Category Archives: Career Path

Falling In Love With Your Job

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Do you know what it felt like the last time you fell in love?

I mean real love?

The kind of love where you talk 42 times per day, in between text and facebook messages and feel physical pain from being apart? Ok, maybe for some it’s been a while and you didn’t have the texts or Facebook!  But, you remember those times when you really didn’t think about anything else or even imagine not seeing the other person the next day, hell, the next hour. Falling “in” love is one of the best parts of love, it doesn’t last that long and you never get it back.

I hear people all the time say “I love my job” and I never use to pay much attention, in fact, I’ve said it myself.  The reality is, I don’t love my job. I mean I like it a whole lot, but I love my wife, I love my kids, I love Diet Mt. Dew at 7am on a Monday morning. The important things in life!  But my job?  I’m not sure about that one.  As an HR Pro, I’m supposed to work to get my employees to “love” their jobs.  Love.

Let me go all Dr. Phil on you for a second. Do you know why most relationships fail? No, it’s not the cheating. No, it’s not the drugs and/or alcohol. No, it’s not money. No, it’s not that he stop caring. No, it’s not your parents. Ok, stop it. I’ll just tell you!

Relationships fail because expectations aren’t met.  Which seems logical knowing what we know about how people fall in love, and lose their minds.  Once that calms down – the real work begins.  So, if you expect love to be the love of the first 4-6 months of a relationship you’re going to be disappointed a whole bunch over and over.

Jobs aren’t much different.

You get a new job and it’s usually really good!  People listen to your opinion. You seem smarter. Hell, you seem better looking (primarily because people are sick of looking at their older co-workers). Everything seems better in a new job.  Then you have your 1 year anniversary and you come to find out you’re just like the other idiots you’re working with.

This is when falling in love with your job really begins. When you know about all the stuff the company hid in the closet. The past employees they think are better and smarter than you, the good old days when they made more money, etc.  Now, is when you have to put some work into making it work.

I see people all the time moving around to different employers and never seeming to be satisfied.  They’re searching. Not for a better job, or a better company. They’re searching for that feeling that will last.  But it never will, not without them working for it.

The best love has to be worked for. Passion is easy and fleeting. Love is hard to sustain and has to be worked, but can last forever.

Great Talent Supports Great Talent

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Too often leaders put up with a great talent who’s shitty to other employees. The belief is that because the employee is so talented we should be willing to put up with how they treat others. It happens all the time in organizations! All. The. Time.

Ichiro Suzuki is a very successful Major League Baseball player for the Seattle Mariners who just hit his 3,000 hit in the major leagues, that just adds to his thousand plus hits he had in the Japanese professional baseball league. All those hits make him arguably the greatest hitter of all time at the professional level of baseball.

ESPN did an article about Ichiro recently as he was coming very close to the 3,000 hit milestone in the MLB, a very rare feat. What most people don’t know is Ichiro almost left the MLB after only one season because his teammates treated him so badly:

“Suzuki explained later that in the middle of his career with the Mariners, when the team wasn’t playing well but he was an All-Star and Gold Glove winner, his teammates called him selfish and said that he cared only about individual accolades. After Griffey, Sweeney and Ibanez arrived, he says, they stood up for him and encouraged their teammates to worry about their own play first.”

It wasn’t until Seattle brought in other MLB All-Stars that Ichiro felt welcomed. Great talent, supports great talent. Okay, everyone on an MLB roster is talented, but even within those rosters, there are levels of talent. Ichiro is a hall of fame talent. Griffey is a hall of famer.

The point to all of this is your best talent should support the other best talent of your organization.  If you have great talent that isn’t supporting each other, you need to make a move. Great talent is talented if they don’t support the other talent in the organization. That might be the single most difficult thing for leaders to understand.

Your talent is wasted if you can’t find ways to lift up the other talent around you. Seattle was able to find talent that was willing to do that and Ichiro turned his talent into one of the greatest of all time, but he was also very close to just packing it in and going home.

I wonder how much talent walks out your door based on how they are being treated by others in your organization?

I’m a Jealous Asshole.

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Don’t blow out someone else’s candle to make yours brighter. – Chelsea Handler


I had someone close to me tell me recently they were jealous of me.  It was hard for them to do, I know. It always hard to put yourself out there and be vulnerable.

I’m jealous as well. I’m jealous all the f’ing time. I hate that about myself.

I’m surrounded constantly be really, really talented people. That’s a gift and a curse. I know many of these folks on a really personal level and I know they work their ass off to get what they have, but it doesn’t stop me from being jealous of them.

Why should you care?

Jealousy kills so many talented people. Not literally killed, but emotionally and from a talent perspective.  It’s easy to say, “just focus on you! Be the best ‘you’, etc.”  It’s much harder to actually do that.

I have a couple of friends I can reach out to, tell them I’m being a jealous asshole, they’ll listen and they’ll try and help. I appreciate that. I trust them completely not to share my crazy jealous fits.  They’re so childlike, they’re embarrassing.   Everyone needs friends like these, and you need to be this friend!

It sucks being a jealous asshole. My wife says I’m never jealous, but I hide it from her. We do that kind of stuff for the people we love the most.

Don’t blow out someone else’s candle to make yours brighter, might be the best advice I’ve heard in a very long time. It won’t stop me from being jealous, but I hope it stops me from trying to bring down someone else when I’m jealous.

 

 

 

T3 – Pilot (@Pilot_Inc)

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This week on T3 I review the new startup coaching technology PILOT. PILOT is the brainchild of Ben Brooks. I’ve known Ben for years, he’s a super smart HR Pro/Leader based in New York who has an exceptional corporate HR background. From Ben’s corporate experience he realized there was a gap in the market when it came to professional, personal development for most people, and PILOT was born.

PILOT is an innovative career improvement company revolutionizing the way individuals command their careers. With leading advice and resources that were previously only available through expensive one-on-one career coaches or control-focused HR departments, PILOT combines an easy-to-use technology platform with focused, real-world advice that empowers individuals to take control of their professional success.

Basically, PILOT is a more efficient, cheaper way to have a professional business coach in your life. One that helps you drive your career forward and holds you accountable to results. For organizations, it becomes retention insurance! If your best people are being developed, they will leave, that’s been proven.

5 Things I really like about PILOT:

1. PILOT is designed like development should be designed, to ensure the person takes ownership of their development. Too often corporate development puts the ownership back on the LOD department or the hiring manager, not the individual. That is where PILOT starts.

2. PILOT’s Job Renovator measures an individual’s job satisfaction, then shows them how to become more satisfied with their job, by staying, not leaving! This is why PILOT should be considered Retention Insurance. Most business coaching type programs almost exclusively get people to find satisfaction by leaving. Ben understands this from working on the corporate side, and saw the power in getting people to stay and find a better way.

3. Each individual gets a pdf blueprint of their action plan on the steps they’ll be taking along the way of their career development.

4. PILOT is designed around your schedule. They’ve discovered about 80% of the participants will actually schedule their sessions on the weekend, for professional career development. The people who are serious about moving the needle in their career find time to make this a priority.

5. PILOT is a great combination of technology and real-life coaching with accountability, check-ins, and reassessment built into the program.

In terms of cost PILOT is a fraction of having a live business coach, plus from a corporate perspective, the system is actually working with you to re-engage your leaders and employees to find more out of current position, stay with the organization, and build their career with you. For those who have had a professional coach (like I have), so often those engagements end by you leaving the organization to meet your professional goals. PILOT is the first developmental tool I’ve seen that truly works for both the individual and the corporations best interest.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

The Rooney Rules Killed NFL Diversity Hiring

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What the heck is the Rooney Rule?

“The Rooney Rule is a National Football League policy that requires league teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs. It is sometimes cited as an example of affirmative action, though there is no quota or preference given to minorities in the hiring of candidates.”

Basically, in 2003 the NFL decided that finally, enough was enough in a league where the majority of its players are black and the majority of its head coaches are white. The Rooney Rule was established to try and fix this issue. When it first started it was more effective than previous hiring cycles and 26% of hires in the NFL for head coaches were of minority hires.

ESPN’s Outside the Lines discovered the problem has gotten worse, not better, over the past five years only where 1 out of 22 hires has been a minority head coach.

So, what happened?

It’s classic corporate problem fixing. The try and cure a symptom of the problem and not the problem. Follow my logic:

  1. We need more minority hires!
  2. The problem is perceived to be we don’t hire minorities, if we did, it would solve our problem. Minority coaches are just as good as white coaches, they just aren’t getting interviews.
  3. Look it works! We started mandating you had to interview minorities and instantly minority hiring went up. Give us a trophy!

Then, it stops working.

The Rooney Rule stopped working because interviewing potential minority head coaches was not the issue. The issue is we have a lack of minority coaches in general. I’m not sure why this is, but I have a theory.

When I was growing up many of my white male friends had a dream. That dream was to play college sports. Probably very similar to most black males of that same age. The other part of that dream was that would come back, teach gym and coach. I think this is where the paths separated in the coaching funnel.

I have three sons, all of whom play sports. When I hear them talk with their friends, I still hear the difference. The white kids want to be teachers and coach as a profession. The black kids don’t talk about this path as often. All of them want to play college athletics, but it would seem from my experience that at some point white kids believe teaching and coaching as a viable career and blacks are less likely to believe this is their career path.

Obviously, this is very anecdotal. I’m one guy with one experience, but I did coach youth sports for 17 years and saw this happen time and time again.

The Rooney Rule is failing not because minorities aren’t getting interviewed. The Rooney Rule is failing because not enough minorities are getting an opportunity to coach, or are not choosing the coaching path as a career.  One other issue that comes into play here is obtaining at least a four-year college degree and the access to affordable education.

For those who don’t know most NFL coaches get their start by coaching in the NCAAs. To coach in the NCAAs you must have a four-year degree at almost every school I’ve ever heard of. In fact, there have been NCAA head coaches fired for lying about having a degree and it was found they actually didn’t when switching jobs and the new institution did a degree verification.

So, why should you care about NFL diversity hiring?

In a nutshell, this is all of our organizations trying to diversify our workforce.  If you don’t try and fix the real problem, getting minorities to believe your profession is a viable career path, you’re never going to fix your issue, you’re just going to poach the few in the field from each other.  That means you need specific minority scholarship programs, minority internship programs, etc. At a level, that is commensurate with the level of hiring you’re trying to achieve!

I hear executives all the time talk about increasing minority hiring, but it’s just talk, not programs and dollars. This is the NFL’s issue as well. The NFL needs to specific program under the Rooney Rules that gets teams to hire more minority coaches in general, not just head coaches. They’ve begun with the NFL Minority Fellowship, which in 2015 had 134 participants, and their is hope this will have an impact in the future. Programs like these are what organizations need if you’re serious about diversity hiring.

Telling Your Executives The Truth Isn’t Courageous

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If I have to listen to one more leadership guru tell hard working people they need to be more courageous, I’m going to walk up on stage and courageously punch that person in the face! There’s a reason you aren’t telling your executives exactly what’s going on in your business and the reason isn’t that you’re a wimp!

The reason we aren’t 100% truthful to our executives about what’s truly going on in our business is because we’ve bought in!

It’s the job of the executive to build and share a vision of the business. It’s the job of those under this executive to then go out and make sure that vision gets integrated into the business. Once you’ve drunk the Koolaid, it’s really hard to un-drink the Koolaid!

It’s not that we don’t want to tell our executives the truth, we do. We don’t because, like most executives, we can’t see the truth any longer!

I’ve worked for some really great executives who knew this about their next level leaders. They hired and promoted great people who they knew would ensure their vision was seen by all. They also knew, at that point, it was then their job to trust and verify.

The best executives I’ve worked for did not sit in an ivory tower and wait for the word to come back from their generals.  They constantly spent time amongst the soldiers, those on the frontline, to ensure that the vision they wanted, was being heard at all levels.

Do you really think that most of the #2’s in organizations lack courage! They got hired and promoted, but then all at once the majority just lacked courage. That doesn’t add up to me! It’s not what I’ve seen in real life.

The reason those underneath you aren’t sharing the exact full picture of what’s going on is they have painted a different version in their mind, they’ve painted a picture of where they are trying to go. It becomes so vivid many times the present is very clear.

When I traveled to locations away from corporate in my career, I frequently got visited upon my return from my CEO. Not because I was one level below him because I was sometimes 3 or 4 levels below! He knew I was the perfect one to tell him what I was seeing and hearing because I was closer to getting my hands dirty then anyone else on the trip.

You don’t need to be more courageous to help your executives.  You need to go back and dig a few more ditches!

Sourcers Are The New Recruiters?

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Come listen to my story about a man named Tim.

Poor Recruiting Pro, barely kept his family fed. 

And then one day he the internet came along, 

and up on his screen came a bunch of profiles. 

Candidates those are. Money, in people form. 

For those of you that are under 40, you might want to go Google Beverly Hillbillies theme song…

What the hell is going on in this world?

No, really!?

I started my career out as a ‘Researcher’. Little did I know, that was really just sourcing (or at least what we call sourcing today). My job was to find candidates for jobs we had open. I find a candidate. Do a basic screen. Pass them onto a recruiter who sold them to the client/hiring manager.

I then got my own clients/hiring managers and did the full boat. Find the jobs. Find the candidates. Make the offers. Etc.

When I went to corporate Talent Acquisition almost every shop was doing it the same way. Recruiters were assigned departments, business units, hiring managers, etc. They would work with those individuals when they had openings. Post jobs. Screen incoming candidates. Attend campus job fairs. Maybe, just maybe, a little bit of outbound calling – those were the rock stars. And complain how crappy their ATS was, and how awful the hiring managers were.

That was corporate Talent Acquisition, as I know it, from 7 years ago.

During this time, Sourcing became a thing. Everyone needed to now, break up “Talent Acquisition” into Sourcing and Recruiting.  Sourcers found candidates. The premise being we need ‘outbound’ activity happening. Actual candidate hunting. Recruiters then did screening, setting up interviews, offers, etc.

Somewhere over the past five years. Sourcers have become what Recruiters used to be.  They find candidates. They screen candidates. They set up interviews. I know some are even closing the deal with offers.

So, my question is, today, what the hell do Corporate Recruiters do in those shops that have Sourcers?

It seems like corporate recruiters are now advanced admin professionals. They really don’t have any skills to speak of.  I’m honestly asking TA Leaders! If you have Sourcing doing all of the skill-based activities of recruiting, what are you paying recruiters for? It would seem like you could get some really good Admin Pros do all of the work you have Recruiters doing.

Am I off base on this?

This came up because I met with a TA Leader who was paying their corporate Recruiters $85-100K in salary. She was also paying Sourcers a bit less, $65-80K in salary. When I dug into what they were actually doing, it seemed to me the most valuable of the two was easily the Sourcing Pros! The Recruiters did almost nothing of value for what they were being paid.

The hiring managers in this environment even went to the Sourcing Pros to get information on candidates! Basically, the Recruiters set up interviews, made offers, and onboarding.  To be fair, they were also in charge of ’employment branding’ for which they had an outside firm doing all of that work. Sourcing Pros had candidate experience, recruitment marketing, ATS/CRM, job postings, etc.

It seems like this is coming full circle.  We split the function and now the Sourcers are just becoming what Recruiters used to be. A one-stop shop for filling positions.

What I’m quickly seeing is that the value of these two positions is quickly becoming uneven.  When “Sourcing” as a concept was introduced, it was to have better efficiency in recruiting. Take a difficult function. Split into two parts, and let folks specialize. Through this specialization and synergy, you’ll get more work then everyone running their own desk.  Great theoretical concept!

What I’m finding in most organizations is that the theory isn’t meeting the actual result.

Are you seeing or feeling the same thing? Hit me in the comments, I’m truly interested.

Your Sunsets Are Numbered!

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I had a couple of things happen to me this past week. First, I traveled to the Cayman Islands for an HR conference and some vacation.

I’m in love with the Cayman Islands. Great people, the most beautiful water you’ll ever see and mind changing sunsets.  I swam with Stingrays and Sea Turtles. I saved my wife’s life from dragged out to sea. I broke bread, several times, with friends, old and new. I was a pretty damn good trip!

I did Disrupt HR Cayman (My presentation starts at 18:18 on the video link) and talked about how Failure is the New Black, but shouldn’t be. Believing failure is okay is the worst snake oil being sold by leadership gurus today. Don’t believe the hype!

The sunset thing got me thinking. The other thing that happened is I had a friend unexpectedly pass away this past week as well.

So, I’m watching these great sunsets and thinking about my friend and understanding a little about you can’t take all of these sunsets for granted. But we do.

We take for granted that we will definitely see another sunset.  So, what does this all mean?

I could tell you the same crap you hear from everyone that talks about this: make sure you tell people you love them, do what you wish now, etc., etc., etc. But I won’t, because you won’t listen. Instead, do this:

  1. Drink expensive alcohol. You’ll drink less of it, and enjoy it more.
  2. Wear really good shoes. They’ll feel better, look better and last longer.
  3. Eat food that you like. I’m not a foodie. Sometimes people eat crap trying to impress others, but it quite honestly tastes awful. You’re not impressing anyone. Shake Shack tastes great. I’m that kind of foodie – burger and fries foodie.
  4. Hang with people who want to hang with you. We spend way too much time in life hanging with assholes.
  5. Go to the other side of the Island. There’s beauty everywhere, and yet we tend to go where we know.  Some of the greatest moments in my life happen when I go to where I know nothing.

How’s that for life-changing advice that you didn’t ask for?

Now get back to work and make some money!

Michael J Fox’s Perspective on Co-Workers #WorkHuman

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Michael J. Fox was one of the closing day keynotes at the WorkHuman conference this year, and he killed it like you expect. One of the key takeaways I took from his talk was in regards to all those people you work with on a day to day basis.

Mike Fox laid out two things you should think about when you think about how you interact with your co-workers:

1. Enjoy the people you work with for what they can positively contribute to you and your organization.  This is all about focusing on the strengths of those around you. If you constantly focus on what someone can’t do, you make them miserable and you stress yourself out as well.  People perform better when you allow them to do what they’re good at. When you recognize them for what they bring to the organization, not what they don’t bring.

2. If you can’t enjoy the person you work with, be thankful you’re not them. We are all going to have people in our life that we have to work with that we frankly just don’t like. Could be personality, or skills, or attitude, etc. Mike Fox said you can still find a positive out of this by focusing on the fact you’re grateful that you don’t have their challenges, and by helping those people be the best version of themselves.

I love this philosophy!

Mike Fox was very big on this concept that judging others will get you nowhere. It’s such a big part of culture. I know I do some this myself, and it’s not something I’m ever proud of. The reality is judging others says more about your inadequacies than it does about the persons you are judging. It was a great reminder.

It was a great reminder. In HR and TA we tend to believe ‘judging’ is part of our job description, but it’s not. The best HR and TA Pros I know don’t judge candidates or employees but find what is most useful of those individuals and try and put those people in positions to be successful.

Finally, Mike spoke about fear. Fear others have when they look at him. They look at him expecting to find fear in him and instead see their own fear in his eyes. That statement made me pause. He’s not fearful of his situation. He’s happy life gave him this enormous platform to change lives.

Perspective. We shouldn’t assume we know others based on our own beliefs and fears. Here’s a guy who is facing an uncertain future, but he’s embraced the joy of living one day at a time. The real secret, he didn’t share, is we all are facing life one day at time, he’s just figured it out way before us!

 

Are Happy Employees The Answer? #WorkHuman

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WorkHuman is this week and it’s one of the new transformative conferences on the landscape within the HR industry. The next generation of user conference (WorkHuman is sponsored by GloboForce) which is how do you engage an audience with awesome content and engage your brand without constantly shoving a sales pitch down your throat! WorkHuman has it figured out!

One of the best sessions had to be from happiness researcher Shawn Achor. The former Harvard researcher laid out a compelling argument on why organizations at all levels should be focusing on helping their employees be more happy. He had great examples from organizations that have focused on his research (see video below) that have gotten great results on higher productivity, higher retention and creating an environment that is more human to work in!

The whole conversation got me thinking of the chicken or egg scenario. What comes first an employee who is happy, or a happy employee?  Can you really make an unhappy person happy?

We all have that co-worker that never seems happy. They’re Eyore! Nothing ever goes right for them, nothing will ever be good, they always see the worst in every situation. I believe if you went backwards in their career with your organization, and you could see their interview, you would immediately pick up on the fact this was their core personality!

It makes sense to think that chronically unhappy people are going to be hard to make happy, thus, will probably be less effective as an employee. If as the research shows that happy people are more productive than unhappy people, or less happy people.

All skills being relatively the same, I would bet my career on the fact that if you then only focused on hiring the most happy people, you would have the same results that Shawn speaks of, without all on the ongoing programs.

Happy people, tend to be happy people almost always. It’s their natural zen. It’s where they like to live. Their natural state is to be happy. So, I would theorize that hiring those happy people would have a lasting positive impact to your organization.

Now we just need a great pre-hire assessment that measures someone’s natural level of happiness. I would think Shawn probably has the actual validated questions we could use. It would be nice if he just handed those over and let us started doing this!

Chicken or the Egg. You can try and make your employees happy, or you can hire happy people. Or, you could do both!