Category Archives: Leadership

Would You Fire Your Top Performer for Punching Another Employee?

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The world of the NBA brings us the real live HR Game Show – What Would You Do?

I know most of you could care less about professional basketball, and I promise, this post isn’t about basketball. In case you didn’t hear last week, Los Angles Clippers Allstar, Blake Griffin, punched an equipment manager of the team, Matias Testi, after a game, while out at dinner.  In the face, more than once, and he broke his hand doing it. So, now he can’t play for the next six weeks.

Most people just chalk this up to stupid, overpaid, professional athlete does wrong. Not even page 1 news. Almost happens on a weekly basis.

For those HR Pros in the audience, you know, the Clippers have a major problem now!  One employee just did bodily harm to another employee. Not only that, your BEST employee just did bodily harm to an employee that can be replaced by a million people in a second.  Your best employee can’t be replaced, and if your competition gets him, it hurts your company. That’s pretty close to the truth.

So, tell me Mr. and Mrs. HR Pro – What Would You Do?

Let’s break down some options:

1. Fire both parties. It takes to get your butt beat. Both were engaged in a verbal spat that one party took further.

2. Fire Blake. He’s twice the size of the guy he hit, and he’s at a much higher level within the company, thus his responsibility is much higher on how he acts.

3. Don’t fire either. Which is probably what’s going to happen – but would never happen in the ‘real’ world. The two parties involved are friends. Something happened that shouldn’t. The lower employee has the job of his life, constantly surrounded by millionaire athletes, he doesn’t want anyone fired. He probably wants to apologize that his head wasn’t softer so he didn’t break Blake’s hand.

4. Fire Matias. He’s replaceable. You could easily cut a severance agreement for a small price and all this goes away. Being in the position he was, he should have known not to push Blake’s buttons and the value Blake has to the franchise.

5. Suspensions all around. Suspend Blake and Matias for their involvement in the industry. The problem with this is the Clips are trying to make the playoffs, probably will, and they’ll need Blake, which is about the same time he would be coming off this injury. Are you really going to suspend your best employee for the playoffs? Heck no. I don’t care about Matias, you can suspend him, no one will notice.

A real HR pro in this situation only has one option. Fire Blake.  He’s demonstrated that he’s willing to physically harm an employee of the company, put the organization in harm’s way by missing games, and even self-implode by not controlling himself in a scenario a normal person would.

This is where reality kicks real life HR Pros in the teeth.

The real call here is to get rid of Matias.  This decision on all fronts leaves the most positive outcomes for all involved.  The Clips get rid of a low-level employee for very little money. If he’s truly a friend of Blakes, he won’t cause problems, he knows where the real money is in this relationship. You can’t leave the possibility, even the remotest, of this, happening again. With Matias on the team, this could always happen again.

Real HR Pros gasp at this scenario because we all know where this would lead in real life. The courtroom. That’s where you miss one really smart play here, that you also can use, the severance agreement. Get them to sign the paper, hand them a check, move forward. The Clips would be smart to move forward, not without their best player, but without an equipment manager, they could easily replace.

Do I do anything with Blake? Yeah, something has to happen. I probably give him the biggest fine I can under the collect bargaining agreement, and maybe even go higher, just to prove a point, knowing it will get knocked down.

Agree or disagree? Hit me in the comments!

Hey, Kid! Know Your Place.

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Something really funny happened this past week in the NBA. Kobe Bryant who was sitting out of a game against Portland, in street clothes, came out to the bench after the game had already started. All the seats were taken on the bench. So, what did Kobe do?

He made a rookie give up his seat and sit on the court. A rookie who was actually dressed to play in the game – take a look:

This is brilliant!

I want to work in an organization where when a legend walks into a meeting room, some kid gives up his seat when there isn’t one available!

I know. I know. We’re all supposed to be Servant Leaders. Kobe should have sat on the court himself and let the kid keep his seat on the bench. Screw that. Kobe is one of the greatest players to ever play the game. If he wants a seat, someone better get up and give him a seat.

For real, though, there’s something to be said about knowing your place in an organization and respecting those who came before you. Respect is earned. Kobe clearly has earned that in his final retirement year.

I can’t stand seeing formal power used in organizations. “Oh, that’s the President, he demands to have the first parking spot.”  There is a little bit of this in the clip. But, if the kid truly didn’t want to give up his seat, he probably wouldn’t have.  He even mentioned as much on Twitter, later, saying Kobe has earned his respect to give up his seat.

I hear too often from people, especially HR and leadership thought leaders, who take the opposite stance. I think we’ve gone a bit too far on this one. As I am told I need to value these young bucks coming into the organization for what they bring, they, also, need to value the years of value I’ve already brought and continue to bring.

Yeah, I said it. These damn kids need to know their place in the organization! Now get off my lawn!

Hands-Free HR – HR Self Service for the Next Generation!

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Remember the first time you got to use Hands-Free with your smartphone? For those of us who live on our phone, it was life changing! Wait, you mean I can drive, I can cook, I can workout and still get this call done? Yes, I want that. No, wait, I need that!

Now, imagine you could do that with your employees. No, not talk to them more. But be able to give them all they need, without being able to talk to them, or at least, eliminate the day-to-day mundane HR needs that all of our employees have.

HR Self Service has been around now for two decades. The difference today is Hands-Free HR at the most dynamic companies is being delivered in a way that does what we all hoped for when it was first launched. The problem with traditional HR self-service models is that HR still does most of the heavy lifting. Hands-Free HR puts the knowledge and the skill in the hands of the employees and allows HR to focus on strategies that make your business successful.

FREE Webinar Alert!

Marjorie Borsiquot (Assistant Vice President of Business Process Integration for Georgetown University) and I will discuss how the best organizations today are delivering a hands-free HR experience to their employees. The tools and processes they use to make this successful, and feedback from those on the front line making it work today.

Click here to register for this SHRM Webinar, sponsored by the great folks at PeopleDoc!

I’m really excited to dig into the details of Georgetown University’s transformation of their HR service delivery. For those of you that work in complex organizations like public education, healthcare, and multi-unit delivery, this will be very insightful!

Look forward to you all joining me on Wednesday, February 10th at Noon EST!

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.

Cutting the Cord of a High Performer

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There is nothing worse in HR than having to terminate a high performer.  If you’re in the game long enough you will eventually end up facing this situation. A high performer does something incredibly stupid, and even though everyone in the organization wants to keep him or her, you all know they have to go.

Nothing sucks more.

I’ve seen executives in very large companies almost lose their own jobs because they tried to save a high performer from getting fired.  We like to think only idiots and low performers get fired, but something really good performers will get fired because of bad circumstances.  Take the case of Cincinnati Bengals Linebacker Vontaze Burfict and his illegal hit on Pittsburg Steelers Wide Receiver Antonio Brown in last week’s NFL playoff game:

Let’s be clear, I’m not a fan of either team, just an observer. He could have killed Antonio Brown!

Okay, one bad hit. One bad choice. You don’t fire a person over that! Especially, a person of Vontaze’s talent. He might be the single biggest reason Cincinnati actually made the playoffs this year.

Herein lies the problem. For how great of a performer Vontaze is, he has one major issue that the Bengals and the NFL can’t ignore, he seems like he truly wants to injure other players! Vontaze now has a ‘history’ of trying to hurt opposing players with questionable and illegal hits. He was fined this year by the NFL to the tune of $169,000 in the 2015-2016 alone. His hit on Antonio Brown alone will cost upwards of million dollars in fines and lost game wages!

So, what do you do?

It’s something the Cincinnati Bengals are going to have to determine.  They can’t keep him and have him continue to do this. It’s not good for the franchise brand. Although, some will argue it actually might help their brand. In the NFL, you need white hats and black hats! Not everyone can be the good guys.

Here’s the problem you face if you’re the Bengals leadership.  You allow Vontaze to continue to play. Vontaze will do what Vontaze does, which is play dirty. He’s proven that with his actions. His past performance has shown you what his future performance will be!

This won’t come back on Vontaze. It will come back on other players on the Bengals team, more than likely a highly skilled offensive player like a quarterback or wide receiver. Vontaze will go out and hurt his next victim, and the other team will eventually retaliate. The Bengals risk this if they keep Vontaze around.

Great performer. One major career derailer.

It sucks to have to let a great performer go, but many times it’s the best thing to do for the over health and wellbeing of the organization. It never ceases to amaze me, though, at what some in the organization will do to keep that risk around.

 

Should Job Hopping Be Encouraged?

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Am I old school?

No, really? Please let me know in the comments because this recent article from Fast Company makes no sense to me! Check this out:

“JOB HOPPERS ARE BELIEVED TO HAVE A HIGHER LEARNING CURVE, BE HIGHER PERFORMERS, AND EVEN TO BE MORE LOYAL…In terms of managing your own career, if you don’t change jobs every three years, you don’t develop the skills of getting a job quickly, so then you don’t have any career stability,” (Penelope) Trunk tells Fast Company. “You’re just completely dependent on the place that you work as if it’s 1950, and you’re going to get a gold watch at the end of a 50-year term at your company.”

Really? I’m not sure Talent Acquisition leaders, across the world, share Penelope’s philosophy on job hopping!

I don’t buy any of this.

In the minds of hiring managers, Job Hoppers are Job Hoppers for a reason. Which basically comes down to you weren’t good enough to stick with any one company you were with. Sure some of that hopping might be they were in a bad company who didn’t treat them like they should have been treated. At which point, a normal person, would learn from this bad fit and choice of employer, and make a better one.

I even job hopped a little in the early part of my career. I was chasing an executive title. In hindsight, it was the dumbest thing I ever did!

This is bad advice, plain and simple.

Don’t job hop. For every person that it helps, it will hurt ten others. Hiring managers still hate to see job hopping on a resume, and they’ll question what is wrong with you if your resume looks like you job hop.

Even in the tech sector, which I work in every day, hiring managers hate to see IT pros that have ten jobs in ten years. They’ll still hire you now, because the need is so great, but eventually the economy of the IT market, supply and demand, will catch up. At that point, your job hopping resume will not be desired.

So, how do you fix this, if you’re currently in this job hopper cycle?

I recommend to job seekers that they bundle many of their ‘projects’ into one consulting job, to make it, at least, appear to be under one umbrella of an employer. We see many IT pros doing this now as contingent workers and incorporating themselves. Work several projects at different companies, but all managed under one brand. It’s not perfect, but it looks a little better.

Job hopping should never be encouraged. Making a change because your career is stagnant is something completely different. Most careers don’t get stagnant in 2-3 years!

Have You Noticed, Most Companies Suck at Recruiting

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Recruiting isn’t about hiring one person. That’s easy.

It’s about consistently hiring one person, and that person should be, at the very least, as talented as the last person you hired. But, really more talented. Then, continually do that, hire better talent, over and over.

To do that, you have to be able to continually build a better mousetrap. You have to continually get better organizationally and individually.

The reason we suck at recruiting is we get satisfied with making that one hire.

“Yay! We did it.”

“Now, what?”

Great recruiting organizations aren’t satisfied with one hire. They aren’t satisfied with having all of their positions filled. They only get satisfied when they are replacing lower talent, with higher talent.

That’s a really hard place to get to. 99.99% of organizations will never get there.  It’s really hard work. Heavy lifting.

So, we give up. Screw it. We’ll just keep filling these one positions.

This is why you suck at recruiting.  Your goal is fill positions, not to make the talent in your organization better.  If increasing the talent was your goal, you would do things differently. You would act differently. Your sense of urgency would be different.

Talent Acquisition isn’t about acquiring bodies.  It’s about making the talent in your organization better. Every day. Every week. Every year.

Most companies suck at recruiting because they see recruiting as filling positions.

Hiring Means Your Organization Failed

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Henry Ward, the CEO of eShares, wrote a post on Medium recently on How to Hire.  It’s a great piece from an executive point of view regarding the concept of talent acquisition.  Basically, Henry feels that if your organization needs to go out and hire external talent, you’ve failed as an organization:

“Hiring means we failed to execute and need help. First, let me quell a misconception. Hiring is not a consequence of success. Revenue and customers are. Hiring is a consequence of our failure to create enough leverage (see eShares 101) to grow on our own. It means we need outside help. The perfect business is a computer plugged into the internet. Starting with me, every human thereafter is overhead. And we are increasing overhead by 50%.

I want to repeat this point. We are increasing overhead by 50% because we failed to execute. It is not something to be proud of. It is humbling to go back to the labor market, hat-in-hand, asking for help…”

Want to know why your executives don’t respect HR?  Read above.  Executives think about the business differently than we do in HR and Talent Acquisition. I’m 100% sure any head of TA would believe hiring, because of business growth, equals success, not failure.

Even if you take out Henry’s example of the perfect business model being a computer plugged into the internet, he could still argue that any organization that can’t self-sustain its own growth of labor is a failure. Think about it from a training and development point of view. You hire entry level candidates and train and develop them into every part of your organization. You have a succession plan. If everything works perfectly, you never hire ‘talent’ from the outside. You just hire new, clean, entry level bodies, and create your own clone army!

Okay, at this point we still need to use outside bodies. I would guess at some point Google will create real, live human clones, then the process could be completely self-contained.

So, how does Henry Ward hire at eShares?  Here is his hiring philosophy:

  1. Hire for Strength vs Lack of Weakness
  2. Hire for Trajectory vs Experience
  3. Hire Doers vs Tellers
  4. Hire Learners vs Experts
  5. Hire Different vs Similar
  6. Always pass on ego

Pretty solid. Some of it might depend on your industry, company, etc. I’m not a huge believer in always hiring for difference. Difference causes conflict. In some organizations that is great. In some organizations that is catastrophic. Just as similar, group think, etc. is bad in many cases, it’s perfect in some cases.

Give his article a read, he goes into detail on each step with an explanation.  One of the best executive written pieces I’ve read on hiring.

How Much Did Your Dreams Cost?

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It’s the holidays, do yourself a favor and go out and download or Redbox the movie “Up In the Air“.  It’s a great movie for HR pros. One of the best scenes is this one (below) between George Clooney and J.K. Simmons:

Enjoy your time off, if you have it. Either way, answer me this, how much did you get paid to give up your dreams?

I got paid $20,000.  That’s how much I get paid, salary, for my first Recruiting job right out of college.

I wanted to be a college volleyball coach.  I was good at it. I loved doing it. I found my wife because of it.

$20,000.

It seems silly, now, looking back on it.  $20,000 is nothing.  My life has worked out wonderfully, but it’s a lesson I’ll pass along to my kids. Dreams are wasted on the young.  Don’t give up your chance when you are young. All too soon, you’ll reach a stage in life where your dreams won’t seem that important any longer.

We are told that the key to a happy work life is to find a job you love, and you’ll never ‘work’ another day as long as you live. About .01% of people actually find jobs they truly love. The rest of the 99.9% work jobs that are fine, but not love. You only fall in love with a job when you follow your dreams.

It’s not 100%. Sometimes your dreams end up sucking. Don’t get down about that. Many, many people suck at their dreams. That’s life. You’re allowed to change your dreams.  Just don’t wait too long to do it!

The Best Talent Expects Tougher Interviews

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I was reminded this week about the importance of tough interviews and their importance!

My friend has been interviewing at a number of good companies for high-level jobs. He’s going to be a great hire for someone, he’s a top notch talent. Great resume, experience, education and personality. He’s a five-tool player, A level talent!

He was debriefing me on some of his interviews and one thing struck me as soon as he said it. He was talking about one interview in particular and why he was interested in the company. Basically, he was interested in the company because they gave him the most challenging interview!

It was his determination that if a company was going to be that challenging in an interview, it was a place he would like to work. It was the toughest interview he has been on, and as a top talent, it seemed they were doing more to ensure they were only hiring top talent, and that made him feel like it was the right place for him!

A few things about this interview:

1. It was a long interview.

2. They didn’t force him to interview with 15 people over 8 stages.

3. They asked tough, challenging questions, they only someone who really knew their stuff, and worked at that level, would be able to answer!

The problem with saying tough interviews are better is too many HR Pros believe ‘more’ interviewing, is tough interviewing. More doesn’t equal tough, it equals more. There is a huge difference!

Tough, difficult interviews are ones where the questions asked would challenge the knowledge and skill of the person asked. Many times we end up not asking anything challenging in interviews because are spending all of our time just ‘talking’ the candidate into the job. In this instance we end up hiring the person who had the best interaction with us, maybe not the best candidate.

Top talent likes to be challenged. It’s the reason they’re top talent! If you don’t challenge them, most will not accept your offer, because they won’t view your organization as a great fit.

So, how do you challenge top talent and recruit top talent at the same time?

It’s your recruiters job to recruit and close. It’s the hiring managers job to challenge the heck out of the talent you put in front of them, then tell you which is the best. Part of the recruiters job is to ‘warn’ the candidates, that they will be challenged in this interview like none they ever have been a part of. This alone will help weed out those who aren’t up for the challenge!

Top talent wants you to want them, but they also want to know they’re going to a great organization that will challenge them and make them better!