The HR Whisperer

 Toyota’s recent woes with automobile manufacturing defects and the dragging of their feet in responding to the resulting safety and customer issues has left a lot of people feeling cold right now.  This, combined with the record brisk temps we’ve been having anyway  is wreaking havoc on the car buying public and our collective psyche. 

Well, maybe I’m the only one who’s collective psyche is cold.  

 John Rosevear of the The Motley Fool points out that the problem really isn’t so much the safety issues, which are bad and need fixing, but more with the “company’s longtime pattern of responding to problems with a mix of denial and foot shuffling.”

 And apparently it is going to get worse. 

John goes on to say that,

 “Officials in high places in the U.S. are getting cranky…on Tuesday [February 16^th], the Department of Transportation ordered Toyota to turn over documents related to various safety issues.  That may not sound like a big deal, but it is — the DOT is aggressively looking for evidence that Toyota knew of safety defects but didn’t take appropriate action. And if they find that evidence? Oh boy.”

Suddenly, it’s getting hot in here.

Many companies have faced recalls – I distinctly remember Johnson & Johnson’s recall of its Tylenol product  as I worked for The Southland Corporation (parent company of  7-ELEVEN food stores) at the time and in the absence of our area manager had to tell our franchise owners to remove the analgesic from the shelves.  Bad situation.  Good decision.

But the product recall itself is not the entire issue; the more important issue is how the company deals with the recall. 

Which really is trust, isn’t it  – customer trust in whether or not it is safe to purchase the company’s products, and employee trust in whether or not leadership is upfront in walking the talk.

J&J’s doing a great job.  Toyota’s not.

The president of Toyota’s Georgetown, KY plant says company workers are taking the series of recalls personally.

Of course they are.

It seems that Toyota built its reputation on excellence, reliability, customer service and value.  But the company values listed on its website say:  “We believe…in hard work…that good neighbors make good company and vice versa…that the world is getting bigger, but resources aren’t…in the value of diversity – it’s what makes life interesting.”

I don’t about you, but I don’t take away anything about integrity and trust from those values.  Maybe they are implied, but if company leadership refuses to accept responsibility for its mistakes and doesn’t even acknowledge that trust and integrity are important components of doing business, then what can employees believe in?

Now, I’m not saying that if it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist.  But we do know that mutual trust is a critical factor in the employer-employee relationship.  If trust exists, employees have a pretty good idea of what company life they can expect and how the company will behave.  When that trust has been breached, as it has been with Toyota, that relationship changes dramatically.

Or maybe the relationship really wasn’t there to begin with.

The best way to maintain trust is to keep from breaking it in the first place.  Leadership integrity, as demonstrated by behavior, is crucial.  That’s Leadership 101.

So, it really is not just Toyota’s products that need to be recalled; I think it’s also time to recall its leadership.

It’s that time of year again when kids are starting to fill out college applications, deciding if they don’t want college but would rather be a dental hygienist or fire fighter instead, or just plain freaking out that in a few short months their high school career will be over.  I’ve got one of those at home right now and it ain’t pretty.

What do these kids really have to look forward to anyway, career-wise?  With unemployment ravaging the workforce, organizational changes drying up the already few and far between entry-level opportunities, major competition for jobs driving highly experienced people to do desperate things and college tuition rates soaring, just what is out there for new grads?

Not much says an article in the October 19^th issue of BusinessWeek.  Author Peter Coy points out that newly minted high school, college and MBA grads are bright, eager – and unwanted.  The U.S. unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds is around 18% and with the lack of jobs for those kids, their lifetime income potential is plummeting.  It seems like we are creating our own death spiral.

You’d think that with all this cheap labor out there companies would be snapping young people up by the dozen and getting rid of the more expensive employees.  Tain’t so.  We all know nobody’s doing anything in light of the unstable economy. But we weren’t doing a good job of bringing in the new kids to begin with anyway.

Part of what is scary about this too, is that so many of these young people are well-educated, enthusiastic and raring to go.  They’re the ones who are going to be funding Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare in the years to come.  We’re all living longer and many of us lost a ton of retirement money over the past several years due to the bouncing stock market.  So, that means that the older generations are going to have to keep working– which leaves even less for the new kids on the block, never mind our societal coffers.  And let’s not start on the loss of creativity and diversity in organizations.

Some people think the government should intervene before things get worse by subsidizing education, cutting minimum wage, offering more job training, or instituting apprenticeship programs for skilled blue-collar jobs.  Good ideas all, but require some more thinking on my part before I profess an opinion one way or another.

What I will opine though, is that we need to take care of our “pack.”  All organizations should be hiring or interning young people to keep the talent pipeline viable in spite of the wishy-washy economy.

Yea, I know these are great words…reality of business life…who’s going to train them…where do we put them…blah, blah, blah.

If we only focus on short-term and not look toward the horizon, how many organizations are going to miss the sunset and not see the dawn?

What is it with business people and buzzwords?  Good Lord, we seem to get new ones every year – and I hate them, just hate them.  To me buzzwords are just a slick way of getting people to pay attention to things they should have been paying attention to all along.  Back in the 90s, we used to call this phenomena the “flavor of the month.” In other words, if you waited around long enough the buzz word and accompanying fluff around it would go away and be replaced by a new one.  One of the things some consultants do is create a new buzzword about an old idea they are rehashing or trying to refresh.  A lot of times it’s a marketing ploy to draw attention to their business.  I shudder when I think about it – consultants and their buzzwords, that is.

Well, now the new buzzword is transparency. We’re seeing it all over the place.  I’m sure it’s the result of Sarbanes-Oxley and all that other good stuff we have to deal with in light of some questionable leadership ethics or lack thereof.  That’s okay – the concept that is – but what I hate is how the word is so overused and from that the good of the concept abused.

In the business and social context, transparency is supposed to mean open communication and accountability.  That one can “see through” to the real heart of the matter, i.e., the truth.  Full disclosure.  But I can’t help but feel that some who say they are being transparent are really trying to hide something in plain view.

I googled “transparency in business” and had 18,100,000 hits.  That’s a lot of transparency going on. 

Oh hey — did you know that there is a worldwide  organization dedicated to transparency?  Transparency International-USA was founded in 1993 with the mission to “combat corruption and promote transparency and integrity in government, business and development assistance.”

That was one good hit out of 18, 100,000.  The other 17,999,999 seemed to have to do with visibility and disclosure.  But doesn’t visibility and disclosure really mean how people behave in the conduct of business? See, it all goes back to behavior.

What I am trying to do is raise the issue that we shouldn’t be hiding behind the buzzword of the day to behave appropriately.

Some people may believe that transparency is really about putting your business out there, totally unguarded.  I don’t buy it.  I believe that transparency is about being open and honest – but also protective of the organization and the people who run it.  Being open and honest with the financials?  You betcha.  Being prepared to accept and learn from frank customer feedback gleaned from social media? Yes. You can’t fix anything if you don’t know it’s broken. 

But how about when someone uses transparency as an excuse to share information that has the potential to hurt another individual or to make themselves look good?  Not so much.  That’s not transparency ladies and gentleman, that’s politics.

People have been spinning the since the dawn of time.  Look at the headlines.  There’s been a flurry  of articles from the Associated Press about how “Fox News Channel acts like a wing of the Republican Party” according to White House communications director Anita Dunn.  The AP states that the White House believes that Fox News“ operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” Fox News executive Michael Clemente responded by saying “most viewers know the difference between news and opinion shows. He says attacking the messenger doesn’t work.”

So, who’s being transparent here?  Is this a real debate going on or is it just a political ploy?  There’s probably a fact pattern on both sides – just like there is when we have one employee warring against another about the honesty of a performance appraisal.  Performance appraisals can be notoriously biased, and often are in the guise of being transparent, when they are really being used to craft a particular political climate for supervisors or employees.

I know, instead of calling people out for not being transparent, let’s call them out for not admitting they are using transparency to further their political gain.  You know who you are – that’s because you’re transparent.