Category Archives: influence

Google Announced They Discovered The Secret to a Great Workplace!

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Over the past five years, I’ve been outspoken over my dislike of Google HR.  But I have to give them credit now, because they spent years of work, really digging into the concept of teams and employees to figure out how we, HR Pros, help our organizations make the whole thing work. Kudos to you Google!

Here’s what they found:

“The tech giant charged a team to find out. The project, known as Project Aristotle, took several years, and included interviews with hundreds of employees and analysis of data about the people on more than 100 active teams at the company. The Googlers looked hard to find a magic formula—the perfect mix of individuals necessary to form a stellar team—but it wasn’t that simple. “We were dead wrong,” the company said.

 Google’s data-driven approach ended up highlighting what leaders in the business world have known for a while; the best teams respect one another’s emotions and are mindful that all members should contribute to the conversation equally. It has less to do with who is in a team, and more with how a team’s members interact with one another…
Matt Sakaguchi, a midlevel manager at Google, was keen to put Project Aristotle’s findings into practice. He told Charles Duhigg of The New York Times how he took his team off-site to open up about his cancer diagnosis. His colleagues were initially silent, but then began sharing their own personal stories.
At the heart of Sakaguchi’s strategy, and Google’s findings, is the concept of “psychological safety,” a model of teamwork in which members have a shared belief that it is safe to take risks and share a range of ideas without the fear of being humiliated…
…In short. Just be nice.”
Wait, what?
Be nice.  That’s what Google found after ‘years’ of work? Be nice!?
You got that HR pros? Just tell your employees to be nice.  Google has it figured out. You can stop working now. Just listen to Google. They spent three exhausting years of research on this.  RELAX. They know what they’re doing. They’re Google. We all just want to be Google.
Mrs. Wilson was my kindergarten teacher. She was this young, beautiful black woman who seemed to be about 7 feet tall. To be fair, I was five and three feet tall, so she might have only been around 5’7″. Anyway, in 1975, she told me something very similar. In fact, I think she used those exact same words, “Be nice, Tim.”
Maybe Google should have just hired Mrs. Wilson, and saved all that time and work. Apparently, she also figured out the secret to a great workplace!

Does it matter if a POTUS has ever hired anyone?

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In the last Republican Presidential Debate, candidate Ted Cruz got in a nice jab on candidate Donald Trump about hiring illegal aliens. At which, Trump fired back (he always fires back) that he was the only candidate to ever have hired anyone.

That last part gave me pause. I don’t care who you might be voting for, Republican, Democrat, Socialist (hey, Bernie!), etc., is it important for a President to have experience hiring people?

It’s a great question to ponder. All of us who hire, as part of our jobs, know how difficult it is, and how frustrating and wonderous of an experience it can be.  We know how difficult it is to select the right candidate, and how disastrous it can be when the wrong candidate is selected.

I do get that while most political lifers have probably not hired in a sense we have hired, they do some kind of ‘hiring’ in their various political offices. They have to select staff to run their campaigns, to work with them in their elected positions, etc. So, while they haven’t had to hire for a private business, they have had to select individuals to come work for them.

Now, if you ever witness government hiring you could easily argue, as Trump did, that none of these people have ever really hired! Government hiring isn’t really hiring as much as it’s selecting the tallest of the seven dwarfs.  Not much recruiting ever takes place, it’s post and pray of the worst kind.

So, I tend to fall into the camp of I want my POTUS to be someone who has really had to go out and hire and fire. Don’t take this as I want Trump to be POTUS, I’m also of the camp that I don’t want my POTUS to be crazy!

If all you’ve done in your career is ‘appoint’ friends and associates to positions, you probably aren’t really ready to run the country. Both parties have this issue. Lifetime politicians don’t understand real world business. They understand politics, which has nothing to do with actually running a business, creating jobs, creating value, having your neck on the line for results.

I want a POTUS who has felt the pressure of having to truly perform, or you lose everything, or you get fired. At that point, they understand what the vast majority of real Americans feel every day.  Elected people don’t feel this. They get elected, and they immediately go back to work on getting re-elected, which mainly constitutes telling people what they want to hear. Again, both parties do this the exact same way.

Yes, I want a POTUS that has real world business experience. One that’s sat across a desk and had to make real hiring decisions that had a bottom line impact to the success, or failure, of a business.  I understand that person. I don’t understand politicians.

 

Failure Is The New Black!

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(Rerun from 2013 – This one still holds up very well!) 

This inspiration came from my friend William Tincup.  If you don’t know him, you need to know him, he’s brilliant.  Like my head hurts after talking to him brilliant, in a good way.

He made a comment recently which was just this:

“Failure is the new black.”

Another friend of ours, Jason Seiden, has been saying this for years, in a little different way, with his “Fail Spectacularly” motto.  Either way, you get the point, it’s now ‘in’ to talk about your failures. It’s a really popular and motivating thought process for a lot of people. Basically, it’s alright that you failed, go do it again and eventually you’ll get it right.

Past generations would go to great lengths to hide their failures.  Think about your parents and grandparents, you never heard them talk about things they failed at.  Think back about how your own parents spoke to you. Was failure really an option?  It wasn’t in my household.  We’re Sacketts, and Sacketts are winners, and winners get to do what they want (oh wait, that was me weekly to my own kids!).

I’m just wondering who originally decided that it was alright to fail?

You can’t go anywhere anymore without everyone telling you “Success starts with Failure” or “The Secret to success is failure”.  This comes from the concept of traditional scientific theory.  Have a theory. Test theory. Fail. Try another approach. Fail. Keep trying and eventually, you’ll be successful.  Straightforward. Makes sense.  But that really only plays out when you’re testing scientific theories.

Can we agree real life might be a bit different?

Malcolm Gladwell’s new book David and Goliath talks about the concept of failure and what it does to the brightest college students in the world.  His research found that the top 50  PhD students going into schools like Harvard, are all smarter than the smartest kid going into Missouri.  But at the end of their schooling the brightest kid at Missouri is more successful than the number 50 kid at Harvard.  Why is that?  The number 50 kid believes they are a failure because they are not as smart as the 49 kids above them at Harvard. While the kid at Missouri, who wasn’t as bright as all the Harvard kids, became a rock star at Missouri. That success, that confidence, led him/her to more and more success.  Put that same Missouri kid at Harvard and he/she would have failed miserably and may have even dropped out of the program.

Let me give you an example.  Your kid goes up to bat.  Strikes out, which is a failure. Goes up the next time and strikes out.  Goes up again and strikes out. Continues game after game, never hitting, only striking out.  Continued failure will not lead to this kid’s success.  In fact, continued failure will lead to more failure as their confidence is shattered.

The path to success, for most life situations, is not through failure, it’s through success.  Continued little successes that will eventually lead to big successes.

Celebrating failure, like it’s some sort of a success, doesn’t lead to success.  Is it alright to fail?  Of course it is. But should we be celebrating it?  I have children.  I want them to be successful at anything they do.  When they fail, we don’t throw a party.  We talk about where failure leads, what we/they need to do to ensure we don’t fail the next time.  Many times that entails a ton of hard work.  Failures enemy is hard work.

I don’t like that we are getting comfortable as a society with failure.  That failure has become something to celebrate. Something that is now cool.   That we give a trophy to the team that lost every game.  It doesn’t make us better as a society.  It doesn’t make our organizations better.  Failure leads to more failure, not to success.

Here’s hoping ‘Success’ becomes the new black!

6 Things That Will Make You A Great HR Pro

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Yesterday, I wrote this post on a question someone asked me about How do I become a great HR Pro?  I told them to stop sucking. Then I remembered I wrote this about three years ago – it’s better than just ‘stop sucking’, although, that’s brilliant advice as well! 

The one great thing I love about going to HR and Talent conferences is that you always get reminded about what really good HR should look like.  It doesn’t mean that your shop will be there, but it gives you something to shoot for.  I’ll admit, sometimes it can be frustrating listening to some HR Pro from a great brand tell you how they ‘built’ their great employment brand through all their hard work and brilliant ideas.  All the while, not mentioning anything about “oh, yeah, and we already had this great brand that marketing spends $100 million a year to keep great!”

Regardless, seeing great HR always reminds me that great HR is obtainable for everyone.  Great HR has nothing to do with size or resources.  It has a lot to do with an HR team, even a team of one, deciding little by little we’re going to make this great!

I think there are six things you need to know to make your HR department great:

1. Know how to ‘sell’ your HR vision to the organization and your executives.  The best HR Pros I know are great storytellers and, in turn, great at selling their visions.  If you don’t have a clear vision of what you want your HR shop to look like, how do you expect others to get on board and help you get there.  Sit down, away from work, and write out exactly what you want your HR shop to look like.  Write it long-hand. Write in bullet points. Just start.  It will come.

2. Buy two pairs of shoes: one of your employees and one of your hiring managers. Try them on constantly.  These are your customers, your clients.  You need to feel their joys and pains and truly live them.  Knowing their struggles will make you design better HR programs to support them.  Support them, not you.

3. Working hard is number 1.  Working smart is number 1A.  Technology can do every single transaction in HR.  Don’t allow tasks and administrative things be why you can’t do great HR.  Get technology to do all of this busy work so you can focus on real HR deliverables.

4. Break something in your organization that everyone hates and replace it with something everyone loves.  This is usually a process of something you’ve always done, and people are telling you it still has to be done that way. Until it doesn’t, and you break it.  By the way, this doesn’t have to be something in HR.  Our leaders and our employees have so many things that frustrate them in our environments.  Just find one and get rid of it.

5. Sometimes the path of least resistance is the best solution. HR people love to fight battles for the simple act of fighting the battle. “NO! It has to be done this way!” “We will NOT allow any workarounds!”   Great HR finds the path of least resistance.  The path of greatest adoption.  The path which makes our people feel the most comfortable, even if it isn’t the path we really, really want to take.

6. Stop being an asshole. You’re in HR, you’re not a Nazi.  Just be nice.  We’re supposed to be the one group in our organization that understands.  Understands people are going to have bad days and probably say things they don’t mean.  Understands that we all will have pressures, some greater than others, but all pressure nonetheless. Understands that work is about 25% of our life, and many times that other 75% creates complete havoc in our world!

Great HR has nothing to do with HR.  Great HR has a lot to do with being a great leader, even when that might not be your position in the organization.

How do you become a great HR Pro?

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From The Project mailbag:

Tim,

I’m a recent HR graduate and I want to be great in HR.  How do I become a great HR pro like you? Is there certain things I can do, read, etc.?

Marcy

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I get asked this kind of question a lot.  I want to be a great HR pro. What do I need to do?

Ugh! That’s a hard question. There’s a lot of things you can do. There’s a lot of things you have no control over. 

S0, what do you need to do?

Just start doing great HR work! Stop waiting around for someone to allow you to do great HR work. If you want to be great, you have to show people you can be great. 

Derek Jeter didn’t wait around for someone to let him show them he was a great ShortStop. He just went out and played Shortstop. He made mistakes. He corrected those mistakes. He just kept doing it. 

You need to go ‘play’ HR. You’ll be bad at some of it. You might actually find you’re pretty damn good at some of it.  The more you play, the better you’ll get. It’s probably unrealistic you’ll be great right off the bat, but who knows, you might.  

You’re going to find that most HR pros don’t become great because they wait for someone else to tell them what to do.  You won’t become great waiting to be told what to do. You need to find out what to do on your own. How do you do that?

Educate yourself. Network with other HR pros. Find out what others are doing, and what’s working and what’s not working. Start testing things in your organization in small ways. If it works, test it in a bigger way.

Ask the people in your organization that are in charge of driving or generating revenue what they would do if they ran HR. Try some of those things. Ask them what roadblocks they have in the organization. Then work to break those down.

Walk away from other HR peers who seem to hate HR.  Great HR pros love HR. They love being involved and making a difference. They are not happy with keeping things the same.

How do you become a great HR Pro?  You just have to go and do it. If you do enough stuff, you’ll find some things that are really good. Do more of those. Do less of the stuff that sucks. Being great is really easy. More good stuff, less sucky stuff! But, you have to do stuff.

The #1 Way You Can Tell Recruiting In NOT Important to Your Executives

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I had a recruiting leader reach out to me recently and ask for help.  They had some critical positions they needed to fill but weren’t having any success.  The executives were all over her to get her team to fill these positions.  The success of the company depended on it!

You feel her, right?  We’ve all been there at one point or another in our careers.

She was looking for some advice about what they could do, because they tried everything, and she was at wits end. This exchange was through email, so the first thing I did was what I usually do. First, I check her LinkedIn profile to check her background. She was solid, good recruiting experience, good companies. Then, I check the company’s career site.

This is where I find most companies and ‘we’ve done everything’ start to fall down.

Nowhere on the first page of the company web page could you find a link to “Careers” or “Jobs” or “Positions”. Nowhere! Not at the top, not at the bottom. You could click on anything on their home page to get to what jobs they actually had open.

But, I’m a pro. So are you. We know exactly where it’s at. Click on “About” or “About Us”. Then scroll down to “Careers” and click on that. Then go through another click or three and you’ll actually find the jobs they have open and “desperately” need to fill.

I sent a message back and we set up a call. The first thing I said was you need to have some sort of link or button or something on the home page where people can access your open jobs with one-click. “I’ve tried getting that changed, but the executive in charge of the website (marketing) refuses to add it.”  You need to go above that person’s head, and actually bring the executive who has the open jobs and explain to the CEO why this has to change.

“Yeah, but even then, this isn’t going to fill our jobs.” You know, you’re probably right, this one thing won’t fill your jobs, but this is indicative of how your executives don’t support recruiting in your organization. If your executives won’t allow you to make this one simple change, which is a clear best practice in every industry, they don’t truly care about filling these jobs.

Having your “Careers” site link under the “About Us” tab on the home page of your web page screams you have no idea what you’re doing in recruitment. Having executives that refuse you to move it, shows you they don’t care about recruiting.  It’s really simple, and always 100% true.

Interviewing for a new Recruitment leadership position? Take a look at how easy it is to find jobs with the company. If it takes forever, ask in your interview how easy it will be for you to immediately change this. The answer you get will tell you everything you need want to know about taking this job or not.

Having your career site linked under “About Us” on your home page is the #1 way you can tell if executives support recruiting or not in a company.

If I was the National HR Czar…

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I think the next President should add a position to their cabinet. That position would be called HR Czar.  That person should be me, and here’s what I would do as the HR Czar.

As HR Czar I would:

– Establish a National Database of No Call, No Shows on interviews.  This database would be used by all public and private employers to let each other know what idiots set up an interview, then without any warning, just decided to ditch it and not show up.  That way we could all know who these awful people are by name, address, SSN and poor professional etiquette.

– Establish a National Database of No Call, No Shows on the first day of employment. Worse than not showing up for an interview, these people have serious problems and should be put on some double-secret probation.  If someone did this they would publicly have to stand out in front of this employer with a sandwich board sign stating “I’m a Loser! I Suck! Honk if you Agree!” for two straight days, before they could be hired by any other employer.

– Establish a National Background Check System. This system could be checked instantly, by all employers. No more waiting 48 hours or more for information that should be accessible instantly in a database a twelve-year-old could put together in about 15 minutes.  This includes educational verification, where all post high school institutions would have to input graduates, degrees, and grades.

– Establish a National Job Posting Site. All jobs, all employers, one place.  All public and private employers would be required to post their openings on this site, close them when their filled and post the name and photo of the person they hired for the position. A little transparency would help both the employers and all those people who applied and have no idea who got hired.

– Establish a National Database for Candidates to Search pending, current and past employee-related litigation of an employer. You like to allow your managers to harass employees? Fine, but understand, everyone is going to know about it. Kind of like Glassdoor, but actual verifiable stuff. Each employer would have a rating, like the ratings we give restaurants – A, B, C, etc. We can make them post their rating in the window of their lobby where candidates come to interview.

– Establish a CEO pay scale whereas a CEO couldn’t make more than ten times the average pay of the top 10% of earners within their company. That’s fair. That’s still a giant amount of money. I support CEOs and their right to earn a lot of money. I don’t support them making four million times more than the actual people busting their butt each day. (JFC – it sounds like I’m voting for Bernie! I’m not!)

That’s a good start! What would you do if you were HR Czar?

Why Most HR Strategies Fail

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We wear a thousand hats in HR.  Developing a good, solid HR strategy is one the hardest things you’ll ever have to do.  Most of the time, when I see an HR strategy fail it has to do with the leadership just not understanding what they should be focused on.  Then, once the focus is determined, not going deep enough to really understand it fully.

It reminds me of an old writing analogy I was told by one of my professors in college. Imagine yourself in a room that is completely black. You have a flashlight and you shine it on the wall. Within that circle of light, you shine on the wall, you can see some stuff.  It’s not clear, as you stand in the middle of the room, the light (your attention) is dispersed.

As you move closer to the wall, the beam of light becomes narrower. You begin to see more detail. Your focus became clear to what you are seeing.

The goal of writing is to make it clear to others what you are seeing.  Standing far away, you could give them some sense of what you’re seeing. As you stand closer, you can give them great detail and specifics to what you are seeing.

Great HR Strategy is similar.

You can make a strategy that is focused on everything, but rarely does that go anywhere. Most will fail. Or, you can get very specific with your strategy, ensure everyone sees what you see, and make it happen.

That is the challenge for HR leaders, moving closer to the wall, providing that clarity.

 

Sometimes, You Quit a Job for Love

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Every once in a while you an employee who decides to move out of state, or another city, or a country, to be with the love of their life. There’s very little you can do as an HR pro or leader to keep this person. You can’t beat love. This is a story about that, but way more.

When I was in middle school my Dad did something for me that I will never be able to truly thank him for. His company, Spartan Stores, started sponsoring the Michigan Special Olympics. My Dad was asked if he would volunteer to help cook food for all the participants. He brought me along, even though I really didn’t want to go.

It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I got to see true joy. True empathy. I got to see something that changed my life. I continued to volunteer all the way through college, then got involved heavily in coaching youth athletics, and I haven’t been back. But, I will. I only say this because I have such a special place in my heart for people living with Downs and other genetic abnormalities. They have so much to show us and offer us.

To feel love this strongly over just one thing in your life, you would be lucky. To feel this love over more than one thing in life is a godsend. Take a view, it’s only 2 minutes:

New Mexico is definitely losing, but Denver is definitely gaining!

I think it’s important to point out, there are two kinds of love here. Job love, which is very strong here. Real love, which is even stronger! When you’re employees leave you for the love of another, it can be heart wrenching on them. Do them a favor, and don’t make it harder.

Just be happy for them. Support them in every way you can. You’ll find another employee. They may never find another love of their life.

Hero Ball: Coming to an office near you!

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If you played ‘ball’ sports, you know the concept of Hero Ball. It’s exactly what it sounds like.  One guy or gal trying to be the hero of the team and doing too much, or not playing within the team concept. They want to be the hero! The hero doesn’t pass. The hero takes the big shot. The hero tries to win the game all by themselves.

Hero Ball is permeating almost every part of our worlds.  You just can’t be friends with a group anymore, because one friend is trying to be ‘hero friend’. You can’t be a normal member of your church because someone is trying to be ‘hero practitioner’. And, yes, we are all seeing this at our workplaces!

Don’t blame the millennials. Heroes come in all ages, shapes, sizes and creeds!

I’m going to blame our celebrity culture in America.

You can no longer just be a good standing member of society.  You know have to be a rock star! It’s not good enough to have your kids participate in sports, they have to participate on the best team.  You can’t just run for your health, you to run marathons! You can’t just show up every day and give a solid 9 to 5 to your company, you have to be willing to give up your life for your company. Or, you just don’t really care, do you?

How do you know you’re in a Hero Ball death spiral?

First, take a look at how you define success. If you define success as everyone needs to meet the same as your top performers, you’re going down a hero ball path. The definition of success isn’t defined by who does it best. Those are your top performers. You need to define what is successful, by what is expected of someone to be above average. You’re facing an uphill battle, and a ton of turnover, if you’re defining success by how your top performers do!

Second, are you rewarding individual outcomes more than you’re rewarding organizational outcomes, in the long run? I’m all for rewarding individual effort, in fact, it’s one of my favorites. Ultimately, though, you have to know that those individual efforts combined, are leading you to a greater organizational outcome. Otherwise, you risk the individual effort, working counterintuitive to the greater good.

Lastly,  to your employees seemed overly concerned about their personal outcomes and position, even in the face of organizational success?  We hear so much about how great top performers are for your organization. Which is mostly true. Top performers do a lot. But, they don’t do everything. As the saying goes, the world needs ditch digger too! In organizations, we need employees who aren’t all top players, that are willing to fill a much-needed role, which is usually not a Hero!

Hero ball is really fun…for one person.  Unfortunately, we are living in a society that seems to love the idea of hero ball.  No one wants to be part of the team, they want to be ‘the’ team.  No one wants to set up another employee for success, they want the success themselves. The organizations that will prosper in the next decade will not be those with the top performers. It will be the organizations that figure out how to have top performing teams.