Companies are constantly on the lookout for new skills, and the development of their employees is at the heart of their HR mission. But does it succeed in doing so, and is it not a machine for wasting talent and manufacturing incompetence?
I was telling you the other day about a recent study produced by Lucca on the career aspirations of the French(The French and work: changing aspirations and worsening conditions). I had the chance to be invited to its presentation at an event that was enlivened by “battles” in which two experts on a subject defended two contradictory visions on some of the study’s deliberately polemical themes.
In any case, it was sufficiently interesting to stimulate my thinking and give me the idea of reporting on it here.
The theme of one of them was ” Do companies make people incompetent?
Let’s start with a brief summary of the debate that took place on the subject.
Power of the worst or learning company?
No, companies are not incompetent; on the contrary, they’re learning organizations. In fact, they’re the only place where you can develop yourself, because soft skills can only be acquired on the job. It’s also a place where knowledge transfer is organized, through mentoring.
But it’s quite the opposite. Companies are kakistrocracies (a system of government in which the worst and most mediocre hold the power), it’s a system and incompetence is at its heart: the proof is that you only recruit those less competent than yourself! The same applies to the civil service: competitive examinations validate knowledge, not skills. It’s a clan, or even internal clans, that protect themselves.
But they don’t.
All this is false in the age of 360° appraisals. It’s true that in large companies there may be people who serve no useful purpose, who are just there to keep the processes running, but on the other hand, in startups, competence is essential, because we have fat-free structures where no one can hide.
No, that’s not so true. In startups, there’s a lot of managerial incompetence , which can be seen on several levels: the treatment of women, botched appraisals, not training people when things are going well, and when things are going badly, not having the means to do so.
But that’s not true! Those in power are under internal and external pressure to be exemplary, and what’s more, there are legal obligations.
Wrong! Competent people embarrass.
No, they don’t! Companies are obliged to manage jobs and skills on a forward-looking basis, in order to help those whose jobs are about to disappear to find new ones! Companies learn by default!
No, that’s just a mental vision. All I hear about is EBITDA and bottom-line management, the rest is just cosmetics.
So much for exchanges with two obviously irreconcilable speakers.
Just so you know, an instant poll taken after the debate shows that for 70% of those present, mainly from the HR world, business makes people incompetent.
Lucid cynicism or the world of Care Bears?
My immediate feeling was that there were two opposing visions, deliberately exaggerated, of course, but that one embodied lucid cynicism and the other the world of Care Bears, the world as we’d like to see it but which doesn’t exist.
The truth undoubtedly lies somewhere in between, and I saw some truth in both theses, but I also think that I wouldn’t have answered the question in the same way as the speakers.
The gap between big companies and startups
I’d like to start with an argument that I don’t think is much debated: the differences in practices between large companies and startups.
Indeed, large companies are notorious for generating excessive bureaucracy and thinking that a complex world can only be addressed through complication (Smart Simplicity: 6 rules for managing complexity without becoming complicated, Organizational complication: the #1 irritant of the employee experience and The future of work: complex by nature, simple by obligation).
The more positive will tell us that this problem will soon be solved by AI, but I don’t believe that for a second. Complication is a consequence of human nature, and having AIs to replace “the people who run the processes” won’t stop people from creating complicated organizations. Worse still, we’ll be able to say that complication is no longer a problem, because we’ll have AI to oil the cogs and replace bullshit jobs.
But in the end, I don’t see what this argument has to do with anything: having people who are supposedly useless doesn’t seem to me to have much to do with matters of competence , except perhaps that it’s proof of a form of incompetence in terms of organizational architecture. It could even be the opposite case: competent people paid not to use their skills.
But even that I don’t believe, I think it’s just the easy way out.
On the other hand, it’s much truer to say that there’s a gap in terms of HR and managerial practices between startups and large companies, and I’d even say between tech companies and others.
Sometimes it’s simply due to their history. You can’t ask a young first-time entrepreneur, who’s also going to be backed up by people his own age, to have the management experience of someone who has 20 years’ experience and has seen and learned things in different companies (Why is the human always the last thing an entrepreneur learns to manage?).
Having lived through it, it’s only when the resignations start pouring in that they realize there’s a problem, and not always because they start thinking in terms of “talent”, but because they see what it’s costing them.
Go and talk to any entrepreneur who’s set up several startups, and they’re usually only rarely complimentary about the person they were as a manager when they set up their first company at under 30. It’s called life experience, that’s all.
There’s also the question of the moment in a company’s life that we’re talking about. When you start a business, you rarely have the means to invest in the “non-productive”, even when you have the will to do so, even if I believe that today’s generation of entrepreneurs pays much more attention to this than it did 20 or 30 years ago.
And then there’s a factor that affects the tech world more generally: everything’s moving fast and there’s no time.
As a result, it’ s in the world of tech and startups that I’ve seen the worst horrors… but also the most beautiful things, or at least the noblest intentions. When you start from scratch and have convictions in the field, there’s no such thing as “existing”, and you can build a company and a culture in the image of your convictions. And the growing demands of investors in terms of CSR are no bad thing either.
Incompetence in charge?
On the other hand, the word kakistrocracy, which I confess to having discovered on occasion, reminded me of well-known things and echoed one of my recent reads: The Bottleneck Is at the Top.
The bottleneck is at the top of the bottle. In most companies, strategic orthodoxy has some very powerful defenders: senior managers. Imagine an organizational pyramid with senior managers at the apex… Where are you likely to find people with the least diversity of experience, the largest investment in the past, and the greatest reverence for industrial dogma? At the top. And where will you find the people responsible for creating strategy? Again, at the top.
Gary Hamel, Strategy as Revolution
Is this incompetence?
Yes, you could say that understanding your environment and changes, anticipating and thinking through the necessary transformations, and even having the courage to carry them out, is a set of skills, and that would mean that the higher up you go, the less capable you are of transformation.
But in part, I see this as a disconnection from reality, the fruit of political games and the damaging effects of closed circles and group thinking. Conformity as a rule is an obstacle to the expression of skills.
After all, it’s true that many managers refuse to recruit someone who is more competent than they are, or who has the potential to become so, and that divergent thinking, that which moves things forward, is rarely well received Leaders and managers: how far are you prepared to go to protect your “disruptive elements”.).
But here again, it’s about decision-making and change, and straying from the realm of strict competence, which brings me to the way I would have dealt with the question posed.
Companies don’t know how to exploit skills
Given what companies invest in and implement to develop skills, I don’t think this is the real problem. Of course, we may think that certain programs are poorly adapted, ineffective or activated too late, but I don’t think that’s enough to say that companies are incompetent.
On the other hand, it seems fairly obvious to me that the company is struggling to use the skills it acquires and develops.
This can be seen at both decision-making and operational levels.
I won’t go back over the decision-making aspect, which I touched on above.
Let’s talk about operations
When I first took on the subject of employee experience, I logically began by formalizing the employee life cycle, with the intention of then listing the key moments and points of contact between the employee and the company.
And then I noticed something: all the literature available on the subject, all the diagrams mentioned all the stages from recruitment to leaving the company, including of course employee development , but nothing, absolutely nothing, concerned the employee in the work situation. We take care of the employee at every stage of his or her life, we pamper them, we develop their skills, but we pay no attention to what happens when they’re working (4th barometer of the employee experience: a major subject in search of impact and The flow of work, glass ceiling of the employee experience).
That’s why I’ve often heard HR policies referred to as “out of touch”. Let me explain
We help employees develop their skills, know-how and interpersonal skills, a bit like polishing a diamond and thinking we’ve done everything right.
The truth is that the employee is then plunged into the reality of work, where he is impacted by what I call his work context. By work context, I mean: his manager, his colleagues, the rules, processes and operating modes, the corporate culture or even the more specific culture of a team, the tools he uses, etc.
The truth is that every element of this work context can ruin a talent, ruin the work of HR. And most of the time, they add up to ensure that only a tiny fraction of the employee’s potential is harvested (Much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work).
This is where the employee experience becomes a question of performance , and where we understand that it’s the context that makes the performance (Why a very good candidate can become a bad employee ( and vice versa)). In fact, employees are saying as much, putting work organization at the top of the list of issues that count when it comes to employee experience (The employee experience: a transformation lever at the service of performance).
My idea is not that the company makes people incompetent, but that it prevents them from expressing their skills. You’ll tell me it’s the same thing, but the nature of the problem, and therefore the solution, is totally different.
Bottom line
At the time, I spontaneously thought that I, like 70% of the people present that evening, agreed with the thesis that companies make people incompetent.
In the end, my opinion is much more nuanced: the problem is not the development of skills, which in my opinion works up to a point, but the possibility for each individual to use their skills to make decisions and do their job.
On the other hand, to believe that everything is perfect and that the company is by principle benevolent and a learner is to really go too far in the opposite direction.