An employee finds out that he is earning 5% less than his peers, and assumes that the organisation and the management are unfair. This demotivates him and he considers finding another job. What should be done?
Legitimate Leadership launched its new website (www.legitimateleadership.com) and celebrated its seventh birthday at a dinner held in Johannesburg on 4 March 2021.
You may coach people to be contributors, but if the system/department/organisation they are in does not change, those people are likely to eventually revert back to what they were before.
Bullying and abuse have been prominent in news reports about, among others, Priti Patel (the UK’s Home Secretary), Julie Payette (Canada’s Governor General), and Meghan Markle (the Duchess of Sussex). One question these cases prompt is: are anonymous callout channels a good way to deal with abuse?
Greg Jackson is the founder and CEO of Octopus Energy, a UK start-up valued at more than £1.4bn ($2bn), selling green energy. Despite now having more than 1,200 employees, he says he has no interest in traditional things like human resources (HR) and inf ormation technology (IT) departments.
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Question of the Month
By Ian Munro, Director, Legitimate Leadership.
Question: An employee finds out that he is earning 5% less than his peers, and assumes that the organisation and the management are unfair. This demotivates him and he considers finding another job. What should be done?
Answer: This question arose in a recent Legitimate Leadership webinar – see our report on this below. Before, this employee was a net contributor – in other words, he was not withholding. Then he withdrew his willingness due to a sense of grievance and grudge.
The problem is that he is falling into a victim’s state of mind.
His manager should challenge him not to have a victim mindset and to focus on what he can control. Strong people focus on what they can control, not on what the world does to them. In other words, the manager here can help the employee to restore his sense of accountability.
The manager should enable the person to see what is happening to him in the situation. the question is how he is going to respond to the fact that life is sometimes unfair. The manager should challenge him to promote growth, rather than encourage him to rail against the system.
The employee/manager may also simultaneously try to solve the unfairness issue – but it should not be the primary focus.
But wait … what if the unfairness is more than just a small salary differential? What if it is a matter, for instance, of ingrained gender/race bias? See our webinar report below for comment on this.
EVENT: LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP LAUNCHES NEW WEBSITE ON ITS SEVENTH BIRTHDAY
Legitimate Leadership launched its new website (www.legitimateleadership.com) and celebrated its seventh birthday at a dinner held in Johannesburg on 4 March 2021.
Legitimate Leadership has grown from a one-person (Wendy Lambourne) business at its inception in March 2014 to a company embracing 24 staff members, associates and licensees.
The function in Johannesburg was physically attended by 20 people; a further 16 people attended the function virtually from other parts of South Africa and from England, Scotland, Belgium, Germany and Canada.
Legitimate Leadership now has operational centres in South Africa and England, and licensees in Europe and Canada.
WEBINAR: ENABLING THE SHIFT FROM TAKING TO GIVING IN AN ORGANISATION
You may coach people to be contributors, but if the system/department/organisation they are in does not change, those people are likely to eventually revert back to what they were before.
In past Legitimate Leadership webinars, the focus was generally on leadership. In this webinar, the focus was shifted to how leaders can assist people in their teams to shift from taking to giving.
In other words, in this webinar it was assumed that the leader is performing well and that she is fundamentally giving rather than taking.
This webinar, on 11 February 2021, was presented by three Legitimate Leadership consultants: Ian Munro, Peter Jordan and Stefaan van den Heever. It was attended by 68 people from various countries.
The three presenters commented on questions arising from vignettes which were drawn from their own experiences and from questions from attendees.
VIGNETTE 1:
An employee finds out that he is earning 5% less than his peers. He assumes immediately that the organisation and the management are unfair. This demotivates him and he considers finding another job.
ARTICLE: ARE ANONYMOUS CALLOUT CHANNELS A GOOD WAY TO DEAL WITH ABUSE?
By Angela Donnelly, Director, Legitimate Leadership Canada.
Bullying and abuse have been prominent in news reports about, among others, Priti Patel (the UK’s Home Secretary), Julie Payette (Canada’s Governor General), and Meghan Markle (the Duchess of Sussex). One question these cases prompt is: are anonymous callout channels a good way to deal with abuse?
I recently weighed in on an article in the Harvard Business Review, Time’s Up for Toxic Workplaces. The article suggested that companies should incorporate or strengthen anonymous feedback channels for employees to voice concerns and report abusive experiences without fear of retribution. Peer managers, superiors or HR could deliver the relevant feedback to managers, making it clear that the organisation does not tolerate this kind of behavior. Knowing that others disapprove may lead the perpetrators to self-correct, the article said.
I commented that legitimacy in the manager-employee relationship is at stake here. Focusing on empowerment of employees and simultaneously creating a leadership culture that places people and excellence at the core of the business will foster the conditions where civility and maturity thrive. Anonymous callout channels are damaging and cowardly ideas; one should rather be deliberately building courage and generosity in the system, to produce masters rather than perpetuate victims.
As I expected, there wasn’t overwhelming support for my viewpoint.
ARTICLE: CEO SECRETS – ‘MY BILLION POUND COMPANY HAS NO HR DEPARTMENT’
By Dougal Shaw, business reporter, BBC News.
COMMENT ON THIS VIDEO BY WENDY LAMBOURNE, LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP: Let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is a role for support functions in companies big enough to afford them. But they need to perform an enabling rather than a controlling or policing role. The HR function’s role is not to do the “care and growth” job for line managers but rather to enable and support them in doing so.
I love the story with the receptionist. She taught Greg a lesson which in a single instant helped him to “grow up”. Leadership requires a level of personal maturity that takes time to develop. In the process of leading others, the leader is the ultimate beneficiary – he or she grows as a human being.
THE ARTICLE: Greg Jackson is the founder and CEO of Octopus Energy, a UK start-up valued at more than £1.4bn ($2bn), selling green energy. Despite now having more than 1,200 employees, he says he has no interest in traditional things like human resources (HR) and information technology (IT) departments.
There is a tendency for large companies to “infantilise” their employees and “drown creative people in process and bureaucracy”, says Jackson.
EVENT: LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP LAUNCHES NEW WEBSITE ON ITS SEVENTH BIRTHDAY
