Interview with Peter Fonseca, Stanley Works

Stanley Works (www.stanleyworks.com) is a global manufacturer of tools and security solutions. Its business ranges from home improvement tools, industrial tools to electronic and mechanical security systems. 

On July 22, 2005, we had the privilege of talking with Mr Peter Fonseca, Head of HR for Stanley in the UK.

What are your current responsibilities? What geography and functions do you cover?
Until June 6th, I was responsible for learning and development and organisational development across Europe. About 50% of our workforce is based in UK and so this was a fairly UK centric role. Recently a colleague left which means that I have taken little change in direction. I am now effectively head of HR in the UK, responsible for around 700 people across all major business functions. 

What attracted you into this area?
My career in learning and development started in my mid to late 20s. I was working in industry and getting increasingly bored and then attended a piece of very experiential training. A programme that involved the use of the outdoors and that sort of thing. I had a wonderful time on this programme and found it very revealing. After the programme I talked myself into an interview with the company and got a job there.

I started working with school leavers, and graduates, for about 2.5 years. Then I moved to a firm providing leadership development for first line managers and above, also working the in the great outdoors. A lot of the work involved building simulations where people could be themselves and address live leadership issues and it involved a lot of experiential learning. It was a lot of fun and we saw people come on these programmes, grow and experience shifts in attitudes. I was working with a small training provider. Even though we worked with a very broad range of companies, most of the work was in a fairly narrow sphere. I was tipped off that Stanley Tools might be looking for a new training manager. The existing training and development manager was getting very disillusioned with all the changes that were going on. I had a bizarre interview with the then HR manager. During the first 10 minutes he was interviewing me, during the next 50 minutes I was counselling him on what to do with his career. The job looked interesting, and so I thought let's have a go at doing that.

It was a move from poacher to gamekeeper. Stanley was the opportunity to get into an organisation and become fully involved with changing things in the medium and long term. The past 6 years at Stanley have been along these sorts of lines. I have been involved in all sorts of training and change initiatives in the UK and other parts of Europe.

The HR team are all ‘funky generalists’. People tend to move to whatever needs to be done. About 40-50% of the time it is generalist HR work the rest is hands on in the business.

What really attracted me is you can get involved in every part of the organisation, there is huge variety. You can learn a wide range of tasks which can be very rewarding. When you see good ideas in one corner of the business, you can connect other parts of the business to take advantage of those good ideas.

I don't know how you perceive the Stanley brand. To most people, it's a building tools icon. High quality tools, high reliability, fit for purpose and so on. There is that image. People tend to assume that because your product looks like that, the whole organisation is the same. Like many other organisations that have grown through acquisition and seen significant change, we’ve had our significant wins, and equally still have plenty of areas where we need to improve.

How Relevant is Outdoor Experiential Learning?
I think it has some isolated benefit. Part of the reason I got away from it was that I was getting bored with it. I think it's biggest challenge has always been how to help people translate what they learn in one environment back to their desk. Like so many things that become popular, the practitioners push the boundaries to see what can be done with it. It become a fad and was used for all sorts of business problems.

It has come back to its right equilibrium. There are some companies in the UK with skilled facilitators who are right for those mechanisms. Building simulations that have both challenge and excitement and remain generally outside of people's experience. You put people into quite an interesting learning situation. It comes back to how well the experience is designed. With good design, and highly skilled facilitation, it still has a place. The experiential thing does reflect something that I feel quite strongly. I read somewhere, and here someone is just using statistics, 80% of what people learn they learn by just getting chucked in and doing the job. Good training and development fills in the remaining 20%. And if the 80% is at work, then it pays to have managers with the skills and inclination to help their people learn.

How do you see your role contributing to the bottom line success of Stanley?
I guess it goes in a variety of ways. All the obvious ones, human resources are here to help managers by helping them manage the performance, the quality and potential of their people. To me this is what HR does to add value. For sure a big one is to make the environment an attractive one so that we can attract people. There is this background agenda and this applies during stability or crazy change.

The more important one is how the HR people can help the management team deal with change, mergers and restructure. These are the things were HR can really add some value.

We learned to be doers. I came to Stanley as a designer and delivery of training and the group has done this. However in Stanley, you are more. You are an extra manager helping the line managers restructure, change a process, improve the business and so on.

For example a colleague in her late 20's spends a lot of time supporting a business unit director who is responsible for £17million per year. It's a small, fairly fragmented and outside of the director, this HR person has spent most of the year managing up the performance of the team and at the same time managing process changes and structural changes.

I often say to people Stanley is not really interested in what HR usually calls strategic HR. The type of things that other companies have international programmes for – graduate selection programmes, pan-European compensation plans, human capital measurement systems and so. We don't so a lot of that. 

We find good people when we need them; get rid of the bad ones when we don't.
It creates variety. We are close to the business. It is very interesting.

How did the HR organization develop the respect to engage with the business at that level?
The fact that you are willing to help, means you will be allowed to help. We are a lean organisation, so no one is going to refuse assistance.

It is a self feeding solution, a positive catch 22. When you get involved with the business, you build an understanding of how the business is being managed and the priorities. Our HR meetings start with the monthly figures for the whole of the business. We strive to be well informed about the business, so when someone needs help we can ask relevant questions, and provide a service that the client values. 

How strategic are large organizations when considering people and organizational development?
When I think about the whole range of companies that I worked with prior to Stanley, quite often their intent was strategic, but often their implementation was comparatively weak. Stanley tends to take a quite short term focus with HR issues and I would say that Stanley is not particularly strategic. 

How are we developing the organisation and the strength of the people? That happens out in the business. 

We have a few processes that address the business quite well. For example, the annual appraisal leads to a view of what needs to be done in the organization. The delivery of outcomes from this appraisal process currently falls short of the analysis.

I think that organisations often underestimate the resource needed to effect a change. If you are trying to change something that becomes the line manager's responsibility in addition to their day job. Maybe it should actually be their day job. Either way, they don't allow enough resource for what they are trying to achieve.

What do you see out in industry?
I see a whole mixture. I see articles in the press talking about organisations who have developed an very interesting initiative or process. For me, what was a great process two years ago, becomes part of the wall paper today. There is a need to repackage the process, so that it creates interest and remains fresh.

Has anything else changed apart from re-packaging?
I would question it, I really would. I read in Personnel Today, a fortnightly rag that everyone gets bombarded with, that emotional intelligence has been outmoded by “spiritual intelligence”. Apparently people want to have meaning in their jobs. Well that is no different from what Peter Drucker was saying when he had hair.

There has been a general shift over the past 30 or so years. There is now a higher expectation that people will have a say about their existence in the organisation, they are there as people and not just objects.

People coming into the workforce in the UK now want a reasonable work-life balance. As a economy we are richer, we can now afford the luxury of not working all the time.

At Stanley we go looking for people who are driven and who want to develop their career and ambition. I would argue that a lot of what comes along has been repackaged thinking that has been around for a long time. I think that sometimes this can be beneficial because it creates something that is fresher. 

As you look around the organizational area what do you see as "fads" that are likely to fade?
Spiritual intelligence for one. (laughs) I don't spend much time looking at fads. The day to day running the business doesn't leave me with time.

A recent fad, has been the mass enthusiasm for eLearning. If you were in training then get worried because you are going to be replaced by a CD-ROM. No need to panic any more, we now have , “blended learning”, which is what good practitioners always been doing.

How would a new concept or topic get your attention?
It would have to be something that I would see a practical and immediate application for in the organisation. For example, we introduced a programme to accelerate people with high potential, one of the things we needed to do was help them build an understanding of the business outside of their function. Another thing we had to was help them build a network.

One of the things we introduced was a mentoring process. We introduced a group of trusted senior managers and introduced them into the process. It mostly worked well. Mentoring has become very popular in the UK. At that time I could see a piece of development work with those managers. To help strengthen their skills or technique to guide people in the programme.

How would you even pick up some of these developments?
A variety of sources, the press, my own network. One of the hazards of being in my position is that I get a huge number of calls. I do listen to my voice mails eventually. I apply a lot of filtering. There are lots and lots of people just peddling training. Sometimes companies have an interesting thought, tag line or question. 

From that initial contact, it can take 18 months to two years to develop the relationship with a supplier to a point where it is right to do business with them. I use those discussions to understand these new perspectives and developments.

What trends do you see coming over the horizon?
The key thing for Stanley is - what are the new processes we can introduce across the business to manage talent? We need to be better at filling our recruitment funnel with talent than we are now. That is everything from the recruitment process through to the process to help you capture and manage what we already have. Talent is important at all levels – not just those that may be destined for the top.

For example, you need a good mechanism for finding someone in finance who may be able to move into sales - a functional shift. Then you need mechanisms to help individuals get from one level to the next level. One of the issues we have, and I suspect that it something that all organisations who have a flat organization structure have, it that there is a big jump between levels.

How do you do you achieve that?
Help people understand non-vertical career paths. For example in our commercial organisation one half-way house is to leave a territory management function and move into a business performance function, a diagonal move. It gives people the chance to become very skilled in analysis, and then use that skill in Key Account management. 

So to move from a team leader in a manufacturing facility to production manager, we can move them out from team leader to a process improvement speciality. That gets you better connected in terms of the financial and business processes and because you are working with a whole variety of teams. Then you are better prepared to move into a production manager role. We create deliberate diagonal jumps. 

The other way is by working on a project or a supported additional responsibility. For example a territory manger who wants to become national account manager. You recognise that potential, then buddy them up and to help them get hands on experience. That then ties into the HR planning process. The hosting manager gains additional resource. The actual manager will not be the one getting the benefit and you rely on their ability to see the “greater good”.

What is the role of formal leadership development?
This is the other 20%. By the pragmatic approach, 80% of what you are going to learn you are going to learn by being involved and with good people. I have found that in Stanley if you want some help it's available. 

This is only 80% and I recognised that some people are not skilled. If the people around you only display limited thinking, you just get exposed to that limitation. 

This is why we have used companies like Mitchell Phoenix and why we will continue to use them. The place for management education is helping people to attach themselves to a robust set of principles and letting them know what they need to know to be safe. First I keep myself safe and then I move onto become more skilled in getting engaged. I start to manage performance at that level.

There is a lot of value in mangers having a consistent set of beliefs and behaviours. This is what drives an organisation's culture. It has a lot to do with how people are lead. It helps manages to face those questions. The approach we have had from Mitchell Phoenix - how should you communicate, how should you develop the resource you are responsible for and so on - has helped us do just this.

Back when we started working with Mitchell Phoenix, we were making just crazy changes to the business. Hacking big pieces of the business off just so we could pay the dividend. The managers would feel incredibly un-empowered. What are you going to do as a group of leaders, what is the protection from fear, to quote Mitchell Phoenix, that you would afford your people? What are the values that are so important to the way we do the business?
It is this sort of thing you just don't get from the brownian motion of coaching and mentoring.

I see that most successful parts of the business have been built around a robust mechanism for measurement and feedback. We have made limited use of this to help individuals to understand with clarity what they should be trying to achieve in their roles and then use that to guide both the structured development and the less structured experience in the role based learning. 

How much talent is around compared to say 5 and 10 years ago, how competitive is the market for such talent?
Demographics and competition say it is going to be tailing off. My view is that the benchmark is shifting. So what you want from people in your lean organisation is more than what you wanted ten years ago. People are more multi-skilled, productive or so on.

Are the people available? Have they moved up and on? In much of Europe the answer is 'not enough'. There are companies chasing fewer really desirable people who really meet the demands of today.

That is an issue for us, it is why Stanley, corporation wide, has had an approach to buy our talent. More wide spread, you need to move to developing talent. 

Some organisations shy away from developing people because they feel that they are just developing people for the competition, how do you feel about that?
I have always felt that even if they do leave after finishing a development process, you get far more out of them as they are moving up that strong learning curve than you would have otherwise.

Leadership is a widely discussed topic. How can a leadership development programme contribute to competitive advantage when everyone is conceptually doing the same thing?
Does competitive advantage come from a differential in leadership? Good leadership contributes to competitive advantage. However it is what good leadership enables you to develop that makes competitive advantage. Competitive advantage is making better products, having a better process for getting them onto the shelves. Good leadership is the prerequisite for making these things happen.

Competitive advantage also comes from the pool of talent that you have elsewhere in the organisation. It comes from the extent to which you enable them to contribute into the organisation.

Many organisations spend a good deal of their budget developing the top few people in the organisation. They are perpetuating the overstretch between the few very engaged people, and the mass of the organisation who need to be managed. A greater difference can be made by maximising the level of engagement from the people in the organisation.

In Europe 50% of organisational development budgets are spent on leadership development. We don't spend that much money, so we spend it on training the super user and getting them to cascade it.

How important the hard skills based training?
In Stanley; development goes to high potentials and mangers, skills training goes to the more junior levels. There is much more spend on the skills development of more junior levels.

The limitation of training managers, is that managers don't spend enough time looking out over the horizon or the future. Most managers are very focused on the here and now. 

We are an organisation that lives quarter by the quarter. That is part of our leadership culture and I think the norm for many US companies quoted on wall street. We are only as good as our last quarter. That has eased a bit over the last couple of years. The horizon now goes out a little further than that however it is still unusual for people to look 18 months out.

How comfortable are you with the approach that you have explained during our whole discussion?
We have tried doing various approaches that are clearly not the only way of doing things. What I have described works well for Stanley. If you look at our business there is a lot of that. When I joined Stanley, we had 13% of the hand tools market in the UK. Today we have 27% of that market and that is the general story in all of our markets. Because we focus on productivity and good implementation what I have described works.

In a different environment we would invest more on training and development. We would help to develop the depth and breath of experience in the organisation. If our managers are too busy in their core role today, then they may not be able to give their attention to building a stronger asset to the organisation. It will take time to change that. Meanwhile we need to contribute what is going to be valued now.