Philosophy for a Happy Life

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Tim Sackett

This is Sam Bern’s Philosophy for a Happy Life. Sam was a 17 year old kid who battled a very rare aging disease called Progeria. The kid was pretty amazing for his outlook on life. Here is his Philosophy for a Happy Life:

1. Be okay with what you ultimately can’t do, because there is so much you CAN do.

2. Surround yourself with people you want to be around.

3. Keep moving forward.

4. Never miss a party if you can help it.

Sam got to share this philosophy at the Mid-Atlantic TEDx event –

I love the simplicity of it. I love the ‘teenager’ in it.

Focus on what you can do. Stay positive. Hang out with people who appreciate you, and you them. Don’t look back, you can’t change the past. Party. This ride won’t last forever, might as well have some fun while we are here.

I wish every person could be this smart!

How To Pay A Headhunting Fee in 15 Easy Steps

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Tim Sackett

I hear statements like this all the time: ‘Ugh, I don’t want to pay a headhunting fee!’ I know this is because corporate HR folks think that it’s really hard to do, but I’m hear to show you that it isn’t hard! In fact, in 15 easy steps, I’ll show you how you can do this all the time!

Here are the 15 Easy Steps in Paying a Headhunting Fee:

1. Post all of your jobs and wait for applications/resumes to come into your email and/or ATS.

2. Weed out as many candidates as possible for stuff that doesn’t really matter, like: too many jobs, not enough time at a job, going to the ‘wrong’ school or not high enough GPA, working for a company that was too big or too small, making a grammatical error on the resume, not living in the ‘right’ area, etc.

3. Email the few candidates you have left with a message about their interest level and make them fill out stuff like applications and questionnaires to be considered for the next step.

4. Wait for email replies.

5. Send the 2 that reply as your ‘best candidates’ onto the hiring manager. 7 others reply after, ignore these, they weren’t quick enough to be the ‘best’ candidates.

6. Don’t follow up with the hiring manager on the two candidates you sent. If she is interested, she’ll get back to you.

7. Don’t respond to candidates following up looking for feedback on next steps, you want to keep the power position in this arrangement.

8. Send another email to hiring manager after two weeks looking for feedback on original candidates you sent. Hiring manager won’t like the two, wants more candidates. You go out and see who else has posted for the position in the past week (forget about those other 7 who first applied, they are old by now). Send 5 additional emails to the new candidates. 1 replies. Send to hiring manager.

9. Let Hiring Managers return calls go to voice mail, you know they just want to complain about the quality and lack of candidates. Call her back end of business tomorrow. She’s already gone for the day.

10. Hiring manager comes to your office. Crap. They caught you. You tell the manager you’ve been working non-stop on their opening, the three candidates are the best you can come up with.

11. Hiring manager goes back to their office. I call your hiring manager. She tells me she can’t get any good candidates.

12. Hiring Manager sets up their own interviews. Three days later, if not sooner, I send your hiring manager 5 candidates all capable of doing the job. I call your hiring manager to highlight two of the candidates who I feel would be the best fit for your organization.

13. Hiring manager picks a favorite from the great interviews they just had. I’ve pre-closed both on an offer, so I’m what they call in the business, a ‘sure-thing’.

14. Hiring manager calls you and tells you they found a candidate through an outside source.

15. You process my invoice.

See, it’s really not that hard to pay a headhunting fee, in fact, you practically don’t have to do much of anything! Just keep doing what you’re doing.

Burning Down Your HR Department

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Tim Sackett

This post originally ran in January of 2012. I liked it, and still like it today. Many of us are looking to kick off 2014 with a fresh approach. Read this, it might save you some time in the upcoming year! Enjoy.

A couple of years ago my parents house burned down. They were away on vacation and lighting struck the roof. Before the fire department could get there and put it out, most of the house was destroyed. 60+ years of memories and possessions, gone. In hindsight, it was a bit of a blessing, there house was at the age where everything was starting to need replacing, and my father was at the age, where he wanted to retire. Those two things don’t go well together! Major home improvements equals major expense, and a fixed income. So, long-story-short, mother nature, and the insurance company, gave my folks a new house for a retirement gift! All is well that ends well, I guess.

This situation, though, led to some deep emotional conversations about what the wish they could have pulled out, if they new this was going to happen. As you can imagine it was all the stuff you and I would want – our photos, our mementos, some favorite things that remind us of loved ones, or things that we were proud of. I thought about his recently when having a conversation with a friend who just started a new position as the head of a large HR shop. His comment to me was:

“What I really need to do is burn this place down and start over!”

To which I replied, “well, isn’t there anything you would keep?” Bam! That is what he needed – he did need to burn it down, but there were definitely some things he needed to take out before lighting the match.

It’s a common practice that Leaders tend to do when taking on a new position – we tend to burn down our departments. Oh, we say we won’t, as we go around throwing gasoline on everything, and we say we aren’t rebuilding as strap our tool belt on and start hammering away, but the truth is, most leaders want to remake their new departments into what they want, not what it was.

So, I’ll ask you to take a few moments today and think about the concept of burning down your HR department. What would you pull out and save? What would you happily allow to burn up? What would you miss?

Everyday we owe it to our organizations to get better. You don’t have to burn down the department to get better – but you do need to get rid of those things you know you would easily allow to burn up!

Your Open Office is Killing Your Productivity

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Tim Sackett

You know what’s funny – everyone, who is anyone, wants to work in a new, cool, ultra modern open office concept! Organizations are spending billions creating these environments, and now studies are coming out and showing that productivity suffers in open concepts, especially with younger workers and those that love to multitask. From the New Yorker:

The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve…In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation. When David Craig surveyed some thirty-eight thousand workers, he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse she fared.

So, why do we continue to design our workplaces around this open office concept? Here’s what I think:

1. Recruiting. Young talent likes to walk into the ‘cool’ office. Executives feel that this is a recruiting advantage and a marketing advantage when customers see a new, ultra-modern office environment.

2. We think we want our office, like we want our homes. Over the past 2 decades home builders have been ask to build open home plan designs. We then go to our office which is all cut up into small rooms and think ‘Hey, wouldn’t this be ‘nicer’ if this was all opened up?’

3. Collaboration. Open office design was billed as the next best thing for creativity and collaboration. It was a theory. It was never really tested out. Someone had an idea, ‘you know what, if we break down these walls and have everyone in one big room, we’ll be more collaborative, we’ll be more creative”. Sounds good. Research is showing us that theory was just that, a theory.

I think for certain aspects the open concept still has merit. Sales offices for years have been using the open concept with success, in a bullpen environment. Hear your peers next to you on the phone, and your competitive nature takes over, you get on the phone. You can feel and hear a buzz in the air in a well run sales bullpen. I tend to think I’m creative, but having others around me, talking, doesn’t help my creative process. I hear this from IT and Design professionals as well. Have you been in a big IT shop or Design house? Most of the pros where headphones, dim the lights, try and create an environment that the open concept isn’t giving them.

Be careful my friends. I love the look of many of the new offices, but if it’s hurting productivity and making my workers worse – I’ll gladly give them back their offices!

Hiring Back An Employee Who Left You

Posted on January 10, 2014 by Tim Sackett

Did you see what happened last week on the college football carousel? The University of Louisville hired their ex-coach, and current Western Kentucky Coach, Bobby Petrino. For those who don’t know the Bobby Petrino story check out his detailed coaching timeline on SB Nation (it’s awesome!) – I’ll give you a five second tour:

I. Hired Head Football Coach at University of Louisville – doing great (2004)

II. Hired Head Coach NFL Atlanta Falcons (Jan. 2007) – didn’t do great

III. Leaves mid-season and takes University of Arkansas Head Coach job – did good (December 2007)

IV. Head Coach Arkansas, has a motorcycle crash with a 25 year old female assistant on the back that wasn’t his wife and that he was having an affair with, and that he hired – Power drunk. (April 2012)

V. Fired as Head Coach at Arkansas – not good (April 2012)

VI. Hired Head Football Coach Western Kentucky University- did good (December 2012)

VII. Hired Head Football Coach University of Louisville. (January 2013)

There’s a bunch of other luggage along the way that SB Nation points out which leads me to only one question – Was it a good hire by Louisville to take Bobby Petrino back?

I asked a couple of my friends and fellow #8ManRotation authors this same question – here are their responses:

Matt (akaBruno) Stollak:

How much time off does a mercurial talent deserve before being brought back? Is Jim Tressel looking at the Petrino hiring and thinking he is up next?

Similarly, how does Louisville Football Core Values (http://ftw.usatoday.com/2013/06/louisville-footballs-core-team-values-include-no-guns-no-drugs/) continue to exist when Petrino has blatantly violated #1 and #2. Is it all about winning? What message does it send to staff and players?

Steve (Mr. HR Tech) Boese:

Even a cynic like me is surprised by this move. I guess the argument was he hit rock bottom and now has done the football equivalent of finding Jesus or something, But it is also about positioning, Louisville does not want to be a stepping stone job between the MAC and the Big 10 or SEC, (they are delusional about this, but I think it is true). So at some level they see this hire as a the best they could do with that in mind. No successful power conference coach would leave for Louisville so with Petrino they find the closest they could to that ideal.

Petrino going to Western Kentucky after his biggest screw up at Arkansas and before coming back to Louisville also serves to give Louisville some cover on this. It is kind of like Western Kentucky took at least some of the flak for letting the guy back in to the world of coaching and at least in theory that will diminish the heat that Louisville is going to take. Kind of like Petrino went to jail (getting canned at Arkansas), then got released to probation, (Western Kentucky), and now the ankle bracelet has been finally cut off (back to Louisville).

Here’s my take:

The best hires that most companies will never make are the ones like this. He was great for us. Went someplace else and had a meltdown. Now we won’t hire him back either. For some reason, he was great with you. Don’t discount what certain environments, certain cultures, etc. will do for someone’s performance. Bobby Petrino is a broken man, coming home to where he had his most success. This might turn out to a great hire for Louisville.

What do you think?

The Future of HR, again.

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Tim Sackett

2014 will be the year Retention returns to HR.

Retention almost died during the great recession. For almost 10 years HR pros were able to roam the halls of their organization and almost never had to worry about the issue of retention. There weren’t many jobs. Most people in times of hardship, hunker down and don’t move. It was like a perfect retention storm! There are HR Pros who graduated out of HR programs, started their careers in the past 5 years, that have never known a time when retaining your employees was the number one priority!

That is about to change.

This year Retention of Employees will once again become a major issue that HR will be looked at to solve. Here are some important things to remember when you begin to look at ways to retain your employees:

1. “It’s really easy to do.” That is what your executives think, so you’re in trouble.

2. You will get blamed for high turnover. Buy a helmet, life sucks that way.

3. You will blame your crappy managers that you haven’t given any management training to in at least 5-7 years.

4. You will tell at least half the people in your organization – “We don’t have a retention problem, we have a compensation problem.” You’ll be partially right, but won’t have the competitive data to back it up, so you’ll come across a a whiny victim.

5. You’ll make at least one info-graphic trying to explain ‘Retention vs. Turnover’ to your executives. It will fail.

6. At least one executive will come up with the brilliant idea of ‘Retention Bonuses’ and think $1,000 at the end of a year will stop people from wanting to leave your organization. Everyone who stays throughout the year will get a $1,000 bonus but won’t know why they got it.

7. To combat your inability to retain employees, you’ll blame recruiting for not being able to find talent. This will work until your head of recruiting gets fired and the new head of recruiting comes in and says this one line – “The best recruit is the employee we don’t have to replace.” Again, retention will be on your desk.

8. Employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Instead of recruiting, you now pass off your problem to the training department. Managers will now be forced to go through soft skills leadership classes. You buy yourself 6 more months of retention not being your problem.

9. You’ll buy a ‘new’ assessment that claims to increase retention by picking the right people to begin with. You’ll never really find out if this worked or not, because you’ve been changing so many things no one will really know. But the HR vendor will take credit and you’ll start in their white paper and get asked to speak at their annual conference!

10. Retention will still be an issue in 2015, but by then you’ll turn everything you’ve done, and your 7% increase into retention, into a new position with a new company in town who has a worst problem than your old company. See #1 for your plan with the new company.

Beautiful Things Don’t Ask For Attention

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Tim Sackett

Over the holidays I got a chance to see the movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Sean Penn, plays freelance professional photographer Sean O’Connell. Walter Mitty is played by Ben Stiller. At one point Walter is searching for Sean to get an important negative and he finds Sean in some distant mountains, overseas, trying to capture a photo of a wild snow leopard. Sean says this line when explaining to Walter why he goes to such lengths to get a photo:

“Beautiful things don’t ask for a attention.”

In context or out, it’s a hugely profound line. Sean isn’t necessarily speaking to the snow leopards outward beauty but saying something truly beautiful, inside and out, doesn’t ask for attention, nor necessarily want attention. Each of us defines beauty differently, so this statement takes on different meaning for all of us.

I love this, I’ll leave it that.

Employee Narcissism At All-Time High

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Tim Sackett

Do you feel that our fixation on employee feedback is perpetuating our narcissistic society?

It’s a question I thought of recently and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. On one hand, I truly believe we have a major issue with narcissism in our society that is getting worse, not better. I also believe giving feedback to employees, on the work they do, is very valuable and needed to have a strong workforce.

So what gives?

We are told Annual Employee Evaluations are broken and not enough.

We are told you must give feedback to your employees frequently throughout the year.

We are also told that we have multiple generations that have gotten ‘hooked’ on feedback, like a junky is ‘hooked’ on crack. You get up and you put up a selfie waiting for your ‘followers’ to comment, to ‘like’, to give you a fix. You get to work, one more selfie – just a quick hit. Out to lunch, with my bestie, just one hit before I return to the office. Okay, it’s late afternoon, I’m going to need a little more to make it until 5pm, hello bathroom selfie, you’re my savior. Look at me! I’m home, bottle of wine selfie should at least get me through the evening.

Is it a stretch to compare the desire for social feedback to our desire for work feedback?

Here’s what I know. The more feedback you get, the more feedback you desire. If that is the case, is your new constant feedback evaluations at work creating a monster that you’ll never be able to satisfy? I feel like by solving one problem (lack of feedback), HR is helping to cause, or at least sustain, a bigger problem we are facing with an employee culture that is becoming overwhelmingly narcissistic.

Maybe the bigger question should be, what are we going to do with rampant narcissism that is running amok in our organizations? Have you created Anti-Narcissism training yet in your organization? If so, what does that entail? I’m thinking it must have some sort of aversion therapy elements (post a selfie and you get a shock from you desk chair!). Or maybe a little public shaming, which doesn’t seem to work on Narcissist, they actually like it – ‘oh look, someone is talking about me!’

I’m not sure what I dislike more in HR – employees who spent all of their time trying not get noticed, or employees who spend all of their time trying to get noticed!

5 Top Regrets of People Leaving a Job

Posted on January 6, 2014 by Tim Sackett

Being in my line of work, I get to hear from a ton of people who have left jobs. One of the questions I like to ask people is to give me one thing they regret about leaving a certain position or company. You might think that most people would find this hard to answer, but I’m always surprised at how quickly people can answer this question, and the fact that no one ever answers it with “I have no regrets.” I use this question to help me understand a candidates level of self-insight. If a person can look back on a job, and say you know what, the company might have sucked, but I could have done ‘this’ better, that’s someone who gets it.

Here are the Top 5 Regrets people have when leaving a job:

1. “I could have done better.” I like people who can come out and say, I just didn’t do enough. It’s usually followed with reasons why, lack or resources or tools, etc. But it shows me they have a desire to be successful at anything they do.

2. “I should have made more work friends.” I talk to a lot of people who have been at a company for years, and after they leave they realize they weren’t really close to anyone. They realize they miss some of the people, but never really put in the time to establish enough of a relationship to carry it beyond just a working relationship.

3. “I didn’t let the executives know what I was really thinking.” This happens to so many people. Even when leaving they somehow justify to themselves that it won’t matter, so they never share what they really thought of so many things. While some of it might not matter, there might have been a great idea or change in there that could have a positive impact to the organization. Yet, they walk away with it unsaid.

4. “I wish I would have celebrated my accomplishments more.” You know what happens when you celebrate your accomplishments? People begin to notice them as accomplishments. Those things turn into positives for the organizations. People are drawn to you and want to be a part of what you’re doing. Celebrations, real celebrations, make a closer bond between you and your coworkers.

5. “I wish I never would have left.” (or “I left for the wrong reasons.”)I hear so many people say these words – “I loved that job!” My next question is – “Why did you leave?” It’s always followed by a reason, promotion, more money, different location, etc. After they left, they found out how much the job they had, was a really, really good job that they loved. I always caution people from leaving a job, especially when they tell me they love the job. Don’t discount loving your job. It’s hard, really hard, to find jobs you love.

The beginning of the year is always a good time to reflect on your regrets from the prior year. I know many people who took on new positions in the past year. I always love to find out how the new gig is going, but I also love to ask about what they regret about leaving, and I’ve never disappointed by the response!

The Tim Sackett Project

TA & HR Expert, Dad, Backup Point Guard on my over 40 men's team

Monthly Archives: January 2014