Category Archives: Feedback

It’s Okay to Tell Your Critics to Suck It!

Posted on by
Reply

In the corporate world, everyone is a critic!  Everyone!  We’ve gotten really good at a learned behavior. No longer can we 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 vanilla crap!  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 and innovation 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 and “team” isn’t always the answer. We should have other tools in our toolbox besides just ‘teams’.

 

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 (since those critics 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 wouldn’t suggest you approach it, beginning with “Suck It”. While you will get their attention, I think we all have 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 about having the conviction to stand behind it and not let it get changed.  That’s your marker, “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, maybe once, but it’s rare.

 

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.

Writing LinkedIn Recommendations like We Write Yelp Reviews!

Posted on by
2

I want to start a trend.

I’ve had some really great people write LinkedIn recommendations for me. I think all of them are from people I’ve actually personally worked with and had a strong relationship. The dirty little secret, though, is no one really ever reads or pays attention to these reviews. I mean, no hiring decisions are based on “OMG! Tim’s LI recommendations were off the charts! We must hire him!”

The trend I want to start is to start giving each other LI recommendations like we give Yelp reviews of restaurants, hotels, attractions, etc. Wouldn’t that be at least more fun!?!

They would read something like this:

Tim S. on Laurie Ruettimann: 5 Stars – Once walked a mile, drunk, with Laurie to a Sprinkles ATM in the middle of the night because Sprinkles Cupcakes are the best! We have a secret IG group where we talk “ish” about everything, and it’s super fun! Be careful though, she’s always trying to talk you into going to work out and other stuff you probably don’t want to do.

Tim S. on Kris Dunn: 4.5 Stars – I would have given him 5 stars but I was expecting Kris Dunn the NBA basketball player, and while this Kris Dunn does play basketball, he’s nowhere as good as the real Kris Dunn in the NBA. Loves to wear to dress sneakers as part of his get up, which I dig. The only person alive who drinks 32 oz Powerade Zeros in the morning, but didn’t drink the night before.

Tim S. on Steve Boese: 5 Stars – Have you felt his muscles? No, he legitimately works out, under all those fancy suits is a chiseled beast (or at least I’m told). The one dude is constantly on speed dial for a road trip to any sporting event in the world but prefers NBA and Gamecocks sports. Super secret Chairman’s dinners were the best until he sold out and went commercial. King of the top ten list.

Tim S. on Carmen Hudson: 4.5 Stars – Her and I were separated at birth. Don’t even try to question, we have the 23 and Me results, haters! Shoes on point. Perfect travel pal. Drags a dude around with her that’s pretty cool, but he constantly complains about his plane seat while on this way to 5-star hotels. Not a 5 star because she lives in Seattle and that’s too far away from me.

So, what do you think!?! 100% improvement from a traditional LI Recommendation, right? I mean, you would hire all of these folks above, I mean if you could afford them, but you can’t, but you would!

Hit me in the comments with your LinkedIn/Yelp Recommendation of me (oh, this will be fun)! Also, be aware, I might hit you back with mine of you!

 

What Employees Are Most Receptive to Your Pseudo-Profound Bullsh*t?

Posted on by
3

I have to tell you I’m just in love with this headline for so many reasons, but probably mostly because everyone who reads it instantly starts shaking their head in agreement to someone they know who is ‘Pseudo-Profound’ and they know the employees who buy into it!

The best part of all of this is there was an actual study done! Yes, Academics finally doing important work! The title of the paper is – The Complex Relation Between Receptivity to Pseudo-Profound Bullsh*t and Political Ideology by some researchers at a Swedish university. From the study:

Among Swedish adults (N = 985), bullsh*t receptivity was (a) robustly positively associated with socially conservative (vs. liberal) self-placement, resistance to change, and particularly binding moral intuitions (loyalty, authority, purity); (b) associated with centrism on preference for equality and even leftism (when controlling for other aspects of ideology) on economic ideology self-placement; and (c) lowest among right-of-center social liberal voters and highest among left-wing green voters…The results are supportive of theoretical accounts that posit ideological asymmetries in cognitive orientation, while also pointing to the existence of bullshit receptivity among both right– and left-wingers.

So, basically what they found was that the farther you are away from the center of moderate political ideology, whether conservative or liberal, the more receptive you are to pseudo-profound bullsh*t. If you tend to be super-conservative or super-liberal, you basically buy into bullsh*t more than others.

Now, this doesn’t have to be a leader who is trying to be pseudo-profound, we all know individual contributors who take over meetings also trying to be pseudo-profound as well!

It does speak to employee selection and leadership style. If you have a leader who you know tends to lean towards the pseudo-profound spectrum of bullsh*t speak you probably want to surround that leader with employees who will actually buy into their bullsh*t. Which means you’ll be looking for people who are farther away from center on their political beliefs but also probably have a bit of a lower cognitive orientation. I mean we want them to really buy in completely!

The reality is, this is how organizations, and countries, go very wrong!

I work with leaders constantly who will say they don’t believe their employees actually tell them the truth. Well, they are mostly right! Your employees are buying into your pseudo-profound bullsh*t and you selected them for that propensity, thus, they are telling you what you want to hear, not because they fear you because that’s all they are capable of!

It’s a really fine line. We want engaged, motivated employees. We want visionary leaders who can paint this picture of success and get everyone to buy in. But, we also don’t want people to follow blinding down a path that sends us over a cliff. At the same time, those type of employees are the most challenging to work with, so it’s easy to understand why organizations and hiring managers tend to pick those most receptive to pseudo-profound bullsh*t.

On a positive note, in ten years of writing, I’ve never got to write a post where I said bullsh*t this many times! Also, “Pseudo-Profound Bullsh*t” would be a great autobiography title for me!

 

Are you ‘Manager Shaming’? #WorkHuman

Posted on by
6

Do you know what’s wrong with companies and organizations?

I know the answer because I go to a lot of conferences and listen to a lot of speakers. All of them will tell you exactly what’s wrong with your organization and every other organization. Turns out we all have the exact same thing wrong! Which is comforting in a way.

Our Managers Suck!!! 

Yay!! We figured it out!! We all agree!! Good for us!!

Can I tell you something? I hate Manager Shaming!! HATE IT!

Almost every speaker, at every conference, who speaks about the employee experience or employee engagement, or just about anything to deal with people blame managers. It’s lazy analysis for the most part. Let’s find someone or something everyone loves to hate and then we’ll blame them for everything, and then I’ll give them some great plan that you can’t possibly pull off, filled with funny little stories about my kids.

Look, I get that we have managers that are struggling, but the reality is we put them in a position to fail and now we just want to shame them and blame them for every single ill we have in an organization.

We have to be better than this. We were the idiots who put these folks in charge, didn’t teach them to properly lead people, or hold them accountable to properly lead people, or actually select them based on who had the right DNA to lead people, and not who is the best individual contributor but truly has no ability to lead people. It’s so stupid.

I want us all to start calling out Manager Shaming at conferences.

Cool tell me all my problems are my terrible managers, but you better be super quick to help figure out how to solve this or we get to throat punch you right on stage! If I hear about one more ‘study’ on how they found out managers suck and this is the ‘real’ problem with helping our organizations be successful I’m going to vomit.

So, how do we stop “Manager Shaming”:

1. Understand we are all part of this problem. It’s not ‘managers’, it’s all of us. We all suck because we all allowed this to happen. Also, most of us are managers.

2. Stop picking people to be managers based on they were the best at something, that has nothing to do with actually managing or leading people!

3. Build a leadership program that not only teaches and mentors employees on how to be effective leaders, but then hold them accountable to be that person.

4. Stop blaming and start fixing. It’s not a ‘manager’ issue. If it’s broke. If you are not successful. That’s an organizational issue. We all own that.

5. Move people out of management roles who are unable to lead people. You know who they are, just make the move.

6. Celebrate, publicly your great managers, and be very specific about the behaviors you are celebrating.

Select, educate, measure, reward, repeat. We aren’t trying to launch the space shuttle. We are trying to do something way, way harder. We are trying to lead people!

Stop Manager Shaming!

Dark Horses – Being Successful When You Shouldn’t!

Posted on by
Reply

Just got done reading a really good book recently by Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas, titled, “Dark Horses: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment“.

The main author, Todd Rose, had a unique journey to becoming a Harvard Professor and graduate. He was a high school drop out with a pregnant girlfriend and no real ambition in life, going down a complete path to failing at life.

He found out you could actually go to community college without having graduated high school and decided he was interested in psychology and just started taking classes while working full-time dead-end jobs. So, when he writes about ‘dark horses’ he’s writing from something he knows very well. He was the ultimate dark horse!

We all know people, or have met people, that when you hear their story there is no reason in the world they should be successful. They didn’t have the breaks they needed. They weren’t overly talented in any one thing. But somehow they made it go through and ended up on the other side to become successful.

Rose and Ogas did a bunch of research to find out why. Why do these dark horses become successful? What is it they do differently from others in similar positions to achieve success? They found four main behaviors and traits that set dark horses apart:

1. They know very specifically what motivates them. 

It might be some video game, or weed, or stars, or sneakers, etc. It doesn’t actually matter what the ‘thing’ is that motivates them, but the clearly understand they are motivated by this one thing and they are going to follow through on it until the end.

2. They know their choices and make choices that will allow them to do more of what motivates them. 

If you’re motivated by sleep and choose to sleep constantly, well, you’re just an idiot. If you’re motivated by getting a perfect night sleep and you start really researching what makes a perfect night sleep, and then you start a mattress company to build the perfect night’s sleep. Well, then, you’re a dark horse. We all have choices. Dark horses make the choice that keeps them chasing what motivates them, every time. They don’t get pulled off course.

3. Dark horses are great at trial and error as it relates to finding the strategy that will lead them to success. 

There are a million ways to skin a cat, as the saying goes. Turns out there isn’t one right way to do anything. Dark horses will keep trying to new strategies to achieve what motivates them, eventually finding the strategy that fits them perfectly. It might not fit you or I, but it does fit them. The key is to keep testing strategies until you find the one that fits you.

4. Ignore the destination. 

Dark horses don’t focus on an end. In fact, they probably don’t even realize there is an end. They love ‘something’ and they just want to keep doing that something. There isn’t this mythical end where they cash out and retire. In their mind, they are doing what they love and they are just making the next decision to keep doing what they love, or chasing after what they love, perfecting knowing perfection will never be met.

This is who I am. This is what matters to me. This is what I’m doing next. 

That’s a super powerful mantra to life!

We are told constantly to begin with the end in mind, but for many people that approach isn’t satisfying. If I love what I’m doing and it matters deeply to me, why would I focus on an end?

Well worth the read, go check it out.

3 Ways to Increase Employee Productivity that Doesn’t Entail Pain or Torture!

Posted on by
4

The holy grail of great leadership is simply getting the most positive productivity for an extended period from your team. That. Is. It.

If I take your current team and I get them to do more work that is of the same or higher quality, I am a better leader than you are. “Yeah, well, they don’t like you as much as they like me!”

I wasn’t hired to be friends. That’s a different game that I can also win if you want to play!

Productivity is the ultimate measure. It leads to better business outcomes. Highly productive employees stay at their jobs longer and have higher rates of job satisfaction. While that end measure of productivity is a great measuring stick, actually getting increased productivity in a positive way is super hard!

I’ve found three ways to get increased productivity where both the leader and the employee feel good about the outcomes:

  1. Deliver career value to the employee. 

An employee that truly believes you have their best career interest at heart will run through walls for you, but they really have to believe you are helping their career. That means you have to be very transparent about how this increase in productivity will lead to what they want, not what you want and the organization wants.

Also, if you lie about this and don’t deliver, you’ll lose this employee forever. You need to put in the time and work to put yourself in the position to start acting like their career mentor, it just doesn’t happen overnight. Be clear of the path and process you’ll be taking them on.

  1. Acknowledge individual productivity increases in a public way, especially to the senior most leaders of the organization. 

Appreciation is paramount in getting and extending productivity increases in your employees. One way I love to support the leaders in the organization is to manage-up to those leaders by giving them information on specific individuals that I want to have them give appreciation to.

I will send the leader a message that states specifically the person, their email address or phone number, and what they did that was above and beyond. Then, I go one more step! I will tell the leader specifically what I expect them to do with this information!

It sounds like a bit of micro-managing but in reverse. What I’ve found is leaders are busy and they love that I give them all the information and what specifically I expect them to do with that information. They know that the employee will love getting the appreciation, and they love giving the appreciation, and in how I’ve delivered this to them makes it super easy for the leader to execute!

  1. Define, specifically what ‘extra’ is and what the employee will get in return. 

Too often, I find, employees believe they are going above and beyond when the leader only sees them doing the job they were hired to do. Great performance management is about defining what is expected in the role, and specifically what it takes to thrive in the role.

Once you do this as a leader, getting more is just a function of seeing which employees want to reach that next step and rewarding that effort. No yelling. No kicking and screaming. Just acknowledgment of great work done by employees who want to be successful in their chosen job.

To learn more about Increasing Productivity in your Workforce check out the great resources at Trakstar!

You’re Banned From Changing My Mind…at Work!

Posted on by
3

Did you see Facebook’s internal announcement to their employees about banning an employee’s ability to change the mind of a co-worker about Politics and Religion? I think I need to use these for my family get togethers!

An internal memo was leaked (God Bless internal memo links) from Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer on some new workplace rules that Facebook is putting into effect immediately on all communication channels, and they are:

  1. Don’t insult, bully, or antagonize others
  2. Don’t try to change someone’s politics or religion
  3. Don’t break our rules about harassing speech and expression

Sorry workplace trolls at Facebook, your Employee Experience just took a major blow! (BTW “Workplace Trolls” is a great podcast name)

As you can imagine I have a few thoughts on this!

My actual first reaction to this had nothing to do with “the rules”, but had everything to do with who was communicating this message! Why is this coming from the CTO and not the CEO or CHRO? Definitely different than most organizations.

This tells me one of two things: 1. The CTO made these up on his own; and/or 2. Facebook’s leadership team wanted to make this seem like it wasn’t that big of a deal, so let’s not have it come from the CEO or CHRO, which normally would handle formal employee communications like this.

This is a bit of an employee experience course correction that I think we’ll start seeing in many organizations over the next couple of years with a softer economy. In an ultra-low unemployment economy the inmates run the asylum.

As we back to a bit of normal unemployment environment, employers will focus less on becoming a playground you get paid to attend, and more of a ‘back to work’ mentality. You shouldn’t have time to berate Billy all day because he worships Pokemon. Get your a$$ back to work!

Over the past couple of years with #MeToo and Trump, our workplaces have become littered with landmines of employee strife. We want and value inclusion, and at the same time this increases the communication issues and the need for rules like Facebook are instituting.

So, what do you think? Does your workplace need to adopt rules like this?

Don’t Kill The Dog!

Posted on by
1

I was listening to the Bill Simmons podcast yesterday and he was interviewing Adam McKay, the director of Anchorman, and the new movie Vice (editor’s note – Vice is wickedly funny, and very disturbing all at the same time).

Adam was talking about how they knew that the movie was super funny and when they did their first test, it came back a 50 out of 100, when a good movie should be 60’s to 70’s out of 100, on the rating system they used.

Adam and the star of the movie Will Ferrell, didn’t understand, the test audience of industry insiders immediate told them they loved the movie and it was the funniest thing they ever saw. That’s when one of the studio executives came up to them and said, “you killed the dog! you can’t kill the dog!”

In the movie, Will throws a burrito out his window while driving and it hits a guy on a motorcycle, played by Jack Black. Will stops to make sure he’s okay, and he is, the motorcycle is ruined and an angry Jack Black kicks Will dog off the bridge. It leads to a very funny scene with Will screaming in a telephone booth, “I’m trapped in a glass case of emotion…”

In the original cut, the dog is dead and never comes back. Rating is 50/100. In the movie that gets released, Baxter, the dog comes back at the end to save Will. That cut of the movie got 75/100. It was the only change made and the movie went from 50 to 75. A 75 movie is super successful. 50 is dud.

Why does this matter?

We constantly “kill the dog” in leadership and don’t even realize it!

We do things that people don’t outwardly think are a problem, and in fact, they might even say they really think you are a strong leader, but then you get rated a 6 or 7 out of 10, versus an 8, or 9, or 10 out of 10!

It’s hard for someone rating you to say specifically why they didn’t rate you higher, there’s just something about you that doesn’t make you a 9.

You kill the dog.

Maybe it’s the way to treat someone publicly that others are seeing. Or something you are doing that others see and don’t approve of, even though it wouldn’t be something that you would catch yourself doing. Think of coming into work late, when at the same time you hammer your team for being late.

You get upset when someone doesn’t follow up with you, but you’re awful at returning the same effort in kind. You expect perfection, but constantly make errors. You want complete transparency of your team, but don’t return that transparency.

Stop killing the dog.

What Dog Walkers Can Teach us About Managing Up!

Posted on by
2

You might not have noticed but Americans treat their dogs and cats much better than we treat most people. I’m not sure exactly what that says about our society.

I like to believe that it’s an evolved behavior. A society that treats animals well probably on average treats all things better, but the cynical part of me says it’s more likely we treat animals well because we all craze unconditional love and aren’t finding it other areas of our live.

Either way, my Scout thinks I’m the best and is always excited to see me!

Because we love our animals so much, we spend a ton on them and want them to be taken care of well. This has created a new profession of animal caretakers, and specifically, for Dog Walkers! 

The Washington Post had a great piece on this recently and what struck me from the article was how the most successful Dog Walkers have figured out that managing up to the animal’s owners is the key to their success! 

In a nation where people lead ever more busy lives and increasingly view their dogs as family members, professional dog walking is flourishing. And along with it is what might be viewed as the unusual art of dog walker communication. Many of today’s walkers do not simply stroll — not if they want to be rehired, anyway. Over text and email, they craft fine-grained, delightful narratives tracing the journey from arrival at the residence to drop-off. They report the number of bathroom stops. They take artistic photos, and lots of them.

“For an hour-long walk, I send six or eight, depending,” said Griffin, 44, who holds a treat in her hand when shooting to ensure her charge is looking at the camera. “Then I give a full report that includes not only peeing and pooping but also kind of general well-being, and if the dog socialized with other dogs.”

Turns out that leaders want from you, exactly what we want from our Dog Walkers! More details about what’s going on when we can’t see it or hear it!

Managing up is simply the skill or task of telling someone what the heck is going on with the ‘proper’ amount of detail. “Proper” being the key the element! Too much and you’re kissing up and being annoying, too little and you’re forcing more communication to take place because you didn’t give enough detail.

The reality is, we all want to know what’s going on with enough detail that doesn’t require us to go back and ask additional questions. The perfect response to a great Managing Up message is “Thanks for this! Keep me updated.”

Where Managing Up goes wrong is when you tell yourself you’re just ‘managing up’ but when in reality you’re managing up to get feedback about yourself, your team, your project, etc. That’s not managing up, that’s you trying to train a leader to give feedback and that usually goes wrong for you!

It’s key to know the difference. Someone who is truly managing up, doesn’t want a ton of feedback or additional questions from their managing up note. A simple thanks is perfect and it’s truly all you want. It’s like when two partners share some details about their day the other should know, “Hey, that package from Amazon came with the parts we needed for the whatever…” No further comment or explanation needed, just an FYI, a common courtesy.

The Dog Walkers have this down. I’m going to give you the details, send some pics, and say great things about your animal that you love more than any other thing in your life. While you’re at work, that’s all you want to hear!

Starting 2019 off with a Recruiting Bang!

Posted on by
Reply

If you’re like me you took some time over the holidays to reflect and to think about how you could make your next year on this earth the best one yet!

One of my “areas of opportunity” (HR speak for “stuff I suck at”) is I’m rarely satisfied with my outcomes. So, of course I want to do more in 2019!

I’m an advocate of doing the hard stuff first. The stuff we don’t want to do. The stuff we put off way too easily. So, as we all get back into the groove, let’s get the stuff done we don’t want to do!

Here are some things you might want to put on the list:

  • Discover and establish the measures that have the actual most impact to your recruiting success. I’m going to tell you right now, those probably aren’t “Time to Fill” and “Quality of Hire”. Those actually have little impact to you recruiting talent to your organization and filling jobs.
  • Start measuring recruiter activity metrics and establish a baseline of activity, then work to increase those outputs. Every year the recruiter in my environment who sends out the most screened candidates to hiring managers makes the most placements. This is not by accident.
  • Fire the person on your team that needs to be fired. Well, I had a talk with Timmy and he assured me he’s going to try harder in 2019. No, he isn’t. Do yourself and your team a favor and give Timmy a gift of finding a job and place where he actually wants to give great effort.
  • Sit down with the hiring manager of your most difficult to fill position and have them tell you what they will be doing over the next 30 days to fill that position. Not what you will do, what they will do! One suggestion to help them – bring in their entire team and take thirty minutes to source their networks live all together in the same room.
  • Figure out which part of your technology that your team is not using and call that vendor and tell them you need the entire team retrained on how to get the most out of that tool or you won’t be signing a contract with them to continue in 2019.

I start with measurements because that will have the fastest impact on your recruiting success. If you don’t measure now, or have weak measures, understand when you put in strong measures your team will revolt. So, it might get worse before it gets better, but it will get exponentially better!

Hit me in the comments and tell me what’s number 1 on your list for 2019. I’m told that putting stuff in writing and making it public gives you a much higher chance of actually making it happen! Let’s do this!