Category Archives: influence

The New Definition of “Meaningful Work”

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I’m going to stop fighting. For years I’ve been fighting morons who claim that Millennials would rather do ‘meaningful work’ than making money. That is actually one big lie, I believe perpetuated by employers who don’t want to pay market wages! (Conspiracy Theory Alert!!!) Actually, it showed up on a bunch of studies that were poorly worded and confusing.

The reality is money matters until it doesn’t.

Millennials and almost any other human on the planet would love to do work that is ‘meaningful’ and something they enjoy doing. That isn’t rocket science. But, if you’re not at least making a fair market wage, money is the most important thing for the majority of people. The studies that said Millennials would prefer meaningful work over money, didn’t make it clear about the money.

It was put to them as if it was a decision about ‘more’ money or ‘meaningful’ work, what would they choose. The perception being that you are already making ‘good’ money, so now what do you want? More money, or meaningful work, or something else. In that case, the majority of people choose other things because we don’t want to come across as greedy.

All of this brings up a great concept, though, about what the heck do we really mean when we say, “Meaningful Work”? That was also a problem in early studies. Most people assumed that ‘meaningful work’ was ‘charitable’ work. It was about working for a company like Tom’s that made shoes and gave a pair of shoes to the needy when you bought a pair. Or working at a hospital that helped people, etc.

You couldn’t work at Amazon and have it be meaningful work. Serving hot fries and cold beer at Applebee’s isn’t meaningful work. All of this ‘meaningful work’ stuff became very limiting for young people searching for jobs!

The reality is, meaningful work has basically two components:

1. Is the work something you’re good at? 

2. Is the work important to you?

This new definition of meaningful work makes it much easier to understand and reach a position that is more personal to what you are good at, and what ultimately is important to where you are at in your life and career.

This definition of meaningful work allows people to have many forms of what would be considered meaningful work for themselves, not others. You might find grooming dogs meaningful work, but I might not. That’s okay, it’s your job, not mine! I find bakers have meaningful work. I love what they make, but the person who is working as a baker might not find it to be meaningful work, it might just be a job.

Meaningful work is important to the individual doing it. I run a staffing firm. We find people jobs that I hope will increase their career value, and help them reach their life goals. I find that meaningful. Others hate my profession and call me a headhunter. That’s okay, it’s not their work, it’s mine.

 

The 3 Rules About Kissing Your Boss!

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May 20, 2013 I published a silly little post on my blog called “The Rules About Hugging at Work”. The post might have taken me twenty minutes to write. It was just an idea I got, like thousands of others, I thought it was funny, so I wrote about it. To date, it’s been read over 1 Million times. Huff Post picked it up, it went viral on LinkedIn (I got over 1300 comments), I’ve been interviewed and called, “The World’s Foremost Expert on Workplace Hugging”.

Twenty minutes of writing, a throwaway idea.

Months later I posted the exact same post on LinkedIn’s publishing platform. This was before everyone could publish (remember that), you had to be invited. I got a call from the LinkedIn chief editor offering me access. I didn’t know if it was really anything so I just threw up old posts I had already written but added a few new pieces.

On the Hugging post, I added at the bottom my next post would be: The 3 Rules About Kissing Your Boss! as a joke. I never wrote it. Until five years later I got a message last week from someone who found the hugging post for the first time asking how they could find the kissing post! I didn’t even know what they were talking about!

So, here’s the kissing post! 

It would be easy to dismiss the notion of kissing your boss as something that would never happen. When I say ‘never’ I mean never. I mean honestly do any of us ever feel it would be appropriate to kiss your boss!?

This one is hard for me. I come from a family of huggers and kissers! My father is 73 and he still kisses me on the lips when I greet him or say goodbye. Some folks would find that super weird. Different cultures do different things.

My son was overseas this summer visiting friends in Belgium and it was quite common for new people he met to give him that traditional kiss on the cheek, but he said those same people would not give you a hug or a handshake. This kiss on the cheek greeting is very common in many parts of the world.

In America, you would probably get punched in the face if you tried kissing someone on the cheek you were meeting for the first time! I mean, look, if I don’t know you, I certainly don’t want your germs all over my face! Most Europeans I meet for business purposes in the states who come here often have gotten used to handshakes, rarely do I see one of them do the cheek kiss greeting.

All of this is way different, though, then kissing your boss! Kissing your boss would have to be a special circumstance or special occasion. I’m guessing if you’re kissing your boss one of a few things probably hasn’t happened in that relationship. You’ve probably become very good friends, some once in a lifetime event is happening, or you’ve become romantically involved, in which case, not really your boss any longer!

So, if we can see a time in which you might kiss your boss, the great HR pro in me says we better put some pen to policy and make some rules! Here are my three rules for kissing your boss:

1. No kissing on the lips. Kissing on the lips is slippery slope you can’t put back in the bag! Wants that happens you might as well just get undressed, stuff just got real! We’re going to assume this kiss is not romantic in nature, completely as professional as kissing your boss can be professional!

2. Do not leave moisture on your bosses cheek. Okay, somehow we got down this rabbit hole to a point where I’m kissing my boss on his or her cheek, let’s not make this super awkward by leaving a nice big wet spot on the side of their face. If you’re so excited to be kissing your bosses cheek that you leave it wet, you should be checked into a mental ward.

3. Do not have bad breath. First impressions are critical and even though your boss knows you, your boss doesn’t know the kissing you. Do not go in for that first boss kiss with bad breath! I love Ice Breakers Mints and I have some close by almost always. Why? I can’t stand bad breath. Coffee breath is the worst and I know a lot of you are major coffee drinkers! Guess what? Diet Mt Dew breath smells like a flower garden! Think about that next time go for a fill up at the coffee station at work!

See? That’s how you do it. That’s how the World’s Foremost Expert in Workplace Hugging becomes the World’s Foremost Expert on Boss Kissing. You can’t be a one-trick pony in this world folks, we all need to keep striving on reinventing ourselves. Watch out fall conference circuit! If you see Sackett coming I might have just raised the game!

So, hit me in the comments. What are your rules for kissing your boss!?

Do you and your HR Team have High HR Self Esteem?

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I was talking to an HR Pro recently and it struck me how negative they were about their organization and their HR shop in general!  Don’t think this is going to be one of those blog posts about if you don’t like your job you should quit and follow your passion.  I don’t believe in that bullshit, that’s how people lose their homes and their families.  They get stupid.

This is for my brothers and sisters who are running HR shops.  You need to fire those folks. Really, I mean it.  Get up from your desk, walk out to their desk and tell them they can go home — forever.

It’s one thing to have a bad day, it’s a completely another thing to have a bad career!  You know exactly who I’m talking about.  You see them every day.  It’s like watching Eeyore on steroids.

I try and figure folks out.  I love asking, “Why you so mad?” Which just usually just makes them madder, but it’s fun to ask.  I have high HR self-esteem.  I like what I do.  I like what we do in HR.  I truly believe that an HR shop in any organization can be the most valuable part of that organization if they have the right folks running it.

Folks like me, with high HR self-esteem.  Folks who don’t believe the bad press HR gets.  Folks who don’t believe the haters.  Folks who at their core, understand how attracting, finding and keeping the best talent in your industry is a true game changer.

It’s alright by me that operations, finance, marketing, etc. all think the same thing. They all think they’re the most important part of the organization. That’s okay. I know.  I know we (HR) are! Knowing this allows me to let them believe their little fairy tale because I know it’s important to keep them happy.  So, I let them believe.  Don’t tell them, please.  ‘Belief’ is important for their continued satisfaction.

I’ll take the blame for when a bad leader turnovers another hire.  I’ll throw myself on the sword when communicating out another policy change made by executives, but one in which they’ll gladly give me ‘credit’.  I’ll let marketing take credit for the major sales increase, when I know it was my talent find that brought on the winning strategy for our organization.  I’ll let finance take credit for millions of dollars in ‘savings’ when I know it was the changes to our work structure that allowed us to make those savings.

Having high HR self-esteem does that.

I only ask one thing from my fellow HR leaders.  The next time you make a hire in your HR shop, please make sure that person has high HR self-esteem.  I can’t take any more HR pros who don’t like what they do.

Should You Measure Candidate Desire by Response Time?

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I have expectations as a leader in my organizations for other employees who are in a leadership position in my company. One of those expectations is, if I call or text you on off hours, weekends, vacations, etc., for something that is urgent to the business, I expect a reply in a rather short time frame.

Some people would not like that. I don’t care. You’re a leader, the business needs you, there’s no time clock for that.

That expectation is set for someone at a leadership level in my organization. They know this expectation before taking the job. Also, I’m not an idiot about it. I can probably count on one hand the number of times in the past five years I’ve reached out to someone on weekends or vacations expecting and needing a response.

But, what if you measured candidate quality in the same manner? Seems unreasonable, doesn’t it!?

Well, check this out:

Nardini is the CEO of the sports and men’s lifestyle site Barstool Sports. In a recent New York Times interview, she detailed her process for vetting job candidates. After saying she was a “horrible interviewer” because of her impatience, she explained a unique process for gauging potential hires’ interest in the job.

“Here’s something I do,” she said. “If you’re in the process of interviewing with us, I’ll text you about something at 9 p.m. or 11 a.m. on a Sunday just to see how fast you’ll respond.”

The maximum response time she’ll allow: three hours.

So, Erika believes if a candidate doesn’t reply back to her on a Sunday at 9 pm within three hours, they are not interested in a job.

This is why recruiting is hard.

You have moron leaders who come up with stupid ideas of what they think is ‘important’ and then they make you live by these dumb rules. This rule is ridiculous. Erika’s assessment of why this works is ridiculous. But, she’ll get a pass.

Why?

She’s a she. If some dumb white dude came up with the same rule the New York Times would write an expose on how this guy is a complete tyrant and out of touch with today’s world, and how crappy this candidate experience is, and how bad leadership this is, etc. But, no one will. She’s just leaning in and doing what the guys do!

Yes, she is. She’s being an idiot.

Now, I’ll say I actually agree with her on her assessment on response time, assuming the roles she is expecting a reply from in three hours are time critical roles. She runs a media site with breaking stories. Twitter has these things up in seconds, media sites need replies to what is happening within minutes and hours. So, there could be some legitimacy to something as arbitrary as measuring candidate desire by response time.

It’s fraught with issues, to be sure, but for certain roles, it might find you some good talent. Should it be a golden rule of hiring for your organization? No, that’s just dumb.

If you really want a silver bullet I ask every candidate if they’re a dog person or cat person. Works every time!

Disrupt HR Detroit! September 27th – Tickets On Sale Now!

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DisruptHR is coming to Detroit!!!  

I’m pretty excited about it and I’m part of the great team that’s putting this event together. The date is September 27th with registration starting 5:30 pm and the event starting at 6 pm at the Garden Theater in midtown Detroit. The tickets are only $25! We should be done around 8 pm. Food and drinks. A ton of networking and laughs! REGISTER HERE! (we do anticipate this will sell out – we have limited seating)

What’s DisruptHR Detroit? 

It’s fun and fast 5-minute presentations/talks by HR and Talent pros. Powerpoint presentations of twenty slides where the slides automatically change every 15 seconds. It’s done in a TEDx-style format and the speakers are there to challenge how we think about HR and Talent, or maybe to just to poke some fun at the profession we all grind at every day.

Want to speak at DisruptHR Detroit?

Our goal is to have 12 speakers for this first event. We already have some folks who have applied and we welcome everyone who has the interest to apply to speak. It’s super simple! Follow this link and submit your idea! The DisruptHR Detroit team will pick 12 great ideas and save the others for our next Disrupt!

Why should I come to DisruptHR Detroit?

First, I’ll be there as the Emcee! I mean who doesn’t want more Sackett in their life!?!

Second, if you are passionate about our profession of HR and Talent Acquisition, this is the one place on the planet you should be to be around like mind professionals and leaders within SE Michigan!

Third, there’s a great chance you’ll take back to your organization some great ideas from the speakers and from the conversations everyone will be having about the topics!

What does a DisruptHR talk look like? 

Here’s me doing one so you can get a flavor:

Failure Is The New Black | Tim Sackett | DisruptHR Talks from DisruptHR on Vimeo.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign Up! 

See you there! This is going to be so great! The first 200 people who sign up get a personal hug from me!!!

I’m a Transactional Memory Leader, are you?

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There is this concept called ‘group transactional memory‘. Simply, this is your ability to allow memories you need or want to be stored within someone else. Let me give you an example. My wife is our family calendar. I unconsciously (and maybe a little consciously) don’t remember anything regarding our family calendar because I ‘rely’ on her memory to store this information.

I’m completely a Transactional Memory Leader!

I’m not the guy who knows everything in HR and Recruiting. I’m the guy who knows the people who know everything in HR and Recruiting. Why should I remember every single piece of HR technology when I have a half a dozen friends who I know will know the answer I need. Why would I remember every aspect of employment branding when I know at least five the top employment branding minds on the planet?!

I’m an inch deep and a mile wide. Some folks are a mile deep and an inch wide.

Frequently you’ll hear older people say “a piece of me died” when their long term companion dies. By the group transactional memory theory, this is actually true. If my wife would die, I would lose so much memory I can’t even tell you. She makes way better than I could ever be on my own. She’s like this awesome additional hard drive add-on that no one else has. A secret weapon!

She allows me to fill up my memory capacity with all the stupid stuff I fill my days with, and she handles all the personal daily stuff. For her, I fill my memory with stuff like directions and well, mostly directions to places (I’m also really good with movie quotes in case she needs a movie quote at any time!).

I think the best leaders are also group transactional memory leaders.

I surround myself with really talented, dynamic people who all have various specialties. I then let them do what they do best, knowing that if I need that knowledge, it’s there for me to tap into when I need it. Why would I learn every aspect of some process, when I know I have someone who is already doing that for me?

I think we used to call that delegation, but for me, transactional memory is delegation 2.0.

To me, the best thing a leader can do for their teams is to allow them to be this group transactional memory buddy. Give them your trust that when called upon to use their memory banks they’ll come through and be that personal memory bank you needed. This trust that they will perform when needed if the basis of leadership.

My wife will probably read this and think “I can’t believe he found a scientific way to be lazy!” She’s probably right! I’m really just looking for more capacity for more pop culture references and athletic statistics!

7 Things You Must Do if You Want to Hire the Best Team!

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Every once in a while I run into someone who “gets it”. Who understands recruiting, talent acquisition, and this whole big HR world at another level. They make it easy, or at least for them, it’s easy. It’s easy because they have a crystal clear vision of what they want and how they are going to go about getting it.

I read an article this week in some obscure publication that probably twenty people read, but the author just got it! Carmen Di Rito is co-founder and chief development officer of LifeCo UnLtd in South Africa (I’ll be speaking at HR Tech Fest in September in Johannesburg! I’m going to invite her over for sure!). Here are her guiding principles when it comes to talent:

  • Look for attitude alignment: When recruiting for a new position, look for alignment in thinking first, then competency and expertise.
  • Be fanatical: Fixate on building a cohesive, robust team that believes in and lives your values so that you have a culture you are proud of—and enjoy being a part of.
  • Be brutally honest: Share the frustrations, challenges, and demands of the job upfront, as well as the mandate of the organization. No sugar coating. Share who and what the organization is—authentically.
  • Develop a compelling, audacious vision: A strong vision will attract people who are courageous, tenacious, and hardworking.
  • Disrupt: The social sector is challenging, rewarding, but above all, disruptive. Build disruptive strategies to recruit, develop, and retain talent.
  • Experiment: Constantly improve processes and policies to unleash talent at all levels.
  • Expect excellence and reward high performance. Obsess over quality. High-performing teams and winning cultures aren’t born out of mediocrity. An organization’s leaders must be exemplars of excellence and high performance.

It’s really good, right!?

“High-performing teams and winning cultures aren’t born out of mediocrity.” This is something I would expect to hear from me, or older dudes my age, not someone who graduated college in 2010! Carmen is a pusher! Working for a non-profit!

If you can do these seven things consistently, you’ll be a great leader and you’ll run a great organization. Simple. Yet extremely hard to maintain. Why? It takes extreme perseverance and fortitude as a leader to maintain this high standard of yourself and your team.

The best organizations and leaders in the world do this. From giants to start-ups. In HR and TA we tend not to think at this level, at least average performers don’t! We tend to think about a lot of other details that might help get us to this point, but also most likely won’t.

I don’t feel like this is aspirational for Carmen. I believe this is her true north. This guides her daily decision making. She can lead a small non-profit or a major Fortune 500 company and she’ll be the same leader. That should be aspirational for all us!

HR/Corporate Communications 101 – Tesla Edition

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You might have seen this pop up on your radar this past week, but there’s a good chance you didn’t because it was put to bed as soon as it came up! Some news agencies tried to rake up a story on Tesla having a sexual harassment issue in their California plant.

Since the major issue at Uber, and big brand is now a media target for these types of stories. Not that they’re not stories, but the reality is the media consuming public love to see big name companies get killed in the media, while this kind of thing is taking place every day in lesser known companies that news agencies could care less!

So, why didn’t anyone bite on the Tesla story like Uber? Check out this response from the Tesla internal comms team:

“The topics raised in this meeting were followed up directly with those willing to discuss,” a Tesla representative told Business Insider. “We have a no-tolerance policy and have made changes to leadership, policy, and training to continue to improve our work environment.”

“The reason groups like Women in Tesla exist is precisely because we want to provide employees with an outlet to share opinions and feedback in a constructive manner. At Tesla, we regularly host events like the Town Hall, and only someone who is intentionally trying to misconstrue the facts and paint Tesla in a negative light could perceive such meetings as something negative.”

Drop mic. Walk off stage.

Clear, concise and no bullshit. We were made aware of it. We handled it. We’ll continue to handle it in a similar fashion if it comes up.

I don’t know if Tesla has a sexual harassment problem or not. What I know is they don’t have a communications department problem, those folks know what they’re doing, especially in light of recent situations at other high profile Silicon Valley companies.

A communication like this doesn’t lead one to believe there’s an ongoing problem. It’s designed to make you feel like some folks in charge know what’s going on and it was taken care of. That should be your goal in designing and developing HR communications for issues of this nature. The trick is you have to actually have taken care of it!

Do your internal and external communications sound like this? Yeah, you probably got in the ‘zero-tolerance’ language and we’ll continue to work to get better, but are you willing to call out your naysayers!? Most aren’t for the simple fact is they don’t really know for sure if there isn’t something going on, which leads me to believe Tesla has probably gone the extra mile to eliminate those responsible and make sure whatever happened won’t happen again.

Great HR communications can have a great impact on employees, shareholders, and customers. Don’t take them lightly.

HR and Recruiting are not Rocket Science!

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I hear one thing over and over from people who read my stuff or see my presentations:

“It’s not rocket science.”

It happened just last week. Some HR guy sent me a message and said, “I don’t get it?” Meaning, he didn’t get what I was trying to say like there was some deeper meaning to my straightforward point. Nope, I was just pointing out some common sense, which seems rather in short supply these days.

I take that as a compliment.  I’m not trying to ‘wow’ anyone with a couple of college credits and my top-notch brain.  I’ve never been known for being the big brain type.  I’m the common sense, straight forward type.  HR and Recruiting, to me, shouldn’t be hard and complex.  It should be simple and easy to understand.

That’s the problem.

Too many HR and Talent Pros want to make it seem like ‘our’ jobs are very complex and difficult.  This is very natural, every profession does this.  If HR is easy, you won’t be valued highly by leadership.  So, let’s make it hard.  The last thing anyone wants to do is come out and say, “Hey! A monkey can do my job, but keep paying me $80K!”   It’s very difficult culturally to come clean and say, “You know what?  This stuff isn’t hard.  It’s work.  We have a lot to do.  But, if we do what we know we have to do, we’ll solve this!”

But that’s HR and Talent Acquisition. It’s work.  Many times it’s a lot of work!  But we aren’t trying to solve the human genome!  We are trying to administer some processes, get our employees better, find ways to keep them engaged and happy and find more folks who want to become a part of what we are doing.  Not overly hard.  It’s not rocket science.

I think the complexity in HR and Recruiting comes into play with ‘us’ not being aligned with what our leadership truly wants.  Many times we flat out guess what we think they want out of HR. Sometimes we assume what they want, and try and do that. Very rarely do we actually find out exactly what they expect, and just deliver that.

There are a number of reasons for this.  First, we might not agree with what our leadership wants or expects from HR.  So, we give them what we want and expect from HR.  This never works well, but is tried often!  Second, our leadership changes what they want and expect, as they see better ways to do HR and Recruiting.  Change is a bitch.  It’s more of a bitch when it’s happening to you.  Third, we might not have the experience to deliver what is wanted or needed.  So, you get what we can give you.

This seems to be why delivering great HR and Talent Acquisition becomes rocket science.  Simply, we can’t have basic communication with our leadership and some self-insight on our capabilities of what we can actually deliver.   Couple this with most people’s unwillingness to ask for help, because they fear others will look down on them for not knowing, and you’ve hit the HR rocket science grand slam!

HR isn’t hard. Recruiting isn’t hard.  Dealing with expectations, and our own insecurities, that’s hard!

The Key Trait of Every Great Employee #SHRM17

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For twenty years I’ve been hiring and firing people.  I’ve been lucky enough to have some really great performers, a bunch of good performers and also a few really crappy performers.  It seems like every time I turn, someone has an answer for me on how to hire better.  For years I have given the advice, if all else fails, hire smart people.  It’s not a bad strategy. For the most part, if you hire the smartest ones of the bunch, you’ll have more good performers, than bad performers.  I’m talking pure intelligence, not necessarily book smarts.

But, just hiring smart people still isn’t perfect.  I want to hire good, or great, people every single time.  How do you do that?  That’s the million dollar question.

To me, there is one trait we don’t focus enough on, across all industries.  Optimism.

Your ability to look at a situation and come up with positive ways to handle it.  Think about your best employees, almost always there is a level of optimism they have that your lower performers don’t.

I can’t think of one great employee I’ve ever worked with that didn’t have a level of optimism that was at least greater than the norm. They might be optimistic about their future, about the companies future, about life in general.  The key was they had optimism.

Optimistic people find ways to succeed because they truly believe they will succeed. Pessimistic people find ways to fail since they believe they are bound to fail.  This hiring thing can be really difficult.  Don’t make it more difficult by hiring people who are not optimistic about your company and the opportunity you have for them.

Ask questions in the interview that get to their core belief around optimism:

– Tell me about something in life you’re are truly optimistic about? (Pessimistic people have a hard time answering this. Optimistic people will answer quickly and with passion.)

– Tell me about a time something you were responsible for went really bad. How did you deal with it?

– The company has you working on a very important project and then decides to cancel it. How would you respond?

Surrounding yourself with optimistic people drives a better culture, better teams, it’s uplifting to your own leadership style.  I want smart people, but I truly want smart people who are optimistic about life.  Those people change the world for the better, and I think they’ll do the same for my business.