Category Archives: Communication

The Key to Handling High Maintenance Employees Like a Pro

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Do you know the one piece of HR technology that hasn’t been created, yet? The Diva Detector!*

Wouldn’t that be nice? “Hey, Mr. or Ms. Candidate, please look into the DD 2.0 and don’t blink….Yeah, looks like you’re a straight-up diva, and sorry, but we’re fully loaded up on those at the moment. Please feel free to test again in 30 days. If your diva levels come down to just a know-it-all, you’ll be reconsidered!”

We tend to hire high maintenance employees because they’re very good at hiding their diva-ness during the interview process. Sometimes they even hide it through the probationary period of their employment. Those are the really hard-to-handle ones because they know they’re divas and hide it long enough to make your life difficult.

The question is, what do you do once you have a high maintenance employee?

I’ve had to deal with this in every single HR stop of my entire career, usually with a line out the door waiting to one-up each other on who has the biggest diva flag.

The thing about high maintenance employees is they usually want more attention than a normal employee. It’s this need for attention that drives you nuts, their manager nuts and all the other employees around them.  The key is getting them to focus on what the organization needs from them, not what they need from the organization. So, how do you do that?

Well, usually, high maintenance employees become a problem because their direct supervisor doesn’t stop this issue immediately when it comes to light. But, this is common, especially with new hiring managers, so it’s critical to work with them and help them become better managers.

High maintenance employees are at their best when they can divide you and the hiring manager. You can’t allow this to happen. You have to make a plan with the hiring manager and stick to it. The best way to box in a high maintenance employee is to never allow them to play two parties against each other. “Well,” they might say, “my boss said I could lead, then Jenny just took over, and I’m the one…”

You see where this is going!

As soon as this starts, you just need to say one thing, ” I’m going to call in your boss and Jenny so we can all talk.” To which they’ll probably say: “You don’t need to do that. You’re in HR! I thought this was confidential!”  (I love that one, by the way. I’m not a lawyer, I’m an HR leader, there’s a big difference.)

My reply to this, delivered in very calm, even-keeled manner is, “I can see this is very important to you, so I don’t want anything to get misinterpreted, it’s best that we get all of us together and get on the same page.”

High-maintenance employees hate to be on the same page because they get their power from the lack of communication within organizations. So the best way to limit their impact is to get everyone in the same room and nip the issue in the bud before it gets way out of hand.

(*Remember how I mentioned how great a Diva Detector would be? This isn’t exactly that…but Jellyvision’s unique recruiting process is a pretty close second. Check out how they weed out divas and slackers right here. It’s good stuff.)

T3 – Employment Branding Activation tool @Universum_eb

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A couple times a year I get to demo a product that totally blows me away.  This week on T3 that product is Universum! Okay, let’s first get out of the way they Universum uses an underscore in the Twitter name which is a kiss of death in marketing! I have to let this go, because what they have is so industry changing, this might be the only mistake they’ve made along the way!

Universum is an employer branding digital research company. What the hell is that? Basically, they measure both sides of employment branding. What candidates want and expect from employers, and what you and your competition is actually doing. All of this information runs on a platform they call “Iris”.  It was originally built in conjunction with 12 of the largest employer brands in the world, and they leverage data from 3,000 universities worldwide, over 2000 individual employer brands and 55 countries.

This is a product that is used by large companies who have an employment branding function within HR or a dedicated social media role in HR or as part of a larger social team. After going through the demo, I can’t imagine any large organization not utilizing this tool. In fact, I would question the capabilities of the leadership and CMO that didn’t use this tool. The data insight and direction Iris gives you is simply a competitive advantage over those not using it!

5 Things I really like about Universum:

1. Universum has figured out the science behind social. Right now most organizations still hire under-experienced marketing pros, or HR grads who think they know social, to run their employment branding and have them basically test crap out and see what sticks. Iris will show you exactly what works and what doesn’t work in your branding.

2. Universum will show you what your competition is doing that is working really well. Competitive data is the holy grail of what HR can provide strategically to an organization. This one product will elevate your practice, strategically, like no other technology I’ve seen in HR or Talent.

3. Iris can give you exact insight to what content and language you should be using to attract specific talent to your organization.  Most employment branding is one message, way too broad. Iris lets you build specific branding tailored to the exact talent your organization is struggling to find.

4. Iris helps you create great content by showing you what is working, with what audiences, and in which countries. Truly a global company, that will give you global views about how branding needs to change based on which locations you’re trying to get talent. They have over 1.3 million pieces of content curated in their platform and growing. No inspiration needed.

5. Universum is an Employer Branding Spy Tool! Probably the coolest feature of Universum is its ability to show you exactly what and how your competition is leveraging their employment brand, and exactly how you can beat them for the same talent!

Universum is an employment branding activation technology.  Most of us either have a nonexistent employment brand or a brand that is basically on life support. Universum does more that just give you knowledge, they show you step-by-step how to activate and win your industry with your employment brand.

As I mentioned at the beginning this is a product for large companies. Probably Fortune 2000 types, or organizations that have dedicated employment branding folks on staff in their HR shop. The cost is fairly reasonable. When they told me the price point, I was surprised, I would have paid way more for what I was getting.

Check them out, I guarantee a demo Universum/Iris won’t disappoint!

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

Employees don’t leave organizations, they leave…

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BOSSES! Right?! Right? Right…

For at least the past two decades, the foundation of employee engagement has been built on this one simple principle. Employees don’t leave organizations, they leave Bad Bosses.

So, if you want highly engaged employees just don’t have assholes for bosses. Super easy! Just hire and train great leaders and your employees will be engaged and productive and all will be right in the world.

Then along comes Harvard and their stupid studies:

“Good leadership doesn’t reduce employee turnover precisely because of good leadership. Supportive managers empower employees to take on challenging assignments with greater responsibilities, which sets employees up to be strong external job candidates. So employees quit for better opportunities elsewhere — better pay, more responsibility, and so on.”

Wait, what!? This is exactly what your CEO said she feared when you wanted to dump all of that money into leadership development. But you said, “If we don’t develop our leaders the people will leave as well!” So, what happened? We did so well at developing and empowering our leaders they pushed our best employees right out the door to other opportunities!

Ugh! This HR thing is hard. We think we’re doing the right thing for twenty years, then we find out we did it all wrong! Don’t fret, there’s some good news:

“There is a silver lining, though. Former employees with good bosses are what we call “happy quitters.” When the consultant company asked them about their feelings toward their former employer, their responses were overwhelmingly positive. Questions included Do you hold positive opinions about your former company? Would you refer employees to work for the company? and Do you see yourself as a potential boomerang employee? Good leadership, then, is an important tool for building goodwill with employees, which they are likely to retain as alumni, in turn becoming sources of valuable information, recommendations, and business opportunities later on.

The upside to losing well-led employees, however, comes with an important caveat. Our research finds that good leadership generates alumni goodwill only for those employees who experience good faith retention efforts when they quit. So managers should go to bat for their employees and counteroffer if they can. Our findings indicate that such retention efforts are critical for preserving the goodwill created by good leaders with employees, which can then be translated into a continuing relationship with them as alumni.”

What does this all mean?

You better get a heck of a lot better at Off-boarding! Off-what?  You know Onboarding but in reverse. Make employees feel really good about leaving you! Make them feel like they are valued and you don’t want to lose them and you’ll do anything to keep them. When they leave, they’ll be more likely to return or recommend others go work for you.

Most companies off-board like this:

Leaving employee: “I’m putting in my two weeks notice, I have this great opportunity to challenge myself and I have to give it a shot.”

HR and/or Hiring Manager: (while ripping their shirt) – “You are dead to us! Leave immediately. Don’t return to your desk, we already have security guards boxing up your crap!”

You laugh, but it’s mostly true. We suck at off-boarding, which is why most of us suck at alumni hiring. Fix that!

The First Rule of Recruiting

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Sometimes we go so far into the weeds in recruiting we forget what is really important.

We have to have a brand!

We have to have an ATS! Or a new ATS!

We have to have a CRM! What the hell is a CRM!

Our job descriptions need to be better!

Our career site sucks! Don’t they all!?

We need to relaunch our employee referral program!

There are literally a million things you could focus on in recruiting and you still would have a list of crap you never even got to.

You know recruiting isn’t difficult. It’s not like we’re trying to launch the space shuttle. Recruiting is finding people for your organization. People are everywhere. We just need to talk them into coming to work for our organizations.

It’s the first rule of recruiting – Just let people know you’re hiring.

We make it so difficult when all we have to truly do is let people know we actually want to hire them. Do you have any idea how many people would really want to work for your organization, but they never know you are hiring or were hiring?

Recruiting is really only that. Just letting enough people know that you want them to work for you until you’ve reached the right people. It’s okay that you will reach some you don’t want. That’s part of the game.

To reach the people who you want, and who want you, you have to let a lot of people know you’re hiring.

Letting people know you’re hiring goes beyond your career site. It goes beyond job boards. It goes beyond employee referral programs. It’s a philosophy throughout your organization. It’s about an understanding that you want everyone to know that you’re hiring.

Most organizations don’t do this. It’s a combination of issues, but mostly it’s conceited belief that letting people know you’re hiring seems desperate. That we are too good of an organization to let everyone know we are hiring, because we don’t want everyone, we only want a few.

This is why most talent acquisition departments fail. Simple conceit.

Great recruiting isn’t conceited, great recruiting is about being humble enough to let people know you want them.

Does my black face make me look more diverse?

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I’m sitting at the conference room table. It’s surrounded by my peers, most of which are white, one other, besides me is black, sprinkle in a couple of females, welcome to corporate America. We’re here because the white folks want to talk about how diversity is important. The entire time this conversation is happening they just keep staring at me and my black face. I do believe they think diversity is important.

I agree, diversity is important. We need to do something about it at our organization.  But, I’m not who they think I am.

Yes, I’m black.  But, I’m not diverse. In fact, the color of my skin is the only diverse thing about me!

I grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb. Not an upper-middle-class black suburb. An upper-middle-class white suburb. So, most people would actually call this a rich suburb. I was classically trained as an opera singer. I didn’t play basketball. I was a great student. I work in a white collar profession. I eat at the Olive Garden with my wife and three kids. I drive a Toyota SUV, the big one.

I might be more ‘white’ than the other white people at this table, but I have a black face. Apparently, because of my black face, I should be chosen to ‘run’ diversity for the organization. Apparently, I understand the ‘struggle’.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a black person living in America. The white female CEO of our organization walked past me on the first month on the job. I recognized her immediately and said a jolly, “Good Morning”. She said nothing and walked past me. Not an hour later she realized the black man she rudely walked past wasn’t some random black guy, but a mid-level executive in her organization, and she stopped by to give me an excuse and a jolly good morning back.  I know she wouldn’t have walked past a white peer of mine without a greeting.

So, my black skin does present a challenge, but it does not make me diverse.

I ask the group, “why not Tom?” Tom, you see grew up in the inner city. Blue collar environment, with a single mom. Tom walked past a GM plant every day on his way to school. Once in a while, he would the workers selling dime bags out of the trunk of their cars in the GM parking lot. Tom played basketball and went to school on a scholarship. It was his only chance to get out of his neighborhood. Tom’s friend network has more black faces than mine, by a lot!

Tom grew up poor. Grew up surrounded by black people, Hispanic people, Asian people, people on the fringes of society, people I didn’t grow up around. Tom saw things I only saw when I went to the movies, which my parents paid for. Tom went to Baptist church, not because he was close to Jesus, but because the black women would cook a hot meal each day for the kids in the neighborhood. Tom has lived a diverse life.

“Tom!? Tom can’t lead up diversity, he’s…”, they stop before stating the obvious, like somehow saying “he’s white” out loud will change the color of his face.

Tom is diverse. Tom actually is passionate about diversity.  The only thing Tom doesn’t have is my black face.

It’s decided, I’ll take on diversity. I’m better “suited” for it, they say.

(Before you lose your minds and wonder why a white guy wrote this, understand that this came from a friend of mine. A friend with a black face who doesn’t have this platform. He told me the story, I wrote it. It was a story that needed to be told. Diversity isn’t about color, yet most organizations still make it about color. It’s the sad state of diversity in organizations in America.) 

Google Announced They Discovered The Secret to a Great Workplace!

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Over the past five years, I’ve been outspoken over my dislike of Google HR.  But I have to give them credit now, because they spent years of work, really digging into the concept of teams and employees to figure out how we, HR Pros, help our organizations make the whole thing work. Kudos to you Google!

Here’s what they found:

“The tech giant charged a team to find out. The project, known as Project Aristotle, took several years, and included interviews with hundreds of employees and analysis of data about the people on more than 100 active teams at the company. The Googlers looked hard to find a magic formula—the perfect mix of individuals necessary to form a stellar team—but it wasn’t that simple. “We were dead wrong,” the company said.

 Google’s data-driven approach ended up highlighting what leaders in the business world have known for a while; the best teams respect one another’s emotions and are mindful that all members should contribute to the conversation equally. It has less to do with who is in a team, and more with how a team’s members interact with one another…
Matt Sakaguchi, a midlevel manager at Google, was keen to put Project Aristotle’s findings into practice. He told Charles Duhigg of The New York Times how he took his team off-site to open up about his cancer diagnosis. His colleagues were initially silent, but then began sharing their own personal stories.
At the heart of Sakaguchi’s strategy, and Google’s findings, is the concept of “psychological safety,” a model of teamwork in which members have a shared belief that it is safe to take risks and share a range of ideas without the fear of being humiliated…
…In short. Just be nice.”
Wait, what?
Be nice.  That’s what Google found after ‘years’ of work? Be nice!?
You got that HR pros? Just tell your employees to be nice.  Google has it figured out. You can stop working now. Just listen to Google. They spent three exhausting years of research on this.  RELAX. They know what they’re doing. They’re Google. We all just want to be Google.
Mrs. Wilson was my kindergarten teacher. She was this young, beautiful black woman who seemed to be about 7 feet tall. To be fair, I was five and three feet tall, so she might have only been around 5’7″. Anyway, in 1975, she told me something very similar. In fact, I think she used those exact same words, “Be nice, Tim.”
Maybe Google should have just hired Mrs. Wilson, and saved all that time and work. Apparently, she also figured out the secret to a great workplace!

My exact 3 minute opening Interview monologue.

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Almost every failed interview can be traced back to the first three minutes. Experts will tell you the first ten seconds, but these are the same experts who have never interviewed or haven’t interviewed in the past twenty years. The reality is a little longer, but not much.

An interview doesn’t really start until you’re asked to open your mouth. And, not the small talk crap that you do while people get settled and wait for Jenny to get her coffee and find your resume.

When you get asked that first question, “So, tell us a little about yourself.” Bam! It’s on. Start the clock, you have 180 seconds to show them why they should hire you.

Here’s what I would say:

“I was raised by 6 women. My grandmother is the matriarch of our family. I was raised by a single-mom, who had four sisters, my aunts, and my sister was the first grandchild born into the family. As you can imagine, I was dressed-up a lot! The women in my life love to laugh and I was always had a stage with them to make this happen. 

The other thing it taught me was to cook, sew and iron. All of which I do to this day. My wife is the baker, but I’m the cook. Mending and ironing fall in my chore bucket around the house.

The real thing it taught me was the value of women in the world. I did my master’s thesis on women and leadership. My mother started her own company in 1979 when no women started companies. Not only that, she started a company in a male-dominated technical field.  I was nine years old, and she would pay me ten cents to stuff envelopes for her. We would sit on her bed and she made calls to candidates, and I would stuff envelopes with the volume off on the TV.

Living with a single mom, who started a business during a recession was a challenge. I learned the value of work and started my first real job the day I turned sixteen. I paid my own way through college as my parents, who could afford to help, believed I would get more out of college if I found a way to pay for it on my own. I did. In hindsight, I’m glad they taught me this lesson. It was hard but worth it.

All of these experiences have helped shape my leadership style. I set high expectations but work hard to ensure people have the right tools and knowledge to be successful. I hold people accountable to what we agree are our goals. I work very hard, but I like to have fun when I work. 

What else would you like to know about me?”

That’s it. I shut up and wait for a response.

What did I tell them in my three minutes?

I told them my story.  People don’t hire your resume, they hire your story.

If you want to get hired, you need to craft your story. A real story. A story people want to listen to. A story people will remember when it comes time to decide whom to hire.

What the Hell is Financial Wellness & Why Should HR Pros Care!

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I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t raised in an environment where much of anything was given to me. In my world, Financial Wellness meant our check didn’t bounce when we went to the grocery store or having to go to a different grocery store where we hadn’t bounced a check in a while! Luckily, my kids have no idea what it means to ‘bounce’ a check!

That is one of our challenges as HR pros to define Financial Wellness. For some of us, having the bills paid means we have financial wellness, for others, having the means to go on that annual trip to Florida means we have financial wellness. Some of your employees feel they have financial wellness, while others, in the same capacity, would feel on the verge of financial ruin!

Financial wellness, by definition, is a program or set of programs designed to improve employees’ financial behavior and outcomes while also driving business impact. Basically, it’s helping to ensure, the best we can, that our employees aren’t overly concerned with their personal money issues, that it impacts their work performance. An organization provides a good financial wellness program so that it can have happy and productive employees, who help drive great financial results for the organization.

Why do we as HR Pros need to care about our employees Financial Wellness?

In the history of HR, we really didn’t.  Sure there were some empathetic HR Pros who cared about someone going through a tough time, but rarely did HR, in the most well-meaning sense, ever want to touch the personal finance issues of an employee! Mostly, we would listen, try and pawn them off on the Employee Assistance Program, and hope it all went away.

The expectations of how we work with our employees, especially concerning things that impact their performance, have changed drastically over the past few years. The great recession is probably the main culprit for this mind-shift. We went through a part of our history where having financial issues, wasn’t rare, it was the norm for so many of our employees. Organizationally, we had to find ways to help our employees cope, get better and stay productive.

What we learned, through all of this, was that HR can make a huge difference in our employees quality of life. Having a great quality of life means that employees will stay around longer. Longer tenured employees, who love their jobs and feel supported, mean better overall outcomes for your organization.

The best HR leaders are now keenly aware of the organization’s bottom line, and what programs have a positive impact financially. Financial Wellness is one of those programs that drive overall better organizational financial performance, which makes it one of those programs HR pros need to care about, and need continue to drive across their organization.

Financial Wellness isn’t an easy program to just go and launch. We still live in a culture where talking about your finances, especially when things aren’t going well, is an extremely hard conversation to have. None of us want to admit we did a bad job managing our finances, and now we are in trouble. This is why HR is in a great position to own financial wellness and help employees. We are trained to be able to handle these types of situations and help our employees.

I joke about growing up in a family that bounced checks at the grocery store. I can do that now since I’m far from that scenario, but it was soul crushing to be a kid and have your mom handing you items to go put back on shelves because we couldn’t afford them. You have employees who are doing this. They need your help. They don’t need a handout, they need the knowledge to change their situation forever.

(By the way, if you’d like to hear me, and my special guest Laurie Ruettimann, get even more passionate and detailed about this topic, don’t miss the free webinar I’m hosting with ALEX, March 8th at 2pm EST. It’s called “Show Me the Money (Tips)! Six Ways to Improve Your Financial Wellness Program!” P.S. You’ll get an amazing Financial Wellness Communication playbook from ALEX as part of the deal too. A twofer!)

 

Failure Is The New Black!

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(Rerun from 2013 – This one still holds up very well!) 

This inspiration came from my friend William Tincup.  If you don’t know him, you need to know him, he’s brilliant.  Like my head hurts after talking to him brilliant, in a good way.

He made a comment recently which was just this:

“Failure is the new black.”

Another friend of ours, Jason Seiden, has been saying this for years, in a little different way, with his “Fail Spectacularly” motto.  Either way, you get the point, it’s now ‘in’ to talk about your failures. It’s a really popular and motivating thought process for a lot of people. Basically, it’s alright that you failed, go do it again and eventually you’ll get it right.

Past generations would go to great lengths to hide their failures.  Think about your parents and grandparents, you never heard them talk about things they failed at.  Think back about how your own parents spoke to you. Was failure really an option?  It wasn’t in my household.  We’re Sacketts, and Sacketts are winners, and winners get to do what they want (oh wait, that was me weekly to my own kids!).

I’m just wondering who originally decided that it was alright to fail?

You can’t go anywhere anymore without everyone telling you “Success starts with Failure” or “The Secret to success is failure”.  This comes from the concept of traditional scientific theory.  Have a theory. Test theory. Fail. Try another approach. Fail. Keep trying and eventually, you’ll be successful.  Straightforward. Makes sense.  But that really only plays out when you’re testing scientific theories.

Can we agree real life might be a bit different?

Malcolm Gladwell’s new book David and Goliath talks about the concept of failure and what it does to the brightest college students in the world.  His research found that the top 50  PhD students going into schools like Harvard, are all smarter than the smartest kid going into Missouri.  But at the end of their schooling the brightest kid at Missouri is more successful than the number 50 kid at Harvard.  Why is that?  The number 50 kid believes they are a failure because they are not as smart as the 49 kids above them at Harvard. While the kid at Missouri, who wasn’t as bright as all the Harvard kids, became a rock star at Missouri. That success, that confidence, led him/her to more and more success.  Put that same Missouri kid at Harvard and he/she would have failed miserably and may have even dropped out of the program.

Let me give you an example.  Your kid goes up to bat.  Strikes out, which is a failure. Goes up the next time and strikes out.  Goes up again and strikes out. Continues game after game, never hitting, only striking out.  Continued failure will not lead to this kid’s success.  In fact, continued failure will lead to more failure as their confidence is shattered.

The path to success, for most life situations, is not through failure, it’s through success.  Continued little successes that will eventually lead to big successes.

Celebrating failure, like it’s some sort of a success, doesn’t lead to success.  Is it alright to fail?  Of course it is. But should we be celebrating it?  I have children.  I want them to be successful at anything they do.  When they fail, we don’t throw a party.  We talk about where failure leads, what we/they need to do to ensure we don’t fail the next time.  Many times that entails a ton of hard work.  Failures enemy is hard work.

I don’t like that we are getting comfortable as a society with failure.  That failure has become something to celebrate. Something that is now cool.   That we give a trophy to the team that lost every game.  It doesn’t make us better as a society.  It doesn’t make our organizations better.  Failure leads to more failure, not to success.

Here’s hoping ‘Success’ becomes the new black!

6 Things That Will Make You A Great HR Pro

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Yesterday, I wrote this post on a question someone asked me about How do I become a great HR Pro?  I told them to stop sucking. Then I remembered I wrote this about three years ago – it’s better than just ‘stop sucking’, although, that’s brilliant advice as well! 

The one great thing I love about going to HR and Talent conferences is that you always get reminded about what really good HR should look like.  It doesn’t mean that your shop will be there, but it gives you something to shoot for.  I’ll admit, sometimes it can be frustrating listening to some HR Pro from a great brand tell you how they ‘built’ their great employment brand through all their hard work and brilliant ideas.  All the while, not mentioning anything about “oh, yeah, and we already had this great brand that marketing spends $100 million a year to keep great!”

Regardless, seeing great HR always reminds me that great HR is obtainable for everyone.  Great HR has nothing to do with size or resources.  It has a lot to do with an HR team, even a team of one, deciding little by little we’re going to make this great!

I think there are six things you need to know to make your HR department great:

1. Know how to ‘sell’ your HR vision to the organization and your executives.  The best HR Pros I know are great storytellers and, in turn, great at selling their visions.  If you don’t have a clear vision of what you want your HR shop to look like, how do you expect others to get on board and help you get there.  Sit down, away from work, and write out exactly what you want your HR shop to look like.  Write it long-hand. Write in bullet points. Just start.  It will come.

2. Buy two pairs of shoes: one of your employees and one of your hiring managers. Try them on constantly.  These are your customers, your clients.  You need to feel their joys and pains and truly live them.  Knowing their struggles will make you design better HR programs to support them.  Support them, not you.

3. Working hard is number 1.  Working smart is number 1A.  Technology can do every single transaction in HR.  Don’t allow tasks and administrative things be why you can’t do great HR.  Get technology to do all of this busy work so you can focus on real HR deliverables.

4. Break something in your organization that everyone hates and replace it with something everyone loves.  This is usually a process of something you’ve always done, and people are telling you it still has to be done that way. Until it doesn’t, and you break it.  By the way, this doesn’t have to be something in HR.  Our leaders and our employees have so many things that frustrate them in our environments.  Just find one and get rid of it.

5. Sometimes the path of least resistance is the best solution. HR people love to fight battles for the simple act of fighting the battle. “NO! It has to be done this way!” “We will NOT allow any workarounds!”   Great HR finds the path of least resistance.  The path of greatest adoption.  The path which makes our people feel the most comfortable, even if it isn’t the path we really, really want to take.

6. Stop being an asshole. You’re in HR, you’re not a Nazi.  Just be nice.  We’re supposed to be the one group in our organization that understands.  Understands people are going to have bad days and probably say things they don’t mean.  Understands that we all will have pressures, some greater than others, but all pressure nonetheless. Understands that work is about 25% of our life, and many times that other 75% creates complete havoc in our world!

Great HR has nothing to do with HR.  Great HR has a lot to do with being a great leader, even when that might not be your position in the organization.