Category Archives: Life Lessons

The Email Every Employee Wishes They Sent After Leaving!

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Please raise your hand if you have ever drafted an email that you desperately wanted to fire off to your entire organization, or leadership, only to delete it, so to not ruin your career? I know most of you have because sometimes, in HR, we get to deal with those poor souls who didn’t have the willpower to push ‘Delete’ and instead pushed ‘Send’.

In the HR business, we call those employees ‘Former Employees’!  I’ve coined a name for those emails I like to call them ‘The Lotto Email’!  It’s the email you would feel comfortable sending the moment you return from picking up that overly sized Powerball check you just won.  You now have I-Don’t-Give-A-Sh*t money and you’re completely unfiltered.

I don’t hold out hope I will ever win the lottery but I imagine the email might look something like this:

Dear Fellow Employees,

I’m Rich Beeatch! (click here for context)

That being said I’d like to say a few things before not packing up any of this crap in my office and leaving forever.  To make this easier for you to cut and paste and send around later, I’ll bullet point this out into chunks – USA Today style – because I know most of you are slow and lose attention quickly:

– Mr. CEO – I know you think it’s probably adorable how you make comments about every woman in the office’s ass behind closed doors, but it’s not, it’s creepy. Just like you.

– Mr. CFO – You’re an accountant, calm the f@#K down, you’re not that important. Just tell us how much money we have and go back to being boring.

– Mrs. HR – Nobody likes you. This is just confirmation. BTW, everyone lies on your engagement surveys because all the managers use them as weapons, so it’s easier to lie and make you feel like what you do actually matters. It doesn’t.

– Mrs. COO – The CEO constantly talks about your ass. Hope that makes your meetings going forward more comfortable.

– Mary – I’ve always wanted to tell you that you are drop dead gorgeous, but your low self-esteem keeps you married to a complete asshole! I’m better than that. I won’t be that asshole. Here’s our chance, walk out of here with me Jerry Maguire style and let’s do this. Otherwise, I’m probably 5 drinks and 2 hours away from making some really bad decisions at a strip club.

– Ted – You’re a douche bag, everyone hates you.

There’s a bunch of other stuff I could to say – but really the only thing I really want to say is: I’m Rich Beeatch!

See you in the parking lot, Mary.

Former Employee

Obviously, this wouldn’t be ‘my’ letter because I’m the President of my company!  My letter would be a lot of thanking everyone for everything and I’ll see you around if you’re ever in the South of France on a large yacht. Plus a bunch of positive stuff and how valuable each and every employee was to me personally.

Follow by – “I’m Rich Beeatch!”

Snoring on a Plane!

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I was flying recently and the dude right across the aisle from me started snoring. Snoring like he had a problem and there’s no way his wife still loves him kind of snoring. Snoring so loud I wanted to punch him right in the face.

I get it. Snoring is a medical condition he couldn’t help. Poor dude was tired and sitting in a hot plane and nature took over.

Snoring on a plane though speaks to me as a recruiter.

If you know you snore, you make sure you don’t snore in public. Drink 26 cups of coffee before you get on the plane, go see a doctor for some kind of surgery, take up a cocaine habit, I don’t know but do something!

It shows lack of self-insight.

The best case scenario is he wakes up, without me punching him in the face, and he looks at me and apologizes because he knows his own snoring woke him up. Or he wakes up and I tell him, dude, you’ve got a problem! Don’t ever fall in asleep on a plane!

He then looks at me, and says, I had no idea! Oh, my god, I’m so embarrassed and sorry! I will make sure to never fall asleep on a plane again without first putting on a breath-right strip!

But, he didn’t. He woke up an hour later with about 12 people hating him, and he had no idea, or he did and didn’t care. Which gets me back to recruiting.

Snoring on a plane demonstrates lack of self-insight. It might be the single most important thing you can have as a candidate. From the first moment you have contact with an employer to the last, you’re being judged.

The last thing you want to be judged on is having low self-insight. “Oh, wow, did you see Tim come in with the stain on his tie? Did he know? How doesn’t he know? Why didn’t he say something like, ‘sorry, guys, spilled coffee on my tie on the way in, and I’m totally embarrassed!’

At least we would know he wasn’t a complete moron! Instead, Tim is “snoring on a plane”.

No employer wants to hire you if you “snore on a plane”, they want to hire people who know who they are, good and bad, and can then overcome the bad and highlight the good. They want to hire candidates who have high self-insight because they know those people will take care of themselves and their performance.

We are really bad judges of self-insight for ourselves. We all think we have super high self-insight, but most of us really suck at this self-diagnosis. As someone who is close to you, but not to close, to help you out with this. Let them know you need to know the truth, the real truth.

Ask them to be real with you for a second! Hey, please, if you’re my friend, tell me, do I ‘snore on a plane’?

Career Confessions of GenZ: Are Dream Jobs a Lie?

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Career Confessions from GenZ is a weekly series authored by Cameron Sackett, a Sophomore at the Univesity of Michigan majoring in Communications and Advertising. Make sure you connect with him on LinkedIn:

In 2014 I (Tim, not Cameron) wrote a post titled, “Dream Jobs are a Lie!”  It’s one of my most read posts of all time. One reason is the title is SEO gold, turns out a lot of people are using the search term “dream jobs”.

When I wrote the post I was basically speaking to the Millennial generation. What I wanted to find out is whether or not GenZ felt like they were also feeling the pressure of finding their “dream job”. So, I went right to my GenZ Expert, Cameron Sackett!

Since we are in Miami on vacation – we decided to go all GenZ and do this post via video –

Let us know what you think in the comments! Do you think the concept of a Dream Job is a lie? Should people be chasing ‘their’ dream job?

 

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a GenZ? Ask us in the comments and I’ll have Cameron respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for Cameron? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with him on LinkedIn.

The Cancer of Speaking Up!

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There was a post recently on TLNT by Tim Kuppler titled Society is Holding Organizations and Leaders Accountable for Their Culture. Go read it, it’s really good. I agree with so much of what Tim wrote in the piece.

There is one concept though that I’m beginning to question. Kuppler wants to believe that we have a problem in our society and that problem is people are afraid to speak up to their leadership.

About a decade ago I would have 100% agreed with him. In fact, I probably spent more time in training sessions working with leaders on how to get employees to open up, then any other single thing in my HR career a decade ago!

In 2018, we do not have a problem with employees speaking up. In fact, it’s a full-blown Cancer! Yes, I want employees to speak up when they have something of value to add to the conversation, or if they or another employee are being wronged. No, I don’t want to hear your idiot opinions that have nothing to do with anything we have going on to make us better!

I get it. Everyone should have a voice! We are in a time when people have the right to speak up.

Just because you have the right, doesn’t mean you should open your dumb mouth! You have employees in non-leadership positions who should open their mouth and add to the conversation. And, you have employees who make you dumber when they open their mouth.

Your company isn’t a democracy. Turns out businesses don’t run well as democracies. When everyone has a say, we tend to get very cautious and very vanilla, and no innovation happens, as we try to take into account every single opinion. The business gets pulled to the middle. “Middle” is not a good position for businesses.

The challenge we have as leaders and HR pros is not giving everyone a voice. It’s finding the best and brightest in our organizations, regardless of race, gender, etc., and making sure ‘those’ people have a voice.

The fastest way to failure is to listen to everyone and take into account every opinion. That isn’t helpful. Having the foresight to understand there are really great voices beyond your leadership team could be your greatest insight of all, but understand it’s not everyone.

In a representative government, you want all voices to come through. In business, you want the voices to come through that can actually make a positive difference. Unfortunately, that isn’t everyone who works for you.

In business and leadership right now we have a cancer that is growing out of control and that cancer is a belief that every voice matters. That’s wrong. Every voice does not matter, at every time. Do you think Steve Jobs listened to every person at Apple? No, he barely listened to anyone! What about Elon Musk? Again, no. What about Marissa Mayer? Heck, no!

Great business and great innovation don’t happen by listening to everyone. They happen by listening to the right ones. That might not be popular right now in society, but that doesn’t mean it’s not right!

When Should You Let Employees Lead Themselves?

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I like to compare sports coaches to business leaders. I know it’s different, but in so many ways there are great comparisons when it comes to execution, performance, and team dynamics.

Coaches are known from time to time to get out the way and let players take over. Player only meetings, player-coaches, etc.

What coaches find is that their teams will sometimes stop listening (sound familiar leaders!?), or they’ve have heard them say the same thing so often, it no longer has the impact it once did. So, have the players be the coach! What you usually find is the players say basically the same thing as the coach, but in a slightly different way and the team responds!

Steve Kerr, the coach of the NBA Golden State Warriors did this last week with a couple of players who had the night off due to injury, rest, etc. He basically let them coach the timeout huddles. Now, he did this with three players he knew could handle it and three players that have high respect for their teammates (see the video below):

There is no doubt each of those players could become a coach when their playing days are over, just like Kerr did if they wanted.

My question is, would this work in a real work setting?

Do you think that your employees, left to ‘coaching’ themselves would respond in a positive way?

Maybe, but most likely not unless you prepared them for this. I’m guessing Kerr has had some time in practice with these three players talking strategy and full confidence that his vision, was also their vision. Because of these “pre-session”, he felt comfortable that the wheels weren’t going to come off.

The other factor here is you need a team that completely trusts one another. The team reacted positively because each of them knew that the player, now playing the role of coach, wanted the same thing they wanted, to win. To make them look good. To use their strengths to accomplish the outcome.

I’m guessing if you walked into your department tomorrow and brought everyone into the conference room and threw Jill a whiteboard marker and said: “Okay, I’m going to have Jill tell us the sales strategy for the 2nd quarter!” Everyone would look sideways and Jill would probably want to have a private conversation!

But, if you had many conversations with Jill and you felt she was prepared and ready, then maybe it could be a positive for her and for the team, believing you had confidence they could make it happen!  I like leaders who try things, given they try things based on skill and preparation.

What do you think? Should Kerr have put players in charge over other players? How would this play in your work environment?

Lifesaving Advice I Gave My Son When Someone Starts Shooting At His School

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Last night I had to sit my 14-year-old son down and have “the ‘talk”.

It was uncomfortable, it should be, having “the talk” is never easy for parents and their kids. Unfortunately, this wasn’t “the talk” I thought I would be having with him. This talk was about what he needed to do to stay alive when a shooter comes into his school and starts mowing down innocent kids because our American government refuses to do anything about it.

I need to take my shoes off to get on an airplane because I might have a shoe bomb and want to blow up a plane. I have to do this because 1 person, 1 time, got on a plane with a shoe bomb and burned himself.

Hundreds of school shootings have happened and thousands of kids have been killed or hurt, and we can’t figure out a way to stop this from happening. It’s not important enough for our society to change this.

This isn’t a political statement. This is a dad crying out to the universe to please stop this so I won’t be that parent on CNN telling my own child’s story because they were never given a chance to tell it on their own.

Those who were voted into a position of political power in our country, every party, every single person, have failed this nation. This isn’t a party issue. This is a kid’s are getting killed issue. You don’t need an arsenal of guns in your house to go deer hunting. You need one rifle that shoots one bullet at a time.

The 2nd Amendment in our Bill of Rights that gives us this ‘freedom’ as Americans to bear arms was written and approved by Congress in 1789. 229 years ago we needed to bear arms because a bear actually might kill you! Now, we don’t need to bear arms. We have the world’s best, most highly funded military force to protect us.

That we live in a society that allows any kind of access to teens to get their hands on guns is shameful. Teens are mostly crazy! They’re emotional. They act impulsively. They don’t think beyond the minute they’re living in. That is not a good combination to mix in access to guns and ammunition. Every single parent in the world understands this simple concept.

But, now I have to give tips and strategy to my son on how to save his life when a school shooter commences to mowing down innocent victims because Timmy’s Dad had to have an arsenal in his basement because this is “America!”

Fuck you, Timmy’s Dad!

So, here’s the advice I gave to my son, and I’m sure you’ll give to your sons and daughters. I told him to survive. Do anything you have to do to survive. Like the Hunger Games, you survive. That’s an order. For some reason, we’ve regressed hundreds of years as a society that my ‘life’ advice to my son in 2018 is simply to “Survive”.

So, ultimately, this is a failure of parenting. We have failed as parents that we elected people in our own image who have refused to fix a problem that we all want to be fixed. We failed because we don’t think this will happen to ‘our’ kid. We hate that it happens to any kid, but it won’t happen to “my” kid.

We’re stupid. It is going to happen to my kid and I can’t sleep at night knowing when I drop my son off at school tomorrow there isn’t one thing being done to save his life by those in charge of our laws in this country. Not one single thing.

Just survive, I told him…

We can stop this. In our world, it takes money to beat the bad guys who have more money right now. I donated to Everytown.org – The Movement to End Gun Violence. I’m not associated with Everytown, but I donated money so I support them. If you want to support them, great! 

(Photo cred: Larry Nodarse)

 

Do you know what you really want in your career?

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About ten years ago I came home one day and said to my wife, “I can’t do this anymore”. It doesn’t matter what I was doing, I just couldn’t do that anymore. I knew it. Something had to change.

Steve Jobs is famously quoted as saying, “people don’t know what they want until you show them”, I think Henry Ford said something similar about one hundred years before Jobs. Both were talking about consumers, but in reality, it fits people in almost every aspect of life.

I find it really rings true for people in their careers. We think we know what we want. “I want to be a vice president by the time I’m 35”, I told my wife when I was 25 years old. I thought I knew what I wanted in my career. In reality, I was just title chasing.

I became a vice president and I found out I felt no difference in my career, and I definitely didn’t feel satisfied. So, a title was not what I truly wanted. What I discovered was I wanted to be in control. Success or failure, I wanted that on my shoulders. It didn’t matter what I was actually doing in my career, I needed control.

As a leader, I find probably only about ten percent of those who you support will truly have an idea about what they want out of a career. The other ninety percent, are just like me, they think they know, but they really don’t until they’ve reached whatever goal they’ve set for themselves, then they’ll find out if they actually had any clue, or they were just guessing.

If we start with most employees have no idea what they want in their career, or at best they have an idea, but it’ll be wrong, it’s now up to leaders to help shape this path. It might be the only real thing we can do for those we supervise as leaders are to help guide them on their career path.

Employees don’t know what they want in a career until you show them. 

If you believe this is your job as a leader to show those you work with what their career can be, this really helps to crystallize what you do each day.

What I know from my experience is the best people I ever worked for had a vision and path they wanted for their career. That path was usually developed and born from a mentor or boss that took the time to care about this person enough to show them what their career could be.

I can point to four different leaders and mentors in my life who helped shape my path, and by the way, all said I was an idiot for my obsession with a title. I was too young to listen, and thankfully they were too smart to give up on me.

It’s your job as a leader to show your people what they want. Don’t ever assume that your people already know what they want, most don’t. They won’t admit this because admitting it makes you sound like a moron, but it shouldn’t stop you as a leader from showing them the possibilities.

What I find is the more you show them the path, the more they’ll gravitate towards it and raise their performance to meet it.

Welcome to Strugglesville: Population 1 (and that “1” is you!)

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Have you been struggling lately?

It seems like I go through bits of struggle here and there. The day starts off awesome, I’m getting stuff done, and then life happens and the struggle begins. Could be the boss gave some super-critical feedback on something you poured your soul into. Might be something outside of work (might? okay, probably something outside of work!). Maybe today just isn’t your day.

I know I’ve got a choice. Do I continue the struggle and take it home or pull others into my struggle, or do I pull myself out of the struggle and get back on track. I. Know. That. Is. A. Choice. And still, I struggle with that choice! Do you feel me?

The struggle is real, for all of us. Sure someone else probably has more of a struggle than you, but when you’re in full struggle mode you don’t want to hear that shit. Your struggle at that moment is for real, real!

So, how do I pull myself out of the struggle?

I’ve got a number of tactics I use to pull myself out of the struggle may be one of these will help you in your struggle:

– Find a small win! I’m not looking to save the world, I just need to get one small win under my belt! Maybe that’s not eating Taco Bell for lunch and having a salad (small win for me, yay!). Maybe it’s clearing my inbox (a little bigger win!). Maybe it’s finally having that one difficult conversation I’ve been putting off (small win with a big stress relief). It all starts with one small win, then find another, and build on those.

– Conversation with a positive ear! I’ve got some friends, peers, co-workers that I know are almost always really positive. I make that conversation happen, and the topic is not about my struggle, the topic is about something that needs to get done, or I need to make better, etc. After those conversations, I feel uplifted and energized to do something, and walk away from the struggles.

– Do something I’m good at or enjoy, that isn’t destructive. Okay, I might be a genius at ordering the perfect Taco Bell meal, but that’s not the good I’m talking about! I’m good at writing. It relaxes me. If I’m in full struggle mode, I start writing. I enjoy listening to music. It helps turn my mood around given the right playlist.

– Helping someone else. Nothing pulls me out of a struggle like being helpful to someone else. I get a positive boost. They get some help. I can return to my previously scheduled programming without the struggles!

I’ll pull myself into one of these three things mid-day if needed, because me working while struggling doesn’t help anyone, including myself.

I would love to hear how you pull yourself out of your struggle. We all visit Strugglesville, how we get home is pretty unique for each of us!

Are You In a Rush to be Offended?

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I was on a webinar recently and the speaker kept adding “she” and “he”every time they tried to say something like, “‘he’ would have to fill out that form” and then quickly go “or ‘she’ I know we have to be correct in HR”. In my mind, I was like okay, I get it, the word we use matter.

When I write, I frequently purposely change gender to try and be more gender-inclusive in my writing, knowing I’ll always by habit write from a more male dominant voice.

If we go back to the webinar example above, I’m sure you’ve seen and heard the same, but what really stuck with me, probably because he kept doing this so often, was me waiting for a comment to come across in the question box saying something like “well, you know there are more gender identities than male and female!”

Yep. There are. But, is this really the place to point this out. Clearly, the dude speaking was having a hard with just two and making sure we knew he cared equally about ‘both’ genders.

Years ago Salon had a great article about comedians struggling with how ‘politically correct’ the audiences were becoming. Here’s a quote from Jim Norton:

“Western culture has become a “tireless brigade of social-justice warriors” and that “Being outraged and upset and feeling bullied or offended are not only things we enjoy, they’re also things we have become thoroughly addicted to. When we can’t purposefully get our feelings hurt by a comedian, we usually find another, albeit less satisfying, source of indignation… I choose to believe that we are addicted to the rush of being offended, the idea of it, rather than believing we have become a nation of emasculated children whose only defense against an abyss of emotional agony is a trigger warning.”

We live in an offensive world, especially right now.

Every day media blasts every offensive phrase uttered by politicians, professional athletes, celebrities, etc. We see our employees and leaders say and write offensive things that in another time would probably have been ignored, but now we have platforms to call out the offense.

I think we hope that in our rush to be offended we will stop the offensive behavior, or at the very least get one person to stop their offensive behavior. We hope that by doing this we’ll ‘raise’ the level of conversation around these issues.

My fear is that we aren’t raising the level of conversation, but shutting it down. In our rush to be offended, we aren’t seeking first to understand, we are first attacking and who cares about what happens after that. I think we need to be careful with our employees and our workplace cultures to correct inappropriate behavior every single time it happens and do it in a way that is lasting for the person who does the offending.

We live in a world of gray. Not black and white. While one employee might be offended, the co-worker standing right next to them might not be at all. Both are wrong, and both are right. Either one attacking the other is never a solution that is sustainable for a positive and inclusive workplace culture.

Welcome to the show kids! This is one of the most difficult issues you’ll deal with in HR. Supporting one employee who is offended, when you know the majority would not be offended. If I had the perfect answer on how to handle this I would share, but I don’t, because each and every one of these situations is unique.

Am I In Charge Yet? Career Confessions from GenZ!

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Today I’m super excited to launch a new series on my blog that brings in thoughts and opinions directly from Generation Z. How do I pull that off? I happen to have a GenZ son at the University of Michigan who is going through an internship selection and interview process and I thought we could all learn a great deal about GenZ by listening hearing from them directly! 

My son, Cameron Sackett, is an Advertising and Marketing major at U of M, looking for his first real-world experience. Here is his take on how you find that first internship: 

Every incoming college student has a plan on how their college experience is going to go. I definitely did. I’m not even halfway done with college and it has gone NOTHING like I expected, but one thing I always knew that I needed was internships.

These coveted “jobs” for college students at cool companies like Nike or Google are a main topic of conversation on any college campus. I wanted to have one of these amazing intern experiences that you hear about all the time, but I quickly learned they are impossible to get.

All of these jobs require an “in”; you need to know someone that knows someone that can get your foot in the door. Reluctantly I had to face the truth, I had no “in” except for my father. The last thing any college student wants to do is turn to their parents to ask for help for anything, let alone getting a job. I have a great relationship with my parents and I love my dad, but I wanted to do this on my own!

I want to be able to say “I got this job and I did it myself”, but I need to play the game and that’s not how the game is played anymore. Luckily, my dad was already aware of this and had posted on his LinkedIn account for internships for my older brother and I. Little did I know this post would blow up and tens of thousands of people would have viewed it! (Honestly, I’m still surprised that many people care about what my Dad has to say).

Now I’m in contact with multiple different companies who are offering me great opportunities that will really further my education in a way I can’t do in a classroom. I now can see the benefit in using my “in”, my Dad, because it’s all about networking. Everyone nowadays is always telling you to network, to make connections with everyone you meet because you never know what they might be able to provide for you. Sometimes, the connections and networking we should be doing are close to us, like our parents.

I never thought that I would want to do anything similar to my Dad’s line of work (still don’t to be honest), but when your dad is a micro-celebrity in the HR world, you should take advantage of that! My biggest takeaway from this experience is to not be ashamed of using your connections because once you get your foot in the door, that’s when you can start to make a name for yourself. I’m still hoping for that amazing internship experience, but I have accepted the reality that to get that experience, I need to use the connections I have.

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a GenZ? Ask us in the comments and I’ll have Cameron respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for Cameron? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Besides being a Dad with a network, I thought the best way to get my son some ‘real-world’ experience would be to put himself out there as a writer! Let him know what you think and let us hear what you would like to learn about the next big generation entering our workforce!