Is your career a liability in disguise?

By Neil Patrick

This week, the shocking revelations about Volkswagen's emission testing fraud and the consequent collapse of its share price prompted me to think about balance sheets. Not corporate ones, but career ones.

We all have a career balance sheet. Do you really know the condition of yours?

Initial estimates suggest that Volkswagen could be liable for around $18bn of fines from its emission test cheating. Investor sentiment has tanked and around $30bn was wiped off its share price value within two days of the scandal becoming public knowledge.

In an instant, Volkswagen's balance sheet has been trashed. The reputation of perhaps one of the most trusted brands in the world lies in tatters. Yet I'd argue that Volkswagen could have seen this coming, they were just not paying enough attention to things that accountants never measure or show on a balance sheet. Things like culture, values and reputation.

I know that many people glaze over when accountancy language is used, but stick with me. This post isn’t about accountancy. It’s about something much more important to most of us. Our careers.

Most of us think about our jobs and finances from a profit and loss perspective. In other words, if our income exceeds our outgoings, we feel like we are doing well. And vice versa.

We rarely think about the balance sheets of our careers. That is, our career assets and liabilities.

But for 21st century career survival, a balance sheet perspective is now vital.

So what has changed?

In short everything. What the VW story illustrates is how even the most successful organisations can group think their way into catastrophe. The financial collapse of 2008 was the same situation. The dot-com bust of 1997-2000 was too.

These collapses were all based on fundamentally flawed balance sheets. Put another way, the assets were overvalued and the liabilities were undervalued.

Individuals are no different. But employers rarely consider their employees to be true assets. The hard truth is they are viewed as a cost from which employers seek to extract the most value they can. And I am sure I am not the only one who frowns with suspicion every time I hear a CEO say ‘Our employees are our most valuable asset’.

So employers typically adopt a profit and loss perspective when they think about their people. Investments in their people assets are rarely made for the long-term benefit of the individual, they are made with a view to the short term ROI for the organisation. In other words the things which impact their profit and loss not their balance sheet.

This was more or less fine in the 20th century, when we could reasonably expect to have a long and rewarding career with perhaps just two or three employers over the course of a 40 year career. But as average job tenure continues to fall, as skills become redundant ever faster and as individuals leverage increasingly tight incomes through borrowing, the nature of critical career assets has fundamentally changed.

What is a career balance sheet?

Of course it is statement of your career assets minus your liabilities. And the remaining balance is what I call career equity.

We cannot assign strict monetary valuations to these things, so accountants will doubtless lose interest at this point. But we can weigh up the balance between our assets and liabilities. And make a fair judgement about whether they are rising or falling.

These assets and liabilities are quite different to what most people imagine

Because they think about us from a profit and loss viewpoint, our employers encourage us to do the same. This can be fatal. See where the group think risk is?

Conventional thinking dictates we think of our career assets as things like skills, qualifications, experience, salary level. But they also include our creativity, our ability to adapt, our leadership skills, our communication skills, our professional network, our reputation, the amount of goodwill our network has towards us.

There’s a ton of stuff which is immensely valuable to us individually but which our employers will view at best as of secondary importance to us getting our jobs done well.

Conventional ideas about liabilities would cite things like poor employer references, short job tenure, periods of unemployment, haphazard career moves. In the 21st century, career liabilities include student debt, health problems, limited professional networks, obsolete skills, immobility, limited digital know how.

Employers do not measure or manage these things for us

They don’t. Because they see little immediate value to themselves in them. The paradox is that getting an outstanding appraisal, being promoted, earning big bonuses actually encourages an illusionary perception that we are doing well. We might be if we take a purely profit and loss view. But if we take a balance sheet view we almost certainly are not. If all our time and energies are directed at pushing things up on our career P&L, then we are doing very little to directly invest in our career balance sheet. And that’s the bit that matters to us most. A weak balance sheet or one which measures the wrong things makes us vulnerable.

So it’s quite possible to have a booming career P&L and a weakening balance sheet. And a weak balance sheet can be fatal whether it’s an investment, a corporation or our career. And because the performance measures and rewards that employers typically use encourage more of the same behaviours, we can find ourselves sleepwalking into career balance sheet erosion or even career bankruptcy.

As long as employers persist with a short term P&L perspective on employee value, employees run the risk of their career balance sheets being weakened.

Just remember this. It’s almost guaranteed that your employer doesn’t see you as an asset (despite their nice words to the contrary). They see you as a cost.

Provided your value to them exceeds your cost, generally, they will be happy and reward you. But those rewards mostly appear on your P&L, not your balance sheet.

If you really want to grow your career balance sheet instead of your P&L, it’s time to think very differently and that's probably not in the way your employer wants.

Why you need to do less to get hired

By Neil Patrick

We have a problem. The odd thing is we not only know about it, we’re celebrating it.

Last week a friend called me up and mentioned he was really busy at work. He’s not alone. Just about everyone I know who has a ‘proper’ job says the same thing. They almost seem to wear it as a badge of honour.

Shortly before the call, I had been out walking along the riverbank. I do this daily. It’s time to reflect and marshal my thoughts. It is always a more productive time than if I were to stay at my desk.

But I have to force myself to do this. I love my work and the default is always to think, ‘Another hour at my desk and I can tick off another task on my to do list’.

A great post on this topic by Greg McKeown dropped into my Linkedin stream at about the same time. It was called, “The Number 1 Reason You’re Too Busy”. You can read his post here.

Whilst I agree with Greg’s points, it occurred to me that the condition he describes for people at work, is magnified even more in the lives of those who are seeking work. And it’s doing them a lot of damage.

Here’s the gist:

Digital communications are filling all our lives with noise

When we are job hunting, it’s easy to subscribe to job boards. We can follow recruiters on Twitter. We can spend hours every day just on Linkedin. It makes us feel better for a start. We are really busy hunting! And that makes us console ourselves that we are doing all we humanly can to find the next job.

Job hunters send out their resume to every possible position they think might be suitable

I’ve lost count of how many times job seekers have reported that they have sent out their resume hundreds of times – every week! I’ve not achieved anything like that number in my whole life!

The cult of more is served well by its biggest disciple – digital media. Digital media makes it too easy to think we can leverage our job seeking activity. But all it is really doing is accelerating the competition for jobs, making it ever harder for recruiters and hiring organisations to find the right people in the deluge of poorly targeted internet derived applications.

Many positions now attract around 200 applications

Which means the basic odds of getting hired are 0.5%. Getting hired isn't a lottery. The successful candidates win because they are better prepared and more impressive at every stage of the process. And that’s not down to luck. It’s down to detailed preparation and attention to every last detail of the requirements the hiring company wants to satisfy.

You are never going to achieve this by luck. You may achieve it by investing many hours in researching the organisation, polishing your resume so that it precisely matches every requirement and practicing and preparing for the interview over and over again.

No-one can do that for hundreds or even dozens of jobs. But you can do it for a carefully selected handful.

The myth of being busy

If you still think that it’s better to be busy., Greg makes an interesting point. He describes our obsession with busy as nothing less than a bubble:

Why are we so irrational in our behavior? We’re in the midst of a bubble; one so vast that to be alive today in the developed world is to be affected, or infected, by it. It’s the bubble of bubbles: it not only mirrors the previous bubbles (whether of the Tulip, Silicon Valley or Real Estate variety), it undergirds them all. I call it “The More Bubble.”

The nature of bubbles is that some asset is absurdly overvalued until — eventually — the bubble bursts, and we’re left scratching our heads wondering why we were so irrationally exuberant in the first place. The asset we’re overvaluing now is the notion of doing it all, having it all, achieving it all; what Jim Collins calls “the undisciplined pursuit of more.”

This bubble is being enabled by an unholy alliance between three powerful trends: smart phones, social media, and extreme consumerism. The result is not just information overload, but opinion overload. We are more aware than at any time in history of what everyone else is doing and, therefore, what we “should” be doing. In the process, we have been sold a bill of goods: that success means being supermen and superwomen who can get it all done. Of course, we back-door-brag about being busy: it’s code for being successful and important.

And that’s the key. We kid ourselves that being busy equates to the greatest possible effort we can invest and therefore our chances of success in our endeavours are as great as we can make them.

Big mistake.

I’m not saying that if we put our feet up, success will automatically flow to us via some mystical karmic force as yet unrecognized by science.

What I’m saying is that focus and the prioritization of the important things over the urgent things is what makes for success in any endeavor.

But it’s not just a question of prioritization. We all need to be ruthless in eliminating the things we spend time on which are sucking the time away from the important value adding things.

Fortunately this isn’t as difficult to practice as it might seem.

Here are the things job seekers can do right now to avoid being sucked into the black hole of busyness:

1. Get the foundations of your search correct

This means having absolute clarity about the type of role you are seeking. It goes hand in hand with a ruthless evaluation of what your personal competencies and aspirations are. Eliminate everything from your search which isn’t a great fit. Do not be tempted into thinking any job is better than no job.

I know that’s hard to say when the bills are piling up, but the hard truth is that unless there is a perfect match between you and the role, you are wasting your time going after it. And in the unlikely event you do get hired, sooner or later you or your employer are going to regret the decision and seek to dissolve the ‘marriage’.

2. Rest well to excel

K. Anders Ericsson found in “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” that a significant difference between good performers and excellent performers was the number of hours they spent practicing.

What few people realize is that the second most highly correlated factor distinguishing the good from the great is how much they sleep. Top performing violinists slept more than less accomplished violinists: averaging 8.6 hours of sleep every 24 hours.

3. Don’t add more – discipline yourself to swap

For every new activity you add to your rota, take out one which is a time-sucking waste of your time. Individually they might seem small…but cumulatively, they can devour hours of your time every day.

Unsubscribe from email lists which are filling your mailbox with jobs you are not interested in or suitable for.

Take down your resume from job boards which only get you calls from the wrong people.

Leave the Linkedin groups which are not providing you with real value and suitable new connections.

4. Invest more in your most important relationships

Don’t accept every social media invitation that comes your way. It’s counter-intuitive to say no to good opportunities, but if we don’t do it then we won’t have the space to figure out what we really want to invest our time in.

Invest more in the relationships which are potentially most valuable to you. Just as you only need one job, you only need one conversation to change your future. But when that conversation arises, you need to be delivering your A game, not squeezing it in between a dozen other tasks you have scheduled at the same time.

Less will become the new more

I cannot put things any better than Greg has done in his post, so I’ll leave you with his conclusions:

A hundred years from now, when people look back at this period, they will marvel at the stupidity of it all: the stress, the motion sickness, and the self-neglect we put ourselves through.

So we have two choices. We can be among the last people caught up in the “more bubble” when it bursts, or we can see the madness for what it is and join the growing community of Essentialists and get more of what matters in our one precious life.



Greg McKeown is the author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. His "why" is inspiring people to design their lives and careers in order discover their highest point of contribution.

Why digital communications are making people less productive

By Neil Patrick

Why do 71% of US workers feel unhappy and unproductive?

The digital communication revolution creates an exciting new world of opportunity if we can harness it to achieve our goals.

But there is worrying data which shows that over two thirds of workers in the US feel unhappy and unproductive in their work and much of this can be attributed to digital information overload.

How can we reconcile this apparent contradiction?

It’s easier to understand this paradox if we accept that 20th century business models based on constantly increasing productivity and top down command and control no longer work at least for many knowledge-based organisations.

This way of managing organisations when combined with digital communications has a negative impact on both productivity and employee satisfaction levels.

How come?

Employee empowerment and lateral and collaborative ways of working are hugely valuable currency for the 21st century enterprise. This way of working is harmonious with the characteristics of the digital age. Just a few days ago, I reported here how Zappos is taking the bold step of removing managerial job titles and authorities in keeping with this philosophy.

To capitalise on this paradigm shift, an organisation needs to fundamentally rethink its values and culture. But many will struggle with the new levels of trust and delegated authority required to make this happen.

If we apply it to a 20th century culture based organisation, digital communication has as many or more negative impacts as positive ones. For example, at the sharp end, people are swamped with email. Instead of engaging in really productive work, they invest far too much time trying to appear that they are adding value by merely adding yet more to the communication overload.

They devote more and more of their time trying to appear productive, when in fact they are becoming less so. Open office environments, designed to lessen barriers to communication, have the opposite effect as workers pay more attention to trying to be seen to be busy than actually doing the things which really create value for the organisation and importantly boost their satisfaction and sense of self-worth.

Technology now means that most of us can work from almost anywhere for much of the time. In fact most people that work from home report that their productivity levels soar when they do this. But again, applied within a 20th century cultural framework, flexible working creates as many problems as it solves due to resentment and suspicion that co-workers are not working when they cannot be seen at the office.

I believe that most organisations have not yet fully grasped how to redesign themselves to accommodate the new open and collaborative models that characterise 21st century working. A perfect example of this was yesterdays’ post here about how JP Morgan got their Twitter strategy so catastrophically wrong. Essentially they were combining a 20th century command and control mentality with 21st century media and networks with disastrous outcomes.

In this brilliant RSA animate, Dave Coplin, Chief Envisioning Officer at Microsoft, describes what might be possible if more organisations embraced the full, empowering potential of technology and critically combined it with a truly open, collaborative and flexible working culture.

In other words, a culture which is consistent with the characteristics of the technology it uses.

It’s revolutionary stuff, but I suspect it describes not an imminent transformation rather the direction of evolution of the only the most enlightened organizations.

So whilst I share the vision, I think sadly we’re not going to see too many changes too soon.

And 71% of people are still going to be unhappy and unproductive for a good while yet…

What do you think?

How to negotiate a 25% pay rise

By Neil Patrick

These days if you want to get a pay rise, you've got to learn how to play hardball.

It may be tempting to think that in these times of recession and cutbacks, getting a pay rise is almost impossible.

Well there’s a new trend happening which I thought I’d tell you about in case you've not heard the news…

It’s called the counter-offer. And right now plenty of people are securing pay-rises of an average of 25% when they hand in their notice and their current employers are immediately offering them a pay rise to try and keep them.

Why is this happening?

Employers know how much it costs them to recruit a replacement. Moreover you've got experience of the organisation, and inevitably after they have secured a replacement for you, that new person is going to take time to get up to speed.

And if your contract means you have only got to give one month’s notice, or even three, it’s going to be a tall order for the hard pressed HR team to find and hire your replacement in that time frame. Your employer knows that this means lost productivity in the organisation and hence lower performance. That costs them directly and indirectly and so they’re willing to pay to keep you, instead of incurring the costs of replacing you.

How do I pull it off?

Of course, if you’re going to adopt this strategy, it’s a pretty risky tactic to threaten to resign when you don’t have another job offer with higher pay. If you don’t have this offer, your employer might just call your bluff and you’ll be left high and dry.

So you’ll need to have a better offer from another employer first. But if you've got a solid set of skills, this isn't necessarily so hard. Remember, employers like to hire people from the ranks of the employed, not the unemployed, so if you currently have a job, you’re in a strong position to go looking for and get other offers.

It’s not unusual to be asked for written evidence of a counter offer. If you've got one, don’t be pressured into showing this. You are under no obligation to do so, and it’s a legitimate tactic to say that you will only do this when you have written evidence of a counter offer.

Should I accept a verbal counter offer?

Absolutely not. There are reports of verbal counter offers which are given in this situation which never actually materialise. An unscrupulous employer knows that if you accept a verbal counter offer and stay, your alternative offer will almost certainly have closed by the time you realise they have duped you.

Are there downsides and how do I counter them?

Yes there are potentially. In some cases, the counter offer may come with strings attached. For example you may have your targets increased and this could be to unrealistically high levels. If this is the case you’ll need to think hard about whether it’s realistic for you to achieve these revised levels of performance.

Some employers will interpret your tactics as revealing a lack of loyalty and commitment. Therefore you have to approach this with tact and no trace of bitterness. The best approach is to be pleasant, clear and honest about it. Don’t be tempted to go on about all the things you hate about your job or employer. This adds nothing constructive to the discussion. The more matter of fact you are about things, the more likely your employer will be willing to negotiate.

It’s a good idea too to demonstrate this by stating (regardless of whether this is true or not) that you were approached by a recruiter about the job, not that you went looking for it. This shows that you've not been actively disloyal - rather that you are just such hot property that everyone wants to get their hands on you!

It’s not just about the money

It’s a good idea to make other non-monetary demands at the same time. This might seem counter-intuitive, but here’s why. Let’s say you feel that you have been under-developed by your employer. It’s fair to point this out and ask what they will do in the next 12 months to help you develop your skills further. This sends an important message; instead of being seen as yet more cost, your employer is more likely to interpret this as evidence that you take your career and personal development seriously. And if you point out that your new offer includes more personal development opportunities, they’ll feel the need to be competitive in this area too.

Do I recommend this to everyone?

No I don’t. It’s a tactic that works for some and is happening more and more in today’s marketplace. But you should think hard before you adopt it. If you think your employer is going to renege on the deal or blacklist you, and you don’t really like your job that much, it’s probably safe to say, you don’t really want a counter-offer anyway.

On the other hand, keeping your networking alive and an eye out for potential openings is absolutely a good idea. Employer loyalty is thing of the past, so you shouldn't have too many conscience pangs about looking after number one.

What the life of Nelson Mandela tells us about measuring human potential

By Neil Patrick

The passing of Nelson Mandela has already prompted millions of words in tribute to his accomplishments. It has also led to all sorts of petty squabbles on internet forums, about everything from racism, to the legitimacy of the ANC’s terrorist activities to his personal life.

I have no intention of starting any debates here about any of these things. I feel it's much more constructive to talk about what his life can teach the rest of us.

The world has lost one of its most charismatic and inspirational figureheads. Nelson Mandela was a great man. He was also an imperfect man, born into a very imperfect world.

It's a simple fact of life that none of us are perfect. And our pasts are a cocktail of successes and failures. But in the eyes of those whose professional business it is to make judgement about others, imperfections, deviations and failures are often used in the calculation of our future value and potential.

Despite being frequently attributed to Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, it was originally the Cherokee tribe of Native Americans, who said, 'Don't judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes'.

Nelson Mandela spent a total of 27 years in prison. He emerged without a trace of bitterness towards his captors. In later life he always looked for the best in people, even defending political opponents to his allies, who sometimes thought him too trusting of others.

Mandela was a devout believer in democracy and would abide by majority decisions even when deeply disagreeing with them. He held a conviction that inclusivity, accountability and freedom of speech were the fundamentals of democracy, and was driven by a belief in natural and human rights.

His achievements and personal qualities have elevated him to the level of a saint in the eyes of many. But he was characteristically modest about his accomplishments, saying  "I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances."

In 1895, at the age of sixteen, Albert Einstein sat the entrance examinations for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich (later the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule ETH). He failed to reach the required standard in the general part of the examination.

Another legend, Walt Disney was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1920 when his biggest client went bust. However, after few years, Walt launched a new company and created Mickey Mouse in 1928, which brought him financial freedom.

If we take anyone’s past record and assign it any importance as an indicator of the future, we are failing to understand that what people do is the outcome of a complex and unique blend of time, place, circumstance, personality, learning, aspirations, beliefs and options.

It’s a common notion that ‘past actions are the best indicator of future performance’. It may well be that people's basic characters do not change much. But character interacts with all the other situational factors to produce differing outcomes. In other words, put the same person in a different environment and a different outcome is more or less guaranteed.

So here’s the point. If we are to try and judge others, we’d better have a really good understanding of every aspect of their life history. If we don’t, our judgements cannot be reliable.

Just consider the common practices involved in recruiting people. The application pile is quickly reduced by rapid scanning to a small pile of 'best fits'. Average time spent - about 10 seconds per resume.

These remaining resumes are then examined forensically to try and find grounds to diminish an applicant’s suitability. Answers to interview questions are scrutinised to try and see if they reveal shortcomings. Ridiculous surrogates are used to try and assess an individual’s character, like their handshake or details of their hair and clothing.

How would Nelson Mandela stack up against these sorts of measurements?

“Mr Mandela, we've been looking at your application for the post of President of South Africa. Have you had any previous experience of being a national leader?”

“Could you tell me about a situation in which you had to overcome opposition to your ideas and how you went about it?”

“We operate a strict policy that all heads of state should have a clean police record. Have you ever been in trouble with the police or convicted of any offence?”

The future performance of an individual will be determined as much or more by the circumstances and experiences they have in the future as it will be by what has gone before.

The past is not a reliable predictor of the future.

And if organisations want to attract and keep the best people, they've got to try much harder to provide the conditions that allow their people to flourish. Create the right culture and environment and everyone performs better than they have ever done before.

The HR agenda should worry less about pseudo-scientific psychological evaluation and much more about how the daily work experience and environment equips and encourages people to be the best they can be.

Unless you are lucky enough to hire someone like Nelson Mandela who is so special, that punishment motivates them to do their greatest work. But you won't, because people like Nelson Mandela won't pass your screening process.

Why you will fail to have a great career

By Neil Patrick

Naturally, I talk almost exclusively about jobs and careers on this blog.

But what is the difference between a job and a career? A lot actually…

Most people think of a career as nothing more than a succession of jobs. But a job and a career are not the same thing. A job, any job, is basically a simple transaction between you and an employer. They give you money and you give them your time and work in exchange.

You take a job because, because… why? Usually it’s just because you are offered it. And you need the money. Not much more generally, if you are really honest about it. I can’t remember the last time I had a conversation that went something like, ‘Yep they offered me the job…and I turned it down. It wasn’t really fitting right with my life goals’.

Most of us have been taught from a very early age, that if you work hard, you’ll succeed and be happy. And if you work really hard, you’ll be really successful. It’s not true. At least it’s not true if all you have is a job rather than a career. And despite the fact that this reality is staring us in the face every day, we still keep on believing it.

Just about every time I ask one of my hard working professional friends how things are going at work, I get a similar answer. But whatever their answer, they will almost always begin with, ‘Yeah things are really busy...’.

'Really busy'. Hmmm. Since when did being really busy equate with the fulfilment of anyone’s calling?

A career on the other hand isn’t a job. It may involve a job or jobs, but it is something you choose because it is what you need to reach your greatest level of self-expression and self-realisation. A real career engages you every single day of your life. It is your very reason for living. It is …your passion.

Yes I know, as soon as I mention the ‘P’ word, some or even many readers will have a Pavlovian response and think… 'Oh here we go, here's another guy, telling me all I need to do is find my passion and my career will flourish’.

'He’s going to tell me all about brilliant people with amazing talents who got lucky'.

Well I’m not going to say that, because it’s not true. And it’s not the point.

What I am going to say is that you have a choice. You can choose the default path and have a life of mediocrity and hard work in a series of jobs. And these days, those jobs will get harder and harder to find and in this economy you’ll have longer and longer periods without one.

Or you can be brave, believe in yourself and the essential truth that no-one ever had a brilliant career by simply having a job. And have the faith that if you accept this truth, find your purpose and pursue your goals because they are your passion, you WILL have a brilliant career.

So the choice is up to you. Every one of us has at least one unique and amazing talent. But most people compete in areas where they have no talent at all.

And it’s clear that I’m not the only one who believes this. Just watch this really entertaining performance at TEDx by Larry Smith from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, who knows a thing or two about careers.

RICHARD BRANSON: Hiring older workers is the right thing to do

Here's a interview with Richard Branson last year, in which he gives his views on the value of older workers. Given the association of the Virgin brand with youthful vigor, not to mention Branson's penchant for adrenaline stoked adventures, I think his views on this subject are worth repeating here. Apparently he plans to work until he is 90...

Q: What is your approach to hiring older workers? If you were looking for a position, how would you look to overcome the ageism barrier?

A: Thank you for your question! It is an appropriate time for me to address the issues of age and the workforce, as I turned 60 in July.

This year I ran my first marathon in just over five hours and tried to set a record as the oldest person to kite-surf across the English Channel (high winds forced me to abandon the attempt) - both tasks usually associated with younger people. And I'm not alone. These days, people are living much longer, active lives - so retiring at a young age is no longer necessary. If a person looks after himself with regular exercise and a good diet, there is no reason why he should not keep going well past 60.

I plan to work until I feel I'm no longer making a real contribution to Virgin. I see a good 30 years of work ahead. It's true that at 60 there are some tasks that suit me better than others, but I see few real limitations in my current role.

Richard Branson

In the UK, the government has recommended extending the age of retirement to 67, and many countries in the rest of Europe are contemplating similar legislation. It is not just governments, but company boards around the world that are facing the challenges of serving ageing populations.

So while it is true that some employers may have negative preconceptions about hiring older workers, they are only doing themselves a disservice. Entrepreneurs and managers who hope to succeed are taking a close look at older applicants.

There are real advantages to hiring these employees. Studies have shown that older workers may lower time-keeping and absentee issues ; they also tend to have higher levels of commitment to their jobs and loyalty to their employers, which reduces staff churn and helps reduce recruitment costs.

And there is a strong business case for companies to diversify the age groups they employ. In all our ventures, we put a real emphasis on offering great service, and to succeed, we must truly understand our customers and see our service through their eyes. As our and others' customer bases get older, managers will need staffers who themselves reflect the changing demographics.

This is a challenge for Virgin since we have tended to be quite young at heart. The average age in the group is still fairly young, with more than a third of staff under the age of 35 and only around 3% over 55.

This is largely determined by a few factors, including the sectors we operate in and the newcomer status of some of the businesses. For example, Virgin Active, our health club chain, attracts a younger workforce due to the physical nature of the work. As the challengers to established brands, our airlines - Virgin America, Atlantic and Blue - have tended to be magnets for younger cabin crews and ground staff, which affects the group's average age.

Even our finance business has younger staff - again, people interested in the company's challenger status and in new product development. But as we prepare for the future, this is a factor that clearly needs to change.

How? Well, many businesses retire their experienced staffers, both to cut costs when times get tough and as a matter of course. But those employers can lose a lot of key skills when workers with a wealth of knowledge and experience leave.

One answer is to become more accommodating in work arrangements. Offering part- time jobs, job shares, flexi-time and full-time jobs with longer holidays may attract older workers. This would enable everyone - not just older employees - to strike a better work-life balance and allow companies to retain their skills and experience.

I hope that with this approach, our group will continue to maintain a very open policy of recruitment and that ageism will not be an issue. Hiring older workers isn't just the right thing to do; it also makes good business sense.

Branson blogs on www.virgin.com/richard- branson/blog. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ richardbranson.

This post originally appeared here:
http://www.bdlive.co.za/articles/2010/10/14/richard-branson-value-the-skills-of-older-workers;jsessionid=27C5CBE518983FFEF9FD83338E88121E.present1.bdfm

What every HR professional needs to know about the latest findings in neuroscience

With any task which requires learning, we can benefit from a deeper understanding of how the learning process actually works. What you may not know about though is how the latest discoveries in neuroscience can help people perform better at any task they undertake.

If you are a judicious entrepreneur, you will not need any convincing about the importance of a talent management approach as a part of your business strategy. Over the past 15+ years, cognitive science research (and specifically neuroscience) has given us some valuable insights into the ways learning and development take place.

These discoveries are not just of value to business leaders however. They are also invaluable for HR leaders interested in understanding how they can improve the learning capabilities (and overall performance) of their organisation’s people. More generally, they are also valuable for anyone who wants to understand how they can improve their own learning capabilities.

Some of the breakthrough discoveries are:

• Learning is a process that allows new neural networks to be continuously built and re-built 

• Teachers cannot transmit knowledge to learners! (interesting) 

• Our personal performance is entirely dependent on context (work, personal, history)  

• Learning skills are dependent on the coordination of basic skills rather than complex skills. 

• We must support our own learning by creating personal contexts (otherwise we will not learn!)  

• Essential to learning is regression (so if we make an error it is part of the learning process!!!)

• Skills are all interrelated rather than isolated

"Up until the 1980’s, scientists thought the structure of the brain developed during childhood and that once developed, there was very little room for change. Scientists now know that the brain possesses enormous capacity to change: People’s ability to process widely varied information and complex new experiences with relative ease can often be surprising. The brain’s ability to act and react in ever-changing ways is known as neuroplasticity" Understanding What Makes People Tick, 2009.

For example, employees may be able to memorise that HR exists for the purpose of people management. However to fully develop a meaningful understanding, for example one that enables HR professionals to use creative concepts, requires a person to constantly build upon new and old concepts, including understanding.

Cognitive development builds up connections between ideas and skills; this is a skill theory process of coordination of very complex (mental) units. So let's take an HR topic like 'Talent Strategy' and see where neuroscience comes in the picture.

With different explanations of talent strategy, I would broadly position it around these keywords: succession planning, effective training and development programs, and empowering your talent.

Now talent strategy cannot do wonders in isolation, instead you should have 4 key elements firmly positioned in place:

• Motivational factors that enable people to deliver business strategy 

• Elements that create the right talent culture  

• Making sure that managers feed motivation to the talent 

• Managing change by running business strategy and talent strategy in parallel with each other

If you have a vision to intersect neuroscience with HR, you will soon realise that the above 4 elements are already knitted into your culture. So what basically neuroscience suggests is that you, as an HR professional should understand how a human brain works.

Every employee performs and understands their work tasks differently, especially when they receive different levels of support.

First identify your talent through answering this question: Who is performing rather out-performing your expectations and has a track record of efficiently delivering the business goals? I will call these people ‘super performers’.

Recognise the attributes (found in a distributed form) of super performers such as having very clear purpose of what drives their behaviour.

Such people are very sure of how to execute their role and often appear as persistent self-improvers. You would observe their healthy disappointment with under-performance and not settling for anything less than perfect. One of the most admired attributes of super performers is that they are ‘thrill, feedback and new role’ seekers.

Without understanding what neuroscience tells us, as an HR professional, you would identify super performers as nothing but ‘trouble and pain’.

The million-dollar question is how to make most out of super performers through applying neuroscience.

I have created a model for ‘change management’ where you can effectively plant super performers and achieve business objectives. But first let's understand what neuroscience has to say about ‘resistance to change’, a very common HR challenge.

To our brains, change is detected as a fault/error/mistake!

This clearly means that our brain sees change as a slip-up. The reason for this is that our brain has been constantly working to create certain patterns and ways of doing things, these patterns are basically our ‘short-cuts’ for carrying out our everyday activities. As an example, you do not have to think how to walk every time you need to walk. However when our brain sees a change in walking, it realises that it has to work harder and hence, prompts a response of 'error/fault/mistake' and I would say sometimes even irrational reaction to change, as it is viewed as an error and this is directly followed by resistance.

Not trying to be a neuroscientist here, but as an HR professional, I have personally experienced the benefits of applying neuroscience. My approach to facilitate change for change-resisters especially those rated as ‘super performers’ would be:

• Encouraging them to create their own way of managing things, though staying within the scope of the change strategy

• Enhancing flexibility through ‘feeding’ them (in my words), otherwise known as training and development

• Developing people to generate solutions and not problems

So remember, “Those who are nurtured best, survive best” Cozolino

(c) 2013 Human Resources Global Ltd.

Written by Nicole Le Maire, Founder of Human Resources Global Ltd. a HR Consultancy targeting individuals and SME's within the emerging market regions. Nicole focuses on supporting clients in non-traditional HR ways and she can be contacted via Nicole@humanresourcesglobal.com or via twitter @NicoleLeMaire