Monthly Archives: February 2013

The Most Dangerous Word In Performance

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What is the one thing you can count on a supervisor saying in 99% of all performance evaluations? Try.  It probably comes in the form of: “You can ‘try’ harder” or “Maybe you should ‘try’ to do…” or “Give this a ‘try’…” But that little 3 letter word – Try – is a very dangerous word.  Remember Yoda from Star Wars –

Fortune had a great article on the use of the word ‘try’ recently:

“Whether in a job interview, on a resume, or in the office, try simply shows a lack of belief, passion, commitment, and confidence — all the qualities you need to succeed in today’s tight job market. Grammarly’s contextual thesaurus has a whopping 66 different synonyms for try, yet none of them are as convincing as words like do, believe, act, tackle, accomplish, or succeed. While try might get you 10%, or even halfway there, employers are looking for strong problem solving skills and unwavering dedication.

I cringe when I hear, “I’ll give it a try,” because the phrase suggests failure. “I’ll do it” inspires confidence every time.”

When I coach supervisors on delivering performance feedback this is a concept I work hard on getting them to understand – the words you choose to use have great impact.  Also, the words they allow the employee to respond with, sets them up for future success or failure.  One thing I’ve always done with performance feedback is allow the employee to give me their performance objectives, instead of dictating what performance I expect.  How I coach the performance, though, is to frequently help in rewording their objectives with the words that is going to ensure they go after the performance they want – not to ‘try’ and get the performance they want.

This might seem a bit nit-picky to some – but using words the convey conviction of a goal do wonders for setting someone off on the right track to reaching that goal.  I can’t say it any better than the Yoda, Jedi Master, “Do, Or do not. There is no Try.”

To Be Honest, We Hate Analytics

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Don’t kid yourself – you hate analytics.  It wouldn’t be politically correct to say that you hate analytics, so you won’t.  That’s why I’m here.

You hate analytics because using them in your organization increases accountability.

Increased accountability = Increased stress.

Increased stress = Increased job dissatisfaction.

Increased job dissatisfaction = Increased Turnover.

You see the cycle, right?

So, who likes Analytics?  Bosses. Why?  Because they like having increased accountability on you.  It makes them feel all strategic and shit.   When analytics are used against you like a weapon – they suck.  Too many organizations are analytics as a weapon to judge your performance.  Leadership justifies this because ultimately they are held accountable to the ultimate analytic – the bottom line.  So, they feel you should be held accountable to.  We would like analytics better if they weren’t used to bash us over the head.  If they were used to help make us better, to help us improve, to help us understand.

Harvard Business Review had a great post on this subject: The Real Reason Organizations Resist Analytics by Michael Schrage

The evolving marriage of big data to analytics increasingly leads to a phenomenon I’d describe as “accountability creep” — the technocratic counterpart to military “mission creep.” The more data organizations gather from more sources and algorithmically analyze, the more individuals, managers and executives become accountable for any unpleasant surprises and/or inefficiencies that emerge.

For example, an Asia-based supply chain manager can discover that the remarkably inexpensive subassembly he’s successfully procured typically leads to the most complex, time-consuming and expensive in-field repairs. Of course, engineering design and test should be held accountable, but more sophisticated data-driven analytics makes the cost-driven, compliance-oriented supply chain employee culpable, as well.

This helps explain why, when working with organizations implementing big data initiatives and/or analytics, I’ve observed the most serious obstacles tend to have less to do with real quantitative or technical competence than perceived professional vulnerability. The more managements learn about what analytics might mean, the more they fear that the business benefits may be overshadowed by the risk of weakness, dysfunction and incompetence exposed.

I recall a very technical business acronym I was taught in my Master’s program called: CYA.  Be very careful with your big data initiatives because many turn into CYA projects.  If I can show these analytics – it will show why this major issue doesn’t have anything to do with my department, but everything to do with another department.  Days To Fill reports are filled with CYA.  “It’s the hiring managers not getting back to us in a timely matter to set up interviews – this is why are Days to Fill is so high.”

Accountability sucks – when it is happening to you.  It’s great when you’re holding someone to it. Big Data might be the biggest weapon you have in your tool box – be very careful who you point it at.

 

HR – It’s You or it’s Me

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I love ‘end of days’ type posts and articles.  The end of Job Boards!  The end of HR!  Here’s another one great one over at ERE by Dr. John Sullivan called: The End of Sourcing Is Near…, which talks about how eventually (in John’s opinion) most sourcing information will be readily available to almost everyone.  This makes really the only thing left to do in recruiting is to sell the candidate on your job and your organization.  Sullivan explains the importance of this very critical step in recruiting – the sell:

“Recruiting leaders should begin focusing on these selling aspects because, as previously stated, “finding” is becoming so easy, and there is little push for change in candidate assessment because most recruiters and hiring managers are comfortable with the existing process of assessing candidates through interviews.

Once you realize that the selling aspect of recruiting is almost universally under researched, underfunded, and it is almost always executed in an unscripted manner, you’ll see that it’s ripe for significant improvement and change. If you review the recruiting literature you will find very little written about the science of selling and the importance of using data-driven selling approaches within the recruiting function. The pressure is increasing on recruiting leaders to make a decision to shift resources away from sourcing by recruiters and toward the remaining big challenge: selling.”

Like most ‘end of days’ type posts, Sullivan’s end of sourcing post is probably a little over the top, but he makes a great point.  HR Pros don’t recruit well for one simple fact – HR Pros didn’t get into HR to sell – they got into HR to do HRy things like: build processes, improve processes, administer people practices within an organization, training, problem solving, etc.   They didn’t go – “Oh boy! I can’t wait to get into the Fortune 500 HR shop so I can sell our company like a a life insurance salesman trying to make quota!”

That’s where I come in.  I don’t hire HR pros to work in recruiting.  I don’t sell the recruiting position as an HR position.  I don’t go over to Michigan State’s HR program and speak to students about ‘getting their start’ in HR by coming to work for me.  99% of those folks, while great people, would fail in my environment.  They want to be in HR – Recruiting is not HR.  There in lies the problem for most HR shops.   Most HR folks – probably 70-80% – have to do some ‘recruiting’ in their organizations.  They don’t have a recruiting department or a sourcing group to do all the heavy lifting.  Most HR Managers, if they’re lucky, have a full time recruiter, but this still means, when it’s busy, they still have to recruit.

That’s why so many HR pros engage recruiting agencies.  We offer a skill set they don’t, necessarily, have on their staff.  We sell.  We sell the crap out of a position and your company.  We can make an average company look like the Best Place to Work and a really bad company look like the next big opportunity.  No power steering – No problem – manual steering builds up great arm muscles!  Want tinted windows?  Yeah, we can get those installed.  Recruiting is selling.  In fact, Recruiting is double selling.  You sell the candidate on the position, then you sell the hiring manager on the candidate.  Good recruiters can work in any industry – because selling skills are transferable to any product or service.

So – do you want your HR Pros to sell, or do you want me to sell?  By the way – I don’t hire HR Pros, I hire closers.

Let my company do some selling for you – let’s connect: sackett.tim@HRU-Tech.com; 517-908-3156 or @TimSackett.

 

How Does HR Think?

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I’m not sure how HR thinks.  I know how I think, and from what people tell me, I don’t think like a ‘normal’ HR person.  One thing I really like, though, is to see how other pros think.  I learn a lot from how maybe an engineer addresses an issue versus say how a Designer would address the same issue.  I like to take aspects of how other professionals think and incorporate those thought processes into how I think about HR.  I think this helps me solve HR issues in ways that the business can grasp onto better.

I found a cool article recently on how Designers think.  Here are some of the ways Designers think:

– “Design is not about solving problems.  It’s about making people happy. And there are always so many personalities and ideas to consider. So you’re trying to simplify it to its fundamental structure.” 

– “You have to understand when the timing is right for dialogue, and when its time to move the limits. Designers arrive at a company to move its limits.”

– “Try to pare things down. Very few moves do a lot.”

– “Unoriginal, ugly and cheap. Revolutionary, gorgeous and luxurious. These do not have to be contradictions.”

– “The idea of innovation as a structured process has been taken to the extreme, where it is no longer a really useful or robust concept. You’ve got to go about letting people take sensible risks.”

– “…Pain is temporary. Suck is forever.”

In HR, I tend to believe that most HR pros don’t believe they work in a creative function.  In reality what you create in HR speaks volumes about the culture you’re shaping in your work environment.  If HR lacks creativity – your work environment is going to lack creativity.  The rule setters need to show the organization that from time to time, we need to break the rules to get us to the next level.  Sensibly, but rule breaking nonetheless.  Breaking the rules is like ‘kryptonite’ to HR Pros.  It goes against our very being.  Most HR Pros pride themselves on being ‘the one’ part of the organization that actually follows the rules. “If we don’t do it, Tim, who will?”

I don’t know.  What I know is I like how designers think.  It seems like a thought process that opens my mind and gets me thinking about how I can make things better.  It’s a thought process that challenges me to rethink what I’m doing and why.  That seems like a good thing. I don’t want to suck.  I hear suck is forever.

 

 

I’ll Retire When I’m Dead

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In case you missed it last week, America’s CEOs want to change the social security eligibility age from 65 to 70.  Of course this isn’t shocking and this argument has been building for decades as a possible solution to the social security funding problem as so many baby boomers start to collect.  From Bloomberg:

Raising the Medicare age to 70, from today’s 65, would keep the oldest workers, who generally have the greatest health costs, on private insurance for an additional five years. The shift would hit states that cover more low-income seniors through Medicaid, and it would raise premiums for younger people who buy health insurance through state exchanges, as more people with higher health costs enter the risk pool.

This would save Medicare money—a good thing for taxpayers. But it would effectively increase health costs for the country overall, including employers. “For many seniors, their costs will go up. For employers in the aggregate, their costs will go up,” says Juliette Cubanski, associate director for Medicare policy at the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s because Medicare pays doctors less for their services than private insurers do…

Workers might not relish spending those extra years on the job to keep their health insurance. But it’s the cost of living longer, as Gary Loveman, Business Roundtable member and chief executive officer of Caesars Entertainment (CZR), illustrated with a personal anecdote at a press conference:

“My father, who was an employee of AT&T (T) for more than 40 years, retired at age 61 and lived to be 95. He was a 34-year recipient of Social Security benefits—something that near his death, he noted to me with great pride that he had been on both [AT&T’s] payroll and the federal government’s payroll for much longer than anyone could possibly have anticipated. That’s, of course, generally speaking, good news,” Loveman said. “But it’s a problem the country simply can’t afford over a sustained period of time.”

I’ve witnessed this personally.  I have a grandparent who spent 30 years with good old General Motors – retired at the ripe old age of 51 and collected pension and eventually social security benefits for more years than they actually paid into the system.  That is why our ‘traditional’ way of retirement in America is broke.  The system was not created to have people collect social security for 15-20-25+ years.  When it was created, social security was a plan that the founders probably figured individuals would be on for 10 years or less.  While I don’t want to have to work until I’m 70 – for me and most Americans this is a foregone conclusion.

The new reality we face is 70 years old today, is not 70 years old of 20-30 years ago.  My Dad turned 70 this past year and still works in professional job and really doesn’t want to retire.  He’s reached a point in his career where he knows just about everything in his business and he has 30+ years of great relationships to leverage, and he has no fear about getting ‘fired’ – he’s 70!  Work can now be fun.

I have friends who still talk about wanting to retire at 55 and I tend to just shake my head and let them have their dream.  They really have no idea the amount of money it will take to live from 55 to 90 or so.  You’re talking millions of dollars in retirement investments – not 1 million – multiple millions to live another 30+ years.  I’m realistic.  I figure I’ll get to retire the day after I die.  At least I hope I get to.