Breaking Self-Imposed Barriers

Caribbean Regional Central Banks Human Resource Conference
August, 2002
Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago
Port of Spain, Trinidad W.I.

by: L. Anthony Watkins

My task today is to explore for some of self-imposed barriers, identify them and suggest ways in which they can be removed.

I am involved in sports, not as a player anymore but with national teams playing at international level in the area of the psychology of performance, trying to assist the sports administrators in doing something different with their teams. Let me share one of my experiences with you.

I accompanied our Senior National Football team when they went to Mexico, during the World Cup Qualifiers, at the end of the game the score was seven to nil. So much for the psychology of performance! So much for my effectiveness with the team! But as somebody said to me:“Tony how can you expect to motivate people who cannot breathe?” Getting into Azteca Stadium, many thousands of feet above sea level, getting there just before the game, makes things look pretty difficult. From this example of major imposed barriers, one can learn some lessons. For your purposes today, I think your hope would be that my performance in the area of Human Resource Consulting has generated better results than those we achieved in Mexico.

What I will do today is share some thoughts around some of the things that we call barriers that we self- impose.
What are some of the things that prevent us as HR Managers, as leaders in our organisation, from really being able to achieve or move forward?

The theme of your conference is entitled: “Re-defining the HR role and function: The Way Forward”. Clearly there is a sense that people want to move forward. But what might be keeping us back? Maybe we need to ask this question not so much about HR in organisations but about people in general, in terms of human behaviour.

What prevents anyone from achieving or being what they want? There are a number of things that are relevant here. One can say that there are notions of control, that place from which we are controlled. Some people will say that if you have an external locus of control that really you are influenced and guided by what happens outside of you. So it is the circumstances, it is the economy, it is the boss, it is how other people see you and even the past, and that these things are the ones that really control who we are and what we do.

However, there is also what we refer to as an internal locus of control to people who feel in some aspect of their lives that control really is from inside them. Yes there are some external circumstances, yes there is a past, yes there are some things that happened but the person with the internal locus of control says: “You know what, that is real, but in all of this, I have some choices. I have some control, I can exert some influence and I can make decisions and choose to act in certain ways.”

In terms of going where we want to go, and achieving what we want to achieve, do we consider ourselves to be externally controlled or do we have an internal locus of control. When we have that internal locus of control we take charge, we take responsibility, we are conscious of the choices we make and we acknowledge the fact that our choices contribute to the consequences that we experience.

I have been involved for quite some time with insurance agents and many would readily contribute their slowdown of sales to many varied excuses such as “ the economy is down, people do not trust the financial system and many other reasons. At the same time we know that there are agents who are doubling and tripling their production, and companies that continue to do good business. So that the results have very little to do with the external circumstance but with the things that people choose to do and not do.
Now this puts the business of barriers to moving forward squarely on our lap. We have to ask ourselves – Why is HR not where we want it to be?

Is it because of circumstances? Is it because of those financial controllers? Is it because of the way companies are structured? Or is there a major contribution that we make to maintaining the way things are?

The title of this particular presentation is an acknowledgement that almost all that happens to us is not the result of some kind of fate. When we talk about ‘Self Imposed Barriers’ clearly there is an acknowledgement that maybe there are some things that we are doing or not doing. So we have to ask ourselves, “What are the barriers that exist in the way of personal success as an individual, and how do we establish some kind of link between that dynamic and what applies to the HR professional and to the HR profession?”

Let me say to you, that our lives are influenced, not so much by the events that occur, but by our interpretation of those events. It is not what happens, it is how we interpret what happens and after we interpret, how we respond in the face of that interpretation.
So what are some of our perceptions? How do we record? How do we see things around us and to what extent does that influence how we behave, in terms of our profession. The Bible says very clearly that: “Without a vision the people perish”.

I am not here talking about a biblical vision, I am not talking about a vision for your organisation, but I am talking about a vision for HR. Do we have clear in our minds a sense of what we want HR to be and more importantly, not just a vague notion of it but do we have it clearly defined in a way that we can articulate?

If you cannot see yourself doing something, you are seriously reducing you chance of actually being able to do it. Where are we as HR professionals? What do we see for the profession? Maybe we see in the past. “Well you know, that’s how it used to be, they never let HR in”, and we can keep looking there if we want.

None of us has been to the year 2003 but what is our perspective of 2003? What is our view? And this thing about the past can really be an imprisoning thing. I share with people all the time that there is a lesson in the relative size of your windscreen to the rear view mirror. This tells you in a very powerful way how much time you ought to spend looking back, and how much time you ought to spend looking forward. Anytime your rear view mirror gets as large as your windscreen, anytime you are looking back more than you are looking forward, you are an accident that is about to happen. So the question to you as HR professionals is “where are you looking?” Are you thinking about what the profession has been, what is it now or is your mind somewhere down the road in terms of what it can be?

Where is your perspective? Where is your vision in terms of HR and what it ought to be in organisations? Do we see ourselves in that vision influencing direction? Or do we see ourselves as merely implementers of the vision that others have articulated?

The barrier to this is really in us as individuals – what is our willingness and our ability to put ourselves into a dream state, a state in which we allow ourselves to envision a new future?

It is almost as though we are afraid to dream. Look around this room and tell me what you see – flow charts, tables, chairs, microphones. Did these things always exist? The answer is no. There was a time when these things were just thoughts. They were nothing more than a dream.

There is just a short step between thought, idea, dream and reality! What do we want the reality to be, that is what we have to think about and when we write it and we articulate it, someone will say that we are mad. When they say we are mad, we know that we are doing something right.

We usually look at dreamers as crazy, mad, time wasters, but when we look around and see the possibilities we have to start walking ourselves through the process:- from dream to ideas, to thought, to talk, to action and output. It happens!! That is the way things are created. The Bible also says “the power of death and life is in the tongue”. We must say what we want to see. Are we afraid to speak up for HR?

If you have an idea, go out there and begin to say it and begin to do it. What is HR going to be? And here we must be a little irreverent about it, because if we stay in the place where we have been, we are not going to move into that “new place”. When we begin to dream there is some passion that goes with it. Dream >Passion >Passion >Energy. If we want to mobilise and generate the energy to make this thing different it has to come from the passion. If we have to get the passion, it has to come from the dream.

Sometimes things happen to us and if we don’t allow ourselves to dream and have these ideas, the opportunities come and we are not ready. As an HR professional, there is something inside you which, if stimulated, can generate and unleash some power from within.

Our challenge is that long before we have a sense that we have the power and the energy and the competency to do it, we must have the dream. That becomes for us, not a HR professional issue but a personal issue. What I am saying is that it applies to HR, it applies to the profession but it applies just as well in your life, to you as a person.

So that in our lives as professionals in the organisation, what we have to do is break these vision barriers and that requires some creativity. Creativity comes divided into a number of pieces.

The first step in the creative process is when the explorer goes to work. Right after the explorer does his work, the artist steps in, because when the information is generated by the explorer, the artist now has to do something with it.

The third step in the creative process is when the judge steps in and the judge says “well we see this phenomenon and we know that something can happen here. Let’s evaluate, are there any business possibilities in this? What is the feasibility in making this and then of course the warrior draws his sword, goes out and makes it happen!

Do you know what our challenge and our difficulty is? We fear the judge too much because the moment the explorer asks a question, the moment the artist comes up with an idea, the judge says that it will never work. One of the things we must remember when we have these dreams is that when we want to break this vision barrier we need to let the explorer and the artist do their work.

Do we have the belief that as HR individuals we can make a difference?
So it is fine to dream, have your dream and vision about HR but do you have the faith and the belief that it can happen? Do we believe in this thing or don’t we? Very often what we will do is operate in a way that says we are trapped in the past. We have some memories and some experiences. (“You know I really want thing to happen, but last time we tried it, the Governor and the other Managers did not go for it”).

That was then!! We have to break that barrier! We have to choose to believe! Belief is a decision that you make and I am challenging you to see yourself making some different choices. Now part of making the choice and part of overcoming in this area of public vision is to move the battle lines from thought to language.

Here’s how we do it:

Learn to take responsibility
We say we want to be invited to sit on the table in board meetings – why must we be invited? When we say we want to invited where is the power? The power is not with us. The power is with someone else to invite us. We talk about accepting responsibility, what is this nonsense about accepting responsibility? If I am going to accept, that means someone is going to give it to me. I am not going to accept any responsibility; I am going to take responsibility. It is that ability to be decisive, to be proactive and to move forward. We must make things happen as opposed we waiting for things to happen.

Overcome the barrier of multi-competency
Also, if we say that we are going to take action we must ask ourselves: Are we competent to do some of these things that we are saying? Yesterday Mr. Oliver Flax talked about people being the constant in all organisations but the fact is this: corporate world requires technical multi-competence and he talked about people being the constant in all organisations. So whether it is IT or money or marketing, the constant across every function is people. So that HR has a place but HR must take its place. We must be able to talk, we must learn to talk people’s language. It is about establishing rapport, it is about establishing a connection with the other person. What we have to do in our organisation is to be able to establish rapport. We need to be able to connect with other people.

See ourselves as influencers instead of implementers of organisational policies and structures.

That of course strikes at another barrier that we have and that is what I will call the Management - Leadership Divide, because unless we are able to grasp the notion of management and leadership and declare that they are different we will not be able to provide and demonstrate the leadership that we need to provide as HR professionals.

Do we become just Managers of HR or do we provide Strategic Leadership from the Human Resource place to the organisation?. What we have to provide is Strategic Leadership.

How do we cross this divide? How do we overcome this barrier of this difference between management and leadership?

Management is doing all those functional things, such as planning, co-ordinating, controlling etc. and getting the job done through people.

Leadership is not about position; it is not about being the head of something. Leadership is a process of influencing self, others and organisations through growth and change towards achieving results and fulfilling a purpose.

So in a lot of ways when we talk about breaking Self Imposed Barriers we are talking about being leaders:- Having that internal locus of control, making that decision. It is about being leaders in the sense of having that vision, coming up with the dream, having the faith that this thing will happen. It is about leading from a place in which we are able to talk in other people’s language, to establish rapport with other people, to be able to connect with other people around the organisation. It is about having the vision and the plans and the ability to strategize around it, and to talk about what our leadership responsibilities are.

Let me close with five short phrases, which in a lot of ways may capture and condense what we have to do. These really epitomise excellent leadership. They capture the essence of being able to break self-imposed barriers – and some externally imposed ones as well:

- Dream passionately
- Communicate persuasively
- Prepare thoroughly
- Execute relentlessly
- Break some rule

Those really provide for us the key to moving forward as individuals and as leaders. They speak as well to us if we wear that HR hat and can guide us to putting HR in a place where it can make a difference in our organisation.