Edward Lawler starts out his new book, Talent, discussing how sick he is of hearing executives give lip service to their employees with nothing to show for it.

“Time after time I have heard senior managers say, ‘People are my organization’s most important asset’ or ‘Employees are number one in my organization.’ Sounds good, but in many organizations, there’s an enormous gap between the rhetoric and the reality,” Lawler writes.

So Lawler, who is the director of the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California, spends the next 242 pages describing what processes and procedures companies need to put in place to create what he calls a “human capital centric organization.”

There is a lot in Talent that you may have heard before: how to make sure you have the right HR people in place (business partners versus administrative staff); how to implement an effective performance management system (that evaluates and motivates); and how to develop your managers so that they are leaders and managers.

This is all important stuff. However, there was one chapter in Talent that I found to be really new and interesting. That was the chapter about corporate boards and talent management.

Often when we think about boards of directors we think about a room of former CEOs and finance guys who go over numbers and compliance issues. That’s pretty much what Lawler has found in his research as well.

But if a company wants to really use its people as its competitive advantage, then these boards of directors have to be informed on the talent management issues within the company. Not only that, but at least some of these board members should have some HR expertise—which, according to Lawler’s research, is a pretty rare occurrence.

Most of the time, former CEOs are the go-to person on the board about talent issues.

“There is no doubt that many CEOs have some understanding of the human capital issues that corporations face, but they rarely have the kind of in-depth expertise that a professional in HR could bring to a board,” Lawler writes.

If boards rely on finance experts for financial matters, why wouldn’t they have HR experts for human capital issues? he asks.

To address this issue, boards should not just seek out HR experts to join them as members, but they should also participate in training sessions on talent management issues, Lawler says.

While boards often undergo training on compliance and finance issues, they don’t do anything with regard to talent management. This is really a problem considering it’s the board’s job to make sure companies have proper succession planning processes intact. How can they oversee this if they don’t fully understand it?

Lawler suggests that boards assess their companies’ talent by acting as “mystery shoppers,” either by dropping by companies and chatting with employees or watching focus groups.

Lawler proposed that boards set up “human capital committees” to delve into these issues.

But probably the most controversial suggestion that Lawler makes when it comes to boards is to have board members go through performance reviews in the same formal way that executives should be evaluated.

He notes that more than 80 percent of board members say they do an effective job. But most of these individuals are evaluated informally.

Lawler described how he once asked a board chair about this, and the chair suggested it would be insulting to establish a formal evaluation for board members considering the amount of time they are giving to be on the boards. But, as Lawler points out, aren’t these individuals being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be on these boards?

I think Lawler is right in saying that a company that really focuses on talent management should have a board of directors that does the same.

I don’t think that his vision will become the norm anytime soon, however. Particularly in the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley and SEC rules on executive compensation, boards are busy enough with financial matters to take the time to focus on talent management.

Maybe I’m just a skeptic. What do you think?

 Listen to a Workforce Management Podcast with Edward Lawer.  Link opens a 2.25 MB MP3 file.

Whether you like her or not (and plenty of people don’t), Hillary Clinton’s showing on Super Tuesday says something about how far women have come in being taken seriously as leaders. Clinton has noted that when her 88-year-old mother was born, women couldn’t even vote.

But it would be going too far to say that Clinton is proof that women are now judged solely on the strength of their leadership and that gender doesn’t matter. The pummeling that Carly Fiorina  took during her tenure at HP is proof of that. Further evidence can be found in book published this fall, Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders.

Some business books toss off anecdotes and pretend that’s research. Not so here. The authors, Alice H. Eagly and Linda L. Carli, both college professors, pack the book with studies and data to support their answers to the provocative questions serve as chapter titles:

• Is there still a glass ceiling? No. Instead, women have to negotiate a labyrinth of conflicting demands, expectations and barriers to advance.
• Are men natural leaders? Men score higher in some traits associated with leadership. And women do better in others.
• Do family responsibilities hold women back? Is discrimination still a problem? Yes and yes.

I think it’s interesting that the authors settled on the labyrinth as their metaphor. Without going too much into the mythic realm, as a recent post did, I’ll just mention that in Greek mythology, it was a woman, Ariadne, who knew her way around the labyrinth that her father had ordered built to hold a monster, the Minotaur. And it was Ariadne who gave her lover, Theseus, the thread he used to find his way out of the maze after killing the creature. So what did Ariadne get for her trouble? Theseus abandoned her on the island of Naxos. I told you that office romances never work out.

Through the Labyrinth is fascinating and depressing in almost equal measures, depending on the page and the finding. For example:

• Unlike women who have bumped into the glass ceiling because they’re not perceived as leadership material in a male-dominated world, men working in female-dominated careers often ride the “glass escalator,” ascending faster than women. Their token status works for them.
• The double bind is alive and well: Acting like a man—assertive and aggressive—is often seen as the wrong way to proceed. Acting like a woman—being soft-spoken, or just plain soft—is just as likely to block professional progress. The authors quote Kim Campbell, who served as Canadian prime minister briefly in 1993: “I don’t have a traditionally female way of speaking. I don’t end my sentences with a question mark. I’m quite assertive. If I didn’t speak the way I do, I wouldn’t have been seen as a leader. But my way of speaking may have grated on people who were not used to hearing it from a woman. It was the right way for a leader to speak, but it wasn’t the right way for a woman to speak. It goes against type.”
• Women endure some astounding suggestions from their bosses and colleagues on how they should behave to get ahead in the workplace. The authors quote Patricia Woertz, CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, who recalled that one of her first bosses “assured her that children would ruin her career: ‘Get yourself fixed,’ he said, ‘and put it on your expense report.’ ” Woertz didn’t take the advice. She had three children, and an “extraordinarily successful business career,” the authors say.

If you can hang in until Chapter 10, you’ll find some sort-of-good news—a discussion of the techniques that women use  to successfully thread their way through the labyrinth. As you might guess, it’s all about juggling, balancing and, sometimes, overachieving. “It isn’t fair, but women often need to be exceptionally good to be credited with the abilities of less-competent men,” Eagly and Carli write.

And as if they could hear the screams of their readers, they add a few pages later: “Some readers may object to some of our advice, because it implies that women must accommodate themselves to existing cultural and organizational norms rather than the other way around. Our point is that women should not wait to seek leadership until organizational and cultural changes have created a level playing field. Women who initially break into male-dominated roles face special challenges, but when they are successful, they can foster progressive organizational change that creates greater fairness for the women who follow in their footsteps.”

It takes guts, that’s for sure. Here’s a thank you to Clinton, Fiorina, Woertz and all the other women who are leading the way through the labyrinth. Keep an eye out for the Minotaur.

There is a trend in business publishing of couching business lessons in parables and stories, and while it may have started with the saga of Sniff and Scurry in Who Moved My Cheese?, it certainly hasn’t stopped there.

I understand why authors use fables featuring mice, horses and even Santa Claus. Books about work can be, well, work, and anything that makes the experience more engaging, interesting or at least palatable is likely to garner more readers.

Call me a grump, but I’ll take my business books straight up, without the cutesy literary devices. If the book has real-life drama that imparts a business message, I’ll gladly read that. You may disagree with some of its conclusions, but Moneyball was a great read about talent acquisition. Likewise, you could learn a lot about ethics—or their absence—from Conspiracy of Fools.

Occasionally, novels have something to say to readers about business culture, and workforce issues specifically. Two recent examples are Company by Max Barry, and Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. Then We Came to the End will be released in paperback next month. Both books deal with highly dysfunctional organizations, and employees’ efforts to figure out how to survive in them.

The company in Company seems to sell training packages. But like the main character in the book, a newly minted MBA who is about to take a trip down the corporate rabbit hole, you’d never know that from its mission statement:

“Zephyr Holdings aims to build and consolidate leadership positions in its chosen markets, forging profitable growth opportunities by developing strong relationships between internal and external business units and coordinating a strategic, consolidated approach to achieve maximum returns for its stakeholders.”

What is really going on at Zephyr is something much more comically diabolical than that corporate doublespeak would let on. If you ever thought your employer was messing with your head as some kind of experiment, you’ll appreciate what’s afoot at Zephyr. The company’s human resources operation occupies the third floor, and since Zephyr has some odd notions about corporate culture, this means HR’s floor is actually third from the top of the building. The first floor belongs to the CEO, who seems to exist only in voice mail. Likewise, HR seems inhuman. There’s just a desk, and a calm, terrifying, disembodied voice that, when it speaks, seems to know every employee’s secrets.

Things are funny in a more realistic way at the failing Chicago advertising agency that is the setting for Then We Came to the End. Everyone is about a day away from being laid off—or, as the office lingo goes, “walking Spanish,” after a Tom Waits song and a pirate term. The anxiety levels are high. The book is told in first person plural, which seems like a gimmick at first, but you’ll find it grows on you—it’s easier than getting used to talking mice or Santa as CEO.

Few books capture a workplace’s intense, hilarious, pathetic and occasionally terrifying atmosphere as well as this one. There’s an honesty to it that cuts through all the malarkey you tend to find in the business books that offer easy answers about complex workplace issues. Take this section, on the complicated nature of a diverse workforce and the bad feelings roiling around a senior art director, Karen Woo:

“We hated Karen Woo. We hated hating Karen Woo because we feared we might be racists. The white guys, especially. But it wasn’t just the white guys. Benny, who was Jewish, and Hank, who was black, hated Karen too. Maybe we hated Karen not because she was Korean, but because she was a woman with strong opinions in a male-dominated world. But it wasn’t just the men; Marcia couldn’t stand her, and she was a woman. And Marcia loved Donald Sato, so she couldn’t be a racist. Donald wasn’t Korean, but he was Asian of some kind, and everybody liked him as much as Marcia did even though he didn’t say a whole lot.”

You won’t learn everything you need to know about managing a workforce from either book, but you’ll get some insights that you won’t find among the monkeys and other faddish mascots that populate some business books.