Category Archives: Leadership

The First Question Every Leader Needs to Ask Themselves!

Posted on by
2

I’ve been blogging now for ten years. Writing every day for eight years. If you go around writing and telling people you know something about something, guess what? They’re going to ask you to tell them about something, specifically as it relates to their circumstance.

So, I get asked my advice quite a bit about talent and HR issues people are facing.

There is a bucket of questions I get asked that fall into the same type of category.  These questions all have to do with how do we ‘fix’ something that isn’t working well in their HR and/or Talent shops.  How do we get more applicants? How do we get managers to develop their people? How do we fix our crazy CEO? Etc.

I used to go right into how I would solve that problem if I was in their shoes.  Five-minute solutions! I don’t know anything about you or your situation, but let me drop five minutes of genius on you for asking! It’s consulting at its worst! But it’s fun and engaging for someone who came to see me talk about hugging for an hour.

I’ve begun to change my approach, though, because I knew as they knew, they weren’t going back to their shops and doing what I said.  The problem with my five minutes of genius was it was ‘my’ five minutes, not theirs.  It was something I could do, but probably not something they could do or would even want to do based on their special circumstances.

Now, I ask this one question: Do you really want to get better?

Right away people will quickly say, “Yes!”  Then, there is a pause and explanation, and sometimes from this, we get to a place where they aren’t really sure they really want to get better.  That’s powerful. We all believe that ‘getting better’ is the only answer, but it’s not.  Sometimes, the ROI isn’t enough to want to get better. Staying the same is actually alright.

We believe we have to fix something and we focus on it, when in reality if it stays the same we’ll be just fine.  We’ll go on living and doing great HR work.  It just seemed like the next thing to fix, but maybe it actually is fine for now, and let’s focus on something else.

Many times HR and Talent leaders will find that those around them really don’t want to get better, thus they were about to launch into a failing proposition, and a rather huge frustrating experience. Better to probably wait, until everyone really wants to get better and move in that same direction.

So, before you go out to fix the world, your world, ask yourself one very important question: Do you, they, we, really want to get better?  I hope you can get a ‘yes’ answer! But if not, the world will still go on, and so will you, and you’ll be just fine!

Leadership Isn’t Raised on Promises

Posted on by
3

I’ve had a lot of conversations with c-suite leaders recently who are concerned they do not have their next generation of leaders on their team. Let’s be clear, they have people on their team, but they do not believe those people are the future or at least they don’t believe they’re anywhere near becoming the future.

The folks in position are all well-meaning enough. I mean they want to be leaders and many believe they probably are leaders. They make all the leadership promises. That’s probably the first indication they aren’t ready. This is what their c-suite is feeling and hearing.

You see, leadership isn’t raised on promises…Leadership is raised on execution and outcomes.

Give me someone who can execute and I believe I can teach them to lead. Too often I think we look for leaders in the way we look for friends. Is this a person I and others would want to hang out with? Is this a person I can trust? Is this person nice? Do I get along with this person, and do others get along with this person? Would I follow this person?

I don’t need my leaders to be my friend. I need my leaders to get sh*t done. Can you get sh*t done without pissing off every single person around you, becomes a key element, right? There’s a balance. Sometimes I think we’ve gone too far on one side of that balance, and it’s not the execution side!

So, you want to be a leader?

Great, awesome, wow! Get sh*t done! The recipe is pretty clear and most fail:

  1. Clearly communicate what needs to get done.
  2. Find out why that will happen or won’t happen. Fix that stuff.
  3. Gain agreement of when and how this stuff will get done.
  4. Help move roadblocks and excuses out of the way.
  5. Follow up. Follow up. Follow up.
  6. Accountability.
  7. Stuff got done.

In my experience the best leaders never made promises, they just got stuff done. The promise leaders tended to go away at some point. Turns out most organizations don’t need promises, they need stuff to get done.

 

 

Are You A Coach in HR?

Posted on by
3

I read an article in The New Yorker, probably the best article I’ve read in a while, on the importance of “Coaching” by Atul Gawande.  Atul is a writer and a surgeon, smart and creative – I should hate him, but he’s so freaking brilliant! From the article:

The concept of a coach is slippery. Coaches are not teachers, but they teach. They’re not your boss—in professional tennis, golf, and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach—but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.

As an HR Pro, I’ve always believed that HR has the ability to act as “coaches” across all vestiges of our organizations.  The problem we run into is this, “You can’t coach me! You don’t know the first thing about Marketing, or Operations, or Accounting.”  You’re right, good thing I’m not “teaching” you that!  That’s why we hired you.  Having a coaching culture in your organization starts during the selection process. Are you hiring people who are open to being coached? 

More from The New Yorker –

Good coaches know how to break down performance into its critical individual components. In sports, coaches focus on mechanics, conditioning, and strategy, and have ways to break each of those down, in turn. The U.C.L.A. basketball coach John Wooden, at the first squad meeting each season, even had his players practice putting their socks on. He demonstrated just how to do it: he carefully rolled each sock over his toes, up his foot, around the heel, and pulled it up snug, then went back to his toes and smoothed out the material along the sock’s length, making sure there were no wrinkles or creases. He had two purposes in doing this. First, wrinkles cause blisters. Blisters cost games. Second, he wanted his players to learn how crucial seemingly trivial details could be. “Details create success” was the creed of a coach who won ten N.C.A.A. men’s basketball championships.

I think this is critical in working with adult professionals.  Coaches aren’t trying to “teach” them new concepts, but helping them self-analyze and make improvements to what they already do well.  We/HR can make our workforces better, not by focusing on weaknesses/opportunity areas, which we spend way too much time on, but by making our employees’ strengths even stronger.

Coaching has become a fad in recent years. There are leadership coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, and college-application coaches. Search the Internet, and you’ll find that there’s even Twitter coaching. Self-improvement has always found a ready market, and most of what’s on offer is simply one-on-one instruction to get amateurs through the essentials. It’s teaching with a trendier name. Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual.

I’m talking about turning HR into “Life” coaches or “Executive” coaches, those types of “coaches” are way different and fall more into the “therapists” categories than what I see HR acting as “professional” coaches.  Professional coaches work alongside their Pros day-to-day and see them in action, and work with them to specifically improve on those things that impact the business.  They don’t care that you’re not “feeling” as “challenged” as you once were, and need to find yourself.

I think the biggest struggle HR Pros will have in a role as “coach” – our ability to understand most employees have low self-awareness (including ourselves!). Being a great coach is measured on your ability to get someone to see something in themselves, they don’t already see, and make them truly believe it.  If we can get there in our organizations – oh boy – watch out!

If Your Company has a Chief Happiness Officer you Should Rethink Your Career Path!

Posted on by
9

In the past three weeks, I’ve been pitched by some well-meaning PR person about a story on how Google, Salesforce, Zappos, Airbnb, etc., have “Chief Happiness Officers” and how important they are to corporate success. Or at least, how “Happiness” as a measure is important to corporate success.

I’ve been pitched this idea four times, primarily so I would talk about their client, Snappy, which apparently is a chatbot of some kind that asks your employee questions to probably gauge their happiness or something, and in turn, you can then turn to your Chief Happiness Officer to fix the happy that is broken. (BTW – look for my new book in 2020 – “Fix the Happy!”)

Snappy might be some awesome tech, but I don’t like the pitch. I think that pitch is broken, for the real world. The real world is not Google and Zappos. Those are unicorns. Real companies have real issues and making their entitled employees happy is not one of those real issues.

I want to punch every Chief Happiness Officer in the smiling face!

Seriously, how completely warped do you have to be to think you actually bring happiness to another human being, let alone an entire company of human beings!?!

Will Smith is my Chief Happiness Officer:

Turns out CHO’s don’t make employees happy. Employees make themselves happy. No amount of money, or time off, or Taco Tuesdays, or standup desks or seven flavors of Kombucha in the employee cafe, will make a person happy. Happiness is an emotion controlled by the individual, no matter the environment they’re in.

There are great stories of prisoners at Auschwitz that chose love and happiness in the darkest hours and circumstances that anyone could imagine. There are people who win $500M lotteries that blow their head off because of how depressed they are. A CHO can’t change that.

Chief Happiness Officers are what happens to organizations when leadership gets out of control. When we stop actually leading and managing the business, and we ‘become’ leaders. When we start believing our own bullsh*t to a level where we think we actually control the emotions of our employees.

Look, I get it. I also want to drink the Kool-aid and believe in Santa Claus. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful, fantasy-filled life?! But that is life. 99.99% of us have to work to pay bills. Within that, we can choose to be happy, or miserable, or somewhere in between and that actually might have many times in the same day. No one person is going to make me happy or miserable unless I make that choice to allow that to happen.

There you go. That’s my take. Chief Life Officer, out.

Should You Put a Rank and File Employee on Your Board?

Posted on by
2

Most boards of companies are made up of current company executives and/or executives from other companies are former executives from other companies. Almost never will you find a “regular Joe” on the board of directors.

Last week, a worker’s rights organization, United for Respect, presented to Congress and then to Walmart’s board the idea of adding hourly Walmart workers to its board, with full voting privileges. From the New Yorker:

“The practice of constantly cutting costs and squeezing workers often stems from the short-term-profit-oriented mind-set that has come to dominate corporate America over recent decades, in which moves to boost a company’s stock price are given priority over longer-term investments in infrastructure and employees. Murray believes that, if there had been a meaningful number of people with a stake in Walmart’s longer-term health—such as store associates—involved in the business decisions, some of these changes wouldn’t have happened, and the company would be better off. This led Murray, with the help of a worker’s-rights organization called United for Respect, to join in drafting a resolution that she plans to present to Congress on Tuesday—and, later, at Walmart’s annual shareholders’ meeting—urging the company to place a significant number of hourly retail employees on its board of directors so that they might have input on major corporate decisions.”

I love the idea. The only way it works is if the hourly employees who are on the board, have full voting rights as other board members, and they are not compensated in a way that makes them vote differently than they would as a normally compensated hourly worker. Basically, you couldn’t allow management to game the system by making it financially rewarding to those hourly employees that incentives them to make decisions in ways they normally wouldn’t.

So, would it be better for organizations to have hourly employees on their board? That’s the real question! More from the article:

“Because workers have so rarely been invited to participate in board-level decisions at companies in the U.S., there are few domestic examples to look to for a sense of how it would play out. In Germany and a handful of other European countries, however, having worker representation on boards is required. Baldwin’s office found research that showed that companies with worker representation invest twice as much in their businesses as those without; wages are higher, and profits are distributed more evenly. These firms also performed better. None of this is surprising. Low-level employees are deeply invested in a company’s long-term success, because their families depend on it in ways that top executives waiting for a bonus may not.” 

I’m definitely one of those people who believe we have an issue with executive compensation. Sure you see examples that are grotesque, but for the most part, executive compensation is market driven, and if organizations want to find effective leadership that has the ability to lead on a giant scale, it costs money.

I think what we are missing is the re-investment piece. Most boards and executives are concerned with financial performance, but in the short-term, not long. Quarter to quarter earnings drives short-term decision making that many times doesn’t include re-investment into the business to ensure long-term, steady success.

The market doesn’t reward steady success, so boards make decisions that are many times counterintuitive to long term success. Hourly employees, in turn, would tend to make better long-term business decisions because this business success long-term has a much bigger impact on their life, versus short-term business gains.

I’m not sure I want to see this regulated, I tend to believe the market will show companies how to run. That being said, in the past few decades the market has led many strong companies down the wrong path.

What do you think? How would you feel about having hourly employees on your board of directors?

I’m Afraid of Being Me Too’d!

Posted on by
5

For the last ten days, I’ve been at HR and TA conferences. It was the longest, consecutive run of speaking I’ve done in my career. Basically, in ten days I did a total of 14 sessions. I now want to crawl into a dark sensory deprivation chamber for a week!

If you haven’t seen me speak, I do some hugging!

At one of my stops, I had a fellow come up to me during a private moment and ask me if I was afraid. “Afraid of what!?”, I asked. “Well, you are doing this hugging thing and I’ve seen you hug people outside of the sessions as well, aren’t you afraid of #MeToo? (I added the hashtag, he just said Me Too’d) I’m afraid if I did that, I would be #MeToo’d!”

I might be super naive, but I said, “No, absolutely not.” I hug in a context around my speaking. It’s about rules, and rules of hugging. It’s not me, drunkenly throwing myself at HR Ladies, trying to hit on them. In fact, it’s the opposite of that, I’m telling them we have rules about this kind of thing! (half making a joke about us HR pros and our rules!)

He persisted. “Doesn’t matter, Tim, it only takes one who feels like they might want to make an example out of you!”

Yeah, still, hard No. I’m a hugger. I’m an equal opportunity hugger. I hug all pronouns, very comfortably.

I think someone who is afraid of being MeToo’d is probably doing some stuff that they shouldn’t be doing. I’m not saying that someone couldn’t take a hug from me and spin it, but I hope with all my being someone wouldn’t do that. I also hope I’m smart enough not to put myself in a position where anyone would even consider that a hug from me was inappropriate!

I’ve had a career in HR and I’ve investigated some pretty nasty stuff where people were willing to do some pretty bad stuff to each other, for a million different reasons, mostly around hate and anger. So, I think I know what someone, improperly motivated, is capable of. I still was uncomfortable with the conversation, because it made me feel like somehow this person was trying to lessen the power of #MeToo.

“Well, someone could lie!” Of course, ‘someone’ could, but we would need to ask ourselves, why? And in 99.99% of those cases, there isn’t a why only some dude doing something stupid.

I’m going to keep hugging. I like hugs. I love the feeling of hugging someone who hugs me back for real. It makes both of our days a little better. I’m going to keep asking those I hug if they actually want a hug. That’s one of the rules!

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

Posted on by
Reply

In the corporate world, everyone is a critic!  Everyone!  We’ve gotten really good at a learned behavior. No longer can we send out a final product the first time. Why?  Because everyone wants to trash it and change it so it can be this really nice piece of vanilla crap!  Welcome to Corporate America. But you know what, this isn’t new, critics have been around since Jesus and critics have been wrong since before Jesus!

I wanted to share with you some famous things that critics got wrong:

Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1824)

What the critics said in 1825: “We find Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to be precisely one hour and five minutes long; a frightful period indeed, which puts the muscles and lungs of the band, and the patience of the audience to a severe trial…” –The Harmonicon, London, April 1825

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville (1851)

And the critics’ response: When Melville died in 1891, Moby-Dickhad moved a grand total of 3,715 copies…in 40 years! The below was typical at the time of the book’s release:

“…an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition…Our author must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius, while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise…” -Henry F. Chorley, London Athenaeum, October 25, 1851

 

Animal Farm, by George Orwell (1945)

What the critics said about the book we all had to read in high school: “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.” –Publisher’s rejection

 

Here’s what I know, true creativity and innovation in what we do, does not come from running our ideas through everyone and their brother for approval.  If your organization wants your employees to be truly creative and innovative, stop pushing teams.

 

Teams don’t make masterpieces, they can do some pretty cool stuff, but pure creativity isn’t one of them.  We push “Team” so hard in HR and in most organizations it sometimes makes you think like this the only way everyone in the world must work, but it’s not.  An HR Pro that can determine the proper work structure throughout their organization is truly valuable and “team” isn’t always the answer. We should have other tools in our toolbox besides just ‘teams’.

 

You hear artist all the time say “I don’t listen to my critics”. This is valuable in that they know listening to a critic will hurt their art.  Unfortunately, in business, we don’t always have the ability/decision to not listen to our critics (since those critics could be bosses, peers, friends, etc.).

 

In business telling your critics to “Suck It” could be a big career derailer!

 

So, when do we go all “Suck It! It’s my project” in the workplace?   First, I wouldn’t suggest you approach it, beginning with “Suck It”. While you will get their attention, I think we all have the ability in our work environment to push back appropriately when you truly know you have something that will make a difference.  But, it’s about having the conviction to stand behind it and not let it get changed.  That’s your marker, “am I willing to put my career/credibility/bank of influence on the line for this idea/project/etc.?” If you are, it’s time to pull out the “Suck It” card and push forward.  For most of us, this might never happen in our work lives, maybe once, but it’s rare.

 

I think what we learn over time is that not all of our critics are bad and some actually might help truly make us better.  The key is to continue to have confidence in what you do, without it, your work critics will make your work life less than artistic.

No, really, just keep being wrong!

Posted on by
2

I was with some HR Pros recently and one of them shared a standard HR axiom about what we do as HR Pros in the vain of maintaining consistency. If we are wrong in the beginning then we just keep being wrong!  It sounds idiotic doesn’t!?! But you see it every single day in HR. At one point someone made a decision, for who knows what reason, and no matter what the reason precedence was set and through hell and high water we will keep making that same decision!

We are HR! We are HR! We are HR! (keep the chant going!)

I’m this person.  Well, I’m trying not to be. You see in my organization we do the same stuff.  If my recruiters exceed their goals we have various rewards that get – one of those is the ability to have a flex day throughout their week, where they can work from home or come in late, leave early, etc.  It’s up to them.  In our environment, that reward is worth its weight in gold!  But (there’s always a “But”) when a holiday week happens where the person is already going to be off for a day, we have said no flex day that week.  Seemed like a reasonable plan.

But was it?

A reward is set up to be a reward it shouldn’t matter if the person has a vacation, or has a holiday, etc.  I had to ask myself why do we do this, take this away just because of a holiday? I trust my people, especially those working their butts off to exceed their goals, so why take it away? I was wrong.  So, I decided to change it and do the right thing.

Do you know what the first reaction was?  Yep, it was “Wait” that’s not how we did it before. A very normal reaction we have as leaders because we want to deliver consistency to our teams, and I agree with that concept for sustained engagement but there’s one thing that should override this. When you’re wrong!

So, do you have the courage to stop being wrong?

Most of your peers don’t. They get caught up in groupthink. They get caught up thinking they are being “consistent” and that is good. But being consistent on doing something wrong is just being consistently wrong!  You have a choice, keep being wrong or start being right!  What will you do?

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

Posted on by
3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Hiring Alone – The Biggest Failure of Talent Acquisition!

Posted on by
3

It takes a village. That’s what Hillary told us in her famous children’s book. You can’t raise a child by yourself, it takes a village to raise a child fully. At least that’s our hope and ideal.

I think it takes a village to hire correctly as well, and I’m not talking about the village of TA and HR. I’m talking about the village of our entire organization.

My team constantly finds themselves searching for talent for clients who struggle to understand that just because we are third party, it still takes a village to hire the best talent for your organization. We still need the insight from TA and HR on why your organization is the one our candidate will want to work for. We need the hiring manager to tell us why her job and her team are the right fit for our candidate, etc.

The exact same thing has to happen when you do talent acquisition in-house as well.

For me, this starts with the hiring manager and the team that has the need for additional talent. While TA will take the lead on the project and do most of the heavy lifting, the single most critical person in recruiting is the person who will ultimately make the hire decision.

Too many leaders want TA to just hire on their own. To hire alone. This doesn’t work well, if at all. “Just go find me some candidates!”

The best hiring managers I have ever worked with always took ownership of this process and did a few things that set them apart from every other hiring manager:

1. They made sure everyone involved in the process knew exactly what they needed in a candidate. Crystal clear.

2. They made sure that the team had every piece of information needed to do this as quickly as possible. “Oh, the job description is crappy, let’s build a new one, right now!”

3. They got involved in sourcing potential candidates for the position, and got their team involved in doing this as well, and didn’t stop until the position was filled.

4. They made filling the position a priority in their schedule for all things related to filling this position.

5. They crafted a communication strategy to ensure they knew, easily, what was going on with this position on an ongoing basis. No judgement, just facts, and how can they help at each bottleneck.

If we all worked with leaders who did these five simple things, hiring in our organizations would be simple! I could argue hiring would be enjoyable, in this state!

Too often in talent acquisition, we are asked to hire alone. Just go out and fill positions and stop bitching. That is usually coming from leaders who actually don’t know how to help, so their frustration comes out in these types of behaviors. They are feeling the pressure and pain as well.

I find if we can give them these five steps, these five deliverables, they actually become a great teammate in getting the job done. If they understand what their role is, and what your role is, everything can move along rather well, in most cases.

Don’t allow yourself to be put in a position where you are constantly being asked to hire alone. While you might feel like that’s your job, it’s not, your job is to lead a dynamic process that involves many people. The biggest job of TA is to deliver great project management on each position they are working and ensure everyone knows the role they are playing.