Category Archives: Culture

How focused Are Your Leaders In Making Your Organization Successful?

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We all like to think we have a leader or two that is freaking dialed in at a level far superior to everyone else. They’re freaks. In early, usually, one of the first ones, out late, if not last. They seem to know what’s going on in every part of the organization before you do.

Our top leaders are ultra-focused on making their organizations great. Nothing seems to distract them and throw them off their game. So much so they probably have very questionable work-life balance, if they have any at all.

Want a real-life example of one of these freaks!? Let’s take a look at Alabama head football coach, Nick Saban:

Nick Saban said he wasn’t aware that millions of Americans went to the polls on Tuesday to vote for the next president of the United States.

“It was so important to me that I didn’t even know it was happening,” Alabama‘s head football coach told reporters in Tuscaloosa on Wednesday evening. “We’re focused on other things here.”

To be fair, news media isn’t part of Saban’s routine.

The 65-year-old coach typically wakes up every morning, has a Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pie and a cup of coffee and watches about 10 minutes of The Weather Channel, which promised no political coverage on Election Day…

Nick Saban wasn’t aware there was a Presidential election going on! Brother! That’s focus!

I’m not sure I buy into the fact he had no idea. Most leaders, especially leaders of 18-22-year-old young men, would have made a very specific point to encourage those men to be a part of the American process. To show their leadership within the community by voting. But, Nick is a freak!

Nick Saban is not like most leaders, he’s an outlier in every definition of the term, which makes him extremely good and extremely successful at what he does.

Do you think you have a leader in your organization that is so focused on making you successful that they didn’t even realize there was a Presidential election going on?  I doubt most of us have one of these folks in our organizations, but if you do, you need to pay attention to that person! I’m not saying it’s healthy, all I’m saying is success is hard, and sometimes you have to have unhealthy habits to get it and maintain it. We all face that balance

We all face that balance. Don’t judge Saban for his choices, they’re his to make. He’s addicted to success, even if it means not knowing what’s going on in the world around him.

Vets, We Love You, but We Still Aren’t Hiring You!

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One of the most politically correct lies that employers spout off constantly is how desperate they are to hire Veterans! There’s a reason for this. In America, we love to honor our Vets! There’s nothing better than propping your brand up against that American flag with a soldier standing right next to it.

The reality is, most Vets are still struggling to find solid careers. Sure, everyone wants to offer them a $15/hr bust-your-ass-job, but Vets are looking for salaried positions with great benefits, in jobs they can work the rest of their career, that won’t destroy their body. Not many employers are offering Vets those jobs!

I’ve been writing about this problem for the past five years and I get a healthy stream of Vets who write me behind the scenes and share their stories and struggles to find solid career level positions. I just recently had an individual who came out of his service with a degree in HR, service of constant promotion, supervised upwards of one hundred soldiers at a time. In that role, he had constant performance management, training, process improvement, etc.

He was applying for an entry-level HR Generalist role. He got turned down because he didn’t have enough experience!

So, why are companies still struggling when it comes to hiring Vets into higher level roles? Here’s what they don’t tell you:

  1. Less than 1% of Americans have ever served in any branch of the military. We fear what we don’t know, and we definitely don’t hire what we don’t know! We only see pictures of Vets holding guns and in combat, but that’s a small part of their every day activities.
  2. Movies have given us a warped sense of what professionals in the military actually do. Today’s modern military is rarely portrayed as it actually is in the movies because it wouldn’t be very exciting. It’s the same reason you don’t see movies about the day to day happenings of a large company. It’s mostly boring! What most military pros do on a daily basis, away from battle zones, is mostly the same stuff you do on a daily basis. It’s HR, logistics, accounting, administration, training, development, etc.
  3. We overvalue work experience within an industry. If someone worked at your competitor for 3 months, you would value that more highly than a military professional doing the same job for 3 years. We so overvalue industry experience it’s not even funny! I’ve worked in four different industries and each time had people tell me, “Oh, Tim, this is the craziest industry you’ll ever be in”, ever time! Guess what? It wasn’t. It’s all the same! Get over yourself!

I recently hired a Vet into my own company. We mostly hire new recruiters and train them up, but it’s definitely a career job. Great recruiters can find work anywhere for the rest of their life, in every industry. It’s mostly a desk job. Recruiting companies love to hire former college athletes. What I’ve found is Vets come with the same motivations and skills, but their work ethic might be a bit stronger!

I constantly have CEOs tell me they just want people who want to work. Yet, when it gets down to their hiring managers, there’s a mental block happening. If these military folks were minority or women we would call this discrimination, but for some reason, we don’t say that with Vets. But, that’s mostly what’s happening.

We love to hide behind the fact we found someone with more ‘industry’ experience, or someone who has done the same job, etc. It’s all excuses. You don’t hire Vets because you don’t think they can handle your jobs. The fact is, they can, they just need you to give them a shot!

Do yourself a favor this Veteran’s Day. Take a chance and hire a Vet into a job you’ve never tried before. Sure, they’ll need some training, but they’ll bring the rest, and you might just find your organizations next great talent pool!

Okay, Your Candidate Won, Don’t Be An Asshole!

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I’m writing this before the election, because either way it turns out, I would feel the same way!

Congratulations! Your candidate won! It’s like when OJ was acquitted of murdering his wife and Ron Goldman. A bunch of people ran around so freaking ecstatic that he ‘won’. Chris Rock famously said,”We won, we wonnnnn!” “What the fuck did we win? Every day i look in the mail for my OJ prize and it ain’t there.”

I’m waking up today, knowing 100% I won’t be getting a Hillary check or a Trump check! In fact, regardless of who won, there’s a great chance I’ll be getting an invoice!

When Michigan State plays the University of Michigan and MSU wins. I’m going to be an asshole to a lot of UofM fans. Why? Because mostly their douchebags and that’s kind of how fandom works in college athletics. If you beat your rival, you can be an asshole until they beat you, then you know it’s your turn to take it for a year, or whenever you beat them the next time.

Politics are not college athletics.

Voting for President isn’t about winning or losing. We’re all on the same team! The team is called America.

That’s the hard part. America has turned into this giant multi-national organization. Within that organization you have mergers that have taken place, we’ve tried some spinoffs, we’re constantly trying to launch startups, we have our main product line that is a cash cow but every new hire thinks it sucks, etc.

America just got a new CEO. Regardless of who that CEO is, some employees aren’t going to like it. A few will actually leave the company, but it’s mostly employees blowing smoke. Leaving takes real work, most people say they’ll leave and then have selective amnesia when the topic comes up after the fact.

So, I’m in HR. It’s now my job to get as many people as possible to follow the new CEO. That’s how a company stays successful and/or turns itself around. Develop a vision, get behind it and see how good we can make it. Americans for the most part, have always been fairly decent employees. We’ll voice our opinion, but when stuff gets real, we support each other.

So, today, when you walk by that co-worker who voted for the other person and lost, don’t be an asshole. Be sympathetic. They want, what you want, to be the best country we can be for those here now and for those who will be here in the future.

 

 

HR’s Unwritten Rules!

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For those NFL/Professional Sports Fans out there I give you one of the dumbest unwritten sports rules that are out there:

You can’t lose your starting spot due to injury.

Dallas Cowboy’s, Tony Romo was injured at the beginning of this season and potentially could have come back this past week, but his ‘backup’ Dax Prescott has done such a good job this season, that the coach and GM now have a really difficult decision to make! This has sports news, radio and fans talking about ‘the rule’ – if you’re the starter and you get injured, once you are better, you automatically get your starting job back.  But, why?  Where does this come from?

This has sports news, radio and fans talking about ‘the rule’ – if you’re the starter and you get injured, once you are better, you automatically get your starting job back.  But, why?  Where does this come from?

I can think of a couple of reasons why an organization might want to have this type of rule, in sports:

1. You don’t want players playing injured and not wanting to tell the coaches for fear if they get pulled, they’ll lose their job.  Thus putting the team in a worse spot of playing injured instead of allowing a healthy player to come in. Also, you don’t want the player furthering injuring themselves worse.

2. If the person has proven themselves to be the best, then they get injured, why wouldn’t you go back with the proven commodity?

I can think of more ways this unwritten rule makes no sense at all:

1. No matter the reason, shouldn’t the person with the best performance get the job?  No matter the reason the person was given to have his or her shot – if they perform better than the previous person, they should keep the job.

2. If you want a performance-based culture, you go with the hot hand.

3. Injuries are a part of the game, just as leave of absences are a part of our work environments, the organizations that are best prepared for this will win in the end – that means having capable succession in place that should be able to perform at a similar level, and if you’re lucky – at a better level.

It’s different for us in HR, right?  We have laws we have to follow, FMLA for example, or your own leave policies.  But is it really that different?  In my experience, I see companies constantly make moves when someone has to take a personal or medical leave and go a different direction with a certain person or position.

Let’s face it, the truth is our companies can’t just be put on hold while someone takes weeks or months off to take care of whatever it is they need to do.  That doesn’t mean we eliminate them, and legally we can’t, but we do get very creative in how we bring them back and positions that get created to ensure they still have something, but at the same time the company can continue to move forward in their absence.

I wonder if ‘our’ thinking about the NFL’s unwritten rule of losing your position comes from our own HR rules and laws we have in place in our organizations.  It would seem, like the NFL, most HR shops figure out ways around their own rules as well!

Falling In Love With Your Job

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Do you know what it felt like the last time you fell in love?

I mean real love?

The kind of love where you talk 42 times per day, in between text and facebook messages and feel physical pain from being apart? Ok, maybe for some it’s been a while and you didn’t have the texts or Facebook!  But, you remember those times when you really didn’t think about anything else or even imagine not seeing the other person the next day, hell, the next hour. Falling “in” love is one of the best parts of love, it doesn’t last that long and you never get it back.

I hear people all the time say “I love my job” and I never use to pay much attention, in fact, I’ve said it myself.  The reality is, I don’t love my job. I mean I like it a whole lot, but I love my wife, I love my kids, I love Diet Mt. Dew at 7am on a Monday morning. The important things in life!  But my job?  I’m not sure about that one.  As an HR Pro, I’m supposed to work to get my employees to “love” their jobs.  Love.

Let me go all Dr. Phil on you for a second. Do you know why most relationships fail? No, it’s not the cheating. No, it’s not the drugs and/or alcohol. No, it’s not money. No, it’s not that he stop caring. No, it’s not your parents. Ok, stop it. I’ll just tell you!

Relationships fail because expectations aren’t met.  Which seems logical knowing what we know about how people fall in love, and lose their minds.  Once that calms down – the real work begins.  So, if you expect love to be the love of the first 4-6 months of a relationship you’re going to be disappointed a whole bunch over and over.

Jobs aren’t much different.

You get a new job and it’s usually really good!  People listen to your opinion. You seem smarter. Hell, you seem better looking (primarily because people are sick of looking at their older co-workers). Everything seems better in a new job.  Then you have your 1 year anniversary and you come to find out you’re just like the other idiots you’re working with.

This is when falling in love with your job really begins. When you know about all the stuff the company hid in the closet. The past employees they think are better and smarter than you, the good old days when they made more money, etc.  Now, is when you have to put some work into making it work.

I see people all the time moving around to different employers and never seeming to be satisfied.  They’re searching. Not for a better job, or a better company. They’re searching for that feeling that will last.  But it never will, not without them working for it.

The best love has to be worked for. Passion is easy and fleeting. Love is hard to sustain and has to be worked, but can last forever.

Great Culture in Born from Great Leadership!

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You know what doesn’t work but we keep hoping it might? Grassroots culture!

The kind of culture where you want your employees to establish. The kind of culture that vendors keep telling you that you must have to be sustainable. The reality is a grassroots culture is mostly chaotic and differs wildly between managers, locations, etc.

The greatest work cultures that we can point to all come from a great leader deciding what culture they want, then living it! Completely living it! You can’t have this cool, flip flops, ping pong, and free beer culture, then your leader walks around all day in a suit and tie, sipping an $12 bottle of water. It will fail.

Case in point. T-Mobile was the #4 cell phone carrier in the U.S. It’s a super-competitive marketplace. In 2012 when the new CEO John Legere was hired, he looked and acted like every single big time CEO you see on Wall Street. Suit and tie, said all the right things, always under control.

The problem was, that was not going to get T-Mobile and their #4 culture to move up. So, he decided to make a change:

This would require T-Mobile to behave like a startup disrupting the industry run by giants AT&T and Verizon, who Legere dubbed “dumb and dumber.” He may have already been in his mid-50s, but he needed to look the part. He began experimenting with different combination of loud clothing options, eventually settling with long hair, a bright magenta T-Mobile T-shirt and accessories, and usually a black jacket of some kind.

Accompanying this came the penchant for dropping f-bombs and hurling no-holds-barred insults at the competition (which occasionally got out of hand as he pushed the boundaries).

“On my very first day at T-Mobile, I demanded that every time I spoke publicly to the company, all employees across the country would be invited to watch,” he said. Legere also initiated a stock program with employees, and made sure to not omit any performance details from his speeches to employees. He said he tells them, “Listen, if some of this doesn’t make sense to you, what should make sense is the reason I’m telling you — I respect you as an owner and as a partner and I’m going to tell you this all the time. Feel free to tune out.”

Legere also has a section in his calendar book that contains a color-coded list of how many times he’s visited each of T-Mobile US’s 18 major call centers. When we spoke, he was about to finish his fifth round of trips to each of them.

“It’s not that complicated,” he said. “I go in, they meet me outside, we take selfies as I stand like a piece of furniture, I tell them about how things are going — but most importantly, I say thank you and help them see that their behavior and their work has driven the culture of the company that’s changed the industry and the whole world. It’s a bit of a love affair.”

I know so many culture consultants will say it’s not about long hair and crazy clothing. I disagree. If a leader truly wants to change their culture, to whatever that vision is they have, they must live that vision 100%. They can’t fake it! You’re either all-in, or your culture continues to be flat and goes nowhere.

So many executives try and live two lives as leaders. The leader they believe the board and the public want to see, and the visionary leader they believe their employees want to see. Most of these folks fail. The ones who succeed are the ones who live one life as a leader. They’re the same person to their board and investors that they are to their employees.

It doesn’t take ping pong and snacks to make a great culture. It takes a great leader will to be 100% invested in a vision, and allow those around them to follow that vision with the same passion.

The Ultimate Gift Guide for Boss’s Day! #MakeBossesGreatAgain

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Does anyone really celebrate National Boss’s Day?  It seems like something made up by some drunk employees one night and then the next day they realized it went too far!

What’s next National “White Man’s” Day? Oh wait, my black friends, women friends, Native American friends, Hillary, etc. say that’s every day! Or was that last week for Columbus Day? I get confused, they keep changing what we can and can’t celebrate.

I have to say I’ve been a ‘boss’ for (well, let’s face it I was born a ‘boss’!) twenty-some years and the only Boss’s Day gift I’ve ever gotten was being taken out to lunch back in the 90’s! Ever since then I was told it was a bad thing to be a boss. I needed to be a leader and leaders don’t get gifts, we give gifts!

I can’t enjoy being white. I can’t enjoy being male. I can’t enjoy being a boss. The struggle is real!

So, since I can’t enjoy Boss’s Day I decided to develop a list of gifts I would like to receive on Boss’s Day is we lived in let’s say Trump’s America! I’m sure part of his political platform is to Make Bosses Great Again!

The Ultimate Boss Gift Guide for Bosses Day:

– Free Back Massage Coupons! Can you imagine anything more magical than giving your well-respected boss a nice good old fashioned in office back rub! Yeah, I thought so!

– Liquor! Hey, this boss in-office bar doesn’t stock itself! Top shelf don’t try and drop off anything you’d find on the rail, no boss wants second tier liquor!

– A nice tie! Just kidding, you should be fired if you give your boss a tie on Boss’s Day! Unless that tie comes with an invitation to tie you up! Now we’re talking boss language!

– Signed copy of “Mean Business” by Chainsaw Al Dunlap!  You kids might have to look up the career of Chainsaw Al, it’s brilliant and inspiring for real bosses. Every boss loves a good bookshelf filled with books they haven’t read but one that scares the hell out of any employee who sees the titles!

– Your Employee of the Month parking spot! Just kidding, again! Ha! Suckers, I park in covered parking or the driver drops me off up front. Keep your Row 1 parking spot, your 2007 Honda Civic looks really nice there.

Boss’s Day! It seems like it only comes around once a year. I’m not quite sure how that happened, you would think bosses would have made it monthly!?

So, remember today isn’t about you, it’s about your Boss! Make them feel special. Treat them with respect. Kiss the ring.

It’s Super Hard to Write a Cool Job Posting!

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Almost every solid TA pro and leader I know wants to have cool, hip, on fleek, whatever new saying the kids on Snap are saying, type job postings. What most organizations end up with is still the old written job description, KSAs, boring I just feel asleep same posting as they always have had.

The main problem is you usually have some over-conservative lady in a cat sweater cardigan who a tiny ounce of power and believes you adding the word “crazy” to your job posting will get you put in prison. True Fact: I’ve been in the HR/TA game for twenty years and still to this day I have never seen anyone go to prison for getting ‘crazy’ with job postings!

I even, yes this is true, saw one company not put “EOE” on their job posting! Yep, no prison! Not even a fine! No grounding. Nothing!

Still, most of us struggle to do something about our crappy job postings and job descriptions. Well, Apple tried to do something! They got creative, kudos for that, but sometimes being creative and HR don’t mix well. Apple’s attempt was to create “Apple’s Orchard” (see what happens when HR and Creative get together! Lame city!) to attempt to recruit entry-level marketing professionals to Apple.

Because you know what’s really hard to do!? Get entry level marketing grads to want to come to work for Apple! Here’s how it sounded:

“The moment is now. Throw everything you know out the window. All in. Head first. Join the Orchard. If you’re lucky enough to make the cut, expect to surround yourself with like-minded souls who are as terrified and excited as you are. Be part of a hand-picked team with a plethora of talent. Kick ass together. Panic together. Grow together. Work alongside the brains of all the iconic work you love from Apple. Watch and learn. Trust your gut. Challenge our ways. Have an impact on everything you touch. Be prepared to stumble and fumble and embarrass yourself. It will be messy, and it won’t be pretty at times, but if you stick together as a team, you’ll build a special bond and something truly great will come out of it all. Take it from us. It’s the only way. Does this whole proposal sound crazy to you? Good. We like crazy.”

“We live crazy!” Like certifiably crazy? No, wait, I’m asking for a friend, who’s locked up..

Apple was forced to take down the land sight almost immediately after complaints started raining down on them like dollar bills at a strip club where you took the new entry level marketing recruits to show them how cool you were.

It’s kind of creepy and overzealous, right? I’ll give them credit for trying to be creative. Apple found out what most of us find out. Writing really good, creative, engaging, funny, endearing, job postings are really freaking hard! 99.9% of TA and HR pros will never be able to do this. My advice is to go out and hire real creative types to do this work, don’t kill yourself trying to do it yourself.

 

 

The Worst Hire You Can Ever Make

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A crazy thing happens almost every day in professional sports, and it’s the one thing that separates great teams from the pack. Talent selection will make or break a team’s success and in professional sports, it’s about getting the right talent for the right price.

The problem with most professional sports team, regardless of the sport, is they continually try to improve their roster incrementally. “Oh, let’s pick up Pitcher A because he’s a little better than Pitcher B”.  Great Pitcher A is better than Pitcher B, but did Pitcher A truly solve the issue you have?

Great Pitcher A is better than Pitcher B, but did Pitcher A truly solve the issue you have?

That’s the real issue!

The worst hire you can ever make is one that doesn’t solve your problem but just make it a little better. “We suck at sales, let’s hire Tim, he’s not great, but he’s better than Bob.” Wonderful, now you only slightly suck less at sales!

Never make a hire that doesn’t solve your problem completely that you are having in that specific position. Upgrading doesn’t always fix problems, and many times it actually continues your main problem longer instead of fixing it completely. We have this belief

We have this belief  that all we need to do is continue to get a little better each day, each week, each month, until we eventually have fixed it. The problem is that this isn’t how most problems are actually solved, by getting a little bit better over time. Most problems are fixed by implementing one solution that solves the problem.

It’s basically this crappy failure paradox we continue to get sold by seemingly everyone with a platform. “Just keep failing and eventually you’ll find success!” Which is complete and utter bullshit, but we LOVE hearing this!

In hiring, you can’t keep failing and find success. You will actually find failure even faster and be out of business. In hiring, it’s critical you find success and hire the right people who will solve your problem the first time, not just make you a little better.

Another great example of this is in the NFL. It’s critical in the NFL that you have a great quarterback, but they’re extremely hard to find. So, if you don’t have an elite quarterback, most teams will continue to try and upgrade with average quarterbacks.

The better advice is work with what you have and make it the best you can, until you get the opportunity to hire, or draft, that one great quarterback that can truly change your franchise. Constant change and churn, just to get a little better, is slowly killing your organization.

Make great hires. Organizational change hires. Individuals who have the ability to make things right. Too often, and we’ve all been there, we make hires that feel safe, knowing they won’t hurt us, but they probably won’t help us much either. Those are the worst hires you can make.

 

 

The Best Feedback I’ve Ever Been Given – HR Tech Edition!

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Yo! HR Tech Geeks! I’m at The HR Technology Conference next week Oct. 4-7th and I’m doing a really fun project with the great folks at Halogen. If you don’t know Halogen they’re the HR technology leaders when it comes to performance management and recently did a full integration with Jobvite to offer a full end-to-end talent management suite.

At HR Tech 2016 Halogen, and I, will be collecting the best feedback you have ever been given and what the impact was on you! I share mine in the video below –

I would love to meet you in person at the Halogen booth #2209 on Wednesday, Oct. 5th from 10-10:30am or on Thursday, Oct. 6th during the Lunch Break. We can swap best feedback stories and if you’re up to it I would love to video you and your story and make you internet HR Tech famous! So, come check it out, we’re going to have a lot of fun with it!

FYI – Bonus points if you come to the Halogen Booth #2209 and bring me a Diet Mt. Dew!!!