We can change the world when we choose to trust the stranger. That's when we see that we're not really so different after all - and that together, we are even mighty.
CCE in brief
- Craig C-E
- Recovering backpacker, Cornwallite at heart, political enthusiast, catalyst, writer, husband, father, community volunteer, unabashedly proud Canadian. Every hyperlink connects to something related directly or thematically to that which is highlighted.
Monday, 29 July 2013
Roads Converging on the Way Forward
I don't know Chrystia Freeland, nor really anything about her. Toronto Centre isn't my riding; I have no skin in the upcoming nomination game. I do, however, have a lot of interest in people who take the time and push their envelopes, look at the broader map of the issues of our time and place them in an historical context.
On that front, I am perfectly comfortable with posting her piece on this humble blog; it's the kind of thing you'd find here anyway. All the hyperlinks below are to posts of my own with what I feel is overlapping content.
I find it incredibly encouraging that more and more people are coming forward with a similar vision of where we're going. Sooner or later, though, we most realize that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.
One thread has run through my work over the past two decades – a growing conviction that we are living through a profound, global economic shift, comparable in its scale and scope with the industrial revolution. The combined impact of globalization and technological change is radically transforming the world economy, national economies, urban economies, and the economic lives of each one of us.
If you believe otherwise, look back two centuries to an earlier great upheaval that reshaped the world – the industrial revolution. It can be tempting to take comfort from that history. After all, for all its dark satanic mills, ultimately, the industrial revolution worked out pretty well. All of us in the western world are healthier, taller – well, there are a few exceptions! – richer, freer and live longer than our early 19th-century ancestors.
But here’s the rub. It took two deep depressions – the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Long Depression of the 1870s – two world wars, and Communist revolutions in Russia and in China before we figured out how to make the industrial revolution work for the vast majority of the population. And it also took the invention of a whole new set of institutions – pensions, public education, public health care, social welfare, trade unions, and even mass democracy itself.
When it comes to today’s economic revolution, a very small and very lucky and very smart group of people is already benefiting. I call this global community of economic winners the plutocrats, and they were the subject of my recent book.
But the other side of the coin is the devastating hollowing out of the middle class in the western industrial democracies. Traditional middle class jobs are being made redundant by the technology revolution or outsourced to lower-wage economies.
Figuring out how to make today’s vast economic transformation work for the middle class is the central political issue of our time. Without a prosperous, secure middle class, our national economy can’t flourish in the long-term. Our democratic society won’t endure, either.
Today’s conventional wisdom is deeply cynical about politics. We portray our elected officials as trivial buffoons at best and as scandal-ridden, self-dealing parasites at worst. What we have lost is our belief that our government represents us all, and that we, collectively, can use it to address the big challenges of our time.
If you believe in democracy – and who doesn’t? – that lost faith is a tragedy. We all desperately need to re-engage with our democratic system, in all its messy glory, and elect leaders whom we charge with the job of solving the 21st-century’s greatest tasks, first and foremost making our new economy work for the middle class.
Over the past few years, as I have been working through these issues for my book, I have felt their urgency ever more strongly. Diagnosing the problem is an important first step, but it isn’t enough. We need to do something about it.
The place for me to do that is at home, in Canada. As the lucky beneficiary of the Canadian public education system, Canadian health care, and Canadian scholarships, I owe our country everything.
We are good at rolling up our sleeves and getting the big things profoundly right. At a time when the rest of the world is struggling to live with one of the human consequences of globalization – mass immigration – Canada is a model for how to make a multicultural, multilingual community really work. We can do the same when it comes to ensuring middle class prosperity in the 21st century. Indeed, we are much better at this than the United States, where income inequality has become an economically and socially devastating chasm. We can’t let that happen to us.
We know some of things we need to do. As University of Ottawa economist Miles Corak has shown, social mobility is one of the casualties of rising income inequality and the hollowing out of the middle class. We must do everything we can to lean against that trend, particularly investing in public education, starting in preschool. Second, we need to become the world’s most attractive destination for entrepreneurship. As traditional middle class jobs vanish, we need to build a platform that makes it easy for driven, inventive Canadians to take risks and create new ones. Third, we need to find ways to realign business incentives with public ones. Toronto is leading the way here, with initiatives like the MaRS Centre for Impact Investing, but there is a lot more to be done.
Toronto itself is a central part of this story. It is a vibrant, diverse, world-class city, which has not yet become a gilded, gated community for the plutocrats, with no room for the middle class, as is happening so quickly in so many of the world’s other metropolises. We need a proud, ambitious, bold, urban vision for Toronto as the world’s magnet for the creative, thriving middle class – precisely what Jane Jacobs found when she moved here nearly half a century ago.
Chrystia Freeland is a candidate for the Liberal party nomination in Toronto Centre. She is a former senior editor at Thomson Reuters and The Globe and Mail.
Sunday, 28 July 2013
Psychobiology
Voting the Bums Out: Political Presenteeism and the Public Executive
If you visit this blog periodically, you'll know I have an obvious interest in workplace behaviour, leadership, human resource management and that newly identified field, cognitive labour.
For the most part, I think we do this incredibly poorly. We don't know the right way to motivate our human resources to be productive in the modern economy, nor how to design work and define roles to foster the best work from our teams. It's not just me that thinks this way - the private sector has come to the same conclusion, as has the Canadian Mental Health Commission. When even Stephen Harper's hands-off Conservative government comes up with psychological health and safety standards for Canadian workplaces, you know it's a significant issue.
How have we gotten to this point? Why are we so bad at creating a culture of cognitive productivity?
I believe this to largely be a hold-over attitude from the Industrial Revolution, where work was pretty standard - every worker was a cog in motion; carrot and stick motivation worked well at promoting manual labour. Management simply had to apply the carrots and sticks and make sure the machines kept running - underperformers could easily be replaced and what happened to them afterwards was someone else's problem.
Which is why I find the approach taken in the article linked to at the top so interesting - the implication therein, that underperformers should be cast away, completely avoids answering the question of why certain individuals would be underperforming in the first place. Drucker seems to think it's likely these were just bad hires in the first place - and I think it's fair to say a majority of employers would agree. They hire and fire; it's up to employees to do and if they don't they can be replaced.
After all, it's not like staff turn-over hurts the bottom line, right? Especially when you don't bother training; nothing gets lost when you're not investing in your employees. Of course, one questions what is gained when it's the cognitive abilities of your employees (their networks, their ability to process and analysis information, produce reports, handle external relationships, etc.) that you're after.
So, here's a problem facing many a workplace in this knowledge-and-relationship based economy; employees are hired, their role and office relationships (internal protocols, support services, etc.) are never clearly defined and their managers are using Industrial Age carrot-and-stick management tools to motivate work. People aren't getting raises or bonuses on churning out more widgets, nor being fired for not producing enough - their performance is being judged based on their ability to read the minds of their managers/employers, figure out what their roles are and manage down their employers anxieties long enough to get the job done.
What happens when people in this situation fail to be occupational psychics? What happens when they struggle to figure out what their duties are, or are never given enough time to finish a product thoroughly, or they are told they must manage their time wisely but write daily reports on productivity to their supervisors?
This thing called presenteeism, which looks an awful lot like those under-performing employees mentioned above. Bosses can pull out their hair, frustrated at all these young kids that don't seem as disciplined or "with it" as they are and churn through employees - this isn't helping their bottom line any.
So let's revisit the equation a bit; what, beyond ruthless removal, is the role of the executive?
The Executive Director is a leadership role for an organization and often fulfills a motivational role in addition to office-based work. Executive Directors motivate and mentor members, volunteers, and staff, and may chair meetings. The Executive Director leads the organization and develops its organizational culture.
That's from Wikipedia, who many still have problems with - but it jives with what management guru David M. Dye has to say about organizational culture:
A culture of respect; everyone treats everyone else with respect. Does that include the executive, as well? I would tend to think so; if the role of an executive is to ruthlessly cut out any performer who fails to set a high standard, then any executive who fails to motivate and mentor members, volunteers or participate in meetings is failing to walk their own walk, potentially fuelling a culture that corrupts the very behavior they should be enhancing. One would think that any executive worth their salt would fall on their own swords should it be pointed out that they are failing to provide valuable leadership to their organizations. Right?
There are some best-practice organizations out there who are investing a bit more in their hiring practices and taking the time to show respect and value to new team members before they even begin. These organizations are seeing dividends for their efforts and, I imagine, will start to outpace the HR laggards out there, setting a new trend. You'd think those organizations committed to excellence would seek out and emulate these examples, if they were sincere in their intent.
Which finally brings us to government. Remember those underperformers who could be easily replaced? They become government's problem; through the work of Ministries of Labour, through economic incentive and training programs but above all, through research, consultation and active commitment to labour/occupational mental health issues, it's the role of government to ensure that everyone has the tools they need to succeed. If it isn't them, it's nobody.
Given the magnitude of this responsibility, you'd imagine government wants the best-trained employees with the right level of commitment and would be constantly researching best HR practices to ensure their teams have the tools they need to succeed, right?
You'd be wrong. Politics is regarded in much the same way as a factory floor in the industrial revolution; there are lots of bodies looking for opportunity, we need only cycle through them to find the right fits. The people can be discarded; it's the elected folk, the executive, that really matters. This is why, despite the commitment of governments across the country to occupational mental health, you'll be hard pressed to find a Political Party that has internally implemented any of the federal standards for psychological health and safety. Training is non-existent for the same reason it's hard to find in all kinds of fields; with constant staff turnover expected and presenteeism not understood at all, the powers that be don't see any need for complex training.
Think about that for a second - the people who advise your government policy and communicate your government's message have little to no training on how to do their job, unless it's on the political side. If presenteeism is a recognized issue and poor performance is seen as a contagion, is it any wonder we are constantly seeing a cycle of entitlement boom and bust in politics?
It'd be all too easy to join the throngs of frustrated citizens shaking their fist at lackluster politicians failing to perform with the highest distinction and turn to our favourite political mantra of "kick the bums out!"
But not so fast.
How much training do our politicians get? Do they receive any management courses, any negotiation or mediation training? Do we expect them to receive budget training, provide them with clear mandates and provide mentorship if they're missing the target? Who would you expect to provide that training? Do we consider periodic and high-level briefings or the odd awareness-building protest sufficient training to empower politicians to do the job we expect of them?
The fact is, government is among the most poorly run organizations there is - politicians, their staff and their internal overseers all fumble around with personality management, time management, task prioritization. Nobody says boo about this; we somehow expect politicians to come to their Legislatures as fully-formed and perfect representatives. When we, surprise surprise, don't get that, we either stew until we can vote them out or tune out of what they are doing entirely.
To let such a man stay on corrupts the others. It is grossly unfair to the whole organization.
In a democracy, it's the people who form the Executive; by how we engage, what motivation and support we offer, we either motivate and mentor our politicians, or we don't.
If we expect them to conceive and execute our work with no direction, we have only ourselves to blame for the outcome.
There's only one way we can ensure Canada or Ontario or any of our jurisdictions remains competitive and keeps moving forward (instead of falling behind others) - and that's for us as citizens to get informed and get engaged. If we expect our representatives to perform with the highest distinction, it's up to us to set that standard ourselves.
GR Rules for Lawyers
Are there different rules around government relations/lobbying for lawyers than there are for standard GR practitioners?
The reason I ask - doing some research, as I'm prone to do, I've come across a prominent lawyer who plays a significant role in a political party. This lawyer lists a growing GR practise on their website, yet has no entries on either the provincial or federal lobby registries for the past seven years or so.
We Could Hide Out Under There... But Hiding Isn't Communicaiton
It's funny - I'm in a pointless, completely avoidable spat with some folk who apparently have difficulty with the concept of value add; the failure to communicate has completely stemmed from my trying to add value for them. Instead of attempting to nurture mutual understanding, looking for points of commonality and building brand by offering value, they paint by the numbers, following self-serving protocols to the detriment of everything they stand for.
What's the funny part? I dunno - when "we need to have a conversation" has become a one-way messaging point, I find that funny in a "fall into an open sewer" kind of way.**
We can hide behind simplistic protocols and completely avoid committing sociology (i.e., looking for context) but that's the approach that has led to our asymmetrical social system in the first place. While "this conversation is over" is the approach favoured by Canada's conservative Parties, Liberal leaders, including Ontario's Kathleen Wynne, have theoretically rejected that theme in favour of one that recognizes we can only surmount each obstacle by acknowledging that they are all connected. And that we are all connected.
Altruism is selfishness that plans ahead, after all; and value isn't something others owe to you, it's something you provide to others.
For the Jacks of all trades making matters unnecessarily complex by trying to play it simplistically, I offer the following - a Boys II Men song (a wink geared towards adults) in a movie geared towards kids. There was no need for the film makers to put this much effort into their product, as the target audience wasn't parents - but in so doing, they have landed with an engaged audience that is doing much of their advertizing for them.
There's a lesson in this for communicators - if they see value in communication.
Ah... lapo dah...
Tala chi, Ma tol, li na...
Ah...
Laba di, ho chi,
La, No chaaa...
Wu pla na chii, leh ji
Fuh pa pu she
La ma nii...
Under wearr
Lah kah reh, Li rey wee
Gih leh bya
Mah ke reh
Under wearrr
Lah pah kreh, Leh gua ri
Teh lah keh,
Lah peh reh...
Under wearrr
Lah cheh pee, Li bi da
Ee leh gua
Lahh gua rehh
Ley show lee leh duu...
Lah keh rey dee zuu...
Bleh ahh boh dee zu re kah
Zohh reh kah laa...
UNDER WEARRR...
Lah duu...
Leh ah moh dee under wearr...
** (Please note the context of the quote, which refers to self-inflicted wounds caused by not thinking ahead as being funny. This quote should not be construed in any shape or form as a threat to any persons living or dead, real or fictitious).
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