Humanity at Work

Leading for Better Relationships and Results

Pierre Battah

• Publisher: LifeTree
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781928055747
• eBook ISBN: 9781928055754
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Nautilus Book Award Gold Winner

A field guide for leaders who want to engage and energize their workforce with a leadership strategy that puts the well-being of people first.

Every leader has a duty to ensure their teams meet and exceed expectations and achieve strategic goals. But leaders who only focus on the bottom line risk alienating or burning out the people integral to the success of the organization.

Engaged employees are more productive, have fewer sick days, and tend to stay in their jobs longer. They go the extra mile because they want to contribute to an organization that cares about them as human beings. Put simply, a leadership approach focused on both relationships and results is good for business.

But what steps can leaders take to cultivate a workplace culture that is positive, engaged, and also productive? This is what CBC workplace columnist Pierre Battah tackles in Humanity at Work.

In this conversational, humorous, and relatable book, Battah acts as a virtual mentor, drawing on his decades-long experience as advisor to large and small organizations. Through colorful and entertaining case studies ranging from fish-packing plants to financial institutions, Battah illustrates what it means to lead with humanity.

In this book, readers will learn:

• why human connection is a crucial component of the employment relationship;
• how to delegate responsibility, set expectations, and give and receive feedback more effectively; and
• how cultivating self-awareness can create safe space in which to engage staff.

Each chapter includes reflection points and helpful tools to help readers track their progress as they move toward creating a workplace with humanity at its heart.

A portion of the proceeds will be donated to Plan International Canada, who strive for a just world that advances children's rights and equality for girls.

( 1 )

How Do I Lead Every Day?

WHEN MAUR A MCKINNON decided to leave a senior role with a high-profile insurance company to join a local sheet metal manufacturer as director of human resources, her career move raised a few eyebrows. No one doubted that she would have a huge impact wherever she went, but her colleagues worried she would be leaving her present position for a rough-and-tumble setting that would chew up and spit out the polished HR executive. Make no mistake—McKinnon hails from the Miramichi region of New Brunswick, and as we’ll discover later in the book, the community surrounding its iconic eponymous river produces people who are spirited and fun, and also fierce and fearless. McKinnon was true to her roots on the river, very much a leader who brings her humanity to work.

But this was no ordinary sheet metal manufacturing facility. Imperial Manufacturing Group (IMG) was owned by Norm Caissie, a slight man with boundless energy who had grown his father’s plumbing supply business into a notable North American player, supplying the likes of Walmart and Canadian Tire. There is a very good chance the air vents in your home are an IMG product. Caissie was renowned for sniffing out unlikely business opportunities in his highly specialized sector as he expanded IMG into the United States and central Canada.

The owner was at once a genius and a challenging man to work for—and with. Regarded with the highest esteem as an award-winning entrepreneur locally and nationally, he had secured his legacy by insisting on keeping a significant amount of the company’s domestic production in his local community of twelve hundred. The plant employed six hundred people. While of huge benefit to the community, needless to say, the decision to invest locally created numerous recruitment headaches for the company—and those were only some of the ills that McKinnon inherited.

Added to the challenge of recruiting for specialized positions in a rural area was the company’s reputation for burning through management talent, not necessarily holding safety in the highest of regards, and having a workplace culture that reflected the growing pains of a successful wholesaler and manufacturer. In an industry where productivity was everything, issues of low productivity and absenteeism reflected a worrisome state of affairs from an employee morale and engagement perspective.

McKinnon, an unapologetically optimistic keener, knew full well that if she were to adopt the same persona and approach that had garnered her promotions and praise in the highly professional insurance and gaming sectors, she risked being ostracized by the all-important production staff. Though her management colleagues might well appreciate her vision, strategy, and tactics, were she not able to establish her street cred on the plant floor, the many things she had in mind would fail miserably. McKinnon knew she had only one shot at making a first impression with the employees.

She wanted to position the HR shop as a center of excellence that would coach, nudge, and support front-line supervisors, managers, and executives, but especially the supervisors, as she felt her focus would have the greatest impact at that level. Supervisors were face-to-face with hundreds of workers every day. How they led their folks was key to engagement and productivity.

McKinnon was confident in her ability to get buy-in from her management colleagues. They quickly realized that her perspective on people and leadership was different. The company’s culture had always been a hard and demanding one, focused on production above all else, but productivity was slipping. Concerns were raised: Would the forward-looking view of the HR function have a detrimental effect by softening the culture to the point where the company would lose its edge in the market? McKinnon’s managerial colleagues soon came to trust her, but convincing highly skeptical workers on the shop floor would be another story. She had the smarts, relatability, and humility for the task, but could she pull it off?

McKinnon knew she had to make a compelling, evidence-based case that tied employee engagement to productivity and profitability. To this end, she would have to secure the support of the owner and senior management teams. She knew the front-line supervisors were the lynchpin in her plan. Without their support and ability to re-engage the workforce (many of them long-term employees), she was sunk.

Employee Turnover Challenges: What They Can Tell Us

How does McKinnon’s challenge of finding the right people resonate with you as a leader? This challenge raises an important question of differentiation: Is it a recruitment challenge (i.e., getting a reasonable number of qualified applicants to choose from) or is it a selection challenge (i.e., where those suitable applicants who were hired are not working out)?

As for the issue of finding skilled people in rural areas, let’s face it—skilled trades positions and many other specialties are tough to recruit for in the most ideal of conditions. Rural and more remote locations present a challenge often best met through partnering with other like employers, ideally noncompeting, to draw people to a region. Local economic development agencies are also a company recruiter’s best friend, as are similar community agencies and partners.

Regarding turnover challenges, you may be able to relate to the problems unique to an employment market now characterized by workers who value mobility as opposed to those seeking a job for the long term. The rapidity with which some people are able to grow their careers by moving every two to five years creates a number of challenges for employers. Companies that have shaped their employment strategies for what is referred to as the “gig economy” are discovering new ways of working. Fast-service restaurants are offering signing bonuses, the promise to work with your friends (an employee engagement coup!), and flexibility in shift scheduling to meet the needs of their target employee market.

A deeper examination of turnover is always informative and raises important questions. If you’ve looked at employee turnover, you may have come to the same conclusion that I have. People decamp one workplace for another for career advancement; or they have a chance to take a job that is more conducive to where they live and their quest for work–life balance; or they simply receive an offer they cannot refuse. My observation is that something leads people to scratch the itch to leave, to look elsewhere. But turnover is much more informative in the aggregate, meaning that as we see a number of departures, patterns sometimes emerge. Those patterns include people leaving a particular department or supervisor, or people leaving for a better wage, benefits, and security.

Perhaps, like McKinnon, you have immediate challenges to face and are wondering where to begin, given the many factors that need attention. And perhaps how McKinnon tackled her new role is instructive for all of us.

Maura McKinnon’s People Solution

As we have noted, McKinnon knew the front-line supervisors were the lynchpin in her plan. As she invested in leadership training, rather than following the usual approach of cascading from the top downward, she targeted front-line supervision, the role that has more impact on more people in how they lead every day. Understanding the flow of influence within the group, McKinnon knew that as she began measuring engagement, her core team of supervisors were going to either lead the way or resist and send her plan awry. As it turned out, they stepped up. By now, McKinnon had brought in an HR staffer, a dynamo named Teena Robichaud who would carry on the work with that critical supervisory group, work closely with the director of production and external trainers, and over a three-year period completely reinvent supervision at IMG.

McKinnon then expanded her leadership training program outward from the front line to the entire organization, implementing formal and informal recognition programs and moving people leadership training to the many shift leads, cell leads, and beyond. She was helping redefine a culture by bringing people leadership to the fore, all the while focusing hard with her management team colleagues on how such a transformation contributed to productivity increases, reductions in absenteeism, and most notably a discernable difference in morale, as documented by their engagement surveys and the uptake of their plant-wide recognition initiatives. She won the hearts and minds of the supervisors, and word was spreading in the plant about the “new HR woman and her boots!” The owner and McKinnon’s C-suite colleagues backed her bold move to redefine the culture.

McKinnon’s accomplishments at IMG were rewarded with an appointment to vice president, and her efforts helped the company garner a coveted Best Places to Work award. She was recruited by an employer ten times the size of IMG (a public-sector health authority) that essentially asked her to replicate the culture transformation she had facilitated in manufacturing.

If you had asked McKinnon what led to her making remarkable progress at IMG—how she overcame daunting obstacles of employee disengagement and skepticism and, most notably, given her background, how she gained widespread credibility in the plant (especially considering that she is a bottom-line HR executive who drives for results and makes tough and often unpopular decisions yet remains credible, liked, and respected)—she would point to a corner of her office where she keeps her personal protective equipment used on the plant floor. Nothing unusual to see here—neon safety vest, bright banana-yellow helmet, and cat’s-eye wraparound safety goggles—until your eye falls on the well-scuffed pink steel-toed construction boots.

When McKinnon was introduced to hundreds of people on the plant floor over her initial weeks and months, and especially to those all-important supervisors, her pink boots were the ice-breaker, the bond builder, and the butt of many good-natured jokes and teasing. Given McKinnon’s relatability and sincerity—not to mention her impressive ability to approach her work with earnestness but not take herself too seriously—the boots became a way in, a way to be known for the right things (in this case, safety), and mostly a signal that change was ahead and that things were going to be different. They were a tangible token of McKinnon’s own humanity.

A great number of onlookers would say that McKinnon’s moving the company towards important investments in people leaders by way of coaching and training, along with her design of HR systems such as timely and rigorous performance management and widespread recognition initiatives, galvanized IMG to make great progress on their culture, reigniting their safety culture and contributing to their continued success in the marketplace.

McKinnon would tell you it’s all because of her pink boots.

IN CHAPTER 2, we explore another foundational challenge for leaders, which is finding the balance between focusing on the results an organization needs to see to be successful and on the well-being of people, giving them guidance and room to grow. Much depends on the situation at hand, as we will see.

Taking Stock of Your Humanity at Work

As you answer the following questions about your people leadership practice, reflect on Maura McKinnon’s story and how her strategies reset the culture at IMG.

1.Do you have a “pink boots” memory or story?

2.Who is a people leader you’ve experienced that remains memorable for you—someone whose influence on you propelled you forward?

3.What is it that made that person stand out? How did they lead with humanity?

4.Which part of their people leadership practice have you experimented with or would you teach to others?

( 2 )

How Do I Balance People and Results?

CAISE POPULAIRE ACADIENNE ltée (Les Caisses or Caisse) is a historical and cultural icon, a banking federation that for nearly a century functioned as the commercial hub of many New Brunswick towns and villages, with branches in virtually all francophone Acadian communities. The model was representative of a bygone time, with local boards directing the operations of their local Caisse, accessing system-wide services like IT and other back-office functions from the federation’s central office. By 2013, federation CEO Camille Thériault, a former premier of New Brunswick, along with many other progressive thinkers on the board of directors, knew the model was anachronistic. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise For Humanity at Work
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One / Awakening the Leader Within
• Part Two / Know The Course. Stay the Course.
• Part Three / Awakening the Leader Within Your People
• Part Four / Getting Intervention Right
• Part Five / Recognizing and Rewarding
• Part Six / Build The Right Culture
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• Recommended Reading
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright Page