Category Archives: influence

Cutting Corners Equals Better Performance

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So, there’s this famous behavioral learning study that gets performed over and over by various researchers. It’s basically the lever study in which if you learn to pull the lever something good happens. The classic is usually a monkey and the treat is a banana. Monkey learns to pull the lever and they get a treat.

The question always is, how long does it take or how many steps, can we train them in some way to do this quicker. Recently, a similar study was done with children and dogs. The researchers found they could train the children in five steps to they would get pretty good at pulling the lever and getting the treat.

The dogs, on the other hand, were another story! You see, dogs can be trained very well, but their natural instinct is not to follow rules, but to find the fastest way to gratification. The dogs mostly just went right for the box, tore off the lid, and got the snacks. Guess what? You don’t have to push down a lever if you rip off the top!

Dogs are good at cutting corners.

When I worked for Applebee’s we constantly spent time and resources training cooks how to cook new menu items. We built entire programs, did training sessions, had rewards, would go back and constantly check and test. It was critical that the Tequila Lime Chicken you ordered in Detroit was the same Tequila Lime Chicken you ordered in San Diego!

Problem was, the best cooks would always find ways to cut corners and do it as well, if not better, and faster! We would have it timed out and stepped out to the second and the data would start rolling in and show us that some kitchen in a location in Indiana is cooking it 45 seconds faster than everyone else!

It was our cooks that found if you take a skillet, turn it upside down over a piece of cooking chicken, you can cook that piece of chicken like a third faster without losing any moister or taste! At first, we pushed back in operations and sent memos out to not do this! It wasn’t “procedure”! Not soon after our test kitchen sent out specs on how to ‘dome’ chicken using an upside down skillet!

Cutting corners became the new procedure!

Organizations usually have an issue with folks who cut corners. It’s believed that cutting corners will lead to lower quality, less customer satisfaction, etc.

To me, many times, cutting corners is the first indicator that you’ve loaded in a bunch of waste into your process! Many times the people cutting corners are showing you there might be a better way of doing things, a faster way, an easier way. I’m a big believer in let’s not make this harder than we have to

Want to increase performance in your organization? Look for those cutting corners and determine are they just being lazy, or have they figured out a better way!

How an HR Leader Would Help Trump Get Better

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By now, if you didn’t see the debates live, you’ve heard that Trump, for the most part, was unprepared and got beat pretty good by Hillary. (BTW – the media, and Clinton’s marketing machine have conditioned me to do this – I call Donald Trump – “Trump” and I call Hillary Clinton – “Hillary” – why is that? Because we have a negative reaction to “Clinton” based on Bill!).

All the time I’m watching this butt whipping I thinking to myself if I had an employee who just performed that badly how would I coach them, pick them up from an HR perspective. Here’s what I think most HR leaders would do with Trump:

1. Pull them into a closed door meeting and say something like, “So, tell me, how did ‘you’ feel like it went last night?” Inevitably, Trump, being Trump, would say something stupid like “I was Yuuuge!” or some sexist remark, which would help the HR Leader frame the rest of how this discussion would go.

2. The next statement from HR would most likely be, “Well, the feedback I’m getting is that it didn’t go so well”. It’s a safe statement, non-confrontational, allows us to keep the energy and passion down so the ’employee’ doesn’t get worked up and this gets out of control.

3. “Let’s talk about your preparation. What did you do to prepare for this event?” Now we are getting into helping the employee understand where their performance started going south. You didn’t prepare, it showed up on game day, we need to correct this. Unfortunately, you’re dealing with a high performer, or at least that’s what Trump would consider himself, so ‘preparation’ isn’t something he needs, he’s a natural, he’s always on, he’s a closer.

4. Ugh, so you’re dealing with unreasonable expectations of their own performance (sound familiar!?). At this point who have two choices, either you’re willing to except this performance again, or you need it to change. Let’s assume you want it to change.  You have to define to Trump what would success look like, but first draw a line in the sand that what the past performance was, was not success. “Look, you got your butt handed to you by a ‘girl’ (I like to twist the knife a little, what can I say!) we can’t have this happen again and it’s going to start with preparation!”

5. Now, HR being HR, they will want to give you some tool. Maybe online time management training, a life coach, or something else that will have little impact in actual performance, but make them feel like they really are moving the needle on performance.  Trump being Trump will take the easiest way out, I would guess life coach, as long as she is young, skinny and pretty.

6. Debate #2 happens and Trump does the exact same thing!!! No preparation and once again gets beat up by a girl and once again believes he did great!

7. Go to Step #1

Some will find this funny, some will find this as a painful reminder of their own performance management within their own organizations. Way too many organizations continue to just do the same thing over and over, expecting it to magically change, but it doesn’t.  Accountability happens when step #6 happens and instead of going back to step #1 to jump to step #8 and go back to the definition of success, what was missed and now what is the accountability factor that was agreed to.

Great performance management is comfortable until it has to be uncomfortable.

The Cost of a New Hire is $1000-$5000!?

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Ryan Holmes, the CEO at HootSuite, recently posted an article over at LinkedIn. Ryan is, of course, an “Influencer” for LinkedIn, because he’s a CEO and because he works for a cool brand like Hootsuite. Who cares if he knows what he’s talking about, he’s from Hootsuite, muthfucka!! He must be influential!

Anywho.

Ryan was actually talking about Google’s “bungee” program (see if you’re influential you talk about Google!) and how millennials only care about being developed. Because if we know anything we know young people are great judges of what they actually want. So, Ryan and Hootsuite are actually coming up with their own copycat program and calling it “stretch”.

This program basically allows Hootsuite employees to try out other roles within Hootsuite one day per week, and if it goes well to eventually into that role full time. The basis of the program being that “great employees will be great employees in any role, given the change”.

But, one other big thing jumped out from the post. Remember this is a CEO of a major company. He based all of this program on cost of turnover and believes his cost of turnover is $5000 per employee leaving! $5000!? Now, if you spent 17 seconds in Talent Acquisition you know there is no way $5000 covers the cost of a top employee, probably not even a crappy employee.

SHRM, and other organizations, continually throw numbers at HR and TA that say they believe the cost of turnover is usually 1 to 1.5 times the salary of the person leaving. Do you see the problem with the HR math we have?

CEO believes that it cost $5000 to replace an IT Developer in your company making $85,000. You believe is costs $85,000-125,000 to replace that person. THIS is a major problem and disconnect!

It would be easy for me to say, “well Ryan just pulled some bad data from some crappy content put together by a TA tech vendor to help shape their own story”, but it’s truly the reality for most executives. This is why I constantly caution TA pros and leaders to stop using the 1-1.5 times metric and start asking your executives what they think it is.

In my experience, what I find is most executives, for a professional position will usually give you a number around $10,000. The biggest miss of executives is they never calculate the revenue and profit a great employee produces versus a bad employee or having that position left open. This is where the SHRM number comes from.

This is problematic because most executives won’t tie revenue numbers to someone who’s not in sales, wrongly, since everyone in your organization has an impact on revenue and profit. So, you can fight this battle, which you’ll mostly lose, or you can just go with what they believe and build your story from there.

$5,000-$10,000 per lost employee aren’t small numbers, it’s still significant dollars to work with as a TA leader, and you’ll get better buy-in from CEOs like Ryan!

 

Want to live like a rock star? Move to Detroit!

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Glassdoor recently published a list of the Top 25 Cities where your pay will go the furthest. Who topped the list!? Yep, it’s DETROIT! GD found that the Cost of Living ratio in Detroit is 50%! That basically means that when living in Detroit you get to use 50% of your income for things other than bills! What is the Cost of Living ratio in San Fransisco (the lowest of all American cities)? 11%! Basically, you only get to use, for your own enjoyment $.10 of every dollar you earn in San Fran!

What is the Cost of Living ratio in San Fransisco (the lowest of all American cities)? 11%! Basically, you only get to use, for your own enjoyment $.10 of every dollar you earn in San Fran!

So, if you read this blog a couple times you know I’m a fan of Detroit! Everyone loves a comeback story and Detroit might be the single biggest comeback story on the planet right now. Being at the top of this list just confirms what others in and around the Midwest have already been seeing.

Here’s the Top 10 in order:

  1. Detroit, MI
  2. Memphis, TN
  3. Pittsburgh, PA
  4. Cleveland, OH
  5. Indianapolis, IN
  6. St. Louis, MO
  7. Cincinnati, OH
  8. Birmingham, AL
  9. Kansas City, MO
  10. Louisville, KY

So, what jumps out about this list?  For the most part, it’s mid-sized, midwest cities.  Low cost of living. Four seasons. A lot of Applebee’s restaurants (at least that’s what the people on the coasts think!). One southern city on the list in Bham – which I hear from Kris Dunn and Dawn Burke is a hidden treasure.

I’m a midwest guy, born and raised. Went to college in the front range of the Rocky Mountains. Have visited every big city in the U.S., multiple times. Big cities are great, but not the best place to raise a family. California’s weather is awesome if you like paying $1 million dollars for 700 square foot home next to a highway.

The reality is startups and Fortune 500 companies are beginning to see what Glassdoor found in putting this list together. Google has a growing campus in Ann Arbor, MI, located about 40 miles from downtown Detroit, about 15 miles from the Detroit airport. It’s easier to attract and retain a Midwest workforce than it is when you’re primarily trying to recruit to the coasts.

This is especially true when your workforce starts to get to the age where they want to settle down, start a family and buy a house. Sure, it’s fairly easy to get college-aged kids to relocate from the midwest to California, New York or Boston. The trick is keeping them there! In Michigan, I see this every summer. The kids come back to have their weddings. Once they’re back, they begin to feel that pull to stay ‘home’.

This is why Midwest companies that are great at recruiting all have some sort of Boomerang recruitment strategy. Most are diving deep in their databases to find students who graduated over the past five years and building a database of 1-5 year experienced pros they are reaching out to constantly, ‘welcoming’ them to come back and enjoy the riches of the Midwest!

HR Pros – Stop it! Facts Really Don’t Matter

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If I know one thing in life, it’s that HR Pros LOVE facts!

We are the Queens and Kings of CYA, and nothing covers your backside better than a whole bunch of facts written down on a form, with copies of emails, and signatures on forms that said you understood what you signed!  It’s HRs little piece of Heaven.

So, you can understand why this recent study from Dartmouth has me concerned:

For years my go-to source for downer studies of how our hard-wiring makes democracy hopeless has been Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth.

Nyan and his collaborators have been running experiments trying to answer this terrifying question about American voters: Do facts matter?

The answer, basically, is no. When people are misinformed, giving them facts to correct those errors only makes them cling to their beliefs more tenaciously.

Here’s some of what Nyhan found:

-People who thought WMDs were found in Iraq believed that misinformation even more strongly when they were shown a news story correcting it.

-People who thought George W. Bush banned all stem cell research kept thinking he did that even after they were shown an article saying that only some federally funded stem cell work was stopped.

-People who said the economy was the most important issue to them, and who disapproved of Obama’s economic record, were shown a graph of nonfarm employment over the prior year – a rising line, adding about a million jobs. They were asked whether the number of people with jobs had gone up, down or stayed about the same. Many, looking straight at the graph, said down.

-But if, before they were shown the graph, they were asked to write a few sentences about an experience that made them feel good about themselves, a significant number of them changed their minds about the economy. If you spend a few minutes affirming your self-worth, you’re more likely to say that the number of jobs increased.

Why is this research important to HR Pros?  It shows us that your facts aren’t really the most important factor in trying to influence a decision one way, or another.  As HR Pros we tend to get ready for the ‘big meeting’ by getting all of our facts in line and making graphs for the PowerPoint presentation.  When in reality, you should be working on your delivery.  You could present total B.S. but in a way that is persuasive and has a better chance of getting your way than presenting your facts in your normal way!

Let me put this another way — if your executives think your recruiting function is broken and you can’t find talent, you presenting facts that say otherwise, won’t change their mind. In fact, they actually might think you’re even worse than before! No matter how clear your facts tell a different story.  What do you need to do?  You need to do a better job marketing how your function has changed.  Make them believe you’re now different. Speak different, act different.  Even if you continue with the same processes, you need to develop an internal department marketing plan that you’re not the same department!

Our perception is our reality.

How the Largest Company in the World does Employment Branding!

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Everyone loves to dump on Walmart. They’ve done enough in their past to make it easy, but I love to tell people working in HR or TA at Walmart is probably the toughest HR or TA gig on the planet! Why? Because of the challenges they face with their brand!

That’s why this recent Employment Branding video done by their CEO is freaking BRILLIANT! Check it out:

It’s clearly a take off on Jerry Seinfeld’s web series “Comedian’s In Cars Getting Coffee” (which is awesome).

I mean really! Can you imagine going to your CEO and saying, “Hey, Doug, we’ve got an idea? We’re going to have you drive around with Ted in his used Toyota Camry. We’ll video it as he asks you random questions and tries to make you act like a fool. Sound good?” How do you think your CEO would react? Would you even get into the CEO’s office to ask!?

It’s really hard for a CEO of the world’s largest company to come across like a normal person! But, Doug McMillon does it perfectly! Is it me or is McMillon, way too close to “McMillion”!?  Maybe just a coincidence…unfortunate last name for a CEO of the world’s largest company! (FYI – Doug made $19 “million” last year)

So, what did we learn about Walmart and Doug?

– Doug takes a nap on Saturday afternoon after returning from work. (Man of the people – we all want to take a nap on Saturday afternoon!)

– Great Chewbacca impression. (Willing to make fun of himself – not your normal CEO)

– Walmart overuses phrases like every other corporate, and Doug will make fun of it. (Willing to make fun of Walmart in a respectful way.)

– Walmart doesn’t need to ‘remake’ itself, it needs to remember who it is. (Founder’s culture – Sam Walton knew what the hell he was doing, let’s remember that.)

Basically, Walmart just gave you a perfect guide on how to brand yourself to your possible talent pool! If your leader can come across this way, the hope is those under him will follow the lead. It’s not easy. They have a ton of work in front of them, but this is a great first step!

Toughest job on the planet – HR and TA at Walmart. You think you’ve got problems? Try managing an organization that has 2.1 Million employees, runs on razor thin margins and has to be customer-first focused.

Kudos to Doug and the EB Team at Walmart on the video!

 

Great Talent Supports Great Talent

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Too often leaders put up with a great talent who’s shitty to other employees. The belief is that because the employee is so talented we should be willing to put up with how they treat others. It happens all the time in organizations! All. The. Time.

Ichiro Suzuki is a very successful Major League Baseball player for the Seattle Mariners who just hit his 3,000 hit in the major leagues, that just adds to his thousand plus hits he had in the Japanese professional baseball league. All those hits make him arguably the greatest hitter of all time at the professional level of baseball.

ESPN did an article about Ichiro recently as he was coming very close to the 3,000 hit milestone in the MLB, a very rare feat. What most people don’t know is Ichiro almost left the MLB after only one season because his teammates treated him so badly:

“Suzuki explained later that in the middle of his career with the Mariners, when the team wasn’t playing well but he was an All-Star and Gold Glove winner, his teammates called him selfish and said that he cared only about individual accolades. After Griffey, Sweeney and Ibanez arrived, he says, they stood up for him and encouraged their teammates to worry about their own play first.”

It wasn’t until Seattle brought in other MLB All-Stars that Ichiro felt welcomed. Great talent, supports great talent. Okay, everyone on an MLB roster is talented, but even within those rosters, there are levels of talent. Ichiro is a hall of fame talent. Griffey is a hall of famer.

The point to all of this is your best talent should support the other best talent of your organization.  If you have great talent that isn’t supporting each other, you need to make a move. Great talent is talented if they don’t support the other talent in the organization. That might be the single most difficult thing for leaders to understand.

Your talent is wasted if you can’t find ways to lift up the other talent around you. Seattle was able to find talent that was willing to do that and Ichiro turned his talent into one of the greatest of all time, but he was also very close to just packing it in and going home.

I wonder how much talent walks out your door based on how they are being treated by others in your organization?

I’m a Jealous Asshole.

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Don’t blow out someone else’s candle to make yours brighter. – Chelsea Handler


I had someone close to me tell me recently they were jealous of me.  It was hard for them to do, I know. It always hard to put yourself out there and be vulnerable.

I’m jealous as well. I’m jealous all the f’ing time. I hate that about myself.

I’m surrounded constantly be really, really talented people. That’s a gift and a curse. I know many of these folks on a really personal level and I know they work their ass off to get what they have, but it doesn’t stop me from being jealous of them.

Why should you care?

Jealousy kills so many talented people. Not literally killed, but emotionally and from a talent perspective.  It’s easy to say, “just focus on you! Be the best ‘you’, etc.”  It’s much harder to actually do that.

I have a couple of friends I can reach out to, tell them I’m being a jealous asshole, they’ll listen and they’ll try and help. I appreciate that. I trust them completely not to share my crazy jealous fits.  They’re so childlike, they’re embarrassing.   Everyone needs friends like these, and you need to be this friend!

It sucks being a jealous asshole. My wife says I’m never jealous, but I hide it from her. We do that kind of stuff for the people we love the most.

Don’t blow out someone else’s candle to make yours brighter, might be the best advice I’ve heard in a very long time. It won’t stop me from being jealous, but I hope it stops me from trying to bring down someone else when I’m jealous.

 

 

 

The First Sign You Suck at Hiring!

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Hiring people to work for you directly is probably the single hardest thing you’ll ever have to do as a manager of people. To be fair, most people are average at hiring, some are flat out kill and probably 20% are awful at hiring.

The first sign you suck at hiring is your new hire turnover is an outlier in your organization, your market, or your industry.

So, what constitutes new hire turnover?

I find most organizations actually don’t measure their hiring managers on new hire turnover but use this to judge effectiveness on their talent acquisition team. That’s a complete joke! That is unless you’re allowing your TA team to make hiring decisions! New hire turn is a direct reflection of hiring decisions. Period.

When should you measure new hire turn?  Organizations are going to vary on this based on your normal turn cycles and level of the position. Most use 90 days as the cap for new hire turnover. That is safe for most organizations, but you might want to dig into your own numbers to find out what’s best for your own organization. I know orgs that use one year to measure new hire turn and orgs that use 30 days.

How do you help yourself if you suck at hiring?

1. Take yourself out of the process altogether.  Most hiring managers won’t do this because their pride won’t allow them. If you consistently have high new hire turn comparable to others, you might consider this, you just have bad internal filters that predispose you to select people who don’t fit your org or management style. Don’t take it personally. I suck at technical stuff. I shop that part of my job off to someone who’s better. You might be an exceptional manager of your business, but you suck at hiring. Shop that out to someone who’s better!

2. Add non-subjective components into your hiring process and follow them 100% of the time. Assessments are scientifically proven to tell you what they’re designed to tell you. If you follow what they’ll tell you, you’ll be much more likely to make consistent hires. If that assessment gives you better hires, then keep following it, or find an assessment that does give you that consistency.

3. Analyze your reasons for each misfire hire. Were there any commonalities in those? What I find is most poor hires stem from a hiring manager who gets stuck on one reason to hire, which has nothing to do with being successful in your environment. Example: “I want high energy people!” But then they work in an environment where they are stuck in a 6X8 foot cube all day. It’s like caging a wild animal! 

Numbers don’t lie. If you consistently bomb your new hire turnover metrics, it’s not the hires, it’s you! In the organizations where I’ve seen the best improvement in reducing new hire turnover, it was in organizations where new hire turnover metric results were solely the responsibility of each hiring manager, and nothing to do with talent acquisition.

It’s the 80/20 rule. 80% of most new hire turn is usually coming from around 20% of your hiring managers. Fix those issues and ‘magically’ your new hire turn improves.

The Rooney Rules Killed NFL Diversity Hiring

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What the heck is the Rooney Rule?

“The Rooney Rule is a National Football League policy that requires league teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs. It is sometimes cited as an example of affirmative action, though there is no quota or preference given to minorities in the hiring of candidates.”

Basically, in 2003 the NFL decided that finally, enough was enough in a league where the majority of its players are black and the majority of its head coaches are white. The Rooney Rule was established to try and fix this issue. When it first started it was more effective than previous hiring cycles and 26% of hires in the NFL for head coaches were of minority hires.

ESPN’s Outside the Lines discovered the problem has gotten worse, not better, over the past five years only where 1 out of 22 hires has been a minority head coach.

So, what happened?

It’s classic corporate problem fixing. The try and cure a symptom of the problem and not the problem. Follow my logic:

  1. We need more minority hires!
  2. The problem is perceived to be we don’t hire minorities, if we did, it would solve our problem. Minority coaches are just as good as white coaches, they just aren’t getting interviews.
  3. Look it works! We started mandating you had to interview minorities and instantly minority hiring went up. Give us a trophy!

Then, it stops working.

The Rooney Rule stopped working because interviewing potential minority head coaches was not the issue. The issue is we have a lack of minority coaches in general. I’m not sure why this is, but I have a theory.

When I was growing up many of my white male friends had a dream. That dream was to play college sports. Probably very similar to most black males of that same age. The other part of that dream was that would come back, teach gym and coach. I think this is where the paths separated in the coaching funnel.

I have three sons, all of whom play sports. When I hear them talk with their friends, I still hear the difference. The white kids want to be teachers and coach as a profession. The black kids don’t talk about this path as often. All of them want to play college athletics, but it would seem from my experience that at some point white kids believe teaching and coaching as a viable career and blacks are less likely to believe this is their career path.

Obviously, this is very anecdotal. I’m one guy with one experience, but I did coach youth sports for 17 years and saw this happen time and time again.

The Rooney Rule is failing not because minorities aren’t getting interviewed. The Rooney Rule is failing because not enough minorities are getting an opportunity to coach, or are not choosing the coaching path as a career.  One other issue that comes into play here is obtaining at least a four-year college degree and the access to affordable education.

For those who don’t know most NFL coaches get their start by coaching in the NCAAs. To coach in the NCAAs you must have a four-year degree at almost every school I’ve ever heard of. In fact, there have been NCAA head coaches fired for lying about having a degree and it was found they actually didn’t when switching jobs and the new institution did a degree verification.

So, why should you care about NFL diversity hiring?

In a nutshell, this is all of our organizations trying to diversify our workforce.  If you don’t try and fix the real problem, getting minorities to believe your profession is a viable career path, you’re never going to fix your issue, you’re just going to poach the few in the field from each other.  That means you need specific minority scholarship programs, minority internship programs, etc. At a level, that is commensurate with the level of hiring you’re trying to achieve!

I hear executives all the time talk about increasing minority hiring, but it’s just talk, not programs and dollars. This is the NFL’s issue as well. The NFL needs to specific program under the Rooney Rules that gets teams to hire more minority coaches in general, not just head coaches. They’ve begun with the NFL Minority Fellowship, which in 2015 had 134 participants, and their is hope this will have an impact in the future. Programs like these are what organizations need if you’re serious about diversity hiring.