Category Archives: Development

The Most Powerful Employee Motivator of All

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I was once fired from a job.  I won’t go into the story because we all have a story and we all frame it to sound like a victim. In hindsight, many years removed, I would have fired me to!

After being fired I could only think about one thing. It consumed me. I wanted to show whomever I went to work for how great I really was.  I didn’t want the ‘fired’ label to follow me, even for a minute.  I wasn’t ‘that’ person. I was better. I wanted…

Redemption!

Redemption is the most powerful employee motivator of all time. None others are even close.

It’s why always laugh when a hiring manager tells me they will never hire someone who has been fired from a job. Really!?  I actually only want people who have been fired from jobs! I want people who have failed, and have a giant chip on their shoulder to show the world they are better than that.

I don’t want to hire crappy people who were fired because they actually have no skill and no personality.  That’s the problem, right? We believe everyone who has been fired to be crappy. “Well, Tim, people don’t get fired if they’re good!” Really? You believe that?

Good people get fired every day. They get fired for making bad decisions. They get fired for pissing off the wrong person. They get fired because they didn’t fit your culture. They get fired because of bad job fit. Good people get fired, maybe as much as bad people get fired. Unfortunately, we lump all of them into the same pool.

Redemption sets the good fires apart from the bad fires.

You can hear redemption speak when interviewing a good fire.  Bad fires don’t speak of redemption, they speak of justification.  Good fires want a second chance to show the world they are right. Bad fires want a second chance to show the world they were wronged. Those are two very different things!

I like redemption motivation.  It sticks around for a long while. Those scars don’t go away easily.

The 1 Reason You’re Afraid To Make Recruiting Simple

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Have you ever wondered why Recruiting Departments continue to make complex processes?  In reality, all of us, wants things simple.  But, when you look at our organizations they are filled with complexity.  It seems like the more we try to make things simple, the more complex they get.  You know what?  It’s you. It’s not everyone else.  You are making things complex, and you’re doing this because it makes you feel good.

From Harvard Business Review:

“There are several deep psychological reasons why stopping activities is so hard to do in organizations. First, while people complain about being too busy, they also take a certain amount of satisfaction and pride in being needed at all hours of the day and night. In other words, being busy is a status symbol. In fact a few years ago we asked senior managers in a research organization — all of whom were complaining about being too busy — to voluntarily give up one or two of their committee assignments. Nobody took the bait because being on numerous committees was a source of prestige.

Managers also hesitate to stop things because they don’t want to admit that they are doing low-value or unnecessary work. Particularly at a time of layoffs, high unemployment, and a focus on cost reduction, managers want to believe (and convince others) that what they are doing is absolutely critical and can’t possibly be stopped. So while it’s somewhat easier to identify unnecessary activities that others are doing, it’s risky to volunteer that my own activities aren’t adding value. After all, if I stop doing them, then what would I do?”

That’s the bad news.  You have have deep psychological issues.  Your spouse already knew that about you.

The good news is, you can stop it!  How?  Reward people for eliminating worthless work.  Right now we reward people who are working 70 hours per week and always busy and we tell people “Wow! Look at Tim he’s a rock star, always here, always working!”  Then someone in your group goes, “Yeah, but Tim is an idiot, I could do his job in 20 hours per week, if…”  We don’t reward the 20 hour guy, we reward the guy working 70 hours, even if he doesn’t have to. (Editor’s note: calling yourself an idiot in a post is cathartic in a number of ways!)

Somewhere in our society the ‘working smarter’ analogy got lost or turned into ‘work smarter and longer’.  The reality is most people don’t have the ability to work smarter, so they just work longer and make everything they do look ‘Really’ important!   You just thought of someone in your organization when you read that, didn’t you!?  We all have them, you can now officially call them ‘psychos’ since they do actually have a “deep psychological” reasons for doing what they’re doing. Harvard said so!

I love simple.  I love simple HR.  I love simple Recruiting.  I hate HR and Talent Pros that make things complex, because I know they have ‘deep psychological’ issues!  Please go make things simple today!

SHRM National Speaker Feedback!

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Got my/our SHRM National Speaker Evaluation back last week.  It’s always fun to get and look at the comments and how you rated as compared the average.  Kris Dunn and I co-presented at SHRM this year. The session was titled: We’re Bringing Techy Back, and it focused on how to buy HR technology.

Here were are ratings, based on 152 responses:

Item Rated Our Average Rating  All Session Average Ratings
Quality of Information 4.41 4.27
Presenters 4.58 4.32
Too Basic 16 14
About Right 78 82
Too Advanced 1 1
Didn’t notice 4 4
Did They Sell – Yes 2 5
No 98 95

All that is cool.  Pretty good ratings. KD and I were happy with the presentation. Great turnout and high participation.

The great part of the SHRM Presentation evaluation are the Real comments that people leave you.

We got a lot like this (95%): 

– “Love these guys! Fresh, from the heart, solid content. Fun.” 

– “HR Pros need to have this presentation.” 

– “Most informative session I’ve attended. Best presentation so far!” 

– “Best session I’ve been to in years! Tons of practical advice. Very engaging!” 

We got a few like this (1%): 

– “Offensive towards vendors and sales people.”

– “The corny jokes at the beginning could be done without. Humility is a good thing.”

– “Very disappointed – a topic of great interest and the deliver ruined the presentation.”

We got some that made us laugh! 

– “Kris interrupts Tim a lot.” (thanks, to my one fan!)

– “Found that the tech session has paper evaluation forms!” (well…)

– “The guys attempt at being funny affected credibility.” (You’re telling us!)

One of the biggest takeaways was a lot of comments about what people were hoping we would have done more of, namely, tell them exactly what vendor to use, for certain situations. It’s the “what ATS should I buy?” dilemma. Kris and I addressed this because we knew this would be stuff people would want.  The problem is, a great technology for one organization, might be the exact wrong technology for another organization.

With such a diverse crowd at SHRM, it is almost impossible to recommend one HR and Talent vendor over another, if we are being honest about what is the best choice for your organization specifically.

This does bring up a great issue, though, across all the SHRM attendees.

People commented on this because they truly want an unbiased and trustworthy opinion on who they should be looking at, and what they should be buying.  They don’t trust vendors, for the obvious reason the vendor is trying to sell you.  They don’t trust industry analysts because they are all in bed with someone.  They don’t want to pay for consultants.

The HR and Talent industry doesn’t have a Consumer’s Report or Trip Advisor to give HR Pros unbiased advice.  So, they look at people, like Kris and I, as someone who will tell them the truth.  Which we would, and did, for many who stayed after and we had one on one conversations with about their specific issue.

I think SHRM could fill this void with some kind of behind the member wall “Trip Advisor” like site that allows all of us to give our own feedback on all HR and Talent technology.  This community share would be invaluable for all of us trying to make that next buying decision.

Your Leaders Secretly Hate Succession Planning

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You want to know what you’ll never hear anyone on your leadership team say publicly?  Well, let me stop before I get started, because there are probably a ton of things leaders will say behind closed doors, off the record, and then open the door and say the exact opposite. Welcome to the PC version of corporate America.

One of the obvious, which always causes a stir is veteran hiring.  William Tincup and I were just talking about this last week, in regards to a correlation he was making about organizations and succession planning.  I wrote a post about Veteran Hiring a while back, in which I state that companies will always, 100% of the time, publicly say they support veteran hiring, but behind closed doors they don’t really support veteran hiring.

If they did, we would not have a veteran hiring crisis in this country! If every organization who claims they want to hire veterans, would just hire veterans, we would have 100% employed veterans! But we don’t. Why?  Well, it’s organizational suicide to ever come out and say we don’t really want to hire veterans.  The media would kill that organization. Yet, veterans can’t get hired.

Succession planning is on a similar path.  Your leaders say the support succession planning. They’ll claim it is a number one priority for your organization. But, every time you try and do something with succession planning, it goes no where!

Why?

Your leaders hate succession planning for a number of reasons, here are few:

1. Financially, succession planning is a huge burden on organizations, if done right.  Leaders are paid on the financial success of your organization. If it comes down to Succession Planning, or Michael getting a big bonus, Succession Planning will get pushed to next year, then, next year, then, next year…  You see Succession Planning is really over hiring. Preparing for the future. It’s a long term pay back.  Very few organizations have leadership in place with this type of long term vision of success.

2.  Leaders get too caught up in headcount.  We only have 100 FTEs for that group, we couldn’t possibly hire 105 and develop and prepare the team for the future, even though we know we have 6% turnover each year.  Organizations react. Fire fight.  Most are unwilling to ‘over hire’ and do succession in a meaningful way.

3. Leaders are like 18 year old boys. They think they can do it forever!  Again, publicly they’ll tell you they’re planning and it’s important. Privately, they look at some smartass 35 year old VP and think to themselves, there is no way in hell I’ll ever let that kid take over this ship!

So, what can smart HR Pros do?

Begin testing some Succession Planning type tools and data analytics in hot spots in your company. Don’t make it a leadership thing. Make it a functional level initiative, in a carve out area of your organization.  A part of the organization that is highly visible, has direct financial impact to the business, and one you know outwardly has succession issues.

Tinker. Get people involved. Have conversations. Start playing around with some things that could have impact in terms of development, retention, cross training, workforce planning, etc.  All those things that constitute succession, but instead of organization level, you are focusing on departmental level or a specific location.

Smart HR Pros get started.  They don’t wait for the organization to do it all at once. That will probably never happen.  Just start somewhere, and roll it little by little. Too often we don’t get started because we want to do it all. That is the biggest mistake we can make.

T3 – @Learnkit

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This week on T3 I’m reviewing elearning company Learnkit.  Learnkit is a custom elearning agency that, through our unique Learn-cycle pedagogy, produces engaging and enjoyable learning experiences to help organizations and individuals get better, everyday.

What does that mean?  They take your old and tired corporate learning materials and make them innovative, cool and fresh.  Learnkit is an extension of your Learning and Organization Development team.

They offer similar benefits reaped by an internal marketing department that outsources their creative work to a high-end agency.  Bringing this same level of expertise and experience in-house can be very expensive, and often internal teams don’t have the resources to develop elearning at the pace their organization needs. A company like Learnkit has the ability and specialized digital learning experts to rapidly produce tailor-made learning solutions that will match your brand and take advantage of the most cutting edge learning experiences on the market.

5 Things I really like about Learnkit: 

1. Measurable data. Learnkit builds on an elearning platform that provides you with great data, real-time. LOD teams are being pushed to innovate and prove ROI. You only do this by having the data available.

2. Standardize experiences. Learnkit provides a standardized experience across all those you are developing in your organization.

3. On demand access. Our organizations, leaders and employees expect training and development differently today, than ten years ago.  We can no longer wait until the training course is offered again, next month.  On demand elearning systems are a must for large organizations today.

4. Learnkit was impressive in their understanding that in every learning situation in an organization, it’s not just about delivering content, it’s also about having an opportunity to engage and aspire your workforce to be better. Better as individuals, but also better as a whole. This is unique.

5. Learnkit doesn’t offer a cookie cutter, one-size fits all approach.  You see this a lot in elearning solutions. We built something, we throw your content into it, it will work. Maybe, maybe not. I saw multiple client elearning sites that Learnkit put together and none were the same, and all fit the culture and brand of the client they were working with.

Here’s what I know.  In every organization I worked for on the corporate HR side, we had great LOD folks.  The problem was they never had the resources, time and creativity to produce great training and development materials. They were good, but they weren’t great.  We are beginning a time in HR where organizations are going to have to put money into training and development.  For my money, I’m shopping out the design and digital work to experts, and letting my internal team build the content.

 

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 space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.