Generation Y: an amazing robustness indicator of your managerial World

« Young people are not interested in our company, its business, they are permanently connected to their smartphones ; their friends and their private life are far more important than the rest ; they do not respect hierarchy ; we are not able to motivate them ».

Socrates already said it 2500 years ago : « Our young people have bad manners, they mock authority, and they have no respect for age ».

Several clients asked us to use our Worlds method to help them to go over « the Ys are different » acknowledgement.

Here are some lessons of our missions.

1/ You do not have a choice, you have to learn to integrate the Ys

In 2015, the 20 to 30 years old represent 40% of the active population. Add to it that the Z generation (the less than 20 years old today), they will be majority in your organizations in ten years.

They are the ones that are going to be leading your 2020 company project. They are the ones who will be designing the next project.

2/Yes, the Ys are very different

Their World is specific, slightly different from our « historical » organizations.

·         Their greatness is, first of all, to reveal their potential and to progress…fast. They want to have fun in their professional life, mainly by giving meaning to what they are doing.

·         For them, recognition must be founded on proven skills and not seniority. That recognition must be translated by a transparent and fair remuneration system. They are not attracted by titles and job positions.

·         In their interactions, close relations are essential. Informal and transparent relations allow to accept constraints…from which they liberate themselves if they do not make sense.

·         It may seem that impulsion and reactivity are ruling their decisions, but they perfectly know what they want. If they have nothing to take or to learn, they just leave or they disengage. And you would have not seen it coming.

3/ You are totally responsible when they are disengaged

Compare their World with the one some of our companies propose them:

·         They expect speed, you give them complexity and heaviness

·         They expect autonomy carried by a sense, you let them only limited flexibility

·         They expect to feel themselves immediately useful, you tell them expertise is a matter of years

·         They expect their performance to be recognized and you insert them in collective grids based on seniority

·         They expect interactions, you block Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and you propose them professional social networks they never asked for and conceived by the X generation

·         They expect proximity and you have so much flattened hierarchies that they do not have managers close to them.

4/ You have to change, not them.

The Ys vote with their feet. They do not try to change society as their elders of May 1968, but if your company’s World is not coherent with theirs, at best they quit, in the worst case, they disengage.

Collaborators are like clients, as an advertisement man said : « Everywhere, clients are preoccupied by their life, their future, their World. We have to live in their World as it is sure that they won’t come live in ours”.

5/ Start by rethinking your proximity managerial model

The Ys await from their proximity managers to be more coaches that planners. They have to give:

·         Sense (versus procedures/processes), with detailed explanations of the assigned tasks for example

·         Presence, active listening and transparency

·         Organized challenges

·         Merit recognition leverages (instantaneous leverages included)

   

6/ Rethink your proximity managerial model makes you rethink the robustness of your whole managerial model

Often as an orphan of a strong world, disappeared, the proximity manager is not completely able to fully assume his role anymore.

·         Is there enough of them?

·         Is his role recognized and acknowledged enough?

·         Does the proximity manager have enough margin and time to dedicate to his teams? For example, if he has no recognition leverage to use, no answer about their career or their evolution in the company, the Ys are going to understand very fast that their manager is useless

·         Does the proximity manager have a support from his own managers?

·         Is the engagement of his collaborators, young and less young, a shared and formalized managerial objective?

·         Can you counter the following idea: «  in these times of crisis and unemployment, should young people be happy to have a job » ?

A robust model lies in the coherence of a commonly shared model. If it is not the case, the proximity managers initiatives would be:

·         exceptional and isolated,

·         unsupported, even criticized by his own hierarchy – and the Y perceives it immediately,

·         frankly trespassing a limit (security rules, social norms).

As a conclusion

1.    Do not forget that when your managerial World is fragile, you let place to unions whose key role is to focus on counter-power

2.    When you hear « I have a problem with the Y generation », answer to it that « you have a managerial problem ».

3.    The Ys are like roses at the head of a vine rank, if theses roses are sick, that means that your vineyard is already sick but you just don’t see it yet.

François Varin

Risk management in Banks: a question of standards or culture?

Risk management is a key performance element for financial institutions. The recent examples show that risk management through standards and processes is not enough.

In the post financial crisis period, banks are trying to maximize their risk-adjusted profit under the constraints of equity and costs. Therefore, a bank profitability lies, by nature, in the balance between the risk appetence, source of profit, and risk aversion (that we could call the non-risk appetence), source of security.   

Les acteurs qui cherchent la profitabilité ajustent en permanence leur business mix pour trouver des zones de profit, donc de risque. Le contrôle des risques ajuste en permanence sa perception et sa capacité de mesure pour s’adapter aux évolutions des activités de la banque. D’une certaine manière, plus il est efficace et encadre la prise de risque, plus il pousse les acteurs à évoluer rapidement vers de nouvelles zones d'activité risquées.

Actors looking for profitability adjust permanently their business mix in order to find profit zones, thus risk zones. Risk control adjusts permanently its perception and its measuring capacity to adapt to the evolution of the activities of the bank. In a certain way, the more it is efficient and manages the risk-taking, the more it pushes the actors to quickly evolve to new risky activity zones.

That raises the question of a different approach by talking about culture.

Therefore, the FSB (Financial Stability Board) recommends the banks to define and put in place a risk culture in a company.

The P-Val approach consists in defining a Risk World: the objective is to define how individuals, whatever their service could be (Risks department, Back Office, Middle Office, Front Office, etc.) think, decide and act when dealing with risks problematics.

After the breakthrough of daring to talk about culture for such a topic, from now on, it is necessary to clearly define the bases of a relevant risk culture. 

The World approach brings a strong methodological frame, validated on hundreds of contexts, around four items:

·             Greatness: the answer lies in the capacity of an organization to implement the decided strategy with a defined risk appetence. It is the integration of the risk constraint into the company strategy and the very definition of performance. Regardless of my service, the risk is not next to quest for performance: it is in the heart of the strategy formulation.   

·             Recognition: in terms of financial recognition, the banking system introduces a well-known bias as single individuals taking the risk for the institution are only carrying a small personal risk. The game between profit and loss is asymmetrical. That is why the recognition loop must be strongly embodied by the management. The management plays a role of an identification model around a collective project that must be promoted and supported. 

·             Collective interactions: the exemplarity without any ambiguity of the top management is the key element of the reducibility of risk culture. Simultaneously, the middle management must be recognized in its ability to act in a responsible way. The more the delegation escalades back, the less front line actors learn to use their judgment. The middle management must be held responsible more strongly, with appropriate escalation processes. 

·             Decision making: decision-making processes must be organized on a 360° spirit to prevent a group of single individuals to « vampirize » the subject to their own advantage at the expense of the institution as a whole. Simultaneously, the appreciation should not use indicators taken one by one but reason globally, based a converging indication beam.

Define the desired World of Risk culture helps, at the minimum, to create the basis for a consensus within the company and helps decision-makers to stay on course in the storm and bring a viable economical answer to strategic risk management.  

Laurent Dugas

Four key questions to build your digital performance World

P-Val provides services to support its clients in their digital transformation with an original approach « move from your old World to a World of digital performance ».

What does it mean?

Innovations introduced by the Digital represent a real revolution in our practices as could be the industrial revolution.

The challenge is not to become digital or not. It is to transform better and faster than its actual and new competitors in order to stay synchronized with the external World, the one of your clients.

Digital transformation is not limited into putting in place multi-channel technology solutions, publication chain or corporate social network,…

This transformation is addressed too much by the technological lever: the « techno-push ».

When it is not just a kind of a social network catchphrase to look cool, this drift costs a lot, with projects that are not always answering real customer needs and an uncertain profitability.  

Okay, but what are actually the key elements of a World of digital performance?

Enter to a Digital World is to get an in-depth review of all the company’s operations: the management mode, the decision-making process, the performance measurement and its recognition, the internal and external interactions, the customer relationship…

Question 1 : First of all, the performance representation. After the computerization phase that helped build and steer complex, international organizations massified on a centralized mode, there is now room for open organizations that are decentralized, connected, agile, just in time. The company “justifies itself” more in terms of external than internal judgment.  

Question 2 : Then, the recognition loop has been turned upside down. The performance assessment comes from everywhere, at any moment, short-circuiting the hierarchy, the « senior users ». It is the « trip advisor » style. The upgrading is done on more diversified and fragmented registers. Development paths are becoming autonomous, personalized.

Question 3 : The internal and external interactions are the third key axis. They are reinventing themselves, in the distance, intermediated by (almost) intelligent machines. All our interactions are to be reinvented to dominate new degrees of freedom. Keeping in mind that the human being have multiple needs at various moments: from physical to proximity, from the expert advisory, from the transactional cold, …

Question 4 : Finally, the decision-making is radically transforming with the big data but far more with massive presence of intelligent systems, sometimes more intelligent than us : Imagine when you will have an IBM watson able to treat a mass of information 10 000 times faster than you can, in a mere second, with algorithms of a chess champion ? The part that will be yours will be small. What would be the consequences on delegations, responsibility, teams autonomy? What global vision for a relevant decision? What role for managers ?

To learn to use these tools and to redefine the added value of human being is a major challenge. 

Avec ces quatre pistes de questionnement vous pouvez commencer à bâtir un Monde digital, spécifique à votre entreprise et à son enjeu de synchronisation avec son monde externe

With these four drafts of questions, you can start building a digital World, specific to your company and its synchronization challenge with its external world.

Laurent Dugas