Does Your Annual Review Process Include Terminations?

Posted on October 18, 2017 by Tim Sackett

By now most of you probably have had the chance to read the Telsla article where they terminated 400 employees directly after their annual review process. If not, check out the link. Also, my buddy Kris Dunn did a great write up on Tesla’s ‘unique’ culture as well over at the HR Capitalist.(Go Check it Out!)

My take is a bit different from Kris’s. Sure Tesla is a unique culture that has been ultra successful, but I’m wondering from an employee performance point of view, is firing employees during your annual process something that drives a sustainable culture?

Tesla is ultra cool, everyone wants “Tesla” on their resume or in their client list. Does that continue to be the case if you treat employees like this? I’m all for firing bad, underperforming employees, we all need to do this more and quicker. I think we all agree on that.

The question is, do you fire employees during your annual review process?

I’m wondering what the day or week before annual review time looks like at Tesla? Probably a lot of going away lunches and after hour drinks, but for everyone since no one really knows who will get ‘cut’ this time. Can you imagine those lunches!?

“Hey, team, everyone is invited to lunch next Thursday, just because, well, you know, it’s annual review time and we just want to say ‘thanks’ (“Thanks” now meaning “Goodbye” in Tesla speak) for all of your hard work, and, well, again, you just never know when one of us might want to do something else, and, oh gosh, we just never spend enough time together, so let’s break some bread!”

I’m also guessing the Friday after Tesla Annual Performance Review week is one big giant after-party!

Let’s face it, firing anyone during performance evaluation time is an awful way to run that process. You wait around for once a year to do most of your terminations, you’re not doing employee performance well at all!

If you have performance issues, high-performance companies address those issues immediately, work to correct, and if that doesn’t happen, they move to terminate as soon as it’s clear performance will not improve. Or you can wait around for f’ing ‘Death Day’ once a year and add a million times more stress to the process than is ever needed.

But what do I know, I mean it’s Tesla and Tesla knows all. Can’t wait to meet the ‘unicorn’ HR leader from Tesla at next conference I go to explain how brilliant they are for coming up with this nightmare.

HR on my friends.

Are You Hiring Raw Talent?

Posted on October 2, 2017 by Tim Sackett

Last week I got invited down to Rock Ventures (Dan Gilbert – the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Quicken Loans – yeah that Rock Ventures) to do the closing keynote for their HR and Talent Summit across the family of companies in Downtown Detroit! Fun, fast-moving culture. Seemingly every CEO of the 130 Rock Venture companies looked to be 30-ish!

As you can imagine, fast-growing organization, that can grow or hire enough talent fast enough to keep up.

One of the sessions was led by Victor You, CEO of Rock Connections, which is a call center that was built for Quicken Loans, but they found out other companies needed a high-quality call center, so they started selling their services. Most of the Rock Venture companies have a similar story. Idea by an employee, run with it, if you can make it happen, you become the CEO!

Rock Ventures is a Detroit company. When I say “Detroit” I mean “Detroit”. The entire campus is downtown Detroit. They hire Detroit city citizens. They are almost singlehandedly turning Detroit into one of the hottest growing cities in the U.S. Therein lies Victor’s problem as a CEO of a fast-growing startup.

Rock doesn’t want to have to relocate everyone they hire to Detroit. They want to hire those people already in Detroit. As you can imagine there’s a skills gap. The normal Detroit citizen is like most urban center citizens. Lower educated, lower income, less likely to have a college education.

Victor graduated from the University of Michigan. Engineering grad who didn’t like engineering. So, he went and sold mortgages. Did pretty well. Good enough that Dan Gilbert made him CEO of a company! What I love about Victor is he gets talent. He gets talent at a very different level than 99% of CEOs on the planet.

Victor explained it the group as “Raw” talent versus experiential talent. Almost all of us hire experiential talent. We have a job opening. That job needs a certain level of experience. So, that’s what we recruit and hire.

Victor doesn’t look for experience. Victor looks for raw talent attributes. What are those?

Hard working
Pride in the work they do
Wants to be apart of something bigger than them
Never satisfied

He saw that many Detroiters had these attributes, but no one was willing to give them a shot because they didn’t have the ‘experience’. He was like, “we can teach them the job”, it’s harder to teach them the raw talent attributes. In fact, you can’t teach those raw talent attributes.

The results have been off the charts! Great retention. High performance. High diversity. High concentration of Detroiters.

In a tight talent economy, you need to start changing the way you do things. We need to open up these modern day ‘apprenticeships’. We need more CEO leadership like Victor You.

Being a Fair Leader Won’t Get You Promoted!

Posted on September 19, 2017 by Tim Sackett

Look out HR Leaders this one is going to sting a little – from The Harvard Business Review:

“In management, fairness is a virtue. Numerous academic studies have shown that the most effective leaders are generally those who give employees a voice, treat them with dignity and consistency, and base decisions on accurate and complete information.

But there’s a hidden cost to this behavior. We’ve found that although fair managers earn respect, they’re seen as less powerful than other managers—less in control of resources, less able to reward and punish—and that may hurt their odds of attaining certain key, contentious leadership roles.”

Wow, that really flies in the face of all that we’ve been taught by our HR Heroes, doesn’t it! Well, not exactly, just because treating employees fairly and with respect might not get you promoted, it doesn’t make it the wrong thing to do. That’s a hard pill to swallow though, right?

How many times in your career have you looked at someone who was promoted and said to yourself “how the hell did they get promoted!?” It’s usually the leader who is pushing people around, and no one likes, and the CEO taps them on the shoulder for the next VP role. Some more from the HBR article:

“We’ve long wondered why managers don’t always behave fairly because doing so would clearly benefit their organizations: Studies show that the success of change initiatives depends largely on fair implementation. Our research suggests an answer. Managers see respect and power as two mutually exclusive avenues to influence, and many choose the latter. Although this appears to be the more rational choice, it’s not always the correct one—and it poses big risks for organizations.”

Do you know why managers choose “Power” over “Respect” as a leadership style? It’s easier! I mean way EASIER! Positional power makes your job so much easier to move things through organizations and get things done, but you burn a lot of bridges and relationships on that path.

Getting things accomplished through mutual respect and influence can take time, but ultimately is more rewarding. Time tends to be the big factor with this, though. In today’s organizations we frequently feel pushed by time to get things done – Now – and that “now” tends not to work well with “respect”. More from HBR:

“Companies can benefit from placing more value on fairness when assessing managerial performance. Our early follow-up research suggests that managers whose style is based on respect can gain power. Their path upward may be difficult, but it’s one worth taking, for their company’s sake as well as their own.”

Thus, this is the key! Want to build Great leaders in your organization? Give them this time to get things done through leading with a style based in respect. Want to get something done tomorrow, and not care about how your employees are getting treated? Let positional power rule the day, and be comfortable with your leaders throwing their weight around the office to get things done.

Let’s face it, this isn’t an all or nothing exclusive thing. We need our leaders to do both – treat employees with respect, and get results quickly. That’s why we have HR! That is a tough thing to accomplish, but HR Pros can help leaders accomplish this task.

It’s Better to Make a Wrong Decision Fast

Posted on September 15, 2017 by Tim Sackett

For those that don’t know I played and coached volleyball for a great deal of my life. Being from Michigan I can tell you that is rare (being a male) and I got called “gay” more than once while fundraising to make money to pay for traveling nationally for major tournaments (I think the actual phrases were more like “don’t girls only play volleyball”, etc. Welcome to the rust belt).

Anyway, one piece of my coaching stuck with me (we used with our middle blockers) that I also have used into my adult life and I use it still today:

It’s better to make a wrong decision fast, then make the right decision to slow.

Why? In volleyball, when you go to block you have to make split second decisions. You have 3 options: block middle, block right side hitter, or block left side hitter. You rely on your instincts, you rely on communication from your teammates and you survey the situation (where is the pass coming from, where is the setter, how far off the net is the setter, etc.), then you make a decision.

The problem most middle blockers have at a young age is they want to be up on every block. They want to make the right decision every time, but by doing this, they rarely make it to block any position because they are frozen with indecision. I taught my middles to decide quickly and then do it. Do it 110%! Go to which ever spot you decided to block and block and even if the ball went to another position!

Why? Some positive things happen by you making the wrong decision quickly. For starters it allows your teammates to make adjustments they need to make to try and get the best possible outcome. Believe me your back row players know you made the wrong decision because they’re staring down the hitter with only one blocker! BUT, it also allows them to know how to try and defend that.

If you’re late, and you have a hole in the middle of the block and now they have to guess where to go. Fill the hole, cover the line, take the cross, etc. It becomes a guessing game. One which you rarely win. What happens if you make the right decision to slow? About 99% of the time, what was going to happen, already happened. You didn’t make the decision, it was made for you. I like being in control, so this isn’t an option I like.

So what? What the heck does this have anything to do with you becoming a better leader?

Fast Company has a wonderful article on this concept called: Why Keeping Your Options Open is Really, Really Bad Idea – from the article:

Why does keeping our options open make us less happy? Because once we make a final, no-turning-back decision, the psychological immune system kicks in. This is how psychologists like Gilbert refer to the mind’s uncanny ability to make us feel good about our decisions. Once we’ve committed to a course of action, we stop thinking about alternatives. Or, if we do bother to think about them, we think about how lousy they are compared to our clearly superior and awesome choice.

Most of us have had to make a choice between two colleges, or job offers, or apartments. You may have had to choose which candidate to hire for a job, or which vendor your company would engage for a project. When you were making your decision, it was probably a tough one–every option had significant pros and cons. But after you made that decision, did you ever wonder how you could have even considered the now obviously inferior alternative?…

When you keep your options open, however, you can’t stop thinking about the downside–because you’re still trying to figure out if you made the right choice. The psychological immune system doesn’t kick in, and you’re left feeling less happy about whatever choice you end up making.

This brings us to the other problem with reversible decisions–new research shows that they don’t just rob you of happiness, they also lead to poorer performance.

I tend to run into this with younger workers who want to make the right choice, fearing “death” or some other less desirable outcome if they make the wrong choice. They tend to defer decision making to their boss or a peer instead of making it themselves, thus giving away the chance for superior performance.

When in reality, all I want is for them to make any choice, and we’ll live with the outcome. I hire great people, so I’m sure they’ll make very wise, research driven decisions, and even then, sometimes they’ll fail. I’m willing to live with that. If it’s fast! Because that allows us to adjust and find a way to make it right.

Two things at play in this concept: 1. Fast action; 2. Failure is an option, that we can live with. Give me those two things, and I’ll show you an organization that is on the move and that can block pretty well!

The New Definition of “Meaningful Work”

Posted on August 24, 2017 by Tim Sackett

I’m going to stop fighting. For years I’ve been fighting morons who claim that Millennials would rather do ‘meaningful work’ than making money. That is actually one big lie, I believe perpetuated by employers who don’t want to pay market wages! (Conspiracy Theory Alert!!!) Actually, it showed up on a bunch of studies that were poorly worded and confusing.

The reality is money matters until it doesn’t.

Millennials and almost any other human on the planet would love to do work that is ‘meaningful’ and something they enjoy doing. That isn’t rocket science. But, if you’re not at least making a fair market wage, money is the most important thing for the majority of people. The studies that said Millennials would prefer meaningful work over money, didn’t make it clear about the money.

It was put to them as if it was a decision about ‘more’ money or ‘meaningful’ work, what would they choose. The perception being that you are already making ‘good’ money, so now what do you want? More money, or meaningful work, or something else. In that case, the majority of people choose other things because we don’t want to come across as greedy.

All of this brings up a great concept, though, about what the heck do we really mean when we say, “Meaningful Work”? That was also a problem in early studies. Most people assumed that ‘meaningful work’ was ‘charitable’ work. It was about working for a company like Tom’s that made shoes and gave a pair of shoes to the needy when you bought a pair. Or working at a hospital that helped people, etc.

You couldn’t work at Amazon and have it be meaningful work. Serving hot fries and cold beer at Applebee’s isn’t meaningful work. All of this ‘meaningful work’ stuff became very limiting for young people searching for jobs!

The reality is, meaningful work has basically two components:

1. Is the work something you’re good at?

2. Is the work important to you?

This new definition of meaningful work makes it much easier to understand and reach a position that is more personal to what you are good at, and what ultimately is important to where you are at in your life and career.

This definition of meaningful work allows people to have many forms of what would be considered meaningful work for themselves, not others. You might find grooming dogs meaningful work, but I might not. That’s okay, it’s your job, not mine! I find bakers have meaningful work. I love what they make, but the person who is working as a baker might not find it to be meaningful work, it might just be a job.

Meaningful work is important to the individual doing it. I run a staffing firm. We find people jobs that I hope will increase their career value, and help them reach their life goals. I find that meaningful. Others hate my profession and call me a headhunter. That’s okay, it’s not their work, it’s mine.

Should You Fire Your White Supremacist Employees?

Posted on August 16, 2017 by Tim Sackett

Oh, boy, this is a hot one! I thought about not evening addressing this, for like twenty seconds!

It was all over the news this past weekend when Cole White decided to travel from California to Charlottesville, VA to support a white supremacist march, that had a tragic outcome to some opposing the group White supported. Some Twitter accounts began almost immediately posting pictures of the white supremacist looking for help in discovering the identity of their supporters.

Why? Once you find who a white supremacist is, it’s fairly easy to destroy them on social media and in real life! The hot dog restaurant that Cole White worked for in California, Top Dog, LLC. (I can’t make this up), fired him as soon as they found out what he was participating in. He wasn’t fired for performance, he was fired because of the backlash of him being associated with this business.

Basically, Twitter won. Either you fire him, or we’ll make sure no one feels comfortable eating in your establishment, forever!

Is that legal? Can you fire someone over their political views? Well, yes! Okay, not if you work within the Federal Government, there are laws, for good reason, to protect workers who have differing political views. Although I would argue that Cole White doesn’t have a ‘differing’ political view, he is more of a terrorist, then some right wing nut job who doesn’t want to pay taxes!

Here’s the legal aspect of him being fired (from The Atlantic):

In many cases, firing someone for their political ideas raises few legal issues. Though public-sector workers can’t be terminated for their political views, and many union contracts require that an employer demonstrate “just cause” for firing someone, federal law doesn’t offer any protections for expressing political views or participating in political activities for those who work in the private sector and don’t have a contract stating otherwise, according to Katherine Stone, a law professor at UCLA who focuses on labor law. (There are a few caveats for those in states or municipalities with laws that go beyond the federal mandate.) But more to the point, Stone says, it’s not at all uncommon—or illegal—for private-sector workers to get fired for what they do in their free time if it reflects poorly on their employer. In cases such as this, an employer in the private sector simply isn’t required to employ someone who exercises their right to free speech, Stone says.

Here’s the money quote:

“it’s not at all uncommon—or illegal—for private-sector workers to get fired for what they do in their free time if it reflects poorly on their employer”

Should you fire white supremacist employees? Yes. Does this set precedence? Yes. Will an employee try and use this against you the next time they feel uncomfortable with something another employee does they don’t agree with? Yes.

It doesn’t matter. You do the right thing, at the right time, in the circumstances you have. Then, you worry about the next time, the next time. White supremacy and hate speech are not something you need in your workplace, ever. We aren’t talking differing political views of normal Democrats and Republicans. Some of my best friends have differing views on tax reform, healthcare, etc. I still love them and want the best for them. That’s normal, hate speech is not normal.

Understand that firing these employees just throws them back out into the wild. It doesn’t make it, or them, go away. Some will argue, and rightly so, that it’s best not to fire these employees because it gives you an opportunity to educate them, to help make them better. That’s truly being inclusive. I don’t agree or understand your hatred, but you are apart of this organization. We made a decision to bring you on. So, maybe we should try and help from the inside.

Will it work? Most likely, no. But it might. It might change one person. It’s a start.

I was married by a Jewish Cantor in a Temple in Lincoln, NE. This Jewish Cantor took in a white supremacist into his home who was unable to care for himself any longer. The Cantor was able to help this person see that the people this white supremacist hated the most were willing to care for and help him in his time of n d, when ‘his’ people were not. Cantor changed one man, not the world. But maybe this is how we change the world, one person at a time.

2017 Michigan Recruiter’s Conference is October 25th in Detroit!

Posted on August 9, 2017 by Tim Sackett

That’s right gang! We’re back and better than ever!

The 2017 Michigan Recruiter’s Conference will take place on Wednesday, October 25th from 9 am to 4 pm in downtown Detroit onsite at our wonderful corporate host Quicken Loans!

Registration is now open – the cost of this event is $69 per person. This is a corporate talent acquisition event, no agency or third party recruiting pros will be allowed to register. It’s not that we don’t love you all, it’s that this is a development event, not a come pimp us with your services event.

Space will be limited, so please register early if you want a seat. You can transfer registration to another person on your team if plans change.

Who’s on the Agenda I hear you asking yourself! Oh, boy did I hit a few home runs this year!!!

SPEAKERS:

Carmen Hudson, Principle Consultant at Recruiting Toolbox, and Co-Founder of Talent42

Shaunda Zilich, Employment Brand Leader at GE

Will Maurer, Global Talent Acquisition, Sourcing Manager, General Motors

Holly Fawcett, Curriculum Development Manager at Social Talent

Margie Elsesser, VP of Talent Brand & Strategy at Quicken Loans

Mike Bailen, VP of People at Lever and former Head of Talent for Zappos

Killed it, right?!?!

ERE, SHRM, and TEDx wished they had this line up coming to their events!

Thank you to our sponsors for making this happen – Lever and Quicken Loans. We could not offer this at such a low price without their financial assistance and support! So, support them!

Can’t wait to see you all in Downtown Detroit! Bringing it to the D!

Midwest Recruiter’s Bootcamp! Minneapolis July 31st-Aug 1 (LAST CALL!)

Posted on July 25, 2017 by Tim Sackett

My good friend and recruiting guru, Paul DeBettignies, is hosting the Midwest Recruiting Bootcamp in Minneapolis next week, and he asked me to come and speak at it. He also asked some of the top recruiting minds in the business as well! The camp is next week July 31st and August 1st in Minneapolis, and you can still register and be apart of this!

Check out this list:

Maren Hogan – Create Winning Employer Brand for Knockout Recruitment
Jim Durbin – 8 Mistakes You’re Making: The New Rules Of LinkedIn
Shannon Pritchett – In OR out? Creative Sourcing Techniques to Find Your Candidates OUTside the box
Caroline Karanja – 10 ways to build diversity, practice inclusion and increase engagement within your organization
Paul himself – Create and Grow Your Recruiter Brand
Nick Roseth – Selling Minnesota: Strategies And Tools to Improve Recruiting To The Region
And me – hugging mostly! Okay, not really, I’m going to be sharing the 10 Truths Of Recruiting And Why You Are Failing At Them! And, how you can not fail at them!

When Paul first talked to me about the concept of the Midwest Recruiting Bootcamp I knew instantly it would be a hit and something I wanted to be apart of! Why? This is real Recruiting development for recruiting teams! It’s what I wanted to bring to Michigan with the Michigan Recruiter’s Conference.

National level development and speakers, in our own backyard!

Paul let me know today he still has some space open for any recruiter’s or recruiting managers who want to join us. We’ll be onsite at the University of Minnesota. It’s two days that are packed with great material. If you can’t make both days – come one day, then send someone else on your team the other day! Or just come one day – you’ll still get a ton out of it!

REGISTER FOR MIDWEST RECRUITING BOOTCAMP!

This might be the biggest bang for the buck in recruiter training budget history!

Here’s Paul telling us a little more:

7 Things You Must Do if You Want to Hire the Best Team!

Posted on July 12, 2017 by Tim Sackett

Every once in a while I run into someone who “gets it”. Who understands recruiting, talent acquisition, and this whole big HR world at another level. They make it easy, or at least for them, it’s easy. It’s easy because they have a crystal clear vision of what they want and how they are going to go about getting it.

I read an article this week in some obscure publication that probably twenty people read, but the author just got it! Carmen Di Rito is co-founder and chief development officer of LifeCo UnLtd in South Africa (I’ll be speaking at HR Tech Fest in September in Johannesburg! I’m going to invite her over for sure!). Here are her guiding principles when it comes to talent:

Look for attitude alignment: When recruiting for a new position, look for alignment in thinking first, then competency and expertise.
Be fanatical: Fixate on building a cohesive, robust team that believes in and lives your values so that you have a culture you are proud of—and enjoy being a part of.
Be brutally honest: Share the frustrations, challenges, and demands of the job upfront, as well as the mandate of the organization. No sugar coating. Share who and what the organization is—authentically.
Develop a compelling, audacious vision: A strong vision will attract people who are courageous, tenacious, and hardworking.
Disrupt: The social sector is challenging, rewarding, but above all, disruptive. Build disruptive strategies to recruit, develop, and retain talent.
Experiment: Constantly improve processes and policies to unleash talent at all levels.
Expect excellence and reward high performance. Obsess over quality. High-performing teams and winning cultures aren’t born out of mediocrity. An organization’s leaders must be exemplars of excellence and high performance.

It’s really good, right!?

“High-performing teams and winning cultures aren’t born out of mediocrity.” This is something I would expect to hear from me, or older dudes my age, not someone who graduated college in 2010! Carmen is a pusher! Working for a non-profit!

If you can do these seven things consistently, you’ll be a great leader and you’ll run a great organization. Simple. Yet extremely hard to maintain. Why? It takes extreme perseverance and fortitude as a leader to maintain this high standard of yourself and your team.

The best organizations and leaders in the world do this. From giants to start-ups. In HR and TA we tend not to think at this level, at least average performers don’t! We tend to think about a lot of other details that might help get us to this point, but also most likely won’t.

I don’t feel like this is aspirational for Carmen. I believe this is her true north. This guides her daily decision making. She can lead a small non-profit or a major Fortune 500 company and she’ll be the same leader. That should be aspirational for all us!

The Story That Wins Becomes The Truth

Posted on July 10, 2017 by Tim Sackett

In HR we hear a lot of stories.

We love to tell ourselves we are hearing the truth from one side and a lie from another side, but the reality is both sides are stories with a little truth and a little lie built in. We then ‘measure’ who we feel is telling more truth than lie, and that side becomes the full truth.

Throughout history, this plays out. The winners of war decide what the truth is, not the losers. One side is good and righteous, one side is bad and evil. Before the war, both sides were just trying to make it through the day and make their society better. Truth.

We fire someone because they harassed another person. That person is a bad person. The person who got harassed is a victim and is a good person. The problem is, that’s not really reality, is it? Many times the person we fire is actually a pretty good person and the victim is a piece of garbage. But, the winner gets to decide the role they want.

We fire an employee because we are told by their manager that they are not performing well. We trust our manager. We have to it’s what our structure is built on. If we didn’t then what are we really doing? The employee claims they weren’t trained properly, they weren’t given good direction, they were put in a position to fail. You’re fired, you’re a bad employee. You lose, you don’t get to decide the truth.

It’s one major reason why I tend not to really care that a person was fired from a job. The reason probably matters. I don’t want to hire someone who embezzled from their former employer or some other major offense, but performance, let’s talk. I’m willing to talk because I know there are always two sides to the story. It just happens that this candidate lost their last story, but they might win the next.

It’s important as HR pros and leaders we understand this concept, not just for hiring, but also that we understand most times we don’t deal in complete black and white wins and losses. In HR we deal in the middle, in the gray. Once we make a determination, we are making a determination of ‘win’. We are validating one story over another. We like to tell ourselves and our leadership that this one story is the truth, but it’s really just another version of a story.

So be careful this week as you decide which stories will win and which ones will lose. Truth can be a pretty powerful thing even when it’s just a story.

The Tim Sackett Project

TA & HR Expert, Dad, Backup Point Guard on my over 40 men's team

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