Category Archives: Communication

Being a Fair Leader Won’t Get You Promoted!

Posted on by
1

Look out HR Leaders this one is going to sting a little – from The Harvard Business Review:

“In management, fairness is a virtue. Numerous academic studies have shown that the most effective leaders are generally those who give employees a voice, treat them with dignity and consistency, and base decisions on accurate and complete information.

But there’s a hidden cost to this behavior. We’ve found that although fair managers earn respect, they’re seen as less powerful than other managers—less in control of resources, less able to reward and punish—and that may hurt their odds of attaining certain key, contentious leadership roles.”

Wow, that really flies in the face of all that we’ve been taught by our HR Heroes, doesn’t it!   Well, not exactly, just because treating employees fairly and with respect might not get you promoted, it doesn’t make it the wrong thing to do.  That’s a hard pill to swallow though, right?

How many times in your career have you looked at someone who was promoted and said to yourself “how the hell did they get promoted!?”  It’s usually the leader who is pushing people around, and no one likes, and the CEO taps them on the shoulder for the next VP role.  Some more from the HBR article:

“We’ve long wondered why managers don’t always behave fairly because doing so would clearly benefit their organizations: Studies show that the success of change initiatives depends largely on fair implementation. Our research suggests an answer. Managers see respect and power as two mutually exclusive avenues to influence, and many choose the latter.  Although this appears to be the more rational choice, it’s not always the correct one—and it poses big risks for organizations.” 

Do you know why managers choose “Power” over “Respect” as a leadership style?  It’s easier!  I mean way EASIER!  Positional power makes your job so much easier to move things through organizations and get things done, but you burn a lot of bridges and relationships on that path.

Getting things accomplished through mutual respect and influence can take time, but ultimately is more rewarding.  Time tends to be the big factor with this, though.  In today’s organizations we frequently feel pushed by time to get things done – Now – and that “now” tends not to work well with “respect”.   More from HBR:

“Companies can benefit from placing more value on fairness when assessing managerial performance. Our early follow-up research suggests that managers whose style is based on respect can gain power. Their path upward may be difficult, but it’s one worth taking, for their company’s sake as well as their own.”

Thus, this is the key! Want to build Great leaders in your organization? Give them this time to get things done through leading with a style based in respect.  Want to get something done tomorrow, and not care about how your employees are getting treated?  Let positional power rule the day, and be comfortable with your leaders throwing their weight around the office to get things done.

Let’s face it, this isn’t an all or nothing exclusive thing.  We need our leaders to do both – treat employees with respect, and get results quickly.  That’s why we have HR!  That is a tough thing to accomplish, but HR Pros can help leaders accomplish this task.

It’s Better to Make a Wrong Decision Fast

Posted on by
Reply

For those that don’t know I played and coached volleyball for a great deal of my life.  Being from Michigan I can tell you that is rare (being a male) and I got called “gay” more than once while fundraising to make money to pay for traveling nationally for major tournaments (I think the actual phrases were more like “don’t girls only play volleyball”, etc. Welcome to the rust belt).

Anyway, one piece of my coaching stuck with me (we used with our middle blockers) that I also have used into my adult life and I use it still today:

It’s better to make a wrong decision fast, then make the right decision to slow.

Why?  In volleyball,  when you go to block you have to make split second decisions. You have 3 options: block middle, block right side hitter, or block left side hitter.  You rely on your instincts, you rely on communication from your teammates and you survey the situation (where is the pass coming from, where is the setter, how far off the net is the setter, etc.), then you make a decision.

The problem most middle blockers have at a young age is they want to be up on every block. They want to make the right decision every time, but by doing this, they rarely make it to block any position because they are frozen with indecision.  I taught my middles to decide quickly and then do it. Do it 110%!  Go to which ever spot you decided to block and block and even if the ball went to another position!

Why?  Some positive things happen by you making the wrong decision quickly. For starters it allows your teammates to make adjustments they need to make to try and get the best possible outcome. Believe me your back row players know you made the wrong decision because they’re staring down the hitter with only one blocker! BUT, it also allows them to know how to try and defend that.

If you’re late, and you have a hole in the middle of the block and now they have to guess where to go. Fill the hole, cover the line, take the cross, etc.  It becomes a guessing game. One which you rarely win. What happens if you make the right decision to slow?  About 99% of the time, what was going to happen, already happened. You didn’t make the decision, it was made for you. I like being in control, so this isn’t an option I like.

So what? What the heck does this have anything to do with you becoming a better leader?

Fast Company has a wonderful article on this concept called: Why Keeping Your Options Open is Really, Really Bad Idea – from the article:

Why does keeping our options open make us less happy? Because once we make a final, no-turning-back decision, the psychological immune system kicks in. This is how psychologists like Gilbert refer to the mind’s uncanny ability to make us feel good about our decisions. Once we’ve committed to a course of action, we stop thinking about alternatives. Or, if we do bother to think about them, we think about how lousy they are compared to our clearly superior and awesome choice.

Most of us have had to make a choice between two colleges, or job offers, or apartments. You may have had to choose which candidate to hire for a job, or which vendor your company would engage for a project. When you were making your decision, it was probably a tough one–every option had significant pros and cons. But after you made that decision, did you ever wonder how you could have even considered the now obviously inferior alternative?…

When you keep your options open, however, you can’t stop thinking about the downside–because you’re still trying to figure out if you made the right choice. The psychological immune system doesn’t kick in, and you’re left feeling less happy about whatever choice you end up making.

This brings us to the other problem with reversible decisions–new research shows that they don’t just rob you of happiness, they also lead to poorer performance.

I tend to run into this with younger workers who want to make the right choice, fearing “death” or some other less desirable outcome if they make the wrong choice.  They tend to defer decision making to their boss or a peer instead of making it themselves, thus giving away the chance for superior performance.

When in reality, all I want is for them to make any choice, and we’ll live with the outcome.  I hire great people, so I’m sure they’ll make very wise, research driven decisions, and even then, sometimes they’ll fail.  I’m willing to live with that.  If it’s fast! Because that allows us to adjust and find a way to make it right.

Two things at play in this concept: 1. Fast action; 2. Failure is an option, that we can live with.  Give me those two things, and I’ll show you an organization that is on the move and that can block pretty well!

Is Talent Acquisition Wasting Your Hiring Manager’s Time?

Posted on by
Reply

I had a conversation the other day with a corporate HR Director and we were talking recruiters, corporate recruiters.  My friend had a dilemma, a classic corporate recruiting scenario. The problem is she has recruiters who are doing a decent job, but they won’t get out from behind their desk and get out into the organization and get face-to-face feedback from the hiring managers. But, here is the real reason:  the recruiters feel like they are “wasting” the hiring manager’s time.

“So,” she asked, “How do I get them out to build these relationships?”

Great question, but she asked the wrong question (was partially my answer).  Her problem isn’t that her recruiters aren’t building the relationships face-to-face with managers. The problem is they feel they are “wasting” someone’s time.

They don’t value or understand the value they are providing to the hiring manager. If they did, it sounds like they wouldn’t have a problem with visiting with the hiring managers.  It’s a classic leadership fail, solving a symptom instead of solving the actual problem.

I don’t think that this is rare, recruiters feeling like they are wasting hiring managers time. It happens constantly at the corporate level.  Once you train your recruiters (and hiring managers) on the value the recruiters are providing, you see much less resistance of the recruiters feeling comfortable getting in front of hiring managers to get feedback on candidates, and actually making a decision.  This moves your process along much quicker.

What value do recruiters provide?  Well, that seems like a really stupid question, but there aren’t stupid questions (just stupid people who ask questions).  Here are few that will help your corporate recruiters understand their real value to hiring managers:

  • Corporate recruiters are the talent pipeline for a hiring manager. (or should be!)
  • Corporate recruiters can be the conduit for hiring managers to increase or better the talent within their department.
  • Corporate recruiters are a partner to the hiring managers in assessing talent.
  • Corporate recruiters are a strategist for the hiring managers group succession planning
  • Corporate recruiters are your hiring managers first line of performance management (setting expectations before someone even comes in the door)
  • Corporate recruiters are tacticians of organizational culture.

So, the next time you hear a recruiter tell you “I don’t want to waste their time.” Don’t go off on them and tell them to “just go out there and build the relationship”. Educate them on why they aren’t wasting their time. Then do an assessment for yourself to determine are they adding value or are they just wasting time. All recruiters are not created equal and some waste time, and it’s your job as a leader to find ones add value.

A critical component to all of this is building an expectation of your hiring managers of what they should expect from your recruiters.  They should expect value. They should expect a recruiter who is a pro, and who is going to help them maneuver the organizational landscape and politics of hiring. They should expect a recruiter is going to deliver to them better talent than they already have. They should expect a partner, someone who is looking out for the best interest of the hiring managers department.

Ultimately, what they should expect is someone who won’t waste their time!

Do Recruiters Still Need to Make Phone Calls?

Posted on by
2

I spoke at CareerBuilder’s Empower last week and in my presentation, I harped on the talent acquisition pros and leaders in the room on why 100% of us are not using texting as a primary first form of contact with candidates. The data is in. Texting works! It works better than email by a mile, but still, less than 50% in the room are texting candidates.

After I was done a great TA pro came up to me and said, “Tim, shouldn’t recruiters being calling candidates!” I feel in love! Why, yes, fine, sir they should always be calling candidates! But, let’s not forsake other tools that are working at a high level. We know people, in general, respond to texts at a much higher rate than email and phone calls.

You see a text and within seconds you read it, and you respond to it at more than double the rate of email or voicemail. In talent acquisition, we are in LOVE with email, even when it doesn’t work.

In 2011, I wrote this post below – funny enough, it’s still relevant today (except now I think we need to add in more texting with those phone calls!)

Do we (recruiters) still need to make telephone calls?

I mean really it’s 2011 – we have text messaging, emails, Facebook, Twitter, etc. – hasn’t the telephone just become obsolete?  Does anyone actually use their cell phones to make actual phone calls anymore?

The New York Times had a very interesting article last week: Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You, in which they delve into this concept of whether the act of making a phone call has jumped the shark or not.  From the article:

“I remember when I was growing up, the rule was, ‘Don’t call anyone after 10 p.m.,’ ” Mr. Adler said. “Now the rule is, ‘Don’t call anyone. Ever.’ ”

Phone calls are rude. Intrusive. Awkward. “Thank you for noticing something that millions of people have failed to notice since the invention of the telephone until just now,” Judith Martin, a k a Miss Manners, said by way of opening our phone conversation. “I’ve been hammering away at this for decades. The telephone has a very rude propensity to interrupt people…

Even at work, where people once managed to look busy by wearing a headset or constantly parrying calls back and forth via a harried assistant, the offices are silent. The reasons are multifold. Nobody has assistants anymore to handle telecommunications. And in today’s nearly door-free workplaces, unless everyone is on the phone, calls are disruptive and, in a tight warren of cubicles, distressingly public. Does anyone want to hear me detail to the dentist the havoc six-year molars have wreaked on my daughter?

“When I walk around the office, nobody is on the phone,” said Jonathan Burnham, senior vice president and publisher at HarperCollins. The nature of the rare business call has also changed. “Phone calls used to be everything: serious, light, heavy, funny,” Mr. Burnham said. “But now they tend to be things that are very focused. And almost everyone e-mails first and asks, ‘Is it O.K. if I call?’ ”

Sound Familiar?

Now I could easily turn this into a generational issue because for one it’s easy to do, but this isn’t a GenX vs. GenY issue.  This is a basic communication issue.  An understanding of what we do in our industry issue.  Whether your third party or corporate recruitment, we do the same thing, we search and find talent.  There are two basic ways to screen potential talent for fit for your organization: 1. Meet them in Person (no one would argue that this is the best way, but boy it’s expensive if you are using it as your first-line screen); 2. Meet them over the phone (done in some form or another by 99.9% of recruiters).

There really isn’t any way around this issue, we recruit, we make telephone calls.  If you don’t like to make telephone calls, if you believe what the New York Times article believes, you shouldn’t recruit.  It’s not an indictment on you, this just isn’t your gig.

Recruiters like to talk to people, to question people, to find out more about people, not a career best done by email and text messaging. We need to talk live to others. That’s how we go to work. Doesn’t matter if you’re 21 or 6. It’s how to deliver great talent to our hiring managers.

So, here’s a tip, if you’re in recruitment and you don’t like making phone calls get, out of recruitment, you will not be successful.  If your first choice of contacting someone isn’t picking up the phone and calling them, instead of sending them an email, when you have their phone number, get out of recruitment. If you’re thinking you want to recruit, and you don’t like making phone calls take another path.

Recruiters make phone calls, that’s what we do.

When You Want It More Than They Want It

Posted on by
1

You know what?  Being an HR Pro isn’t tough, being a Dad/parent is tough!  But, sometimes they seem to be very similar jobs.

I was reminded this weekend that many times in life, you want more for your kids/employees than they might want for themselves.  We run into that frequently as HR Pros – you sit through 100’s if not 1000’s, performance management reviews, and in many of those, the conversation is centered around asking the employee,”Well, what do you want out of your career?”

The smart ones usually tell you what you want to here, the not-so-smart ones will tell you something totally off the wall, but either way, you end up feeling like you’re doing the parenting!

Recently, I was taught a lesson that I’ve taught many people in my career.  The usual scenario is me sitting with an executive or hiring manager, explaining to them there is nothing we can do to change this employee if they are not willing to change this for themselves first.  Seems simple, right!?

We can offer the best tools, the best teachers and mentors, send them away to great conferences and nothing happens, it’s the same old employee that we had before.  We (HR, leadership, etc.) keep trying to change the individual, but the individual hasn’t decided, yet, that they are willing to change. In a nut shell, this is Performance Management, and there is a ton of performance management in Parenting!

For me, this is about wanting to turn one of my sons into something they are not, or are not yet ready to become.  I can yell and push and plead and do everything my Dad probably did to me but if he hasn’t made up his mind to change, it’s just not going to happen.

It’s funny how we all teach and train things that we haven’t really experienced or understand.  It’s in our DNA to want more for those we care about most. If you are a great leader/HR Pro and you care about your employees, you innately want them to reach their highest potential, it’s a natural feeling.  The hardest part is getting to the point where you understand that no matter how much you want your employee to change for the better they have to want to change, first before any step forward will take place.  The hardest thing to do as a leader/parent is to wait for this to happen.

So, don’t stop giving them the opportunity because you don’t know when the light will come on when the desire to change will take over. It could happen at any time.  We set the table, we invite them to eat, then they either come and eat or they don’t.  The next day, we set the table again and again and again.

One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from Leo Buscaglia (who is a wonderful writer and teacher), Leo says: “We don’t love to be loved in return, we love to love.”   As HR Pros/Leaders/Parents I think Leo has it right. We don’t try and make those we care about better, for something we are going to get in return, we try and make them better (and continue to try) for the simple reason, it’s the right thing to do.

The hard part is we know, we see the potential usually because, we didn’t reach that potential ourselves, and through that experience, we want to make sure others don’t miss their opportunity.  So, we will head back to the gym, a little smarter, a little wiser and, yeah, I’ll probably still yell a little too much…

The day Political Correctness Jumped the Shark

Posted on by
7

You know what “Jump the Shark” means, right? It’s basically saying that something has lost its relevance and is past its time. In today’s always on social media train, things can jump the shark very quickly. Something that is hot today, is totally forgotten about within hours.

Obviously, there are certain things that will never jump the shark. Racism can not jump the shark. There will never be a day when racism is irrelevant. Political correctness and companies trying to be politically correct, though, can jump the shark!

Robert E. Lee.

That infamous Confederate General with all the statues and car named after him on Dukes of Hazard has been really popular in the news lately. After the tragedy at Charlottesville, VA recently, folks around the U.S. have come to the conclusion maybe it’s time we stop celebrating people who fought for slavery and take down those monuments that are awful reminders of things we should not be honoring or celebrating.

ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports, has a really great announcer that happens to be named Robert Lee. Not Robert E. Lee. Just Robert Lee. In fact, ESPN’s Robert Lee is an Asian-American, not even a white dude, like the original Robert E. Lee.

ESPN’s Robert Lee was supposed to call a football game on ESPN being hosted by the University of Virgina. The same place where white supremacists marched and killed a person recently. When all the brilliant folks at ESPN put their heads together, they thought it best not to put “Robert Lee” on the telecast of the University of Virginia game.

Why?

Well, that’s a great question! ESPN believes folks will be offended by a person named Robert Lee calling a football game on TV in which the University of Virgina is playing in Charlottesville. The Asian guy, Robert Lee. Not the dead Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which appears ESPN leaders don’t believe those watching the game could tell the difference, between an alive Asian-American and a dead Confederate White General.

Political Correctness has jumped the shark. ESPN is everything that is wrong with Corporate America.  We’ve gotten to the point where we’ve tried to dumb down everything to a level that it no longer makes sense to anyone.

Of course, Robert E. Lee is not something we need to celebrate in our country. But, does that mean that a guy named Robert Lee can’t call a football game?! ESPN, how dumb do you think America is? Wait, don’t answer that, I think we get the picture.

The New Definition of “Meaningful Work”

Posted on by
1

I’m going to stop fighting. For years I’ve been fighting morons who claim that Millennials would rather do ‘meaningful work’ than making money. That is actually one big lie, I believe perpetuated by employers who don’t want to pay market wages! (Conspiracy Theory Alert!!!) Actually, it showed up on a bunch of studies that were poorly worded and confusing.

The reality is money matters until it doesn’t.

Millennials and almost any other human on the planet would love to do work that is ‘meaningful’ and something they enjoy doing. That isn’t rocket science. But, if you’re not at least making a fair market wage, money is the most important thing for the majority of people. The studies that said Millennials would prefer meaningful work over money, didn’t make it clear about the money.

It was put to them as if it was a decision about ‘more’ money or ‘meaningful’ work, what would they choose. The perception being that you are already making ‘good’ money, so now what do you want? More money, or meaningful work, or something else. In that case, the majority of people choose other things because we don’t want to come across as greedy.

All of this brings up a great concept, though, about what the heck do we really mean when we say, “Meaningful Work”? That was also a problem in early studies. Most people assumed that ‘meaningful work’ was ‘charitable’ work. It was about working for a company like Tom’s that made shoes and gave a pair of shoes to the needy when you bought a pair. Or working at a hospital that helped people, etc.

You couldn’t work at Amazon and have it be meaningful work. Serving hot fries and cold beer at Applebee’s isn’t meaningful work. All of this ‘meaningful work’ stuff became very limiting for young people searching for jobs!

The reality is, meaningful work has basically two components:

1. Is the work something you’re good at? 

2. Is the work important to you?

This new definition of meaningful work makes it much easier to understand and reach a position that is more personal to what you are good at, and what ultimately is important to where you are at in your life and career.

This definition of meaningful work allows people to have many forms of what would be considered meaningful work for themselves, not others. You might find grooming dogs meaningful work, but I might not. That’s okay, it’s your job, not mine! I find bakers have meaningful work. I love what they make, but the person who is working as a baker might not find it to be meaningful work, it might just be a job.

Meaningful work is important to the individual doing it. I run a staffing firm. We find people jobs that I hope will increase their career value, and help them reach their life goals. I find that meaningful. Others hate my profession and call me a headhunter. That’s okay, it’s not their work, it’s mine.

 

The 3 Rules About Kissing Your Boss!

Posted on by
7

May 20, 2013 I published a silly little post on my blog called “The Rules About Hugging at Work”. The post might have taken me twenty minutes to write. It was just an idea I got, like thousands of others, I thought it was funny, so I wrote about it. To date, it’s been read over 1 Million times. Huff Post picked it up, it went viral on LinkedIn (I got over 1300 comments), I’ve been interviewed and called, “The World’s Foremost Expert on Workplace Hugging”.

Twenty minutes of writing, a throwaway idea.

Months later I posted the exact same post on LinkedIn’s publishing platform. This was before everyone could publish (remember that), you had to be invited. I got a call from the LinkedIn chief editor offering me access. I didn’t know if it was really anything so I just threw up old posts I had already written but added a few new pieces.

On the Hugging post, I added at the bottom my next post would be: The 3 Rules About Kissing Your Boss! as a joke. I never wrote it. Until five years later I got a message last week from someone who found the hugging post for the first time asking how they could find the kissing post! I didn’t even know what they were talking about!

So, here’s the kissing post! 

It would be easy to dismiss the notion of kissing your boss as something that would never happen. When I say ‘never’ I mean never. I mean honestly do any of us ever feel it would be appropriate to kiss your boss!?

This one is hard for me. I come from a family of huggers and kissers! My father is 73 and he still kisses me on the lips when I greet him or say goodbye. Some folks would find that super weird. Different cultures do different things.

My son was overseas this summer visiting friends in Belgium and it was quite common for new people he met to give him that traditional kiss on the cheek, but he said those same people would not give you a hug or a handshake. This kiss on the cheek greeting is very common in many parts of the world.

In America, you would probably get punched in the face if you tried kissing someone on the cheek you were meeting for the first time! I mean, look, if I don’t know you, I certainly don’t want your germs all over my face! Most Europeans I meet for business purposes in the states who come here often have gotten used to handshakes, rarely do I see one of them do the cheek kiss greeting.

All of this is way different, though, then kissing your boss! Kissing your boss would have to be a special circumstance or special occasion. I’m guessing if you’re kissing your boss one of a few things probably hasn’t happened in that relationship. You’ve probably become very good friends, some once in a lifetime event is happening, or you’ve become romantically involved, in which case, not really your boss any longer!

So, if we can see a time in which you might kiss your boss, the great HR pro in me says we better put some pen to policy and make some rules! Here are my three rules for kissing your boss:

1. No kissing on the lips. Kissing on the lips is slippery slope you can’t put back in the bag! Wants that happens you might as well just get undressed, stuff just got real! We’re going to assume this kiss is not romantic in nature, completely as professional as kissing your boss can be professional!

2. Do not leave moisture on your bosses cheek. Okay, somehow we got down this rabbit hole to a point where I’m kissing my boss on his or her cheek, let’s not make this super awkward by leaving a nice big wet spot on the side of their face. If you’re so excited to be kissing your bosses cheek that you leave it wet, you should be checked into a mental ward.

3. Do not have bad breath. First impressions are critical and even though your boss knows you, your boss doesn’t know the kissing you. Do not go in for that first boss kiss with bad breath! I love Ice Breakers Mints and I have some close by almost always. Why? I can’t stand bad breath. Coffee breath is the worst and I know a lot of you are major coffee drinkers! Guess what? Diet Mt Dew breath smells like a flower garden! Think about that next time go for a fill up at the coffee station at work!

See? That’s how you do it. That’s how the World’s Foremost Expert in Workplace Hugging becomes the World’s Foremost Expert on Boss Kissing. You can’t be a one-trick pony in this world folks, we all need to keep striving on reinventing ourselves. Watch out fall conference circuit! If you see Sackett coming I might have just raised the game!

So, hit me in the comments. What are your rules for kissing your boss!?

What Would You Ask For If Your Workplace Went Union?

Posted on by
2

If you didn’t see it last week a Nissan automotive plant in Mississippi went through a union vote deciding on whether the 6,000 workers at the plant wanted to represented by the UAW. It’s 2017, right? Is it just me or does it seem strange that we are still having union votes?

Here’s what the Nissan workers who support the union vote say they are looking for:

“Union supporters complain that the company has been stingy with benefits and bonuses, that workers on the production line are pressured to sacrifice safety to keep the line moving briskly, and that supervisors arbitrarily change policies about discipline and attendance.”

So, basically:

  • Pay
  • Benefits
  • Retirement
  • Safety

The UAW is trying to make this out about race. Be careful thinking this is the real issue. When you have a predominantly diverse workforce it’s an easy tactic to use to drum up votes. This is about the UAW increasing membership, period. They could care less about race issues, pay issues, or safety issues, just come ask all the out of work former UAW members in Flint! The UAW would try and unionize a girl scout troop if it increased their coffers.

Have you been in a modern day automotive plant? You could eat off the floors. There are so many safety precautions in place you would have to be blind to put yourself in harm’s way. The average UAW employee makes twice the average salary of an American worker. These workers don’t need a union, they need a reality check.

This got me thinking though of what I might ask for if my company decided to go union. Or, what would any of us in a modern society ask for from a union? The reality is in today’s world with the current competitive talent landscape there really isn’t much a union can offer. Pay and benefits are pretty competitive, pensions are no longer viable with current life expectancies, and laws are in place to protect workers from most safety issues.

Here’s what I think most people would want from a modern union:

– Flexibility in working hours. Not work from home, although in many cases that could be argued, but the ability to be treated as an adult when it comes to my schedule and getting my work done. It’s not too much to ask to allow me to drop my kids at school at 8 am then come into work by 8:30 am. Just because you want everyone at the office by 8 am, doesn’t mean it has to be that way. That’s just silly. Not all of your employees are living the same life.

– Different Financial Benefit Options for Time in Life. A college graduate with student debt needs different financial benefits than your employees who are ten years away from retirement. A recently married employee looking to buy a house has different financial needs than the employee having his first kid go off to college. Having one company 401K match no longer makes sense to all of your employees.

– Diet Mt. Dew Fountain Machine. Unions are stupid so I might as well ask for stupid stuff! If you want to represent me, you better install a Diet Mt. Dew fountain machine in the break room or will not get my vote and union dues. I’m paying you $17.63 out of every check for what? No, Diet Dew?! That’s not happening!

– College Education or Free Skill Training for my Kids. Oh, wait, now I’m listening. Don’t you think if unions are truly invested in their members that they should be able to invest the dues and make this happen? We’re talking billions of dollars per year paid in union dues across America, for a very little amount of negotiating every few years. If you can guarantee my kids a college education or to learn a trade, now you’re earning your keep!

What would you ask from a union in today’s world?

 

The Questions Leaders Ask When Great Talent Leaves

Posted on by
4

Employee Turnover is a major problem in the majority of organizations, and it’s going to get worse. The economy might not continue to be as strong in the near future as it has been, but it doesn’t look to be any major downturn as well. Plus, demographics are playing into the job seekers favor with so many people retiring.

I’ve never been too concerned with low performers leaving my organization. I do have an issue with hiring managers telling me a performer is average or above, then when they leave the ‘new’ story comes out about how that person was a piece of garbage and now we are ‘better’ off that they left. Wait? What? You said this person was solid, but now they’re awful?

This happens all the time, especially in organizations that segment and track turnover by performance and hold managers accountable to this metric.

For me, I think the best organizations at controlling turnover are the ones where the leadership asks certain questions when they see their best talent leave. The ones that really dig into the reasons and not allow a middle-level manager make up a reason. The ones that have a documented ‘save’ strategy in place.

Here are some of the questions I ask myself when great talent leaves:

  1. Is there anything I could have done to keep this person with our organization? Why wasn’t that done?
  2. Was there anything the employee asked for to stay but we couldn’t deliver?
  3. What would have had to take place to keep this employee with us?
  4. Can we get this employee to return to us in the future?
  5. What was the ‘real’ reason this employee left?
  6. Did we ask this employee what it would take to keep them with us? What was the answer?

I’m a firm believer that you can talk anyone into staying with your organization. I’m also a firm believer that the ‘studies’ that tell you people who accept a counter offer will leave in 18 months anyway are completely wrong and out of date!

What I’ve found in all my years of doing this is that for about 50% of people who tell you they’re leaving, small things can keep them and ultimately they actually want to stay, but someone else showed them some love, and that feels so good to be wanted by another! The other 50% probably have a larger issue that is harder to solve, but if you work really hard it can get done.

One issue organizations with high turnover face is they let each other off the hook with turnover by giving each other excuses. “Yeah, Tim used to be good, but lately, he’s been awful.” “Well, it’ll hurt losing Mary, but we weren’t going to keep her happy for long.” “George is our best sales person, but he was holding other back that can be great as well.”

To control turnover leadership needs to change this narrative and stop the excuses for every single turn. The one caveat I allow is documented bottom performers that are on a plan. That’s good turnover, but it better be documented, or it’s bad turnover. Leadership owns this and it starts with tough questions about their own behavior that led to the turn.

If you get to this place, turnover will stop being a problem, and start being an opportunity.