Category Archives: Culture

GenX Rant: You’re not lonely, you’re just an idiot…

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So, the Washington Post ran an article this week where the former Surgeon General states that the U.S. has a “loneliness epidemic” it’s currently facing. A what?!

From the article:

“Vivek H. Murthy, who became the U.S. surgeon general in late 2014 after a lengthy confirmation battle over his remarks about guns being a health-care issue, added emotional well-being and loneliness to his list of big public health worries.

Now he’s writing about the impact the workplace has on those issues, taking his concerns to employers and speaking out about how the “loneliness epidemic” plays out on the job. In a new cover story in the Harvard Business Review, Murthy treats loneliness like a public health crisis, and the workplace as one of the primary places where it can get better — or worse. “Our social connections are in fact largely influenced by the institutions and settings where we spend the majority of our time,” Murthy said in an interview with The Washington Post. “That includes the workplace.”

Have we lost our f#*king minds!?

So, Timmy doesn’t make friends at work, goes home and spends eight straight hours on social media, or binge watches 8 episodes of Breaking Bad and feels like no one is his friend. That not an epidemic. Tim is an idiot!

I wasn’t a lonely kid, and I didn’t grow up being a lonely adult. Why? My parents would physically lock me out of the house from like after school to whenever the street lights came on. I was no ‘allowed’ in the house. They forced me to got out and make friends. It’s a learned skill, making friends. They said only one thing, “Go make friends.”

No instructions. No scheduled playgroups. Get your lazy ass outside and make friends. It’s not hard, just don’t be an idiot to the other kids who are were also forced outside. A ‘friend’ is not a social connection. It’s someone you physically talk to, touch, you know what each other’s likes and hates. You know their dreams and fears.

So, here we are in 2017, we can’t find enough talent, we’re struggling to help our leaders manage the performance of our workforce, and now we have to teach adults how to make friends? You have to be freaking kidding me!

A decade ago Gallup found out the ‘trick’ too happy employees is they have a ‘best friend’ at work. Little did we know, then, but apparently we do today, HR would become best friend matchmaker for friendship illiterate millennials who couldn’t look up from their phones for fifteen seconds to say an actual “hello” to Timmy as he walked by.

I give up. We’re all morons. Society is lost. China, please come takeover already…

Are You Hiring Raw Talent?

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Last week I got invited down to Rock Ventures (Dan Gilbert – the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Quicken Loans – yeah that Rock Ventures) to do the closing keynote for their HR and Talent Summit across the family of companies in Downtown Detroit! Fun, fast-moving culture. Seemingly every CEO of the 130 Rock Venture companies looked to be 30-ish!

As you can imagine, fast-growing organization, that can grow or hire enough talent fast enough to keep up.

One of the sessions was led by Victor You, CEO of Rock Connections, which is a call center that was built for Quicken Loans, but they found out other companies needed a high-quality call center, so they started selling their services. Most of the Rock Venture companies have a similar story. Idea by an employee, run with it, if you can make it happen, you become the CEO!

Rock Ventures is a Detroit company. When I say “Detroit” I mean “Detroit”. The entire campus is downtown Detroit. They hire Detroit city citizens. They are almost singlehandedly turning Detroit into one of the hottest growing cities in the U.S. Therein lies Victor’s problem as a CEO of a fast-growing startup.

Rock doesn’t want to have to relocate everyone they hire to Detroit. They want to hire those people already in Detroit. As you can imagine there’s a skills gap. The normal Detroit citizen is like most urban center citizens. Lower educated, lower income, less likely to have a college education.

Victor graduated from the University of Michigan. Engineering grad who didn’t like engineering. So, he went and sold mortgages. Did pretty well. Good enough that Dan Gilbert made him CEO of a company! What I love about Victor is he gets talent. He gets talent at a very different level than 99% of CEOs on the planet.

Victor explained it the group as “Raw” talent versus experiential talent. Almost all of us hire experiential talent. We have a job opening. That job needs a certain level of experience. So, that’s what we recruit and hire.

Victor doesn’t look for experience. Victor looks for raw talent attributes. What are those?

  • Hard working
  • Pride in the work they do
  • Wants to be apart of something bigger than them
  • Never satisfied

He saw that many Detroiters had these attributes, but no one was willing to give them a shot because they didn’t have the ‘experience’. He was like, “we can teach them the job”, it’s harder to teach them the raw talent attributes. In fact, you can’t teach those raw talent attributes.

The results have been off the charts! Great retention. High performance. High diversity. High concentration of Detroiters.

In a tight talent economy, you need to start changing the way you do things. We need to open up these modern day ‘apprenticeships’. We need more CEO leadership like Victor You.

Should the NFL Players Stick to Playing Football?

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I didn’t watch much NFL football this weekend, but I certainly heard about every single one of those players who made the decision to stand or kneel during the national anthem!

One thing I’ve heard from a lot of people is that football players (and celebrities in general) should stick to playing football, and stay out of politics. This is usually told to me by someone who is not a politician, but giving me all of their political commentaries!

Freedom of speech is one of the fundamental pillars of our nation.

You may or may not support a Football player not standing for the national anthem. It doesn’t really matter. They have a stage and they’re going to use it in a way they see fit. If you don’t like it, stop watching football. It’s silly we pay millions of dollars to men to play a game, to begin with, and idolize them for playing kid’s game (see what I did there with my commentary!).

We’re the idiots, not them. They’re just using the stage we’ve given them.

What I don’t like is this concept that people should stick to doing what they know. We were all idiots at most stuff at some point in our lives. Someone we gained knowledge of something, and within that thing, we felt like we were no longer idiots.

We added to those things, and soon we had a number of things we could speak on and not be sound like an idiot.

If an NFL player wants to talk politics, or social injustice, or whatever, good. That’s what America is truly all about, deciding what you no longer want to be an idiot about, and changing it. I was an idiot when it came to technology. I studied. I asked for help. I got involved. I now feel like I’m way less an idiot when it comes to technology.

That NFL player who wants to get involved is no different. Some might just be starting. Good for them! Some might be further along. Some might never have any interest in any of this. Also, good for them.

I believe America is the greatest country on the planet. I love it here. Some might not, and want to make it even better. I totally understand that. I love America, but it’s not perfect, and we have some big room for improvement.

Should NFL players demonstrate their political and social views on the field? Should your employees at your place of work? We are all having to grapple with these issues, and one thing is clear, this will not be going away anytime soon, or will it go away easily and quietly.

For me, I don’t take my political or social views from celebrities. I take my political and social views from people who have put the time into truly understanding what these issues are from all sides. That actually might be a football player, it might be a politician, it might a teacher, it might be my postal carrier. That’s my America.

Do you pay your employees more for referring Diverse candidates?

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I know a ton of HR Pros right now who have been charged by their organizations to go out and “Diversify” their workforce.  By “Diversify”, I’m not talking about diversity of thought, but to recruit a more diverse workforce in terms of ethnic, gender and racial diversity.

Clearly, by bringing in more individuals from underrepresented groups in your workforce, you’ll expand the “thought diversification”, but for those HR Pros in the trenches and sitting in conference rooms with executives behind closed doors, diversification of thought isn’t the issue being discussed.

So, I have some assumptions I want to lay out before I go any further:

1. Referred employees make the best hires. (Workforce studies frequently list employee referrals as the highest quality hires across all industries and positions)

2. ERPs (Employee Referral Programs) are the major tool used to get employee referrals by HR Pros.

3. A diverse workforce will perform better in most circumstances, then I homogeneous workforce will.

4. Diversity departments, if you’re lucky enough, or big enough, to have one in your organization, traditionally tend to do a weak job at “recruiting” diversity candidates (there more concerned about getting the Cinco De Mayo Taco Bar scheduled, etc.)

Now, keeping in mind the above assumptions, what do you think is the best way to recruit diversity candidates to your organization?

I’ve yet to find a company willing to go as far as to “Pay More” for a black engineer referral vs. a white engineer referral. Can you imagine how that would play out in your organization!?  But behind the scenes in HR Department across the world, this exact thing is happening in a number of ways.

First, what is your cost of hire for diverse candidates versus non-diverse candidates? Do you even measure that? Why not?  I’ll tell you why, is very hard to justify why you are paying two, three and even four times more for a diversity candidate, with the same skill sets, versus a non-diverse candidate in most technical and medical recruiting environments.  Second, how many diversity recruitment events do you go to versus non-specific diversity recruitment events?  In organizations who are really pushing diversification of workforce, I find that this figure is usually 2 to 1.

So, you will easily spend more resources of your organization to become more diversified, but you won’t reward your employees for helping you to reach your goals?  I find this somewhat ironic. You will pay Joe, one of your best engineers, $2000 for any referral, but you are unwilling to pay him $4000 for referring his black engineer friends from his former company.

Yet, you’ll go out and spend $50,000 attending diversity recruiting job fairs and events all over the country trying to get the same person.  When you know the best investment of your resources would be to put up a poster in your hallways saying “Wanted Black Engineers $4000 Reward!”.

Here’s why you don’t do this.

Most organizations do a terrible job at communicating the importance of having a diverse workforce, and that to get to an ideal state, sometimes it means the organization might have to hire a female, or an Asian, or an African American, or a Hispanic, over a similarly qualified white male to ensure the organization is reaching their highest potential.

Workgroup performance by diversity is easily measured and reported to employees, to demonstrate diversity successes, but we rarely do it, to help us explain why we do what we are doing in talent selection.  What do we need to do? Stop treating our employees like they won’t get it, start educating them beyond the politically correct version of Diversity and start educating them on the performance increases we get with diversity.  Then it might not seem so unheard of to pay more to an employee for referring a diverse candidate!

So, you take pride in your diversity hiring efforts, but you’re just unwilling to properly reward for it…

 

Being a Fair Leader Won’t Get You Promoted!

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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.

Everyone has their own rules. These are mine. The Sackett Rules!

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I’m heading back from South Africa today, so I’m re-posting a blog post I wrote six years ago. The day I wrote it I was at SHRM with Matt Stollak and Matt Charney, who gave me the motivation for this! It’s fun looking back on some old posts and reminding myself of some of these.

I think we all have rules, our own set of rules, but rarely do we let others know, which is why it’s so hard dealing with people. If we just knew everyone’s rules, we would probably all get along just fine!

Here are my rules:

The Sackett Rules

1. Don’t call in sick on Mondays or Fridays – no one believes you. (My staff knows this one well)

2. Everyone has a price, it’s a recruiters job to figure that out.  Never take “I’m not interested” as a reason. You just haven’t found out the price where they would be interested. (I don’t want to shovel cow manure, but if you pay me enough, well, heck, where’s the shovel?)

3. It only costs a little more to go, first class.  (My Grandpa use to say this, then my Mom, now me. It’s about doing things right.)

4. People won’t remember what you said, but they’ll remember how you made them feel. (That’s why I bring great snacks to meetings, and try and have a funny story!)

5. Always be nice to Moms with young kids. (Their day is always much harder than mine.)

6. There’s always a reason to kick an old man down the steps, just don’t do it. (via Chris Rock – this just makes me laugh)

7. Don’t cross the streams. (from Ghostbusters: I use this one with my youngest son, it makes him laugh, and he’s never seen the original movie)

8. No touching of the hair or face. (Ron Burgundy in Anchorman: my wife will laugh at this. I don’t like people touching my almost gone hair and I had Lasik surgery years ago and don’t like anyone touching my face, and I don’t like bees!)

9. Don’t be a victim. (Yeah, you pretty much control what happens to you, I have very little patience for people who play the victim.)

10. If you are scrubbing the kitchen floor in your boxer shorts, don’t do it with the shades to the sliding glass door open, while your neighbors behind you are having your other neighbors over for drinks on the back deck. (enough said I believe)

What are your rules, that you wish everyone would know? Hit me in the comments!

Is Talent Acquisition Wasting Your Hiring Manager’s Time?

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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!

The 5 Hiring Managers You Never Want to Work With

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I tend to read a lot about the type of manager you want to work for and with. It got me thinking, what about the 5 Hiring Managers You Don’t Want!? Not only for performance reviews but for interviews, development planning, discipline, etc. In HR we are constantly dealing with every type of hiring manager you can imagine but I came up with the top 5 I hate dealing with:

1. The Up-And-Out:  You know this person, usually happens in larger organizations, at some point they were given a manager/director/VP title because they were the last one standing.  As the talent took off in the organization to better positions with your competition, they kept moving up based mostly on the fact they had been around longer.  But in the end, they lack talent, lack motivation, aren’t respected, and usually way over their head.  They’ve been promoted past their ability and are now just waiting to be fired or retire.

2. The Nana-Nana-Boo-Boo I’m Better Than You:  This the person who became a manager because they were probably the best at what ever function they were in, but lack leadership skills, so their leadership philosophy is to continue to show their staff that they are still better than their team by showing them up constantly and publicly.  A huge piece of this stems from lack of self confidence and they feel they have to continue to show their bosses why they put them in charge, to begin with because they “get” this stuff and no one else does.

3. The Classic Politician:  This is Captain Ass-Kisser (which was my first title for this hiring manager but I didn’t want to offend anyone) and Captain Fence Sitter.  This is the hiring manager that will never take a stand, never be controversial and never put themselves in a position where they will protect their team. Basically, these are 85% of hiring managers at the Fortune 500 (hey don’t get mad at me I didn’t come up with the stat! Okay, I did but it seems about right, right?).

4. The Super Model:  Have you ever noticed that most leaders are “pretty” people? Not only that, but they’re Tall. Abnormally tall and pretty on average, like there’s some conspiracy against short, ugly people.  Look around at your leadership team and you’ll see 3 things: the average heigth is above the national average, they don’t have adult acne, and they have good hair.  There actually have been academic studies done on this concept. People want their leaders like they want their celebrities, good looking and tall.  Now this doesn’t make them less qualified, but it doesn’t make them more qualified either. And yes, I’m short with red hair and only my youngest son thinks I’m good looking and that’s only because he still fears I’ll shut off his iPhone.

5. The Tony Robbins-Stephen Covey-Wayne Dyer-Dr. Seuss:  This one drives me completely insane! It’s the manager who reads leadership books constantly and only speaks in leadership-quotes-I’ve-read-in-books speak.  You know, it’s gotta be a win-win, sharpen your saw, focus on our hedgehog, get that fly wheel going kinda day! These are the people that don’t have an original thought in their head but think their mashup of all the latest leadership crap somehow is an original master piece of their own.

So, hit me in the comments, which leader persona do you hate!?

Do Recruiters Still Need to Make Phone Calls?

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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.

This is how your Culture truly forms

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There’s nothing I really need to add to this. Hugh MacLeod, the brilliant artist at Gaping Void, has an awesome knack for saying so much with his work. I love their work. Turns out, design matters when building culture. So, brilliant.

We love to believe that culture starts at the top with this great visionary leader, but our reality is most of us will never work for a visionary leader. Most of us will work with mere mortals who everyday struggle to keep it all together, just like us.

Our culture is not decided by one person and then disseminated down to the rest. It’s decided by all of us through shared experiences, failures, successes, and love.