THE PEOPLE MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES OF HARDSHIP POSTINGS - PART 1
By Matt Henricks
Organisational Psychologist and Human Resources Consultant Matt Henricks recently completed a challenging, fixed-term assignment as the Industrial Relations and Human Resources Manager for a large construction project in Port Hedland. He provides perspectives on management in general and in hardship settings.
Upon beginning this assignment I became acutely aware of the lack of literature available on how to manage a blue-collar workforce in a hardship posting. Given Australia is currently experiencing a mining and construction boom in many parts of regional Australia I was surprised by this. I had expected to find a plethora of information (both useful and otherwise) but was disappointed. This article will hopefully prove a useful and thought provoking read for other Managers, Applied Psychologists and HR professionals working in this challenging area.
Given this may be your first exposure to the Team Focus strategic HR approach I will also be outlining this throughout the article.
WHAT IS AN EFFECTIVE PEOPLE MANAGER?
We believe the best way to define effective people managers is by the outcomes that they are able to achieve. Managing people well results in a number of positive outcomes for the manager and their employees. However the most important outcome is an increase in the discretionary effort of staff towards the accomplishment of business objectives. The Team Focus approach maintains this as the primary goal of effective people management.
What is discretionary effort? We all know there is a bare minimum that employees can typically get away with, especially in a large company. In the right commercial environment this bare minimum might be enough to build a profitable business. However, it will rarely be enough to take that business and make it exceptional. Those of us who have worked for ourselves or in a small start-up business know the energy and enthusiasm that it is possible for people to employ when they are truly motivated. Your people managers should be able to elicit this same level of discretionary effort from each and every one of their employees.
THE FOUR INSTRUMENTS OF MANAGEMENT
We challenge customers to utilise all the tools available to them as managers. Often corporate strategy is put at risk because managers fail to use all the tools at their disposal, or worse, set them up in competition. The four main instruments of management that Team Focus encourages managers to consider are:
MINDSET - considering staff beliefs and attitudes and challenging these where necessary.
BEHAVIOUR - demonstrating that you mean what you say and say what you mean.
PROCESS - consideration of the regular and systematic influences that your organisations policies, systems and procedures have on your staff behaviour.
STRUCTURE - designing an organisational structure that reflects the most effective and efficient way to achieve your business objectives.
In this article I will consider some people management challenges that have been experienced at my most recent assignment in Port Hedland from the perspective of each of the first two of these instruments, being Mindset and Behaviour. In the next article I will complete my observations from the perspective of Process and Structure.
MINDSET
The most powerful driver of behaviour is underlying belief. In a way, you can liken a person's underlying beliefs to gravity. On a day-to-day basis you might be able to defy gravity for short bursts but you will always come back to earth. When we talk about beliefs at Team Focus we are not just talking about religious, ideological or theoretical beliefs, we are actually talking about the practical day to day beliefs that guide employee behaviour at work. For example:
"This is an engineering business and the most influential people here will always be engineers…"
"They know what they are doing."
"My manager cares about me and gives me the benefit of the doubt."
"We value the safety of employees above all else."
Gravity is a funny thing, you cannot actually see it or touch it but every day we see evidence of it in the world around us. The same could be said of beliefs. However, many managers do not take the time to consider what their employees actually believe in order to make sense of the way they are behaving. Worse still, many people managers do not spend enough time talking to their staff to come up with an accurate understanding of their beliefs in the first place.
As a senior manager at my current posting I have identified a number of common beliefs amongst staff that are potentially very dangerous. Just three beliefs that I think are quite common at this posting are as follows:
I am isolated from the broader business and it does not care about me.
The umbrella "project management" organisation is not working in my best interests.
This place is terrible and we deserve to be paid well just to be here.
All three of these contain an element of truth; we ARE working in an isolated place and the tyranny of distance certainly makes it hard to liaise with other projects or head office; the project management organisation does ensure that each contractor is held accountable for delivering against their commitments; and unfortunately, yes, Port Hedland is not the nicest place to live in the world. However, what is scary is that many employees would hold each of the above beliefs as entirely true (not partially so). Just think about the implications of this for behaviour. If the business does not care about me, will I be committed to seeing out the project to completion? If the project manager is not on my side will the information that I share with them be entirely accurate and transparent? If I'm paid just to be here then how hard am I likely to work?
The truth is that often beliefs are extremely hard to shift. However, what an employee believes is a product of what they experience to be true each day and if we are able to change this experience in a significant way then we can begin to shape their underlying beliefs. The only long term way to ensure that an employee is experiencing a particular type of environment is to utilise all of the four instruments of management in harmony. As managers we must accept that what staff experience is a result of the processes we ask them to use, the structure that they work within and how they see us behaving. If any of the four instruments of management is misaligned or ill-directed it will detract from the impact of the other three.
What does this mean for this construction project that I am assigned to at the moment? The other three instruments will be discussed later. However there are a number of initiatives that managers should consider when setting up this project and throughout its operation to address this mindset problem. Managers should have at least considered the following:
(1) A project launch process that right from the start positioned the management of each contractor involved as one big team and ensured that that team was working in a productive and functioning manner. This does not happen by accident and a small investment in workshops up front can yield significant and measurable results.
(2) Embedding of appropriate principles and materials into induction and orientation processes.
(3) Symbolic intervention across the entire workforce. Establishment of awards and highly visible actions by senior management to reinforce the right messages.
While the above initiatives should help to reinforce or set-up appropriate mindsets for all employees it is important to note that all four instruments of management need to be utilised wisely so that sustainable success can be achieved.
BEHAVIOUR
Perhaps the most difficult area to master as a manager is behaving in a way that is consistent with the way you want employees to see you behaving. The way you think you are behaving is often quite different to the way you are perceived. This is because employees view their manager's behaviour via their own mindsets and tend to interpret what they see consistent with these mindsets. The challenge as a manager is to anticipate and accept these biases in your employees and to try and behave in a way that realigns their beliefs consistent with the goals of the business.
Thinking about behaviour as a manager should be an iterative process. As a manager, when you act, irrespective of what instrument of management you use, you should be constantly assessing whether or not your action has had the desired impact on employee behaviour. At Team Focus we can tailor a variety of programs to help you think about the way you behave as a manager, whether it be presentation skills, performance management training or general coaching sessions. Our approach is always to help managers to help themselves by training them to constantly assess and re-assess their own behaviour and adjusting based on what is best for the business.
In hardship postings, often all personnel working onsite have an air of machismo and outwardly portray a tough exterior. This project is no different. This makes people management even more difficult. One common pitfall for managers is assuming that if someone is tough they don't need the same level of attention or care. An example of this recently occurred at this assignment:
A front-line manager (lets call him Bill) recently came to me to advise that one of his crane drivers (lets call him Sam) had not been paid for a week. Crane drivers are well paid on site and annualised Sam can earn up to $200,000 pa. Sam is a pretty tough looking guy and so Bill decided, without Sam's input, that he would be able to cope without pay for a week until next weeks pay run. While in this particular situation, Sam was able cope, Bill had not checked on this. Bill had obviously assumed that he understood Sam's personal circumstances but he could not have been certain about this without asking. Equally, Bill missed out on a valuable opportunity to demonstrate to Sam that he cares, AND that he can be trusted to ensure that he is fairly paid for the work that he does.
If we consider the above as a case study in the context of the four instruments of management, it is clear that there was a real opportunity to behave in a different way as a manager that might have resulted in increased discretionary effort from Sam. While behaving in the way he did may not have caused visible damage to their relationship, if Sam develops any negative Beliefs about Bill, it is likely that this inaction will be seen retrospectively as confirmatory evidence.
While behavioural intervention is important as a manager, you can never be everywhere at once and nor should you be. Having robust processes that keep the business ticking along without you are essential and we will consider this in more detail in the next issue of "In Focus" the Team Focus newsletter.
