Category Archives: Career Advice

7 Habits Of Remarkably Likeable HR Managers

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Ripped from the pages of Inc. Magazine’s recent article 7 Habits of Remarkably Likeable Bosses, I give you…something slightly different:

7 Habits Of Remarkably Likeable HR Managers!

1. They are named “Kay”.  Have you ever really not liked someone named, Kay!?  Kay just seems like a friendly lady with at least 3 cats and grandchildren, a whole lot of grandchildren.  Kay is helpful.  Kay will give you a hug when you need it.  Kay brings in really good comfort food with funny names like “Redneck Bunt Cake”.

2. They dress up on dress up days at work.  You know what I’m talking about.  They wear green on St. Patrick’s Day.  They wear their normal sweater on Ugly Christmas Sweater Day.  They aren’t afraid to be apart of the festivities.  People like people who are involved.

3. They order right mix of cookies for the conference room.  Don’t even think about discounting this as ‘remarkable’!  Have you ever been late to a meeting and had to choke down an oatmeal raisin cookie!?  Likeable HR Managers know you need at least a 3 to 1 chocolate chip to raisin mix at a minimum, really high performers will forgo all raisin cookies all together.

4. They are forgetful.  You know that one holiday party where you had too much to drink and hooked up with a coworker, and your HR Manager saw? Yeah, don’t worry, she forgot on purpose, because she doesn’t want your one bad decision to haunt your entire career with the company.  Likeable HR Managers tend to forget your misdeeds (that are forgivable) and remember the value you bring to the organization!

5. They Drink the Kool-Aid.  A likeable HR Manager is one who is also an organizations cheerleader.  They support top managements decisions, and in turn help others in the organization to see the benefits as well.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Getting everyone to move in the same direction is a very powerful trait to have.  Some will view it as they are just followers, I view it as a great strategy to build influence.

6.  They cuss at your CEO.  You wouldn’t actually know about this trait, because besides being remarkably likeable, they’re also remarkably professional and only do this behind closed doors of your CEO’s office. But they do it, and they’re the only one who does it and gets away with it.  It keeps your CEO from going crazy train, and they appreciate it, as long as it stays between just the two of them.

7. They don’t rake sh*t.  You know what happens when you rake sh*t that’s been lying stagnant for a long time?  It stinks. That’s just like problems in your organization that have been laying dormant for some time.  You begin digging up and turning over stuff, you’ll find stuff that stinks.  Many times that stuff has been taken care of and is water under the bridge. No reason to rake sh*t, unless you just like the smell.

For those who will hate on this and say “I don’t want to be liked, I want to be respected!” I say, “Why, not both!?”  It’s not a one or the other choice, you can have both.  The HR Pro who can be respected and likeable is the HR Pro I want working for my team!

Recruiting is my Drug

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I don’t take drugs.  It’s not that I’m anti-drug, I just had something happen in my formative years that scared the hell out of me, so I never really went down that path. I’m 16 years old in 1986, and I’m sitting at home watching this cool new cable show called ESPN SportsCenter and they announce Boston Celtic’s first round draft pick, Len Bias, overdosed using cocaine, and died. I was in complete shock. His friends came out and said it was the first time he ever tried drugs.  First time, dead.  I was scared straight.

Don’t get me wrong, if I’m in pain, drugs are good.  If I’m sick, give me a pill to get better.  I would love it if there was a pill I could take and never get fat.  Also, to give me a full head of hair again.  One second thought, it sounds like I’m actually pro-drug!

I think all of us find certain things that tend to get us going.  For many people that is exercise. Others like to go out and drink and have fun.  I get super energized when I’m recruiting!  I know, geeky, right!?

Like most drugs, recruiting can bring out the best and worse in me.  When recruiting is great, you have a great opportunity for someone, you find the perfect person for that opportunity, it makes you feel like you can do anything.  It’s the high!  When recruiting is bad, you have positions no one wants, you find talent without any other options, your hiring managers think you couldn’t find ice in the North Pole, well, that’s the down side of drugs.

The high brings you back, though.

The right job, the right person, when it seems like no one else has had success.  It reminds me a lot of golfers.  I golf, but I’m terrible.  I still like to golf, because out of a round you’ll get a handful of really, really good shots, and it feels so good, it makes you forget about the downside.  That’s recruiting.  The positives out weigh the negatives.

I tend to find most people in HR, and many of those in Recruiting, hate to actually recruit.  It’s not their drug.  Maybe they like FMLA or developing comp plans. I don’t get high off those, but who am I to judge the drug of another!

People will read into this (besides that I might have a drug problem) that I ‘Love’ recruiting.  Let’s not confuse love and drugs. I love my wife and kids.  I like how recruiting makes me feel when it all works well.   “Oh, it’s so great that you found work that you love!”  Slow down.  If someone would pay me to fish all day, I’d love that! Recruiting is something I found that I’m really good at.  That’s important, for all of us.  Way too many times I meet people who haven’t found that, so I’m grateful for finding recruiting.

What’s your drug?

Client Respect and Love

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I dropped a vision on my team a couple weeks ago.  I think it’s important for any leader to do this, but it’s also important that it be completely authentic and transparent.  I say ‘dropped’ on my team, because that’s exactly what I did.  I didn’t let anyone know I was ‘working’ on my vision, because I wasn’t.  It came to me.  Like a vision.  It took me about a week to get the thoughts down in my own style, and add a grammatical error or two.

I’m not sharing my vision with you.  It’s for me and my team.

I will share a concept from it.  I want to work with clients who want to work with us.  Not just work with us, but want to partner with us.  Now, I know we throw that word ‘partner’ around a bunch.  My vision of a partner is a client who respects us and loves us.  We have to have both, love and respect, to get to my vision.  Respect isn’t enough.

In HR many times we will say something like “I don’t need that hiring manager to like me, as long as they respect me.”  That’s just a nice way we lie to ourselves that this will be a functional relationship.  It’s not.  You need more than respect, to be wildly successful.  You need Love.

I want love.

I want respect.

I want to work with clients who respect what we bring to them from a skill and support side.  But I also want clients who love us, and we love them.  That I look forward to talking to them, to seeing them, and they feel the same way.  That isn’t easy.  But it is something I think we owe to ourselves.  To work with people we love to work with, whether it’s those sitting next to us as coworkers, or those clients we work with daily.

I don’t care if I was selling staffing solutions, or the cure for cancer, my vision would not change.   I don’t care if I’m running a business or running a department, my vision stays the same.  In HR you have ‘clients’, all those who you support.  Are you trying to get your clients to love and respect you?  If you reach that level, where they do, it will make your job, your life, glorious.

Becoming A Victim Of Can’t

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I spoke in Huntsville, Al this week to a group of around 175 HR and Talent Pros for North Alabama SHRM.  It was a fun group. They had a ton of energy and were willing to put up with me and my fast talking northern ways! My wife told me to be more respectful, than usual, on my way down to Alabama.  She said southern women expected more manners than I was use to!

For those who don’t much about Huntsville it is a big military town, which means most people either work on the base, or work for a contractor supporting one of the many military contracts coming out of the base.  There are literally hundreds of companies in Huntsville that are considered military ‘contractors’.  That’s really just a big fancy term for companies that won a military contract, which is just a scope of work they need to do or deliver to the military.

If you haven’t worked a military contract before, they come with as much red tape and rules as you can expect from the U.S. government.  That becomes a very big problem for HR Pros who love to follow rules!  One thing that was apparent very early into the day was that some Huntsville HR and Talent Pros became very comfortable with saying the following statement:

“We can’t do that, we are a military contractor!”

You can probably guess what my answer was to that!  “Yes, you can! You just have to find a way to do it!”  What they didn’t expect was that my company was also a military contractor, I was going to accept any victim statements.  Yes, you are a military contractor.  Isn’t it great!  Now, let’s find out how we can use Facebook to recruit and find you some really good talent!

But, Tim, OFCCP! OFCCP won’t allow us to social recruit!  Really.  It really says within OFCCP regulations that you can’t recruit on Facebook!?  Well, no, but…you just don’t understand.  Yeah, I understand more than you really know.  I understand it’s going to be hard, but it can be done.  I also understand that it’s really easy to fall the victim and use OFCCP as a crutch to why we can do our job.

I actually spoke to two pros who were going through OFCCP audits.  Scary stuff for any HR or Talent Pro.  But I didn’t even let them use it as a crutch.  I asked them if they would get through it. Yes, was the answer.  Did you get fined? No.  So, now you just have to figure how to make it the sourcing you need to do, work within your OFCCP process.  Not easy. But doable and needed.

The most dangerous thing we’ll ever face in our career is becoming a victim of can’t.   I’m a firm believer you can try to do anything.  We might not succeed, but it shouldn’t stop you from trying.  Things like OFCCP are there to catch bad companies, doing bad things.  I’ve never spoken to a good company, with good people, trying to do the right things, that ever had an issue with OFCCP! Ever!

Go do the right things for your organization, and in the end trust that why you might get audited, you are doing what is right.  That’s ultimately all you really can do.

How to tell your Work Critics to “Suck It”!

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In the corporate world everyone is a critic!  Everyone!  We’ve gotten really good at a learned behavior.  No longer can we just send out a final product the first time. Why?  Because everyone wants to trash it and change it, so it can be this really nice piece of plain old vanilla cake!  Welcome to Corporate America. But you know what? This isn’t new. Critics have been around since Jesus, and critics have been wrong since before Jesus!   I wanted to share with you some famous things that critics got wrong:

Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1824)

What the critics said in 1825: “We find Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to be precisely one hour and five minutes long; a frightful period indeed, which puts the muscles and lungs of the band, and the patience of the audience to a severe trial…” –The Harmonicon, London, April 1825

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville (1851)

And the critics response: When Melville died in 1891, Moby-Dickhad moved a grand total of 3,715 copies…in 40 years! The below was typical at the time of the book’s release:

“…an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition…Our author must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius, while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise…” -Henry F. Chorley, London Athenaeum, October 25, 1851

Animal Farm, by George Orwell (1945)

What the critics said about the book we all had to read in high school: “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.” –Publisher’s rejection

 

Here’s what I know, true creativity in what we do, does not come from running our ideas through everyone and their brother for approval.  If your organization wants your employees to be truly creative and innovative, stop pushing teams.  Teams don’t make masterpieces. They can do some pretty cool stuff, but pure creativity isn’t one of them.  We push “Team” so hard in HR and in most organizations it sometimes makes you think like this the only way everyone in the world must work, but it’s not.  An HR Pro that can determine the proper work structure throughout their organization is truly valuable.  “Team” isn’t always the answer, and you should have other tools in your toolbox.

 

You hear artist all the time say, “I don’t listen to my critics”. This is valuable in that they know listening to a critic will hurt their art.  Unfortunately, in business, we don’t always have the ability/decision to not listen to our critics (who could be bosses, peers, friends, etc.).  In business telling your critics to “Suck It”, could be a big career derailer!  So, when do we go all “Suck It – It’s my project” in the workplace?

 

First, I would never suggest you approach it beginning with “Suck It”!  While it will get their attention, it will also shut off communication.  I think we all need the ability in our work environment to push back appropriately when you truly know you have something that will make a difference.  But, it’s really about having the conviction to stand behind it and not let it get changed.  That’s your indicator,  “am I willing to put my career/credibility/bank of influence on the line for this idea/project/etc.?” If you are, it’s time to pull out the “Suck It” card and push forward.  For most of us, this might never happen in our work lives.  It’s rare to have to do this, if you find yourself doing it often, you’ve got an interpersonal issue to deal with!

 

I think what we learn over time is that not all of our critics are bad, and some actually might help truly make us better.  The key is to continue to have confidence in what you do, without it, your work critics will make your work life less than artistic.

Putting On the ‘You Show’

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That’s what an interview is, right?  It’s a complete 60 minute show about you.  The entire thing rotates around your storyline.  Will you fit with this position? Will you fit with our culture? Are you the skilled enough?  Are you the ‘right’ personality for the hiring manager.

It’s a complete 60 minute tell all that you really control.  You can make it a sitcom, a drama, a horror show, crime show or a boring biography.  It’s really your choice!

But in the one time any of truly has for a ‘You Show’ we allow employers to make it a ‘Them Show’.  We allow them to run the show.  Can you imagine going to a Broadway musical and you tell them what songs you want to hear!  It doesn’t work that way.

“But you have to follow the employers interview structure!”

To a point.  If you’re asked a question, you have answer it.  Wait a minute. No you don’t!  Do you know how many hundreds of thousands of questions I’ve asked in interviews over my career, where the candidate didn’t even come close to answering what I had asked!

Here the secret to getting and not getting a job all at the same time.  Be the director of your You Show.  Some employers will not like your show and will not make you a offer.  That is okay, that is not an offer you would want anyway.  In the long run you wouldn’t be happy.  Some employers will love your You Show and want to extend your You Show to many more seasons.  That’s the job you want.

That doesn’t mean you go into an interview with sweatpants and your “Just Legalize It!” t-shirt, because that is who you ‘truly’ are.  You go into the interview the best version of yourself, not the worse version of yourself.  Think date night, I really love this girl you.  Trying to impress, but also not trying to be someone you are not.

The You Show, now playing at an interview near you.