Category Archives: influence

What Are You Doing With Your 30,000 Days?

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I had something happen to me recently that was really just one more reminder that life can change in an instant.  It seems like life has a way of trying to shake us awake and bring your focus back to what’s really important when we start to focus on things that really aren’t that important.

Here’s the deal.  If we are lucky we each have about 30,000 days to live.  (I’ll wait, go ahead and do the math…) Welcome back. 30,000 days seems like a lot of days.  The thing is that 30,000 number is really the best case scenario.  Many will not make it to 30,000, and those that do, I can’t tell you those 30,000+ days will be your best days.

So, what are you doing with your 30,000 days?

I won’t say I’ve wasted 16,000 already because I’ve done some pretty remarkable things.  I’ve got a great wife. Three great kids. That awesome puppy in my arms.  A solid career.  It’s taken all of those 16,000 days to get to this point.

Here’s what I’ve learned to this point in my 30,000 days:

– I’ve stopped valuing how valuable each day is.  I mean, I value all that I have and my life, but it gets lost on the daily basis of life.  I get the big picture, small picture overtakes it constantly.

– I don’t enjoy the things I enjoy, enough.  I have enjoyment, but if I only have 30,000 days, I should be enjoying those things more.

– I don’t spend enough time with those I love.  In the end, I won’t cry over not being able to work another minute.  I will cry over not having another second with those I love.

My guess is many of us will have the three things above in common.  Many of us are in this race of life.  Until we realize we are just racing to the end. At which point, you’ll go, oh wait a freaking minute, I don’t want to win this race!  Go ahead, I’ll catch up later!

This doesn’t mean I want to sell off all my worldly possession and walk the earth like Caine from Kung Fu (look it up Millenials).  I don’t.  I like my stuff!  It helps me enjoy my life.  I like my work.  I like to play more than work (my guess is that’s 99.9% of the world!).  This isn’t about balance.  30,000 days doesn’t care about your stupid balance.  It’s a clock, and it’s ticking.

In my 30,000 days, I want to leave the world a better place than when I arrived.  To each of us, that means something different.  One person might want to care for sick kids. One might want to change our environment. One might want to help homeless. I’ve decided I want to leave the world 3 young men who will create a legacy of their own.  Three men who will take my vision one step further and help to leave the world a little better as well.  If I spend my 30,000 days being the best Dad possible, I think I’ll feel content that I spend my 30,000 days pretty well.

What are you going to do with what’s left of your 30,000 days?

You need to be a part of a Professional Tribe

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One of the things I speak about when presenting to HR pros is there need to become part of the ‘Tribe’.  Meaning, if you want to have your seat at the table, you want to gain influence with your leadership team, you need to become part of that tribe.  How do you do that? Well, every tribe is different, you need to figure that out. There is no magical answer, but my guess is they have or do something in common. Find out what that is, and slowly work yourself into that tribe!

HR people struggle with this concept.

“Tim, I just want to do my job and go home!”  Okay.  Then stop bitching that you’re not getting any respect from your executives.  You’re choosing not to be part of that tribe.  Tribes take care of themselves.

You see, most HR pros place themselves on a professional island.  Just Tom Hanks in Cast Away, they’re all by themselves, plus maybe there own little ‘Wilson’ comfort toy picked up at a SHRM conference, a Monster stuffed animal, a Careerbuilder ‘recruiter’ doll, you know the ones!

I have a really, really cool tribe.  In fact, I have many tribes.  First and foremost of have my family.  My HRU tribe is next.  I probably spend more time with them, then my real family on a daily basis!  I also have a number of other personal tribes around youth sports, neighborhood, etc.

My FOT tribe is professionally very cool and satisfying. It’s a group of HR and Talent bloggers who are super smart and snarky, and they make me laugh every day.  I support this tribe and they support me.  They make my professional world better.  They help make me get excited about what I do, and how I do it.  They challenge me to be better. There are many subsets of that tribe, like the 8 Man Rotation tribe, the greater HR blogger tribe, etc.

Tribes are important.

HR and Talent Acquisition pros need to take down their locked HR office doors. Take them right off the hinges.  Get out and start getting involved with professional tribes.  Start in your own organization first.  Do you support a department or client group?  Get into that tribe, now!  Go to lunch with them. Go for drinks after work on Friday.  Bake cookies and bring them to the tribes.  All tribes like to eat and drink! Never underestimate the importance of being a part of that tribe.

I hear from HR pros who tell me all the time, “Tim, ‘they’ just won’t listen to me. How do I get them to listen?”  My first question is to ask them what relationship they have with whoever isn’t listening. That answer is usually, none, or next to none.  They aren’t part of that tribe. That’s the real problem.

I’m not saying it’s easy to break into every tribe. It might not be, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying.  Also, you can create your own professional tribes.  There are so many people just like you that just want to be a part of a tribe.  Go find them! Start a tribe.  You’ll be better for it.

Some of my Tribe and I will be at SHRM Talent next week speaking and hanging out. If you’re going reach out to me and let’s connect! Maybe you’ll become a part of my tribe!

The Realities of Using a Full-Fledged Modern Day Talent Acquisition Platform

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I’m in a pretty cool place in life right now. Great job, great family, every day I get to work and talk with awesome, smart people, every week I get to see the most awesome technology on the planet. Like the t-shirt says, “Life is Good!”

If you’re a TA leader for a big shop, I’m guessing my life is better than yours! Why do I know this? Because the technology you’re being asked to use has completely passed you by on the side of the highway!

Remember that first time when you’re Mom or Dad asked you to ‘fix’ the clock on the VCR? It was simple, but they had no idea on how to set the VCR clock, so it would blink “12:00” for weeks until you decided to fix it. Most TA leaders, right now today, are looking at that clock on the VCR blinking!

The reality of using a full-fledged modern day Talent Acquisition Platform is:

– You’re not ready for it.

– It’s like you’ll be taught how to walk all over again.

– It’s like you’ll be learning a new language.

– It will be the single most valuable thing you’ll ever do in your TA career.

– You’ll be forced to teach your entire leadership something completely new.

– Most vendors selling these solutions, don’t have the capability to actually teach you and your team how to effectively use it.

– You and your team aren’t ready to unlearn all of your broken, bad habits to use it effectively.

– You’re going to have to admit to yourself and others, you really don’t know what you’re doing.

That last one is hard. Because we do know what we’re doing, damn it! But, this is where you have to remember the blinking VCR clock. You don’t, but you can learn!

A full end to end TA platform will change the way you, your team, and your organization actually attract, recruit, and onboard talent. Gone, completely, will be Post and Pray. So, will be those employees who think this is what recruiting is.

It’s not overly difficult to learn these new skills. It is uncomfortable because it’s a BIG change from what you’re actually doing today and calling it recruiting. You’re not recruiting. You’re administering a recruiting process. Those are different things. Your organization actually needs you, desperately, to attract, retain, and develop great talent.

Any monkey can collect resumes and pass them onto a hiring manager. In fact, you don’t even have to pay an admin $12 per hour to do that, I can find you an A.I. bot that can do that for pennies on the dollar.

The really, really cool part about this is you’ll completely change your career path by doing this! Once you implement and transform your organization’s recruiting practices using technology, you’ll have other organizations lined up at your door begging you to do the same for them!

The real reality is you have a choice to make. Fix the blinking clock, or keep ignoring it. What kind of TA leader are you?

Be Careful What You Incentivize! You Actually Might Get It!

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I’m fascinated in how we compensate and incentivize employees. Not the actual process, but the decision-making process behind the what and how we do it. In my experience, how this usually goes is a two-level process:

First Level: Someone has a hunch, or it’s being done this way somewhere else.

Second Level: Someone in compensation searches for data to justify the hunch or data that agrees with what you want to do.

Real scientific, huh!?

Let me give you a real-world example that most of us are familiar with. We have a prison problem in America. We can all agree on this, correct? Prison populations are exploding and continuing to grow at an alarming rate.

Popular ‘theory’ says the reason behind this are based on a few situations. First, the war on drugs has caused the increase in more inmates in prison. Seems fair, we definitely hate those drugs. Second, for-profit private prisons have turned prisons into a business and this keeps prisoners in longer than they need to be. Third, minimum sentences and three-strike policies have people in prison for life for minor crimes and drug offenses.

What if you were to find out none of this is actually true? That in fact, the real reason we have exploded our prison population over the past two decades is because of one simple incentive program. This is probably going to piss you off!  From The New Yorker:

“So what makes for the madness of American incarceration? If it isn’t crazy drug laws or outrageous sentences or profit-seeking prison keepers, what is it? Pfaff has a simple explanation: it’s prosecutors. They are political creatures, who get political rewards for locking people up and almost unlimited power to do it…between 1990 and 2007, while the crime rate began to fall, the number of line prosecutors went up by fifty percent, and the number of prisoners rose with it. That fact may explain the central paradox of mass incarceration: fewer crimes, more criminals; less wrongdoing to imprison people for, more people imprisoned….

Meanwhile, all the rewards for the prosecutor, at any level, are for making more prisoners. Since most prosecutors are elected, they might seem responsive to democratic discipline. In truth, they are so easily reëlected that a common path for a successful prosecutor is toward higher office. And the one thing that can cripple a prosecutor’s political ascent is a reputation, even if based on only a single case, for being too lenient. In short, our system has huge incentives for brutality, and no incentives at all for mercy.”

Go read the full piece in The New Yorker, it’s loaded with statistics to back up these real reasons for prison growth, and it’s an exceptional example of you actually get what you incentivize!

Many times we come up with incentive plans based on a short-term situation we want to change, but then years later those short-term incentive plans are still in place, and driving behaviors we never wanted or intended.

The other stat I loved from the article that we never hear in mainstream media or from our politicians is after the age of 40, most crime just stops. Basically, crime is young person’s game for the most part. If we were to release all prisoners at age 40, we would basically see no increase in the crime rate, but this will never happen. Why?

Because it only takes one. It takes one person getting out and committing another horrific crime and we all go, “See! It doesn’t work!” And, if it was someone I know, or god forbid my family, I’m probably right there with you. So, we lock up 7 Million Americans!

Be careful what behaviors you’re incentivizing, my friends, you actually just might get them!

Body Language Matters in Recruiting Great Talent

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So, possibly the greatest basketball coach of all time is University of Connecticut’s Women’s Basketball coach, Geno Auriemma.  He currently has a 109 game winning streak in NCAA Division I basketball. Many of his current players have never lost a collegiate game!

You have no idea how unreal that streak is. It’s not like he can just recruit every top player, every year. He might get three or four of the best high school players, but other schools are also getting great talent.

Geno has something that only a tiny few great coaches have. Watch this short video to see it in action:

Couple things about this:

1. He says when he watches game film he watches what the kids on the bench are doing. If you’re at that level of detail, you’re going to be successful! I can guarantee you Nick Saban does the same thing. Tom Izzo does the same thing. Bill Belichick does the same thing.

2. If you’re interviewing for a job, the moment you pull into the parking lot, you better believe your actions are being evaluated, and almost 100% of those actions are body language!

If you hire an Eeyore, you’re going to get an Eeyore. Don’t think somehow they’ll change from the interview. If someone can’t have good body language in an interview, they’ll never have it coming to work and grinding each day.

Most of the jobs we hire for are basically skill-irrelevant. What we truly need is someone who comes to work each day with enthusiasm, is open to learning, has the ability to learn quickly, and plays well with others. I can teach you the rest. I can’t teach you to have great body language. That’s on you!

There’s No Test for Grace Under Pressure

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By now you’ve all seen and heard what happened at the 2017 Academy Awards. It’s the end of the night where they announce the biggest award, Best Picture, and those announcing the award were given the wrong envelope, so the wrong movie gets announce. Mass confusion and you can see here what happens:

Jordan Horowitz, the Producer of La La Land, was put in the most extremely embarrassing situation most of us could imagine. 120 Million people on live television have just witnessed his greatest triumph turn into defeat in a matter of seconds.

How would you have handled this?

Jordan handled it with complete grace. There’s nothing that prepares you for being in an awkward time like this. His first thought was only to congratulate the true winners. I can’t even imagine how hard that was, but for him, it wasn’t. It was his true being, his natural state. If that happened to Jordan a thousand times, he’s most likely always be gracious.

Grace under pressure is such a wonderful trait to have in your character. I honestly can tell you I don’t have this grace, and I’m ashamed by that.

In 2006 I was working for Applebee’s and we had this huge leadership meeting. Probably a thousand employees in attendance and they gave out annual awards for top performing regions. My region was number one in all three main areas: Operations, HR, and Training. The winners got an award and a Rolex watch. Boy, I couldn’t wait to put on that watch!

The night went along and our operations leader accepted his award and watch. My training partner accepted her award and watch. Then it came time for HR! Our VP of HR got up there on stage. I straightened my shirt, cleared my throat, and oh no you didn’t just say what I thought you said, another name, not my name, I don’t understand, why is everyone telling me they’re sorry, what the fuck just happened!

The award was given to another deserving HR pro who improved their region a significant amount. She wasn’t number one like I had been back-to-back years, but who’s counting. I was counting! That’s who! I was pissed with a capital P. I excused myself from the ballroom and walked out.

I was not graceful. I was embarrassed. I was hurt. I let that VP have it as soon as he found me. I was not someone I ever wanted to be in that moment.

Grace is a funny thing. We all want it. We all think we have it. But until you’re actually put in a position to show it, you truly don’t know if you have it.

Shout out to JP! You screwing me out of that Rolex still stings! By the way, I was number one in HR metrics for a third straight year the next year, but the company decided to end doing awards that way. Man, I really wanted that Rolex! In hindsight, I wish I would have had the grace, like Jordan.

 

Employee Betrayal is Something You Never Get Over

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You probably missed this recently, another lawsuit, another former employee ‘allegedly’ stealing company secrets and taking them to their new employer who just happens to be developing the same or similar product as their past employee. This one is interesting because it evolves one of the company that everyone in tech seems to want to work for, Tesla.

Here the information on the lawsuit:

Tesla filed a suit against its former director of Autopilot, Sterling Anderson, on Thursday, alleging he attempted to recruit engineers from Tesla to join the self-driving startup he and the former CTO of Google’s self-driving arm, Chris Urmson, were establishing.

The suit further alleged that Anderson downloaded “hundreds of gigabytes of Tesla confidential and four proprietary information” documents to his personal computer. When he was terminated, Anderson returned the documents, but not the backups he created, the company alleged.

In addition to making offers to a dozen Tesla employees — only two of whom accepted, according to the suit — Tesla is also alleging Anderson worked on the company Urmson was starting, called Aurora, during company time. Recode first reported that Urmson was starting his own self-driving company and that he was recruiting big names from many players, including Tesla and Uber.

There’s always two sides to every story, but this one always plays out about the same way. The original company hires you, trains you, develops you, gives you the opportunity to be a part of something great. The employee then says “F-you, I’m using all of this knowledge to benefit someone else. I mean it’s my brain, not yours.”

That’s really the extent of every employer-employee betrayal, like this one. Of course, in their minds, both sides are correct.

The reality is, and Mr. Anderson knows this, he would have never gotten the information into his brain if he Tesla never put him in a position, and billions of dollars of development, to get such knowledge. As you can imagine, Telsa feels betrayed. Mr. Anderson feels like he’s completely innocent. The courts will decide.

This has gone on since the beginning of time and will continue. Companies spend way too much money on developing ideas to have them just walk out the front door. As of today, it’s illegal for companies to kill employees who try and take this knowledge to the competition or start their own company on the back of all the work they got from their previous employer.

Here’s what I know. As a leader, you never forget this betrayal. You can forgive, but you won’t forget. It’s less about the ‘stealing’ of secrets and more about the break in trust. You were a part of the team, and you decided to leave and go play for the other team (and you took our playbook!). That employee will be forever dead in your eyes. They burned the ultimate bridge.

The employee would argue the other side. “Hey, wait, I should be able to take my skills and work anywhere I want!” For many employees, this is the case. For some, for those who get brought into the ‘circle of trust’ and get to see the secret sauce recipe, you give up this right. Or at least, you give up the right to go to another employer and share trade secrets. The line of betrayal is fine and sharp. You never really want to find yourself on either side of it, because no one wins.

I’m not an “Us” or a “Them”

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Politics are ruining my friendships. Look, I don’t really want to know what you care about, because most of us care about crazy shit that others don’t understand, or can’t understand. You getting me to understand your crazy, probably isn’t a good thing!

I have true friends who are pro-life. I love these friends. I don’t understand how they can’t understand my pro-choice stance, but they don’t. They can’t understand how I can be a baby killer. I’m not, but we all have our positions. We’ve been able to have a great friendship in spite of this one difference.

Maybe there should be a difference of belief scoreboard. Only having one difference of belief is fine, we can still be close friends, even two or three. Once you get to four, you begin to be a person I don’t want to hang with. Once you get to six, maybe you turn into a horrible person I would rather see dead. I’m not quite sure at the math, but I’m sure we could come up with a system.

I want to be friends with all kinds of people, but recently it seems like all kinds of people don’t want to be friends with me because I don’t believe in their crazy, to the exact specifications they want me to believe.  I see their points. I respect their points. But, I’m not flying their flag. So, apparently, that makes me part of the evil empire.

I like puppies. I fly that flag, for sure! I love babies. All babies. White, brown, yellow, any color baby is alright with me. I’m definitely pro puppy and pro baby. I like gin and tonics. Marry whomever you please, I support that. Single moms, I was raised by one, that’s the toughest gig on the planet. I’m not a church-goer, but I’m not an Athiest. I like the Spartans, probably too much. I like money. I hate giving money to people who don’t deserve it or appreciate it. I’m definitely, pro-money. I like helping people. I try and do that as much as I can.

I’m not a ‘them’. I’m also not an ‘us’. I’m more of a ‘we’.

Both the Democrats and Republicans are extremely happy we are all going ‘us’ and ‘them’. By doing this we keep both parties in power. The last thing they want is that we become a ‘we’. The establishment has ‘us’ exactly where they like to have us. Against each other. That gives them the most power. If we find a middle ‘we’, you’ll really see some shit happen!

The reality is, our current government is fine with the other party winning. All that does is give their own party more power for the next four years. Until they come back into power. Then the cycle repeats. Don’t you think if one side had it ‘right’, I mean really ‘right’, they would keep winning each year? But neither do. So, we yo-yo back and forth. Feeling passion one cycle, beat down the next, on top again the next.

Morals matter, well about once every four years, then we go back to forgetting morals matter. Walking by homeless like they’re not there. Laughing a comics tell crude jokes but she’s a woman so it’s okay to say those things. Letting our government drop tens of thousands of drone-bombs on people different from us, killing anyone in our way of a $1.99 gallon of gas.

I know this sounds naive, but I just want my friends back. I want to be able to have a conversation that isn’t filled with hatred and absolutes. I didn’t vote for him because he’s a bad person. I didn’t vote for her because she was an awful liar. I voted for someone I thought was different than the establishment because I truly want a change that benefits us all.

I’m stuck in the middle right now wanting to be a “we”, but surrounded by “us’s” and “them’s”.

 

 

The One Fix to Talent Acquisition You’re Too Afraid to Implement

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There’s a ton of reasons we are afraid of stuff. I was never scared of the dark, but for some stupid reasons, I’m scared of bees. I know that I’m not going to die from a bee. I’ve been stung. It hurts, you get over it. Yet, I hate when a bee is buzzing around me!

I think most people are afraid to be ‘found out’ professionally. To have it discovered that we aren’t as good as we think we are. Every function has hickeys. Things we really don’t want others in the company to see or know about. They aren’t career ending things, still, they are things we aren’t proud about.

In talent acquisition, we lose great talent at points in our recruiting process. It happens way more than it should, for a number of reasons. If you were to truly dig into the exact reason of why each person was lost, it wouldn’t be something most TA departments would be proud of.

Visier recently released their annual Hiring Manager survey. It’s full of great information, one stat that hit me in the gut was this:

What this is really saying is that talent acquisition isn’t giving this information to the hiring manager, or more likely, your hiring managers don’t believe the B.S. you’re selling them on the reasons why!

The majority of TA departments, when asked why a good candidate is lost during the process will come up with candidate problem reasons. The candidate backed out, it was too far to drive. They got an offer from another company and couldn’t wait. It wasn’t the position they truly wanted. Etc.

All of which might be legitimate, but we forget, many times the hiring managers get a different side.  Usually, hiring managers know people, who know people, etc. and the ‘real’ reason will get back to them. It then becomes, “well, Mark was getting the run around from your TA team about his plane ticket costing too much, and he felt like it just wasn’t worth dealing with this at this level”, or “the Recruiter took three days to call Mary back to schedule the interview time and by then she decided to take the other offer”.

The reality is, the majority of TA leaders don’t want to know the ‘real’ reason because it reflects poorly on their team, and on them. That doesn’t feel good! Uncovering the brutal truth is painful and many times embarrassing.

Want to fix your TA department? Find out why candidates truly left your hiring process. If that’s your focus, you’ll quickly have your priorities of what to fix, change, and improve upon.

How do you do this? First, you don’t allow your recruiting team to ask the question. The answers you’ll get back will be ‘massaged’ to make TA look great and make the hiring managers look bad, or at the very least blame anyone else except yourself. Third-party this out, or find a neutral party within the organization that can make these inquiries and report back the results. This is key.

The best leaders want to know the truth. Not their version of the truth, but the real truth. Unfortunately, the truth might be the scariest thing you’ll ever face.

The Joe Biden Employee Appreciation Award

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I’m sure by now most of you have seen President Obama give Joe Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It was very moving, no matter which side of the aisle you sit:

Let’s face it, being the Vice President of the United States is a thankless job. You don’t really get credit for anything besides being a good wingman, which Joe seemed to be to Obama throughout their entire time together in Washington.

So, President Obama did what he could to show his appreciation, and Joe responded emotionally like I think most people would expect. It’s a huge honor receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Isn’t really all any of our employees want? No, not the Medal of Freedom, to be appreciated for the work you do. To be recognized by your supervisor in the best way you can, publicly, letting everyone know, “hey, Joe’s a great guy, he gave it his all, all the time, and I that truly matters to me”.

Being appreciated is so powerful, yet, so underutilized.

Why?

Because you can’t fake appreciation. I mean you can, but everyone knows, especially the person receiving fake appreciation. Real appreciation is emotional. It’s connected. You can feel it.

You have a bunch of really hard working people in your organization. Not all of your employees, but still a bunch that deserve this level of appreciation. The key is that they get it from the person who actually appreciates them for real. They might not all act like Joe receiving his medal, but don’t be surprised if they do.

Appreciation is the holy grail of engagement.