery.

Here are its three main components:
1. Policy development: training legislation, policy framework, content of policy, policy making process, governance and delegation of authority.
2. Policy implementation: extent of the “training” practice within government, systems, processes and tools to implement within and across institutions.
3. Policy evaluation: accountability framework, approach to risk assessment, monitoring and evaluation and continuous improvement.

Photo: Government of Laos, Vientiane, Laos 03.05

The Most of Posts

After a year and a half of blogging I have noticed that my entries are either regarding the work or the work location. After some thought, I have decided to add a small indicator to my posts for easy reference.

The FarsidePost will contain information regarding the work location. As in the past it will focus on interesting information about the people, their culture and their experiences.

The InsidePost will focus on the work I do – ranging from wide-scale civil service reform to small scale organizational diagnosis. It will include advice, brief guidelines and helpful hints to facilitate the development, implementation and sustainability of workforce management changes in the public sector.

I hope you find them useful. My website will also be upgraded shortly. Stay tuned for further announcements.

Leaping for Clarity

Large scale organizational change often brings leaders with a slight moment or two of puzzlement and obscurity: the landscape appears to have a new look that is neither shaped to what it was nor modified to what it should be. Here are a few suggestions that may help to bring clarity:

1. The balance between consistency (operational expectations) and innovation (change) is difficult to maintain at a level where both will be satisfactory. For careful monitoring, operational indicators should be reviewed against targets and milestones set for change projects to ensure an adequate balance is maintained throughout the change.


2. Reporting on what was achieved often does not take into account how it was achieved. More precisely, are the change activities implemented in a manner that align with the desired cultural values and beliefs? This can be critical to an organizational change that largely depends on a change in culture.


3. Not being able to see the forest through the trees happens when a change is driven by a passion that blurs the world around us. Relying on a change management team excelling in objectivity, rigor, humility and fastidiousness is an absolute must to bring executive snapshots cabable of feeding change efforts with a daily regimen of clarity.

In the midst of it all there is always something that brings to life achievement; often in the place you least expect it. This toad hiding in this barren land is proof enough.

Photo: Vientiane, Laos, April, 2005.