Category Archives: Career Path

The Most Powerful Employee Motivator of All

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I was once fired from a job.  I won’t go into the story because we all have a story and we all frame it to sound like a victim. In hindsight, many years removed, I would have fired me to!

After being fired I could only think about one thing. It consumed me. I wanted to show whomever I went to work for how great I really was.  I didn’t want the ‘fired’ label to follow me, even for a minute.  I wasn’t ‘that’ person. I was better. I wanted…

Redemption!

Redemption is the most powerful employee motivator of all time. None others are even close.

It’s why always laugh when a hiring manager tells me they will never hire someone who has been fired from a job. Really!?  I actually only want people who have been fired from jobs! I want people who have failed, and have a giant chip on their shoulder to show the world they are better than that.

I don’t want to hire crappy people who were fired because they actually have no skill and no personality.  That’s the problem, right? We believe everyone who has been fired to be crappy. “Well, Tim, people don’t get fired if they’re good!” Really? You believe that?

Good people get fired every day. They get fired for making bad decisions. They get fired for pissing off the wrong person. They get fired because they didn’t fit your culture. They get fired because of bad job fit. Good people get fired, maybe as much as bad people get fired. Unfortunately, we lump all of them into the same pool.

Redemption sets the good fires apart from the bad fires.

You can hear redemption speak when interviewing a good fire.  Bad fires don’t speak of redemption, they speak of justification.  Good fires want a second chance to show the world they are right. Bad fires want a second chance to show the world they were wronged. Those are two very different things!

I like redemption motivation.  It sticks around for a long while. Those scars don’t go away easily.

How to Gently Crush Your Employee’s Dreams!

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I get the feeling that many of your employees feel that HR Pros are Dream Crushers!  It’s the main reason almost everyone hates HR, right?

I don’t actually buy into this theory, but there are some valid things we do in HR that don’t help our reputation.  Here’s how we crush dreams on a daily basis:

  1. We don’t allow our employees to develop.  Let’s first start with the concept of development vs. training.  You giving job training is not development. While it might help the employee get better at the job they have, it’s not exactly personal or professional development. Development is very individualized.
  2. We don’t listen or act on your employees ideas.  I get to go in and work with companies a lot and almost always the employees already know what needs to be done, but leadership isn’t listening to them.  So, I’m not really brought in to tell them something they don’t know, I’m brought in to them their employees are smart and you should start listening to them!
  3. We don’t allow our employees to dream about the future. This is really difficult for most organizations.  We won’t promise an employee where they’ll be in 1 or 2 or 3 years, because we believe if we can’t deliver it, it worse than not giving them anything to begin with.  Actually, that’s a false premise.  Allowing your employees to dream about the future and giving them something to shoot for, will give them hope. Hopeful employees stay around and work hard.
  4. We micromanage the work, not the result.  I don’t care how you get there, just get me there.  We have been taught for way too long to ‘manage’ people. This means we tell them how to do the job exactly, instead of letting do the job in a way that works best for them, and holding them accountable to the result, not the path. This not only crushes your employees dreams, it crushes their soul.

I think it would be funny to see someone has that as a title in HR: Dream Crusher, VP of Crushing Dreams, Chief Dream Crusher!  Sad, but funny.

What are you doing with your employees today?

Sometimes a Job Isn’t Worth It

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Linds Redding, a New Zealand-based art director who worked at BBDO and Saatchi & Saatchi, died last month at 52 from an inoperable esophageal cancer. Turns out Linds didn’t really like his old job and mad hours he spent creating a successful career. Here is what Linds wrote before he died:

“I think you’re all f—— mad. Deranged. So disengaged from reality it’s not even funny. It’s a f—— TV commercial. Nobody gives a s—.

This has come as quite a shock I can tell you. I think, I’ve come to the conclusion that the whole thing was a bit of a con. A scam. An elaborate hoax.

Countless late nights and weekends, holidays, birthdays, school recitals and anniversary dinners were willingly sacrificed at the altar of some intangible but infinitely worthy higher cause. It would all be worth it in the long run…

This was the con. Convincing myself that there was nowhere I’d rather be was just a coping mechanism. I can see that now. It wasn’t really important. Or of any consequence at all really. How could it be. We were just shifting product. Our product, and the clients. Just meeting the quota. Feeding the beast as I called it on my more cynical days.

So was it worth it?

Well of course not. It turns out it was just advertising. There was no higher calling.”

When faced with death, I wonder how many of us will look back on all the time and effort we put into our career and will feel the same?

That all being said, sometimes I think a job might be worth it as well.  Here’s the other side of the coin.  I frequently see articles and blog posts, recently, written by people who have given up their careers to travel the world.  It  all seems so glamorous and adventurous. Until you realize you had a career and job to pay for all those glamorous adventures! From Adweek, “The Couple Who Quit Their Ad Jobs to Travel the World Ended Up Poor and Scrubbing Toilets The uglier side of a year-long creative journey”:

 “You remember Chanel Cartell and Stevo Dirnberger, the South African couple who quit their agency jobs this year to travel the world and document the experience. It sounded like a dream, and the lovely Instagram photos have made it look like one.

But halfway through their year-long odyssey (they’re currently in Athens, having traveled 25,000 kilometers so far), they’ve posted a reality check on their blog—a post titled “Why We Quit Our Jobs In Advertising To Scrub Toilets”—in which they share “the uglier side of our trip.” It turns out that following one’s dream—while working odd jobs in exchange for room and board—involves a lot of dirty work, and more than a few tears.

“The budget is really tight, and we are definitely forced to use creativity (and small pep talks) to solve most of our problems (and the mild crying fits),” Cartell writes. “Don’t let the bank of gorgeous photography fool you. Nuh uh. So far, I think we’ve tallied 135 toilets scrubbed, 250 kilos of cow dung spread, 2 tons of rocks shoveled, 60 meters of pathway laid, 57 beds made, and I cannot even remember how many wine glasses we’ve polished.

“You see, to come from the luxuries we left behind in Johannesburg … we are now on the opposite end of the scale. We’re toilet cleaners, dog poop scoopers, grocery store merchandisers and rock shovelers.”

We work for a reason. Your reasons might be vastly different than my reasons, but we all have reasons. I hope if I look death in the face I won’t regret my choices to work and create a successful career. I’ve missed my fair share of school events and sporting events that my kids have participated in. I’ve missed many of their most joyful and sad moments. Those I already regret. What I won’t regret is that I work to allow my family to have so many of these moments.

I lived poor.  I lived with a single mother who wasn’t quite sure how she was going to pay for dinner that night. I work because I never wanted my family to feel this anxiety.  Sometimes a job is worth it, sometimes it isn’t.  It’s all up to you to decide, though.

Ask Sackett: Mid Career Change

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One of the coolest things that happened when I started writing blog posts eight years ago, is people reach out to you and ask you questions.  Random people you don’t know off the internet asking me for my ‘expert’ advice.  It’s scary, comical and flattering all at the same time!

This week a question came in about how would I go about making a mid-career change from one profession to another.  In this case, the person was wanting to move out of a teaching profession and into an information technology profession.  This individual is about ten years into their teaching career. Went back to school, while working, and got another bachelor’s degree in IT.

How do I get a position in IT? That was the actual question, but as you can imagine, that question is fraught with complexity!

Here is the biggest problem most people face when making a mid-career job change, they can’t stop working at their current job to get experience working in their new field.

So many people fall into this trap!  You want to change careers, but you’re working and making a decent living, paying the bills, living life.  You go back to school in the evening, taking on more debt to get the education. Still busting your butt during the week in the job you no longer love, waiting to start your new career.

That’s when you first begin hearing things like, “well, you’ll need some experience to work here”, or “we don’t have entry level positions for someone at ‘your level'”.  “At my level?” What does that mean?  It means, organizations aren’t comfortable hiring a 32 year old for a position they usually hire 21 year olds in. Plus, you aren’t comfortable making an entry level wage at this point in your life.

This is why people stay in miserable jobs.  Once you get far enough down a career path, you are really left with few choices.

So, what was my advice?

– Find a ‘free’ internship. Work your regular full time job, then find some hours in your week to work for free in your new field. You have to get some kind of experience in your new field, especially if you’re a mid-career professional.

– Start adjusting your lifestyle to be an entry level professional.  Remember when you were first starting out in that apartment and crappy car? Not going out and drinking cheap beer?  Welcome back. More than likely you will have to make this adjustment. It’s worth it, if you’ll be happy. Embrace it. Less is more.

– Use your current professional connections to begin connecting with hiring managers in the career you want, not the career you have.  You have to start networking like you’re an entry level graduating from college, looking for you first job. But, you have the network that can help you, that no new college grad has!

– Lastly, give your current employer, if possible, a shot at moving you into the position you want.  Many times employers will work with you to gradually move you into the role you want, by giving you some experiences working in the position you want, and gradually transition you out of your current position and into the new one.

It’s Always Someone’s First Time

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Sometimes I forget that many other HR and Talent pros aren’t as geeky about the profession as I am.  I like to break down the profession of HR on the following scale:

1. The 1%ers.  These are the people who really get HR and Talent. They are the ones who actually decide what the future of the profession will look like, because they are smarter than all of us.  I am not one of these folks. I love to hang out with these folks, and I’m happy to call some of them friends, but I’m sure I annoy them with my questions and trivial insights.

2. The First Ten. The top ten percent of our profession.  Most of these are folks are the people you see running big HR shops, HR thought leaders, pundits in the space.  Smart folks to be sure, but also folks are involved beyond just doing the job of HR. They are the foot soldiers of the one percenters. They carry the message. I like to think I’m here most days.

3. The Masses.  These are the good men and mostly women who do the work of HR and Talent Acquisition on a daily basis. These are SHRM members, who might go to a national conference, state conference and definitely attend local meetings every once in a while. They are in the trenches every day, fighting the good fight, trying to make organizations better through great people practices. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

4. The Why We Hate HR pros. These the bottom ten percent folks.  These are the HR and Talent pros that make the organization hate HR. They use their power in HR for bad, not good.  They take out their crappy, meaningless lives on unsuspecting employees.  These folks should be hung publicly. They work to bring down the entire function of HR as a whole, but think they actually do good HR work.

I try to remember this scale when I talk to HR and Talent pros around the world.  Most just want to do better, and most are seeing problems and issues for the first time.  It’s not that they “don’t get it”, they have never seen it.  It’s there first time.

Someone might be very experienced in HR and Talent, but seeing something for the first time, or have made the decision to try something they have never tried.  As a first ten it’s my role, I believe, in the industry to help those folks in any way I can to get better.  That helps the entire profession to get better.

So, what does this all mean?

I want to encourage HR and Talent pros to reach out.  If I can’t help you, I’ve got great friends who can.  The community will help you get better, if you really want to move your organization forward.  We love success stories!

At one point in time we were all first timers doing this HR and Talent thing.  We either learned through trial and error, or through someone helping us that had already experienced what we were trying to do.  The cool part about the community I hang out with, is we all remember our first time, and want to help you with yours.

3 Ways to Turn Down a Job Offer

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The NBA free agent signings took place at midnight EST last night.  The signing period lasts 9 days, where players can negotiate, but not sign, deals until last night at midnight.  One big free agent signing this year is DeAndre Jordan, who was with the LA Clippers last season, and had a verbal, handshake, agreement to join the Dallas Mavericks.

That was until DeAndre decided to change his mind and re-sign with the Clippers, but not tell the Mavericks he was going to do this!  Basically, doing what we see in HR all the time, accepting our offer, only to see the candidate turn around and accept the counteroffer.  The problem with DeAndre was that he never let Dallas know he was going to do this, so they weren’t able to go after another player to replace him!

Not only did he not tell Dallas, he actually tweeted out a picture from his house with a chair blocking the door, to give the implication that his Clipper teammates weren’t allowing anyone to come to his house until after midnight and contract was signed!  Way to keep it classy LA…

So, how should a candidate turn down an offer when they decide to go in another direction?  Here are three ways that are all better than was DeAndre did:

1. Pick up the phone! If you are adult enough to make the decision to accept another offer, be adult enough to pick up the freaking phone and let the other party know that is what your intent is.  You get bonus adult points if you also give them a reason or two of why the other offer was better for you to accept! Do this the moment you have made the decision to accept the other position. Timing is critical for this, as the other organization might have a backup candidate and they don’t want to miss out on this person.

2. Send an email.  Less favorable, and it’s definitely conflict avoidant, but at least you did something to let the organization know.  The plus factor on the email is you have time to craft your message, as some people are not good over the phone in real-time interactions.  Again, give the organization some sort of ‘real’ reason on why their offer wasn’t as good as the offer you accepted.  This will be appreciated, as companies need to know how to get better.  NEVER – give the “it’s me, not you” as a reason. That’s lame!

3. Text message.  I put this one in for the kids. They like texting, but the reality is, this looks unprofessional, and you’ll get know adult points for doing this.  The one way I can see texting being used to turn down an offer is if it is used in conjunction with another form of communication. A quick “just wanted to let you know I will not be accepting your offer. Sorry. I’ll call soon with an explanation”, will work, but make sure you call!

I’m not sure why anyone ever feels it’s okay to accept a job offer, then just decide to not do it, but never communicate back with the organization. This happens more than you think, but I’m always surprised by this mentality of who would think this is acceptable.

In my career I’ve probably had at least a half a dozen people accept jobs, sign an offer letter, then on start day, be a no-show. I find out later they decided to accept a counteroffer, but never communicated anything back to my organization.  This is across multiple industries, multiple companies. I would love to see an industry study of why people think this is an appropriate behavior!

The morale to the story? Don’t be a DeAndre!

Do Demotions Work?

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Quietly, Brian Williams returned to NBC last week. Not in his usual spot of nightly news anchor, but in a demoted spot, for less pay:

The embattled former NBC Nightly News anchor has been demoted and will receive reportedly less money in his new role, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Williams is being replaced by Lester Holt, who took over for him after he was handed down an unpaid six-month suspension for making factually incorrect comments and “misremembering” details spoken about on-air.

The newspaper reported that Williams will receive “substantially” less money when he returns to the network as a breaking news and special reports anchor for MSNBC, a division of NBC. He had been making at least $10 million a year for the last five years.

It begs the question, do demotions work?

They certainly aren’t popular. Both, employers and employees, dislike demotions.  Employers feel like if they demote an employee they are just giving them notice to go find another job.  Employees feel like a failure and that the organization is probably just trying to push them out the door. In my experience demotions rarely work.

What kind of demotions work?

There are times when you promote a good worker into a new role, a promotion, and both you and the employee think it will be great, but then it ends up not being great. The employee can’t handle the new role, you did a bad job preparing them, there were other organizational issues at play, whatever the reason, it’s not working. This happens more than you realize, but we usually just end up firing the employee for performance, or they see the writing on the wall and take off before you get a chance to shoot them yourself.

I always find it ironic when I hear about this type of turnover. I’ll ask, “was this person a good, solid employee before they got promoted?”  The answer is always yes.  They wouldn’t have gotten promoted if they weren’t. So, then, why did this person have to be a turnover statistic? Why couldn’t we figure out how to get them back to a position where they were productive and successful again?

Modern organizational theory doesn’t allow for this.  We don’t believe that a person will ever want to go backwards in their career. Once they have been promoted, they will not want to go back into a position they had prior, and they definitely don’t want a pay cut!  We assume this to be true. Also, it might be true in many cases. So, we take a ‘good’ employee and terminate them or let them just go away on their own.

I think the only way you make a demotion work is if you set it up within your organizational culture that this ‘demotion’, going back into a very important role in the company, is something that happens here.  We want to challenge people, and sometimes those challenges won’t end well.  That’s okay, we still love you, and respect you, and we want to get you back on a path of success.

This conversation has to happen, not after failure, but before the person is ever promoted.  That moving along the career path here, at our organization, isn’t just up, it’s down, it’s sideways, etc.  We are going to constantly want to get you into a ‘role’ of success.  Yes, failure happens, but we will want to get you back to success as fast as possible.

The reality is, people don’t stay around if they’re failing.

Brian Williams is damaged goods, so he accepted the demotion.  He’s talented. He’ll get back on the horse, show his value, and then he’ll go someplace else.  NBC is giving him an opportunity, but this kind of demotion doesn’t usually end well, for the employer.

Too Small, Too Slow, To Succeed

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Regular readers of this blog know I’m a huge Michigan State fan, and a basketball fan. So, this week, when the Golden State Warriors won the 2015 NBA Finals I was excited.  Not because I’m a big Warriors fan, although I do love their style of plan, but because former Sparty, Draymond Green, is on the Warriors and played his butt off!

Three years ago Draymond was the National Collegiate Player of the year, then he got drafted in the second round.  Normally, a player reaching that level is a for sure lottery pick, but DayDay was told he was too small, too slow, didn’t have enough skill to play in the NBA.  What they didn’t measure was his ability to lead and his heart to win:

CBSSports.com’s Zach Harper captured Green yelling to his mother, Mary Babers-Green, “Mom, they told me I can’t play in this league!”…”That’s what they said,” Green said postgame. “I won the national player of the year award in college. Consensus all-American. I made every single first-team all-American [team] that you could possibly make. And I was a second-round pick and a lot of people said I could never play in this league. Too slow, too small, can’t shoot well enough, can’t defend nobody, what does he do well? He doesn’t have a skill that stands out. I got heart and that’s what stands out.”

Constantly, throughout the playoffs you heard the Warrior players and coaches say that Draymond was the heart and soul of this team.

That’s the secret sauce to hiring.  You need to hire more employees like Draymond Green.

Employees who appreciate the opportunity they’ve been given.  Want to prove to everyone they are better than other think, but confident in their own abilities.  Willing to work harder than almost everyone else to make it happen.

Sounds easy, right!?!

It’s not, it’s almost impossible to find individuals that have those traits and also fit within your culture!  The Warriors got lucky.  Second round picks in the NBA are throw away picks, most of those players never make an NBA roster.  You can get lucky as well.

Most of the traits you are looking for can be screened if you’re looking for them. The problem is we are usually screening for two or three main criteria when looking at candidates: Do you have the skills for the job? Are you willing to accept the salary we have for this job? Are you ‘hickey’ free? If yes to all three, move forward to hiring manager.

This is where we fail. Things like heart and passion and desire are the differentiators that make someone success. You still need to have the skill, but all skills being close, you then need the intangibles.  Too often we choose someone based on their skill was slightly better.  Once you get to a certain point in skill, a little more skill doesn’t make that much of a difference.

At that point you want to look someone who has a chip on their shoulder. Something to prove. To show the world, yes, I can do it.

“Mom, they told me I couldn’t play in this league!”  Said the man holding the championship trophy.

 

The “New” Skilled Trades

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Google started it.  Don’t they start everything. You can thank Lazlo for all of this when he came out and said Google no longer requires a college degree to get hired into many of their technical roles. Now, we are beginning to see specialized training schools popping up to begin to ‘train’ the next gen workforce in what will be soon considered the new skilled trades of the future.  From CNBC:

Students at the New York City-based school pay $15,000 for four months of coding instruction. They leave with the ability to develop software, and according to Flatiron School, 99 percent of students get a job with an average starting salary of $70,000 a year.

Flatiron founders Adam Enbar and Avi Flombaum said they believe coding will be a form of literacy in the future.

“Just like you need to learn how to read and write, even if you’re not going to be a journalist, you need to learn how to code and wield technology if you’re going to be successful in the world,” said Enbar…

Some of Flatiron’s students share Enbar’s frustration with higher education. Jen Eisenberg was studying computer science as an undergraduate at Michigan State University, but stopped after her first semester when her father asked if she could build him a website.

“I realized I couldn’t build anything tangible … it’s more theory and algorithms,” Eisenberg said.

After completing Flatiron’s program, Eisenberg is a software engineer at Paperless Post, an online stationery shop. She helps write the instruction, or code, that makes the website function.

For years I’ve been telling high school students are getting ready to graduate that public education has given them two paths in their life:

1. College

2. Prison

That’s it!  Years ago we did away with skilled trades curriculum in public schools. The programs where kids learned how to weld, fix cars, pull wire, sweat pipe, build things, etc. Now, you go to high school to do well on a test and hopefully that test will get you into college. If it doesn’t?  Good luck, you’re basically on your own, which for most eighteen year olds usually ends up in prison.

So, I’m actually excited about these ‘new’ skilled trades!  Learning how to code, test, program, design and build web apps, etc.  Our reality is we have kids who don’t want to go to college. Traditional school environments are not their cup of tea!  They can’t wait to get out of high school, and the last thing they want is to go back to a similar setting in college.

America is in desperate need of vocational programs that start when kids are around seventeen.  Companies are begging for help in the traditional skilled trades, as well.  On both ends of technology, those who turn a wrench and those who click a mouse, need more trained individuals in the workforce, and at both of those ends, a full four year college program isn’t the answer.

Does this mean no one needs to go to college any longer? No.  We still need all kinds of college grads.  But, we can’t forget about all the others, and we have, for more than a decade.  Skilled trades, traditional and new, are the lifeblood of innovation.  You can design the greatest thing ever, but eventually, someone has to build it.  Someone has to get their hands dirty.  Someone has to put in the hours to make it a reality.

Sounds like a job for someone with a skilled trade.

The First Question HR Needs To Ask

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I love going out and speaking and meeting with HR and Talent pros across the world (I can say ‘world’ now because I’ve spoken in Canada and the Cayman Islands, which technically makes me an international speaker!).  It’s a privilege to be certain.  I also really like when I get pimped constantly for free advice. It’s part of the gig.

If you go around telling people you know something about something, guess what? They’re going to ask you to tell them about something, specifically as it relates to their circumstance.  So, I get asked my advice quite a bit about talent and HR issues people are facing.

There is a bucket of questions I get asked that fall into the same type of category.  These questions all have to do with how do we ‘fix’ something that isn’t working well in their HR and/or Talent shops.  How do we get more applicants? How do we get managers to develop their people? How do we fix our crazy CEO? Etc.

I used to go right into how I would solve that problem if I was in their shoes.  Five minute solutions! I don’t know anything about you, or your situation, but let me drop five minutes of genius on you for asking! It’s consulting at its worst! But it’s fun and engaging for someone who came to see me talk about hugging for an hour.

I’ve began to change my approach, though, because I knew, like they knew, they weren’t going back to their shops and doing what I said.  The problem with my five minutes of genius, was it was ‘my’ five minutes, not theirs.  It was something I could do, but probably not something they could do.

Now, I ask this one question: Do you really want to get better?

Right away people will quickly say, “Yes!”  Then, there is a pause, and explanation, and sometimes from this we get to a place where they aren’t really sure they really want to get better.  That’s powerful. We all believe that ‘getting better’ is the only answer, but it’s not.  Sometimes, the ROI isn’t enough to want to get better. Staying the same is actually alright.

We believe we have to fix something and we focus on it, when in reality if it stays the same we’ll be just fine.  We’ll go on living and doing great HR work.  It just seemed like the next thing to fix, but maybe it actually is fine for now, and let’s focus on something else.

Many times HR and Talent pros will find that those around them really don’t want to get better, thus they were about to launch into a failing proposition, and a rather huge frustrating experience. Better to probably wait, until everyone really wants to get better.

So, before you go out to fix the world, your world, ask yourself one very important question: Do you, they, we really want to get better?  I hope you can get a ‘yes’ answer! But if not, the world will still go on, and so will you.