A Couple of days ago I was asked to give some feedback to a friend’s blog post on talent management and sustainability. As I contemplated what he had written I remembered an interesting article (Swedish) I read a couple of month ago.
The article covered students at Sweden’s most well renowned business college (SSE). The authors of the article had somehow measured the business students views on the importance of CSR when evaluating potential post grad employments. The conclusion was that in general students today look just as much at potential employers CSR efforts, as at their compensation and benefit structures. Interesting as that fact ought to be for a lot of HR-managers, it was not what struck me as most fascinating about the article.
Lately, during the recent/current recession, we have been bombarded with head lines about “immoral” bonuses. These bonuses were/are payed out to executives in traditional business sectors, such as banking etc.
Reading the findings quoted in the previously mentioned article, it apparently was clear that students within the traditional orientations, accounting and finance, payed less attention to CSR opposed to students within general management, marketing and international business orientations. Further the article mentioned that when representatives from banks and accounting firms come to visit the school, as part of their talent attraction strategy, they seldom emphasize CSR aspects of their organizations in their presentations to the students. Also the article went on to mention that the students at SSE at the time (November 2008) only had the possibility to choose two subjects covering CSR issues.
It is probably fairly certain that if the academia does not provide business students with a deep understanding of business ethics when training them for a life in business. The students will likely not actively reflect over the issue very much later in their professional careers. This is something that has been a hot topic among the articles in the Harvard Business Review past year. Looking back in history this might explain why today, within the banking sector, we see a culture that apparently has very few issues with handing out huge bonuses to executives even though the rest of the world finds them out of order.
The effects of this behaviour are clear in the latest Edelman report: “Banks went from being one of the most-trusted sectors before the recession to near the bottom of the list, declining from 71 percent in 2008 to 33 percent.”
During last Friday afternoon, a couple of people at the office were for a moment occupied by an animation of a spinning female silhouette . They were fascinated by the fact that she appeared to be spinning in different directions depending on who you asked. The explanation for this phenomena was spelled out under the animation. If your left brain hemisphere is dominant the woman appears spinning counter-clockwise and vice versa. As you may know, your left brain handles your “logical” skills and your right dominates your “creative” skills (roughly of course). View the table below:
This got me thinking about another perspective of the entire compensation and benefits debate. Could there, besides the culture issue, and now I’m really out there speculating without any grounds what so ever, be a connection between questionable incentive structures and left brain hemisphere dominance among the people creating these incentive structures? The thing that strikes me as most fascinating with the bonuses are not the size of them (even though they are mindbogglingly large at times) but rather that they keep handing them out and seem surprised at the negative reactions it creates in society. It is as if they do not seem to be aware of the world around them.
Getting back to left and right brain dominance thing. Comparing the functions of the left and right brain hemispheres (table above) you see traits of the left such as: logic, detail oriented and facts rule. Compare this to traits of the right: emotions, “big picture” oriented and imagination. Do you see where I’m getting at? The explanation for these incentive structures is of course is that it is absolutely necessary to hand out huge bonuses, in order to retain top talent within the particular industry sector (detail oriented?). Maybe that is so and then we are back in questioning the health of the culture I guess.
Anyhow I think it would be a interesting research project for e.g. cognitive scientists. How about you?
Another easier way of avoiding losing trust in your brand, than analysing the brain dominance of the creators of your company’s comp & ben structure, is to have a working strategic dialogue with all your stakeholders. To learn more about how these work you are very welcome to contact this company.
Please! Feel free to give correct me on anything that is faulty in this blog.
I’d like to wish all of you a very happy ending to this year and decennial and a great start to 2010.
