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

« Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast »

This comment, assigned to Peter Drucker (crazy that once you are famous, every good quotes are attributed to you), has been mainly used by Mark Fields, FORD president, who posted it on the wall of the executive committee.

Three information to remind from Marck Fields

1. 1 His conviction that a culture can change: the leadership has the impact
2. 2 His challenge to go from the current Ford World (often with mistrust and fear) to a creative World (with innovation and responsibility sense).
3. 3 His result: Ford is the only car manufacturer from the “Big three” which has not asked money to the US government and with a positive brand image of quality according to customer expectations.

These three information are the core of our World method that we invite you to discover in your firm

•             I notice every day that the culture eats the strategy from the beginning on!
•             It is very silent. The official communication is full of strategy: your conviction, your internal newspapers, your executive committees… Rigorous your teams will say “Yes” and will translate the strategy into their World.
•             Like a solar radius through the water, the target is not reached in spite of efforts

Our book “changing World” (page 211) goes further when illustrating the link between World and Strategy

·         If your World is the lever to realize your strategy, are you aware that your World is the matrix of your strategy?

·         Indeed you think when being in your current World and it is usually hard to think your strategy from “somewhere else”

Laurent Dugas

A new project which fails looks similar to an old project which failed

A modern IT project fails for the same reasons than an old IT project failed, even in cloud computing or mobile phone era.

Pierre Hessler, advisor of Capgemini CEO, thinks so. He said so on the Oracle Cloud World stage in Paris. He started his career in 1965 in Switzerland as commercial engineer for IBM where he worked for 27 years. Afterwards he was part of Capgemini board from 1993 to 2003.

Failure reasons according to Pierre Hessler?

They can be explained by three words COMPLEXITY – SKILL – OBJECTIVE which give the characteristics of our projects World, yesterday as well as today. Three topics structuring our consulting-coaching-training missions on project management.

1. 1 “We underestimate what we have to do, we underestimate the complexity”

This difficulty is inherent to the pro-ject concept: what is before “ject” does not exist for now.

This original problem is emphasized by project teams practices. Two main facts :

•          A budgetary bias. To launch the project the manager tends to underestimate costs and risks which could have an impact on the launch. P-Val answer: having an ROI that the manager will be in charge along the project.
•          A dogma Quality-Cost-Period. Trying to optimize all these topics means to not chose anything. In the contrary, it is important to favor one of them and our experience at P-Val shows that the main item to favor is the period. If this one fails, the other ones will join and fail as well.

The idea is therefore to put your project in a Simple World around three ideas:

•           Shrink
•           Hide
•           Embody

1. 2“People do not have skills and abilities to do“

Project skills and behaviors are very different from what’s expected in an operational functioning. People need to overcome cognitive hurdles to be efficient in a project World.

Companies, like the Société Générale with its Project School, make a lot of efforts in that sense and we guide them in their training offers, based on PMI.

Practitioners share with us their difficulties between the theory and the practice: ability to do.

Indeed, project governance always faces the power of the organization already implemented. A Chinese quote explains that “projects are like fishes, they start to decompose from the head”. In that case, it is often the high level leadership which fails. This brings us to the next point:

1. 3“and project objectives are not clear enough”

How to analyze this sentence? Objectives are more and more shared. However, they remain in the old World, the one the project intends to change. For instance, if our project tends to create an internal department like HR and the objectives are based on the current World, they are far from your target, the expected World. This situation leads to ambiguous information.

During your project, elements are changing and you notice that these objectives do not give the right solution to the expected World.

To get clear and sustainable objectives, they have to be thought in the expected World and not in the old World.

Here is a summary of the three ideas to succeed your transformation project:

•          Being simple first
•          Engaged leadership
•          Target = expected World

Laurent Dugas

Top-managers, do not forget to be open minded to conflicts between your strategy and the World of your teams

True story from this week. I start a new project with a new client who invites me to the annual commercial kick-off with all the commercials, before-sales and experts. This firm is a real success in a new IT field, specialized and business oriented.

At the middle of the morning, a Business Unit boss says when talking about a new innovative offer “let’s sale it first, we will figure out afterwards how to perform the project”. Hearing that, an expert explains why he disagrees: “We will not be able to properly charge based on a new business model”. The BU boss answers “We will figure out at this moment” and carries on his speech.

World translation:

This Business Unit boss lives in a World where selling is a normal start to offer a new product on the market. In his mind, no offer would be sold if we should wait 3 years before his delivery teams figure out how to implement this new offer; the first client would be the opportunity to deal with that.

The expert lives in the industrial World: there is no way to sell a solution before the delivery process have been designed and tested…and it doesn’t matter if we need to spend three full years before selling the solution.

Analysis: the topic is not to determine the right statement. The real topic is that the manager probably did not understand that the expert might not help him to sell the solution before the industrialization has been achieved because of a lack of confidence. The manager did not get the point that the World of the expert is too far from his own.

P-Val advice remains the same: when you launch a new strategy, a new offer or a new idea, take your time to understand if the World of your teams matches your strategy. If you have no idea, give a call to our awesome consultants.

Bruno Jourdan

Undercover boss? What about taking some time to understand your co-worker’s World?

A late evening, I had a look at the show called “Undercover Boss”. I directly noticed the link between the program and what we daily live with our clients.

What is the purpose of the show?

A boss becomes aware that his is far from the reality of the field and thinks he needs to match again with it. He decides to dress up and spend 5 days under covered in his own company pretending to be an unemployed person trying to find his way during a television coverage on his path.

The reality show can annoy or distract, this is not the issue.

What interests me is the gap between the manager and his teams, and the importance to live it to be able to introduce this in his strategy and his management: having some empathy to the job of the other one.

The show presented the 5 days of the CEO of Colombus Café: one day to make the sandwiches in the kitchen, another one at the bar making the coffee, another at the cashdesk…

What are the points which question me?

•          The interest that co-workers gave to this unknown added person, who asks a lot of questions. They notice his mistakes as a beginner but they do not care so much… Many other managers would be annoyed in that kind of situation?
•       They brightness in the feedback: “he talks more than he does”, “he is not precise”, “he is really slow according to what he has to do”….
•      The concrete lessons the boss learns : “Yes, knowing by heart prices of a whole range is not easy…Should we make it easier?” Or “the kitchen is not tidy therefore the production is limited…but people are always under pressure therefore they cannot step back and organize their job better…”
•       The boss feedback is mainly that the pressure from the management is due to blindness to reality and to a high constraint for the teams without any added value: a useless stress.

Without playing the reality show, a lot of managers would improve visiting the World of their indirect co-workers:

•          From the N-2
•          In a “do it together” style
•          With a transparent and positive feedback

Within our cabinet, we have a process to be immersed during one day on the field with operational workers:

•          With postman during their job, commercial from Essilor, SNCF ticket inspector, reception banking…
•         This enables us to challenge during the executive committee established images and to sometimes know more that the person in charge for many years

Act, open your calendar and fix a meeting to experience that, you will be thankful!

Do not wait for the contrary show “I replaced my boss”, the candidate could keep the job!

Laurent Dugas