Category Archives: Communication

10 Ways Old White Dudes Can Stay Relevant in the Workplace

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I don’t consider myself an old white dude, but I’m sure most of the twentysomethings working for me probably think I’m the old white dude! Old white dudes are at a crossroads of the American workplace. They used to be on top. There was no better role to have in the American workplace than to be an old white dude!

But times they are a-changin (only old white dudes and hipsters will get that reference!).

In today’s workplace old white guys are as desired as foot fungus. Somewhere between WWII and last Tuesday old white dudes became irrelevant, well, I mean unless you’re a Fortune CEO or President, besides that stuff.

But, I’m here to help. I mean, eventually, I’m going to fall into the old white guy category on the diversity and inclusion surveys so I better find a way to pull us out of this funk and make us super cool again! Here what you need to be doing old white dudes:

1. Denounce all other old white dudes. That way you’re not ‘that’ old white dude, you’re the cool new old white dude who got ‘woke’ (look it up on Urban Dictionary old white dudes).

2. Stop wearing cargo shorts. Apparently, the kids decided cargo shorts are lame and only old white guys where them. Remember those shorty-shorts we wore in the 1970s and 80s? Yeah, those are super cool now. Wear shorty-shorts and show a ton of leg!

3. Hide the fact you like money, small government, and hate taxes. If you want to be cool you have to be willing to give up most of your money to a government who has continually shown to have no idea how to spend our tax dollars for people who claim they can’t find a job.

4. Buy comfortable marching shoes – but not those lame white Nikes or New Balance sneakers all the old white dudes have – go for Nike Air Max’s. Cool old white dudes march with our brothers and sisters who have been wronged. If you don’t march, or at least show up at their parties in downtown areas, you can’t join their click. Also, get ready to wear a ton of rainbow stuff. Calm down, no one looks good in rainbow, but the after parties are super fun!

5. Sell your $60, 000 pickup or sports car and buy a Prius or some kind of Subaru. Only old white dudes drive expensive pickups and sports cars. Cool old white dudes drive Prius’s and Subarus. A good second option is a bike and ride it to work.

6. Talk about Tacos like they’re your new religion. Cool folks in the workplace ‘love’ tacos. Not only are they great food but you’re also supporting a diversity group by eating them, I think. You can’t just ‘like’ tacos. You have to want to have sex with tacos. Tacos should be your primary conversation point each day until you die.

7. Get into a workout routine and then push what you do onto anyone within ten feet of you at all times. It’s cool to workout, but it’s more cool to workout and then make everyone else feel stupid who doesn’t do your workout. Old white guys golf and go boating. Stop all of that. If you want to get into the water buy a paddle board and a rack for the top of your Subaru.

8. Complain about your super long eight hour work day and how you could do all of this working at home in two hours. The goal of becoming a cool old white guy is to fit in. Sure work-life balance has never been better in the history of America, but that shouldn’t stop you from railing against the machine.

9. Be super chill about all dumb decisions people make. To be a super cool old white guy, you have to be super chill about how everyone else decides to live their life no matter how stupid it might seem. “Hey, Mikey, love the new face tattoo! I’m sure that will really help your career path! Super cool!”

10. Never say anything about diversity and inclusion. Old white dudes can’t have an opinion about diversity and inclusion because you don’t know the struggle. Even gay old white dudes should probably keep quiet. I mean Tim Cook is an old gay white dude and he runs Apple! Does he really know the struggle!?

There will come a time when old white dudes will become a minority in the world, but you pointing this out just makes you sound like a racist old white dude, so cut that stuff out. Just suck it up, buy some slim fitting jeans and throw away all y0ur Docker Khakis, no one wants your theories on changing demographics.

You might grow a crazy long beard. Many old white dudes have found that really awful long beards help them blend in a bit better. Like ‘hey, I’ve got a way too long beard, so maybe I’m not an old white dude, but a Viking!” People love Game of Thrones in the workplace, so it might help.

Hey, hit me in the comments about how ageist this is or what other great ideas you might have to keep old white dudes relevant in the workplace!

 

The Story That Wins Becomes The Truth

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In HR we hear a lot of stories.

We love to tell ourselves we are hearing the truth from one side and a lie from another side, but the reality is both sides are stories with a little truth and a little lie built in. We then ‘measure’ who we feel is telling more truth than lie, and that side becomes the full truth.

Throughout history, this plays out. The winners of war decide what the truth is, not the losers. One side is good and righteous, one side is bad and evil. Before the war, both sides were just trying to make it through the day and make their society better. Truth.

We fire someone because they harassed another person. That person is a bad person. The person who got harassed is a victim and is a good person. The problem is, that’s not really reality, is it? Many times the person we fire is actually a pretty good person and the victim is a piece of garbage. But, the winner gets to decide the role they want.

We fire an employee because we are told by their manager that they are not performing well. We trust our manager. We have to it’s what our structure is built on. If we didn’t then what are we really doing? The employee claims they weren’t trained properly, they weren’t given good direction, they were put in a position to fail. You’re fired, you’re a bad employee. You lose, you don’t get to decide the truth.

It’s one major reason why I tend not to really care that a person was fired from a job. The reason probably matters. I don’t want to hire someone who embezzled from their former employer or some other major offense, but performance, let’s talk. I’m willing to talk because I know there are always two sides to the story. It just happens that this candidate lost their last story, but they might win the next.

It’s important as HR pros and leaders we understand this concept, not just for hiring, but also that we understand most times we don’t deal in complete black and white wins and losses. In HR we deal in the middle, in the gray. Once we make a determination, we are making a determination of ‘win’. We are validating one story over another. We like to tell ourselves and our leadership that this one story is the truth, but it’s really just another version of a story.

So be careful this week as you decide which stories will win and which ones will lose. Truth can be a pretty powerful thing even when it’s just a story.

HR/Corporate Communications 101 – Tesla Edition

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You might have seen this pop up on your radar this past week, but there’s a good chance you didn’t because it was put to bed as soon as it came up! Some news agencies tried to rake up a story on Tesla having a sexual harassment issue in their California plant.

Since the major issue at Uber, and big brand is now a media target for these types of stories. Not that they’re not stories, but the reality is the media consuming public love to see big name companies get killed in the media, while this kind of thing is taking place every day in lesser known companies that news agencies could care less!

So, why didn’t anyone bite on the Tesla story like Uber? Check out this response from the Tesla internal comms team:

“The topics raised in this meeting were followed up directly with those willing to discuss,” a Tesla representative told Business Insider. “We have a no-tolerance policy and have made changes to leadership, policy, and training to continue to improve our work environment.”

“The reason groups like Women in Tesla exist is precisely because we want to provide employees with an outlet to share opinions and feedback in a constructive manner. At Tesla, we regularly host events like the Town Hall, and only someone who is intentionally trying to misconstrue the facts and paint Tesla in a negative light could perceive such meetings as something negative.”

Drop mic. Walk off stage.

Clear, concise and no bullshit. We were made aware of it. We handled it. We’ll continue to handle it in a similar fashion if it comes up.

I don’t know if Tesla has a sexual harassment problem or not. What I know is they don’t have a communications department problem, those folks know what they’re doing, especially in light of recent situations at other high profile Silicon Valley companies.

A communication like this doesn’t lead one to believe there’s an ongoing problem. It’s designed to make you feel like some folks in charge know what’s going on and it was taken care of. That should be your goal in designing and developing HR communications for issues of this nature. The trick is you have to actually have taken care of it!

Do your internal and external communications sound like this? Yeah, you probably got in the ‘zero-tolerance’ language and we’ll continue to work to get better, but are you willing to call out your naysayers!? Most aren’t for the simple fact is they don’t really know for sure if there isn’t something going on, which leads me to believe Tesla has probably gone the extra mile to eliminate those responsible and make sure whatever happened won’t happen again.

Great HR communications can have a great impact on employees, shareholders, and customers. Don’t take them lightly.

Why Am I Being Ghosted After I Interviewed?

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Dear Timmy,

I recently applied for a position that I’m perfect for! A recruiter from the company contacted me and scheduled me for an interview with the manager. I went, the interview was a little over an hour and it went great! I immediately followed up with an email to the recruiter and the manager thanking them, but since then I’ve heard nothing and it’s been weeks. I’ve sent follow-up emails to both the recruiter and the manager and I’ve gotten no reply.

What should I do? Why do companies do this to candidates? I would rather they just tell me they aren’t interested than have them say nothing at all!

The Ghost Candidate

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Dear Ghost,

There are a number of reasons that recruiters and hiring managers ghost candidates and none of them are good! Here’s a short-list of some of these reasons:

– They hated you and hope you go away when they ghost you because conflict in uncomfortable.

– They like you, but not as much as another candidate they’re trying to talk into the job, but want to leave you on the back burner, but they’re idiots and don’t know how to do this properly.

– They decided to promote someone internally and they don’t care about candidate experience enough to tell you they went another direction.

– They have a completely broken recruitment process and might still be going through it believing you’re just as happy as a pig in shi…

– They think they communicated to you electronically to bug off through their ATS, but they haven’t audited the process to know this isn’t working.

– The recruiter got fired and no one picked up the process.

I would love to tell you that ghosting candidates is a rare thing, but it’s not! It happens all the time! There is never a reason to ghost a candidate, ever! Sometimes I believe candidates get ghosted by recruiters because hiring managers don’t give feedback, but that still isn’t an excuse I would accept, at least tell the candidate that!

Look, I’ve ghosted people. At conference cocktail parties, I’ve been known to ghost my way right back up to my room and go to sleep! When it comes to candidates, I don’t ghost! I would rather tell them the truth so they don’t keep coming back around unless I want them to come back around.

I think most recruiters ghost candidates because they’re over their head in the amount of work they have, and they mean to get back to people, but just don’t have the time. When you’re in the firefighting mode you tend to only communicate with the candidates you want, not the ones you don’t. Is this good practice? Heck, no! But when you’re fighting fires, you do what you have to do to stay alive.

What would I do, if I was you? 

Here are a few ideas to try if you really want to know the truth:

1. Send a hand written letter to the CEO of the company briefly explaining your experience and what outcome you would like.

2. Go on Twitter and in 140 characters send a shot across the bow! “XYZ Co. I interviewed 2 weeks ago and still haven’t heard anything! Can you help me!?” (Will work on Facebook as well!)

3. Write a post about your experience on LinkedIn and tag the recruiter and the recruiter’s boss.

4. Take the hint and go find a company who truly values you and your talent! If the organization and this manager treats candidates like this, imagine how you’ll be treated as an employee?

 

Turns Out, Millennials Actually Don’t Want Your Feedback!

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It’s conference season and I got a chance to see the ever-popular, Marcus Buckingham.  Marcus has the great English accent, high energy and great leadership content to share. He’s strong every time I’ve seen him, going on way too many times at this point in my life!

Here was the money-shot quote Marcus dropped on the audience this time:

“Millennials don’t want feedback!”

We’ve all been told by thought leaders and Millennial experts for a decade that all Millennials want is feedback and work-life balance!  They don’t want money or power or ice in their beer.  Just feedback and time off.  Marcus put a stop to all of this, and had the data to back it up!

In reality, Marcus told us the truth.  Millennials and the rest of us don’t want feedback, we all just want attention. Pay attention to us!  Stop by frequently and see how we are doing, give us some insight into our near future, help us get our jobs done.  But, please, don’t give us feedback on what we are doing wrong!

No one wants that.  The whole reason performance reviews fail is because they don’t deliver what we truly want, attention, not feedback.  So, our “HR” answer to this is to do what?!? Let’s do more frequent, smaller, feedback sessions! NO!

Unfortunately, this is going to be big old Titanic to turn around.  The wheels have been in motion too long to stop what we’ve already started.  HR technology platforms and your processes are already in place. Your managers have already been trained, and now you want us to stop?!?

Basically, yes.

Those organizations with high engagement are not the ones who are giving more feedback. They are the ones who are paying more attention to their employees.  Yes, there is a difference.

This is fraught with issues for most HR pros and organizations because it feels a little pie in the sky-ish.  There is an assumption that you pay attention to your employees and they’ll just magically do what they’re supposed to do, and we live happily ever after, cats and dogs living together.

We know that isn’t reality.

Some employees need to be managed to get the most out of them.  They need to be held accountable. I do think there is a balance that we can get to when it comes to paying attention to our employees like they want, and being able to ‘manage’ them like the business needs.

Managers need to know that even with those employees they’ve worked with for a long time, it’s critical that they don’t stop paying attention to what they’re doing, professionally and personally. Also, our employees need to understand that, yes, we care about you, but that doesn’t mean you can just not perform the job you were hired to do.

I don’t need engaged employees that don’t do the job they were hired to do. I want engaged, productive employees.  It’s all about balancing your approach, and I love that Marcus put to bed the concept that Millennials just want feedback!

5 New Rules of Work

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I’m usually a big fan of Fast Company articles (in fact my friend Lars Schmidt is now a regular contributor to FC and his stuff is awesome!)but this one seemed like the biggest contrived piece of new-aged garbage, I just had to share!

The article has a great premise: These Are The New Rules of Work.  You know, one of those articles that will show us all how we use to do work and how we now do work. Well, maybe, but also how we hope we could do work like they talk about in magazines like Fast Company, but we really don’t because we live in the real world.

Here’s a taste:

Old Rule: You commute into an office every day.

NEW RULE: WORK CAN HAPPEN WHEREVER YOU ARE, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.

Cute, but I actually work at a job where we go to the office each day, like most people in the world. So, while it would great to work in the Cayman Islands, my job is in Flint, and if I don’t come in, I don’t get paid. Which makes trips to the Cayman more difficult.

You get the idea.  It was written by a professional writer, not by someone who actually works a real job. Writing isn’t a real, normal job. When you write freelance, you can actually work from anywhere, because you basically work for yourself!

Here are the others:

Old Rule: Work is “9-to-5”

NEW RULE: YOU’RE ON CALL 24-7.

Well, you’re not really on call 24-7, you choose to be ‘connected’ 24-7, there’s a difference.  I do believe that ‘leaving’ your job at the office was a concept that was overblown for the most part in our parent’s generation. They claimed to do this, but only because they didn’t have email and smartphones and laptops. Let’s face it, our parents would have been just as connected given the same technology.

Old Rule: You have a full-time job with benefits.

NEW RULE: YOU GO FROM GIG TO GIG, PROJECT TO PROJECT.

There’s no doubt there is a rise in the use of the contingent workforce, but this doesn’t mean it’s necessarily chosen by the worker.  True, thoughts have shifted that many people no longer want to work at one company for forty years, but much of that has been shaped by companies and economics. When you live through an entire decade of layoffs and downsizing, you begin to think of the work environment as more transient. The crazy part about this mindset is organizations still feel like candidates should want to stay at a company for forty years, even though they can’t, and won’t, guarantee that for you.

Old Rule: Work-life balance is about two distinct, separate spheres.

NEW RULE: FOR BETTER OR WORSE THE LINE BETWEEN WORK AND LIFE IS ALMOST ENTIRELY DISAPPEARING.

This is the one rule I actually agree with.  Again, from a day when you could actually separate yourself from your work and personal life. In today’s ultra-connected world, it becomes very difficult to do this. I think most people get tired of living two separate lives, and just want to live one. This is who I am, professionally and personally, take me a whole person, or not.

Old Rule: You work for money, to support yourself and your family.

NEW RULE: YOU WORK BECAUSE YOU’RE “PASSIONATE” ABOUT A “MOVEMENT” OR A “CAUSE”—YOU HAVE TO “LOVE WHAT YOU DO.”

This is actually the single worst piece of advice ever given to mankind! Bar none.  If this was actually the case, how do you think anything would actually get done on this planet? How would store shelves get stocked? Gas stations get to run. Your dinner gets cooked and the dishes washed at your favorite restaurant? Do you really feel there are folks “passionate” about washing dishes for you? That they want to wash dishes for your cause of having a chicken fried steak and gravy for dinner?

Get some freaking perspective.

I think it’s great if you can work at somewhere you’re passionate about, good for you. But it’s definitely not necessary for you to have a great life. Have a cause that is special in your life? Perfect, go for it. You know what really helps most causes? Money! If you have a job that makes great money, just imagine how you can truly help that cause.

So, what do you think about these ‘new’ rules of work?

The One Thing That Will Have The Most Positive Impact to your HR Career #TSLive17

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I just got back from attending the Halogen TalentSpace Live 2017 conference. Halogen is the industry leader in Performance Management. Great product, great tools for your hiring managers and organization. On the first day of the conference, it was announced they would be acquired by Saba.

Saba is the industry leader in Learning, so it makes a good marriage. Most large full suite HR enterprise software has both performance and learning, but it’s not even close to what these two systems have. Organizations that prioritize performance and/or learning use systems like Halogen and Saba, not large vanilla enterprise plays.

As you can imagine with any merger of this level some leadership positions are eliminated. You don’t need to CEOs! Halogen’s dynamic and beloved CEO Les Rechan is leaving the combined company immediately and said his goodbyes to the Halogen customer base. Saba’s CEO Pervez Qureshi is also a great leader and is handling the transition well and his closing address at TalentSpace Live left me feeling optimistic for the new company.

So, how does this have anything to do with making a positive impact on your leadership career? Harvard Grant and Glueck study followed two groups of men, one poor, one Harvard grads

Harvard’s Grant and Glueck study followed two groups of men, one poor, one Harvard grads for 75 years to track the physical and emotional well-being of these men. What they found over multiple generations was one thing, in particular, stood out for those men.

The study discovered that those men who had the best well-being had no real genetic similarities. Nothing to do with income or education. The geographic location made little difference. The single most compelling factor of a fulfilling life is if you have and surround yourself with good, positive relationships.

Fulfilling, healthy life = good relationships.

So, if you want to have a positive impact on your career you need to surround yourself with good positive relationships. People you care about, and people who care about you.

That’s what I saw from both Les and Pervez. To strong leaders who surrounded themselves with good relationships with people they truly care for and those people truly care for them. I’m not sure if this means the new Saba/Halogen combined company will be a smashing success, but I know the leadership understands this concept.

I was able to give Les a hug, and I told Pervez if he would have been in the same session he would have gotten one too! You see, I try and surround myself with good relationships. I want to see those in my life succeed and do well, and I always feel they want me to succeed as well.

I think most HR pros and leaders I meet sometimes struggle with this concept and keep too many bad relationships in their life. Relationships that leave them feeling unfilled and detract from them spending time on the right things for themselves and their organization.

So, today, make a deal with yourself. Tell yourself that you will eliminate one bad relationship from your life. You don’t need to do this publically. No big announcement on Facebook is needed. Just quietly walk away, disengage, and move on. It feels so uplifting, you can’t even imagine!

 

 

The 5 Skills I Honed From Other Jobs That Have Served Me Well in my HR Career

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Believe it or not, I didn’t go to college thinking, “Oh boy! I can’t wait to work in HR!” And there’s a pretty decent chance you didn’t either.

Eventually, if you’re like me, you got some official HR education under your belt. But a lot of the skills you use every day are skills you probably didn’t learn for the first time in an HR class. You learned them before all that—at home, or at some earlier job, right?

Here’s how it went for me:

My undergrad degree was in elementary education. Back then, my goal in life was to teach your kids how to finger paint and blow up stuff in science class. At the time it seemed like the best gig on the planet. Kids are easy to make laugh and I got my summers off. That all seemed pretty awesome. Plus, being a dude in elementary education, meant it was usually me and like 30 female teachers in the school. I wasn’t the best looking guy, so I liked those odds!

After doing a little teaching, I moved into sales and recruiting for a while. I’m a mile wide and inch deep, as they say, so I was able to carry on a conversation about just about anything. So, those two careers worked really well, because it’s pretty much just getting people to trust you and then talk them into something where they’ll never trust you again!

Then, to my good fortune, I sort of fell into HR. When I was in recruiting, one of my clients was an HR leader for General Motors. He took a liking to me and I thought he had the best job on the planet, so he encouraged me to get my master’s in HR and he would help me get a real HR gig.

When I got my first job in HR, what I found was that all of the skills I learned being a teacher, a sales pro, and a recruiter were all skills I that really helped me in HR. Here’s five in particular that have come in handy.

Being Confident: Turns out elementary age school kids can smell fear like a pack of wild dogs! When you step into a classroom and you lack confidence these little monsters will attack! So I had to learn very quickly as a teacher that even if I didn’t really need to know anything about what I was trying to teach, everything would be okay as long as I controlled the room with confidence.

Similarly, in HR, people will question you constantly, unless you can portray similar confidence in your abilities. And compared to a pack of eight-year-olds, they’re pretty tame by comparison!

A Good Attitude:  When I got into HR people kept telling me, “Hey, you’re not like every other HR person I know!” What they were saying was, you’re always positive, most HR pros come across negative. (Which I don’t think is fair.) My first job out of college was as an agency recruiter. You better have a great attitude in that job, or you’ll fail for sure!

Being Proactive: A lot of HR folks see their jobs as being firefighters. In other words, they wait for problems, and then try to solve them. When I got into HR, I decided I didn’t want to think that way. I wanted to be proactive. Nothing was ever good enough, we needed to make it better. Everything was broken because I just broke it, so we could make it better. I found as a recruiter early in my career the engineering hiring managers I worked with had thoughts like this and responded well when I came at them with ideas in the same mindset.

Being Humble: How can you be confident and humble? It’s hard, but you can do it. As a teacher, you have to do what you say, or your kids will never let you forget. Their memory is a like an elephant’s! The best sales pros are also very humble in a way you feel connected with them, that makes them relatable. The best HR pros are reliably humble. You can count on them and admire their willingness to put the organization’s needs in front of their own.

Being Persuasive: As a teacher, I had to ‘sell’ ideas to kids thousands of times per week. As a recruiter, I had to sell jobs to candidates all day, every day. And having the ability to sell ideas and projects sets great HR pros apart from average HR pros.

Why were these skills important for me to learn? They all help get the tools and technology I needed to be a great HR Pro!  These skills help make me build a story around how we are going to get better and eventually become world-class. I want those that I support and those who support me to truly believe the only choice we have to get better is to take Tim’s advice and go get that technology solution!

(P.S. If you want more ideas on how to convince your boss to give you the budget for cool new stuff, download this eBook I wrote.) —

Anyway, that’s how it went for me. How about you? What skills did you never learn in HR-school have been the most important to you? Please share in the comments below.

(Oh, and if you’d like to read more interesting posts on how to bring more of the soft skills you learned outside HR to your job, check out this awesome blog post right now:

6 Tips on Creating a More Empathetic Leave of Absence Process,  by my friend, the excellent Dawn Burke, VP of People for Daxko!

The real value of A.I. is in HR, not Recruiting!

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What if you could catch and stop sexual harassment in the workplace before it got started? What about other types of violence, embezzlement, etc.? What if you could determine when disengagement was starting with an employee and address it immediately?

All those would be pretty powerful advantages to HR and leadership, don’t you think!?

Google is beginning to use A.I. and machine learning to find objectional content on the internet. Now, the main reason for this is a little less moral than it sounds. Google was losing advertisers because many ads they were paying for were showing up on content that was not something they would want to be associated with their brand.

Seems like most solutions to problems happen because of money…

Recently, in HR, we’ve seen some really high-profile cases of harassment come to light with Uber, Tesla, etc. These cases have had a major impact to both the consumer brand and especially to the employer brand of these organizations. While those of us who work in HR understand this is far too often occurrence, it seems like little gets done to stop it.

Say hello to my little friend!

Why couldn’t an artificial intelligence technology tell me when some creepy employee is sending inappropriate things to other coworkers, customers, vendors, etc.? What about when an employee uses threatening language to intimidate another employee? Wouldn’t you want to know about that? I think Mary just told Jennifer she’s ‘done’ and wants ‘out’ and she needs to get her resume together.

Would love to know that, so I can find out how to talk Mary off the ledge!

Say hello to Big Brother!

Yikes, right!? But, this is probably closer to reality than we realize and it will probably actually help our work environments a ton! Our employees communicate in a number of ways: email (primarily), messaging, voice, various tech platforms we use to do our daily work, etc. Almost all of which have unstructured data that A.I. could analyze and make predictions.

Some of those predictions could help you as an organization reduce risk. Tim seems to be coming very close to crossing a line with Mary, maybe we should give him a little reminder about our policy on harassment in the workplace. Bam! A nice, neat, little piece of content automatically hits Tim’s inbox and a message gets sent to his boss to stop by and remind Tim about what’s appropriate behavior in the workplace.

Some might help the organization retain their talent. There’s already predictive analytic solutions in play that predict employee turnover, add in machine learning, and A.I. will begin to show you employee who might turn before they’ve even thought of turning!

This might seem all futuristic, but the technology is really already here. Eventually, someone will launch a solution that does all of the stuff mentioned above, I’m quite certain someone already has this in development. It will only take one company to put it in place and the dominos will fall.

What you get paid to do at work is owned by your employer. We’ve all known this for a long time. What we never realized was that eventually, technology would actually hold us to not only the work but the behaviors as well!

Would you want to work in an environment where every move you made was measured by A.I.? I’m guessing not, but I’m also guessing it won’t be a choice!

Can I be Totally Honest?

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“Can I be completely honest with you?” is a phrase usually followed by some sh*t you don’t want to hear.  We talk about this concept a bunch in HR.  We need to tell our employees the truth about their performance.  We work to coach managers of people on how to deliver this message appropriately.  We develop complete training sessions and bring in ‘professional’ communicators to help us out on the exact phraseology we want to use.  All so we can be ‘honest’ with our employees.

Can I be completely honest with you?

No one wants you to be honest with them.

Employees want you to tell them this:

1. We like having you work here.

2. You’re doing a good job.

3.  You are better than most of the other employees we have.

4. We see great things coming from your development, and you’re on target for promotion.

5. Here is your annual increase.

Now, that might actually be ‘honest’ feedback for about 5% of your employees.  That means you will be saying a different version of honest to the other 95% that won’t like you being completely honest.

That is why talent management is really hard.  No piece of software will help you with this one fact.  Most people don’t like honest.  The cool part of this is that most managers don’t like to be honest. It’s uncomfortable. It causes conflict.  Most people aren’t comfortable telling someone else that they have some issues that need to be addressed, and most people don’t take that feedback appropriately.  You tell an employee they have ‘room for improvement’ and they instantly believe you told them they suck and they’re about to be fired.

So, as managers, we aren’t completely honest.  We tend to work around the truth.  The truth is we all have things we need to get better at, and it sucks to hear it out loud.  If someone tells you they welcome this feedback, they’re lying to you and themselves.  Those are usually the people who lose it the most when they are told the truth.  People who tell you they want honest feedback will believe you’re going to tell them ‘honestly’ they’re a rock star.  When you say something less than ‘rock star’ they implode.

So, what’s the honest solution to this?

Say nothing.  Set really good metrics. Metrics that show if a person is performing or not.  Make sure everyone understands those metrics.  Then, when the employee wants feedback, set down the metrics in front of them, and shut up.  Don’t be the first to talk.  The employee will give you some honest feedback if you wait.  Which will open the door to agree or disagree? Otherwise, you’re just working on subjective.  Subjective and honest don’t go well together.

But, you knew that. I really like having you stop by and read this.  You do a great job at your job. You’re certainly better than all those other readers who stop by and read this.  I’m sure you’re on your way up!