The Rewards of Bold HR - and Risks - interview with Jim Moore

Workforce, Jan, 2001 by Bob Rosner

How can HR make a difference in a fast-paced company? Jim Moore, who directed workforce planning and development at Sun Microsystems, says it takes guts. You pick baffles. You push back. It might earn you respect. It might also get you fired.

Jim Moore recently decided to "call in rich." He's leaving his job as the director of workforce planning and development for Sun Microsystems after six years to serve as an executive consultant to the company. Before that he was the VP of training and development for Northern Telecom and the director of executive development for BellSouth. Moore was trained as an engineer, and that's where our provocative conversation about the challenges of executive development began.

WORKFORCE: How much does your background in engineering help in executive development?

Jim Moore: There's absolutely no relationship between executive development and engineering. In fact, "behavioral science," I believe, is an oxymoron, I know I'll offend every psychologist and psychiatrist in the world, but I fail to see the science in much of HR and organizational development. Dealing with executives is more about getting some clear notion in your mind about a desired "end" and then using imagination, intuition, and your ability to put yourself in the shoes of the executive to create movement toward that end. This involves thinking about ways to make them change and shaking them up a little bit. So the good news is I know enough about engineering and executive development to not apply it.

WF: You've said that adult learning principles don't apply to executives. What do you mean?

Moore: Does that mean they're not adults? Of course, I would never say that. But adult learning theory is another science that doesn't fit the real world. Part of it has to do with the insecurities of an executive. The higher you go, the greater the responsibility and risk of failure, the more you realize your inadequacies and the more people attribute super-human capabilities to you. Most executives don't want to admit that they don't know.

WF: So what can you do?

Moore: You have to hit the executives over the head at the very beginning of an education program and somehow cause failure. Get them to realize they don't know how to do it and confront them with feedback that says, "You're not as good as you think you are." Another problem with executive learning is that most people learn through reflection, and executives are the worst reflectors. There's something you lose as you move up the chain--the ability to reflect. You just think, "I've got to react quickly and instantaneously to everything," and to sit there and ponder something is not a good sign. Whereas I believe that until you really ponder things and struggle with them, you'll have trouble learning.

WF: Can you give an example?

Moore: An executive says, "I don't need to pay attention to that because I'm a great listener," when you know that feedback says they're the worst listener in the history of this company. Getting confronted with subordinate and peer feedback that compares them to their peers is very effective because executives are competitive and they hate to see low scores. Most never get low scores-- everybody's always awesome. So 360-degree feedback is a way to get their attention. On the accountability side, we're saying if you want to get serious about management effectiveness, you have to measure it and hold people accountable. How will we measure it? There are several ways: you could hire psychologists to follow managers around and observe them every day; you could video tape them; you could interview subordinates; you could send them to an assessment center and assume they behave in the assessment center the same way they behave in the shop; or you could do as we did--design a system to ask the subordinates, who are the customers of the manager's effectiveness, "How well is the manager doing?"

WF: How will this change HR?

Moore: I've worked at companies where I've written the speech for the CEO to say, "Our people are our most important asset," and they've said it, but I don't believe they believed it. In fact, I don't believe they were the most important asset, because the jobs were so standardized that it wasn't really that hard to replace the person. The difference between what a really outstanding person contributed and a not-so-outstanding person contributed was relatively small. There wasn't room in the jobs for individual variance to make that big a difference. Therefore, it was lip service. Look at these high-tech companies that have these market caps or price- earnings ratios that are so outrageous. How can you justify that? You cannot justify it because of any process they have; processes are easily replicated. Markets are easily stolen. It's just the intellectual capital that differentiates.

WF: What else can HR learn from high- tech companies?

Moore: We believe chaos is a way of life in a high-tech, high-growth company, and while you might like to get chaos under control and make everything orderly and neat, if you did that, the company would die; there wouldn't be enough innovation or speed. So life at Sun is extremely chaotic, as it is in any high-tech company. But there's a lot of research there, and our own instincts tell us that if you're going to have all that chaos, the one thing you should have is a clear and compelling vision and direction. You ought to know where you're going.