Category Archives: Culture

7 Habits Of Remarkably Likeable HR Managers

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Ripped from the pages of Inc. Magazine’s recent article 7 Habits of Remarkably Likeable Bosses, I give you…something slightly different:

7 Habits Of Remarkably Likeable HR Managers!

1. They are named “Kay”.  Have you ever really not liked someone named, Kay!?  Kay just seems like a friendly lady with at least 3 cats and grandchildren, a whole lot of grandchildren.  Kay is helpful.  Kay will give you a hug when you need it.  Kay brings in really good comfort food with funny names like “Redneck Bunt Cake”.

2. They dress up on dress up days at work.  You know what I’m talking about.  They wear green on St. Patrick’s Day.  They wear their normal sweater on Ugly Christmas Sweater Day.  They aren’t afraid to be apart of the festivities.  People like people who are involved.

3. They order right mix of cookies for the conference room.  Don’t even think about discounting this as ‘remarkable’!  Have you ever been late to a meeting and had to choke down an oatmeal raisin cookie!?  Likeable HR Managers know you need at least a 3 to 1 chocolate chip to raisin mix at a minimum, really high performers will forgo all raisin cookies all together.

4. They are forgetful.  You know that one holiday party where you had too much to drink and hooked up with a coworker, and your HR Manager saw? Yeah, don’t worry, she forgot on purpose, because she doesn’t want your one bad decision to haunt your entire career with the company.  Likeable HR Managers tend to forget your misdeeds (that are forgivable) and remember the value you bring to the organization!

5. They Drink the Kool-Aid.  A likeable HR Manager is one who is also an organizations cheerleader.  They support top managements decisions, and in turn help others in the organization to see the benefits as well.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Getting everyone to move in the same direction is a very powerful trait to have.  Some will view it as they are just followers, I view it as a great strategy to build influence.

6.  They cuss at your CEO.  You wouldn’t actually know about this trait, because besides being remarkably likeable, they’re also remarkably professional and only do this behind closed doors of your CEO’s office. But they do it, and they’re the only one who does it and gets away with it.  It keeps your CEO from going crazy train, and they appreciate it, as long as it stays between just the two of them.

7. They don’t rake sh*t.  You know what happens when you rake sh*t that’s been lying stagnant for a long time?  It stinks. That’s just like problems in your organization that have been laying dormant for some time.  You begin digging up and turning over stuff, you’ll find stuff that stinks.  Many times that stuff has been taken care of and is water under the bridge. No reason to rake sh*t, unless you just like the smell.

For those who will hate on this and say “I don’t want to be liked, I want to be respected!” I say, “Why, not both!?”  It’s not a one or the other choice, you can have both.  The HR Pro who can be respected and likeable is the HR Pro I want working for my team!

The 3 Minute Hire

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Let’s look at how 95% of people are hired. Besides a little variability, almost every person, at some point in their career, has been hired in this manner.  Interview someone for an hour. If you like them, you make them an offer.  Sound about right?  Sure you might actually add some other steps, like phone screening first, a second one hour interview with someone else, but your reality is, it’s an hour interview, and the decision is made!

We’ve taken the one hour interview and expanded it with science.  We add pre-employment screens, cognitive testing, background screens, personality profiles, etc.  But, we still go back to the one hour interview.  “Well, Tim tested off the charts, all the data says, he will be a rock star, but I didn’t connect with him in the one hour interview.  I don’t want to hire him.”  We allow our hiring managers to do this, often.

A much better way to hire would be to have the actual candidate work with you for like four to six weeks, before you actually hire them.  An extended job tryout.  Pay them to come interview with you for 4 weeks.  That would actually be a better way.  It would probably limit your options for candidates.  It would leave you with people who are unemployed, the under-employed, those working consultant or temporary type of jobs, or those people who love your brand so much they would be willing to risk it all to prove to you, that they are the one you really want.

Or, you can continue on the one hour interview platform.  But take away all the other stuff.  In fact, take away the one hour, and just do an initial impression interview.  It might take about 3 minutes.  “Initially I really liked Tim!  Let’s do this.”  You would virtually get the same exact candidate as you do with your one hour process.  But you would save so much time, effort and resources.  Your hiring quality and retention would almost remain unchanged.  That would be the second way.

1. Extended Job Tryout Hire

2. 3 Minute First Impression Hire

Reality is, most would be more willing to do the 3 minute First Impression hires than the Extended Job Tryout hires, even though one leads to actual better hires, and the other does exactly what you have now.    We fear that changing to something we view as ‘radical’ will be worse than what we have.  Even though, we know it won’t.  So, we keep doing what we do.  Scheduling one hour interviews and hiring those people who we ‘felt’ the best connection with.

If I was you, I’d go with the 3 minute interview.  It’s simple.  It’s the same. Your hiring managers will actually like the new process.

 

Client Respect and Love

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I dropped a vision on my team a couple weeks ago.  I think it’s important for any leader to do this, but it’s also important that it be completely authentic and transparent.  I say ‘dropped’ on my team, because that’s exactly what I did.  I didn’t let anyone know I was ‘working’ on my vision, because I wasn’t.  It came to me.  Like a vision.  It took me about a week to get the thoughts down in my own style, and add a grammatical error or two.

I’m not sharing my vision with you.  It’s for me and my team.

I will share a concept from it.  I want to work with clients who want to work with us.  Not just work with us, but want to partner with us.  Now, I know we throw that word ‘partner’ around a bunch.  My vision of a partner is a client who respects us and loves us.  We have to have both, love and respect, to get to my vision.  Respect isn’t enough.

In HR many times we will say something like “I don’t need that hiring manager to like me, as long as they respect me.”  That’s just a nice way we lie to ourselves that this will be a functional relationship.  It’s not.  You need more than respect, to be wildly successful.  You need Love.

I want love.

I want respect.

I want to work with clients who respect what we bring to them from a skill and support side.  But I also want clients who love us, and we love them.  That I look forward to talking to them, to seeing them, and they feel the same way.  That isn’t easy.  But it is something I think we owe to ourselves.  To work with people we love to work with, whether it’s those sitting next to us as coworkers, or those clients we work with daily.

I don’t care if I was selling staffing solutions, or the cure for cancer, my vision would not change.   I don’t care if I’m running a business or running a department, my vision stays the same.  In HR you have ‘clients’, all those who you support.  Are you trying to get your clients to love and respect you?  If you reach that level, where they do, it will make your job, your life, glorious.

Great is the Enemy of Good

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You know what I find really funny?  That we take a really interesting concept like “Good is the enemy of Great” from the 2001 book Good to Great, and we make it law.  It’s now wildly held belief by most well-read leaders that Good is the enemy of Great.  That is you truly want to be Great, being Good hurts you because it gives you a false sense of accomplishment.

I think this is bullshit.

In fact, it’s such B.S. that I think the opposite might be a more true statement: Great is the enemy of Good!  Think about this for a moment:

  • Great performers are usually difficult to deal with:
    • They are more demanding
    • They tend to share diva qualities
    • Many will ostracize their coworkers because they don’t understand their relative ‘lower’ performance
  • Great performers tend to blow up your compensation bands and raise overall compensation of the position they’re in.
  • Great performers want preferential treatment.

From a corporate sense many great performers are a major pain in the butt.  Plus, great performers don’t raise the bar for everyone else, this is another false premise, just for themselves.  Great performers also raise the expectations of your leaders on what performance should be on average performers which tend to drop engagement of the majority rank and file.

Don’t get me wrong.  Great performers do add their value.  Remember what this post is all about, not great performers, but good performers.  “Good is the enemy of Great” sounds proactive and sexy, but it doesn’t stand up to reality.  The reality is, as corporate leaders, we want to surround out great performers with a bunch of good performers.  Saying good is the enemy, goes against this entire mindset.

To be wildly successful in any organization, I don’t need great performance,  I need good performance from everyone.  I could have a few great performers, and no good performers, and still the great performers, or more precisely our organization, will end up failing.  Give me no great performers, and everyone else are good performers, as we’ll do really, really well!

Next time you find your mouth saying “good is the enemy of great” think about what you’re really saying.  That isn’t leadership speak, it’s just being naive to your reality.

Becoming A Victim Of Can’t

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I spoke in Huntsville, Al this week to a group of around 175 HR and Talent Pros for North Alabama SHRM.  It was a fun group. They had a ton of energy and were willing to put up with me and my fast talking northern ways! My wife told me to be more respectful, than usual, on my way down to Alabama.  She said southern women expected more manners than I was use to!

For those who don’t much about Huntsville it is a big military town, which means most people either work on the base, or work for a contractor supporting one of the many military contracts coming out of the base.  There are literally hundreds of companies in Huntsville that are considered military ‘contractors’.  That’s really just a big fancy term for companies that won a military contract, which is just a scope of work they need to do or deliver to the military.

If you haven’t worked a military contract before, they come with as much red tape and rules as you can expect from the U.S. government.  That becomes a very big problem for HR Pros who love to follow rules!  One thing that was apparent very early into the day was that some Huntsville HR and Talent Pros became very comfortable with saying the following statement:

“We can’t do that, we are a military contractor!”

You can probably guess what my answer was to that!  “Yes, you can! You just have to find a way to do it!”  What they didn’t expect was that my company was also a military contractor, I was going to accept any victim statements.  Yes, you are a military contractor.  Isn’t it great!  Now, let’s find out how we can use Facebook to recruit and find you some really good talent!

But, Tim, OFCCP! OFCCP won’t allow us to social recruit!  Really.  It really says within OFCCP regulations that you can’t recruit on Facebook!?  Well, no, but…you just don’t understand.  Yeah, I understand more than you really know.  I understand it’s going to be hard, but it can be done.  I also understand that it’s really easy to fall the victim and use OFCCP as a crutch to why we can do our job.

I actually spoke to two pros who were going through OFCCP audits.  Scary stuff for any HR or Talent Pro.  But I didn’t even let them use it as a crutch.  I asked them if they would get through it. Yes, was the answer.  Did you get fined? No.  So, now you just have to figure how to make it the sourcing you need to do, work within your OFCCP process.  Not easy. But doable and needed.

The most dangerous thing we’ll ever face in our career is becoming a victim of can’t.   I’m a firm believer you can try to do anything.  We might not succeed, but it shouldn’t stop you from trying.  Things like OFCCP are there to catch bad companies, doing bad things.  I’ve never spoken to a good company, with good people, trying to do the right things, that ever had an issue with OFCCP! Ever!

Go do the right things for your organization, and in the end trust that why you might get audited, you are doing what is right.  That’s ultimately all you really can do.

How to tell your Work Critics to “Suck It”!

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In the corporate world everyone is a critic!  Everyone!  We’ve gotten really good at a learned behavior.  No longer can we just send out a final product the first time. Why?  Because everyone wants to trash it and change it, so it can be this really nice piece of plain old vanilla cake!  Welcome to Corporate America. But you know what? This isn’t new. Critics have been around since Jesus, and critics have been wrong since before Jesus!   I wanted to share with you some famous things that critics got wrong:

Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1824)

What the critics said in 1825: “We find Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to be precisely one hour and five minutes long; a frightful period indeed, which puts the muscles and lungs of the band, and the patience of the audience to a severe trial…” –The Harmonicon, London, April 1825

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville (1851)

And the critics response: When Melville died in 1891, Moby-Dickhad moved a grand total of 3,715 copies…in 40 years! The below was typical at the time of the book’s release:

“…an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition…Our author must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius, while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise…” -Henry F. Chorley, London Athenaeum, October 25, 1851

Animal Farm, by George Orwell (1945)

What the critics said about the book we all had to read in high school: “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.” –Publisher’s rejection

 

Here’s what I know, true creativity in what we do, does not come from running our ideas through everyone and their brother for approval.  If your organization wants your employees to be truly creative and innovative, stop pushing teams.  Teams don’t make masterpieces. They can do some pretty cool stuff, but pure creativity isn’t one of them.  We push “Team” so hard in HR and in most organizations it sometimes makes you think like this the only way everyone in the world must work, but it’s not.  An HR Pro that can determine the proper work structure throughout their organization is truly valuable.  “Team” isn’t always the answer, and you should have other tools in your toolbox.

 

You hear artist all the time say, “I don’t listen to my critics”. This is valuable in that they know listening to a critic will hurt their art.  Unfortunately, in business, we don’t always have the ability/decision to not listen to our critics (who could be bosses, peers, friends, etc.).  In business telling your critics to “Suck It”, could be a big career derailer!  So, when do we go all “Suck It – It’s my project” in the workplace?

 

First, I would never suggest you approach it beginning with “Suck It”!  While it will get their attention, it will also shut off communication.  I think we all need the ability in our work environment to push back appropriately when you truly know you have something that will make a difference.  But, it’s really about having the conviction to stand behind it and not let it get changed.  That’s your indicator,  “am I willing to put my career/credibility/bank of influence on the line for this idea/project/etc.?” If you are, it’s time to pull out the “Suck It” card and push forward.  For most of us, this might never happen in our work lives.  It’s rare to have to do this, if you find yourself doing it often, you’ve got an interpersonal issue to deal with!

 

I think what we learn over time is that not all of our critics are bad, and some actually might help truly make us better.  The key is to continue to have confidence in what you do, without it, your work critics will make your work life less than artistic.

It’s not a Bromance, It’s a Promance!

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Bromance –

“A bromance is a close non-sexual relationship between two (or more) men, a form of affectional or homosocial intimacy. “

Basically a Bromance is two dudes who really, really like each other, but not in a romantic type of way.   It’s like girls can be ‘besties’ but guys can’t.  So, if guys are ‘besties’ and acting a little to close, they’ll be told they’re having a ‘Bromance’.

Professionally this is called a ‘Promance’.

Promance –

“A promance is close non-sexual relationship between two (or more) coworkers, a form of affectional or homosocial intimacy.”

Basically a Promance is coworkers who are best friends at work, but might not actually be that close outside the work place.  This sometimes has been called ‘Work Wife’ and/or ‘Work Husband’, but it can also between coworkers of the same sex.   The fact is we spend a great deal of time with our coworkers and become very close to many of them.  But we also have life outside of work, sometimes that includes coworkers, sometimes it does not.

Promances allow us to have close relationships with coworkers we actually like.  Promances are what keep coworkers staying at companies, sometimes, far longer than they would have if no promance was in place.  It also causes multiple coworkers to leave, or follow, each other to other companies.  “My promance just got a job at Ford, I’m going to follow her over there, we work great with each other!”

The cool thing about Promances is that they’re really only defined by work hours.  There is no expectation from a promance that you’ll actually communicate outside of work hours, and no one feels slighted by this!  It’s like the relationship you always wished you could have with everyone! “So, you mean like when we’re together we can be totally cool and hangout and just be great, but when we aren’t together neither one of us is going to feel an obligation towards communicating with the other!? Okay, I’m in!”

There is a fine line that you have to be careful with, as Promance can turn into a Bromance if you’re not careful.  It usually starts with happy hour or the company softball team, and quickly begins to spiral out of control.  It’s when boundaries of work hours no longer matter, and you begin to spend non-work hours with your Promance.  Many times this becomes too much.  All of sudden you’ll find yourself sitting on your coach on a Sunday night watching a game and saying things like “okay, I’ll see you in the morning at work” and realizing you’ve never stopped seeing that person, ever!

I love Promances.  I’ve got a wife and three sons, very full out of work life.  Promances are perfect for me.  I can have all of these relationships at work, and go home and not have those relationships interfere with my home relationships.  It’s truly the best of both worlds!

The Ghost of Athlete Past

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I have three sons.  Two of whom are current high school athletes having successful high school careers.  Both have potential to move onto college and play the sport they want, if they choose that is the path they want to take.  Both are considered very hard working kids in their sports by their coaches and teammates.  They get that from their Mom, I was more of a gamer type.  Their Mom was the type of player other teammates hated playing against in practice because she never took a play off.  It made her very successful as a college athlete.  She has passed this down to our sons.  I’m grateful.

You see, anyone who has been around high school athletics will recognize this, not all kids give their all.  Many times you have kids on these teams with super high potential and athletic ability who seem to just piss it away for no real reason.  They don’t work hard.  Coaches play them anyway.  They screw around in school because they think their future is playing professional sports, or that colleges won’t care they’re a crappy student.  People treat them differently because their the local star of the moment.  They float through life believing this will never end.

Flash-forward 10 years and they are usually sitting in the stands of the same local school’s games carrying around their regret like a backpack.  Working at the local factory or some crappy sales job, talking about how they were so close to ‘making it’.  But they didn’t.

I wish I could send these kids a Ghost like in the movie The Christmas Carol.  A Ghost of Athlete Past to show them where they are and where they are going.  Where they are truly going is not where they think.  It’s not dropping out of college because they didn’t prepare themselves. It’s not sleeping in their parents basement at 28 because they can’t find a job to pay them enough money to have their own place.  It’s certainly not sitting a some random game at their local high school talking to anyone who will listen how they were better than the current version of themselves on the field right now.

I know people like to blame coaches.  The coach should have been able to get ‘that’ kid to see how they were throwing it all away.  Some blame the parents for not disciplining them enough and showing them how their path was broken.  I tend to blame the collective.  All of us who each, at one time or another, gave the kid a pass.  Well, he’s the best player, you need to put up with his attitude.  We won’t win with out him so, you’ve got to put up with him not practicing hard.  Well, we need him for this Friday’s game, so let’s just give him a passing grade ‘this’ time.  We’ve all failed him.

We all had the chance to make this kid a great kid.  Great athlete, great student, great person.  Instead we filled him with regret that he’ll have to carry around for a lifetime.  I lifetime of regret at 18.  It’s heavy at 18, and it only gets heavier each year after.  I love athletics.  Athletics have given me a ton in my life, as they have for so many people in our society.  It breaks my heart to see a young kid getting ready to sling that backpack on, though. To know you’re looking at someone who has already seen their best days at such a young age.

Just a reminder to give it your all today.  Some will only have one shot. Did you do everything you could have done to be ready?

 

Performance Doesn’t Matter: Women must still sell attractiveness

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True.

Right?  The title of this post is a true statement.  A woman can be a great performer, but she still needs to be attractive to find high success.  This is a parameter for her male peers.  Her male peer can come in with a beer belly and stain on his tie and no one cares. No one!  That same performing lady comes in with a beer belly and stain on her tie, and well, that’s might be a little weird, but you get my point.  She has to sell not only is she great performer, but she looks good doing it!

I grew up with an attractive mother.  Don’t get creepy.  I didn’t think she was attractive, she was my Mom, but I constantly had people tell me, “you’re Mom is attractive”.  Which to this day I’m not really sure on how to respond, but with “thanks, she owes it all to the easy childbirth I put her through”.  She was also a very successful business woman.  But she would be the first to tell you, these things weren’t mutually exclusive.  She always had to have her ‘A’ game on both in business and with her looks.

Oh, but Tim that was the 1970’s and 80’s, today that isn’t the case.

Is it ladies? Do you feel like your attractiveness plays no role in your perceived performance?

I can take a look at my own workforce.  Some of the guys role in here looking like they took all of 10 minutes to get ready and find the cleanest smelling shirt.  The females who work for me carry around ‘toolboxes’ of beauty products and always, I mean always, are put together.  I don’t ask or demand this, but some how there is a perceived culture which makes this seem appropriate.

I’m sure there is a bit of competition going on.  The ladies like to look good, especially when the other ladies in the office look good, and it starts a vicious little game to who’s more beautiful.   Doesn’t matter if you’re married or single, young or old, almost all play the game.  Guys don’t play this game.  Guys play other games, just not the ‘I’m prettier than you’ game.   This still doesn’t speak to why in our culture we expect both great performance and good looking when it comes to female performance.

You then have that big stereotype of the pretty woman who doesn’t perform, but still keeps her job.  This is the traditional stereotype of women and performance.  Oh, Mary is an idiot, but she’s beautiful so they’ll never let her go.  I don’t think this happens as much, but I’m also not naive enough to not think it still has some impact.  Pretty women will always get more chances to screw up, than a less attractive woman.  Always.  Not fair, but true.

Guys, especially those in leadership, will never bring this up.  It’s a taboo subject. Being in HR I’m always amazed that the ones who will bring up this subject more than anyone are other female leaders.  Guys won’t touch performance and attractiveness with 10 foot pool, but the ladies will!  Female executives are some of the first ones who will speak about another female employee in the context of ‘she’s a good performer, but she holy smokes she’s a troll’ and then walk away like it’s completely normal!

So, I ask you female readers, do you feel your looks play a role in your perceived performance at work?

 

 

 

HR’s Biggest Irony: We think we’re Contrarian

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When you get a group of HR Pros together there is one thing I can count on – the majority believe they somehow think differently than everyone else.  Then you look at their words and actions, and you discover they’re just like everyone else.  HR isn’t the only ones who believe this, in fact it’s rampant throughout our organizations.  The reality is, when we get around others, it’s really difficult for us to act and think differently. Hello ‘Group-think’!   The Motely Fool had a great piece on this in regards to investing, but it works for organizations as well:

“In the 1950s, Solomon Asch brought a group of students together and asked them to solve a set of problems, such as whether two lines were the same length. These were simple problems with obvious answers. But several of the students weren’t trying to pick the right answers. They were actors working for Asch, purposely giving the wrong answers in front of their peers. 

Asch repeated the study with varying numbers of actor-students blurting out the wrong answers. His conclusion: Three-quarters of the test subjects went along with the actors’ wrong answers at least once. In any given experiment, at least one-third of test subjects ignored the obvious answer and followed the actors. Just one in four consistently gave the right answer even when their acting peers disagreed with them.

Even when everyone around you is giving an obviously wrong answer, your tendency to second-guess yourself, not want to embarrass yourself, and your natural desire to fit in can trump every bit of rationality you think you have.”

Sound familiar?

The contrarian in most organizations is either the CEO, or the first one fired!  Contrarianism is not valued in the majority of our organizations.  CEO, and many senior executives, will tell you it is, and it’s what they want, but the facts don’t lie.  Most people who go against the grain don’t fit in well in corporate structures.  Which makes it even more funny when I hear HR Pros tell how they are the contrarian voice in their organizations.  No you’re not.  Plus, I would question is that what you really want to be?

I believe HR doesn’t need to be contrarian, HR needs to be conformist.  HR needs someone who is going to take that executive vision and completely conform to it.  Full buy-in, drink the kool-aid, get the tattoo on your ass, conformity.   In away that is contrarian, if you are lead by a visionary leader, either way it’s what our organizations need out of HR.  HR thinks the opposite.  They think our leaders need someone to tell them their full of it.  They don’t. Your leaders don’t want to hear they’re full of it. In fact most, really, just want to hear you think they’re right.  Those who are very self aware still only want to hear how you can help them make their ideas reality, not that their ideas are crap.

That isn’t what you expected was it? HR needs to conform, there, I said it.  Conform to the vision. Conform to the mission. Leading through conformity.