Musings on a Monarch

Musings on a Monarch

by | Sep 12, 2022 | Jobs, Leadership, Leadership Agility, Pivoting

In the autumn of 1984 when I arrived in England to begin an academic year there, I wasn’t thinking so much about Queen Elizabeth II. There to study Tudor and Stuart History, I had Elizabeth I on my mind. What a strong, and amazing monarch she was! As an American, the thing I most noticed about Elizabeth II? Seeing her image on a daily basis: on stamps and on money. That was odd to me, we enlightened Americans had a tradition that no living person should be on its currency. 

 

In September of 2015, I was in the UK when Her Majesty surpassed Victoria and became the longest reigning British monarch. Older, and having seen more of life, commitments, and oaths, I was grateful to be there on that historic day. I had grown to respect her greatly for her endurance and dedication alone.  The James Bond video only added to my admiration.

 

In 2018 circumstances found me sitting in on a college seminar class called Gender in Politics. That day, one topic of conversation was Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand. The students and professor turned from discussing the job she was doing, to how many countries have had female leaders.  Why, they wondered had the United States yet to have a female president?  One student posited that countries that had had monarchies might be more comfortable with a woman as a leader.

 

The conversation continued around this theme. How rich the irony that this discussion might be praising benefits of an “outdated” form of rule?

 

September 2022. Surveying some of the coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s death, I stumbled across a BBC interview of four women who had travelled to lay wreaths at Buckingham Palace. One of the women said: “We will never see a queen again, and that is quite odd.”

For that group, every single day of their life, there was a female leader, always adorning their stamps and their money. Indeed, throughout the Commonwealth, especially with the advent of television, and now social media, a huge population has grown up with not only a female head of state, but one that demonstrated duty that few others on earth will ever equal. 

Elizabeth I was indeed an important monarch, solidifying England’s position at tumultuous time. Elizabeth II was given a far trickier portfolio – of acknowledging that the sort of democracy that had evolved in Britain over centuries was worthy of export, that the Empire should disassemble, and that she would shepherd the process with grace and dignity.

 

 

Labor Day Contemplation

Labor Day Contemplation

by | Sep 1, 2022 | Human Capital, Jobs, Skilled Labor, Work Place

Labor Day evokes many images.  For some of us, it’s a time to savor the last days at the beach, perhaps with a good read?

Most of us hope to find meaning and purpose in our jobs.  In this era of The Great Reassessment, maybe this is the Labor Day to reconsider our own toil?  Or that of our colleagues?

Here are three suggestions to spark your own contemplation:

This podcast introduced me to Dr. Mike Rose, who was a professor of education at UCLA.  He wrote The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker.  In an excerpt from the podcast, he reflects on the concept of meaningful work:


So let’s then bust this notion of meaningfulness open, … regardless of the kind of work, to be able to support a family or put food on the table, that’s meaningful. … So for her, then, in the midst of this difficult work and difficult circumstances, there was great meaning in the kind of social dimension of it, right?

Conversely, you and I both know people who are doing work that the culture at large, from a distance, would say is really meaningful — and they’re miserable.

… They’re as unhappy as can be. You know, the miserable lawyer, the unhappy neurosurgeon … So meaningfulness is a more fluid and rich and variable concept, I think, than we tend to imagine.

In Dr. Rose’s book, he references Stud Terkel’s American Classic: Working: People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.  This 600+ page book is something we all should have picked up in quarantine! In the introduction, the author says:

“It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash.”

 

Some industrious folks found Stud’s original reel-to-reel tapes and distilled the best of them into an hour-long podcast.  These snippets from the 1970s are both time capsule and insight into what gets folks out of bed in the morning.

Lastly, a book published about a decade ago by a modern-day philosopher, Alain de Botton. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work questions how some professions can be so admired, yet how we overlook those that accomplish remarkable feats.

As goodreads summarizes it:   

We spend most of our waking lives at work–in occupations often chosen by our unthinking younger selves. And yet we rarely ask ourselves how we got there or what our occupations mean to us.

… With a philosophical eye and his signature combination of wit and wisdom, Alain de Botton leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art–in search of what make jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying.

All good fodder to ponder as the summer winds down, and we head back to work, possibly with renewed vigor about our own vocations.

 

It’s Complicated

It’s Complicated

by | Aug 9, 2022 | Compensation, Economy, Hiring, Jobs, Labor Markets, Unemployment, Wage Increases

And then some

Sometimes you read that about relationships. Right now it applies to the relationship all of us have with the economy.

This headline from The Washington Post seemed to sum it up: “Pick your economy: Booming labor market or fizzling growth”

Yes

It’s hard to wrap your head around economic conditions that are so seldom seen in tandem.

The backdrop for the recent wage increases is very complicated, which is frustrating because everyone would like a very simple answer, and even easier solutions.

A recent paper from The Hamilton Project examines where all the workers have gone.  In the most simplistic of summaries:

  • • The U.S. Labor Force is down between 3 to 3.5 million people from what was expected
  • • Over 250,000 pandemic-related deaths were those aged between 18 and 64
  • • Government policies have limited immigration
  • • The child-care crisis worsened during Covid and has diminished women’s labor force participation

Before panic sets in about a recession, perhaps look for opportunity?  If other companies are laying off, it could be for a host of reasons that has nothing to do with your organization.  External economic pressures can expose internal flaws in firms.  Maybe they’ve just laid off someone with that specific skill set that you haven’t been able to find? 

Remember, there are still approximately two job openings for every available person, which gives people the confidence to leave jobs.  As the Atlanta Fed’s chart shows us monthly, the job switchers make more than the job stayers.   

COLA

COLA

by | May 10, 2022 | Compensation, Economy, Jobs, Labor Markets, Salary Budgets

There’s a word that compensation consultants of a more recent era have shunned for at least two decades:  COLA

And not in favor of the unCola – in favor of NO COLA.

In fact, the consultants at CHRC have spent a fair amount of time explaining the differences between

Merit Budgets

and

COLA – Cost of Living Adjustments

Until their faces turn an unattractive shade of blue.

The phrase that gets economists animated is “wage-price spiral” … and many are turning an unattractive shade of red believing that the current wage increases are going to take the U.S. to the kind of wage-price spiral that the U.S. economy experienced in the 1970s.

So much to our delight, last week Mitchell Hartman on Marketplace did a story that featured the COLA that we don’t like to imbibe.  More importantly, in addition to economists that are convinced we are headed for the spiral, he featured two that pointed out key distinctions of what separates the current situation from that in the 1970s.

Ross Mayfield of Baird points out that unlike the 1970s, the worker’s demands aren’t driving inflation, supply constraints caused by the war in Ukraine and Covid are.  Economist Joe Brusuelas underscores the statistic that undergirds Mr. Mayfield’s point:

“At that time, labor unions represented approximately 1 in 4 American workers.”

Why were those COLAs so worrisome?  They were built right into those union contracts for years at a time, regardless of market conditions. That was a very large factor in the wage-price spiral

How many Americans belong to a union right now? 

Reach for the STARs

Reach for the STARs

by | Feb 22, 2022 | Competencies, Diversity, Economy, Hiring, Human Capital, Innovation, Jobs, Labor Markets, Recruiting

Our February musings have encouraged looking beyond your own environment — whether a groundhog emerging to see his shadow, imagining beyond deep snow drifts to the intricate physics of a single flake, and now urging you to gaze at STARs …

STARs is an acronym for Skilled Through Alternative Routes.

The Burning Glass Institute recently published The Emerging Degree Reset. While employers are finally understanding that eliminating the degree requirement for some of their jobs will give them access to a broader labor pool, there will be a burden as well: 

“A reset requires employers to be more articulate about the skills they require for the job”

Article after article on this topic concedes that employers have used the degree requirement as a proxy for the competencies that they assume a college degree imparts, versus articulating or probing for those behaviors in the interview process.

How many more workers?

In a recent story on Marketplace, Papia Debroy, who leads research at the nonprofit Opportunity@Work said:

“There are more than 70 million workers in our U.S. labor force today who are skilled through alternative routes — through community college, through military service. Most often they’re learning on the job…”

If you’re wondering what sort of employers might be looking for STARs, the piece interviews Jimmy Etheredge, CEO of Accenture North America, who is an advocate.  

“The assumption has always been, ‘I need to look for people that have a technical background, and then the easier thing to teach is the soft skills,’” “It’s easier to teach them the technology, and they already have amazing skills for doing client-customer interaction,” Etheredge said.

If you’ve ever seen a detailed image depicting the crystal structure of a snowflake, it didn’t come from a college graduate.  Those photos taken under a microscope in the bitter cold were taken by a farmer nicknamed Snowflake Bentley who had all the competencies like curiosity, initiative, and determination – but lacked the technical tool to capture the images.  Once armed with that technology, the sky was his limit, and his laboratory.