Category Archives: Metrics

Bad is Stronger than Good

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I spoke at the inaugural TLNT Transform event last week in Austin – my topic was – What Your CEO Wished HR Would Do.  One thing that came up during my presentation was a conversation around “Must Do Moves”.  Must do moves are those things in your organization that you grab a hold of, as an HR Pro, and make sure they happen.  I asked the group a question:

Do you have anyone in your organization that you need to get rid of?

 

100% – all hands raised – Yes!  If you work in an organization that has a decent size – let’s say 100+, you almost always have a least one or two folks you would be better without. (for the record – my staff is less than 100, and I don’t have anyone I need to get rid of – they all rock! Don’t hate, I just follow my own advice!)  As HR Pros we hear about this in meetings with your executives and hiring managers – “Oh, if we could only replace John, we would be so much better!”   My point to the HR Pros in the audience is this is a value item that we can own in our organizations.  Must do moves – especially those that make our organizations stronger, need champions.  When it comes to staff moves – we are that champion.

What we realize, but many of our hiring managers fail to realize, is that Bad is Stronger than Good, when it comes to employees.  We hear all the time “Addition through Subtraction”, and yet we struggle in our organizations to make this happen.   Most likely this happens in your organization because you are trying to make your hiring managers, manage, and have them make this decision.  When in reality they have made the decision – they told you.  They hate conflict, even more than you do, and this was their cry for help.  Take it – run with it – make it happen.  It’s the one thing in HR we are all good at – process and planning.  Put a plan together to get rid of your Bad and make it happen.

I didn’t just say – go fire.  That’s not a plan. Well, it is a plan, but not a very good one.  I said make a plan to get rid of the bad.  That means working with the hiring manager to determine timing, back-fill options, sourcing, recruiting, progressive discipline – all that good stuff – but make it happen.  Really – make it happen.  Executives like doers!  They like doers that get rid of Bad in our organizations.  We own the Bad people in our organizations.  Any time you have a Bad person in your organization – you need to take on the persona – this Bad person is my fault, and I’m taking care of it.  Bad is Stronger than Good – you have to fight hard against Bad.

Want to look and be better in HR – own Must Do Moves in your organization.

Want me to come and tell you what other things your CEO wants HR to do?  Contact me – I’m cheap – not free – but cheap.

The 8 Man Rotation – 2011 Season

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In what is probably the most anticipated eBook release of 2012 the The 8 Man Rotation crew (Matt Stollack, Steve Boese, Lance Haun, Kris Dunn and I) today release to the world version two of our most famous HR/Sports related blog posts of 2011:  The 8 Man Rotation – the 2011 Season.   The forward is written by two of our HR friends and great writers in their own right – Trish McFarlane and William Tincup – who get to poke fun at our obsession with the weird combination of sports and HR that we just won’t give up writing about.  Check it out –

The 8 Man Rotation – The 2011 Season
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Do You Have a Jeremy Lin on Your Staff?

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“Linsanity” has taken over New York and the NBA!  Do you even know what it is?

Let’s begin with some background – Linsanity refers to Jeremy Lin the up-start Point Guard for the New York Knicks which seems to have materialized out of thin air.  How up-start? In his first 4 NBA starts, with the Knicks, he has scored more than Allen Iverson, more than Shaquille O’Neal, more than Michael Jordan, tops since the NBA and ABA merged in 1976.  Where did he come from?  Harvard – was a good player in college, but not a star.  Was signed and released by both Golden State and Houston, spent some time in the NBA Developmental league, before signing a 10 day contract with the Knicks (which has turned into a longer term deal).

Jeremy Lin coming onto the scene in the NBA is keen to you knocking down a wall in your house and finding $50 million.  It doesn’t happen.  Professional sports are professional because they have and find the best – they scout talent 24/7/365 – they do make mistakes – but rarely does potential get missed.  So, how did this Asian-American Ivy League educated Point Guard fall through the cracks?  No one really has a good explanation.  I can assume being on the only Ivy League educated, Asian-American in the NBA didn’t help him get noticed – for the simple fact – that wouldn’t get you noticed in the NBA.  He didn’t have Duke, UConn or UNC on his resume, the NBA doesn’t care that he’s smart, and so few Asians (under 7 foot) actually ever get looked at for their basketball talent.  He was a plow horse hidden behind a stable full of race horses.

While this type of thing doesn’t happen in the NBA – it does happen in your organizations all-the-time!

The majority of HR Pros just don’t have the background and scouting ability professional sports teams have in tracking potential talent.  We give it our best shot, instituting Employee Development Programs, Succession Programs, etc.  But our reality is, we still have a very long way to go to be truly effective.  So, how can you ensure you don’t have a Jeremy Lin sitting on your bench, that you aren’t utilizing, or worse yet, you allow your competition to have?  Look for some of these traits on your staff:

1. Smarts.  There is a common saying in athletics, you can’t “coach” size. Meaning no matter how good of coach you are, it is still very hard to overcome a team with superior size and athletic ability.  Smarts is the same way in business.  You can hustle your way out of a lot of situations in business – but eventually Smarts will get you!

2. Desire. Give me someone with a desire to be the best, and I’ll take them a long way.  Too many of our employees have the components to be great, but lack the true desire to be great.  Doesn’t matter if your an engineer, accountant, software developer, teacher – little or no desire will kill your talent every time.

3. Love. You’ve got to Love what you do, Love your organization and Love your team.  Those people are set up for success, because there is no place else they would rather be, and they’ll fight to keep themselves in that position.

Just because you have one or two of these doesn’t make you great, or even good – you need a lot of all 3.  To often HR Pros hang onto people way to long because “they work so hard” but lack core talent (smarts), or “they have more talent than anyone else on team”, but lack the desire to do the job anymore.  Stop that!  You’ve got too many good people sitting on the bench, waiting for their opportunity, like Jeremy Lin.  Open up your mind, really look for the combination of talent, desire and those who want to be with you – and put them into the starting lineup!  You won’t be sorry.

7 Secrets that only HR Pros know

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I was reading an article the other evening over at Huffington Post, Welcome to the Club: What only Moms know (Why was I reading this I hear some of my dude HR guy pros asking themselves? Let’s face it I’m 40ish and woman are still mostly a mystery to me, so I try and find out their secrets! Plus I hate being left in the dark on this parenting thing, so “I need the info” as Dr. Evil would say.)  I don’t want to spoil the article, but suffice to say, either I’m very in touch with the feminine side of parenting, or what they were sharing really wasn’t the “real” secrets Moms know!

The article did get me to thinking about secrets and how in HR we seem to always have a few that we are either ask to keep by others, or just the ones we share in this great fraternity of HR.  Here are some of the HR secrets that I thought of:

1. Who in the organization is on the way out.  (Sometimes many people know of individuals who are on the way out, but usually HR has a good pulse on everyone)

2. Who in the organization is probably on the way up, and not because they deserve it. (Every leader has an attraction to an employee or two, for a number of reasons, and those folks usually find their way into roles that they don’t deserve.)

3. How much money you’ll get on your next raise.  (Oh, yes we do. But keep working hard anyway, we don’t want it to seem like it’s predetermined)

4. The information of why certain departments tend to get more (resources, staff, etc.) than others – but we can’t you – it would cause organizational chaos!  (I hate to tell you this, but it usually has nothing to do with department performance and everything to do with you department leader – or should I say lack there of)

5. What you’re going to get for your annual bonus – usually 6-12 months before you get it. (hey, this stuff has to be budgeted)

6. What changes will happen to your benefits – again – usually 4-8 months before it hits you.

7. Who in your company is most likely to go postal on you.  (But we can’t tell you for HIPAA reasons – sorry – but if you sit next to Ted you might want to invest in a bullet proof vest)

I’m sure there are a number of others, but many aren’t unique to just HR.  I was thinking of putting down: We cook the books on our metrics, but guess what? So does every other department!  Let’s face it, in a political corporate structure that relies on metrics to obtain budgeted resources – the numbers aren’t always going to be clean!  I like HR because we tend to have “big” secrets and are called upon to keep those secrets.  It’s probably the biggest failure I see with new HR pros – they tend to try and create organizational friendships by sharing “the secrets” -and it always ends up blowing up on them.

HR has secrets – you knew it, I confirmed it for you.  Now let’s move on – because I not telling you the specifics! (besides the Ted thing)

Group-Thinking Your Way To Better HR Metrics

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Great article this week in the Wall Street Journal on What Gives Social Norms Their Power, the research doesn’t have direct implications to HR, but you can derive much out of not just how social norms/the unspoken rules of a group, shape not just behavior but also the attitudes of your employees. From the Wall Street Journal:

These are examples of how individuals’ behavior is shaped by what people around them consider appropriate, correct or desirable. Researchers are investigating how human behavioral norms are established in groups and how they evolve over time, in hopes of learning how to exert more influence when it comes to promoting health, marketing products or reducing prejudice…

The more public an object or behavior is, the more likely it is to spread, Dr. Berger says….

Rarely does any one individual set an entirely new norm for the group. Group leaders, however, help perpetuate or shift the norm. Unlike innovators, leaders tend to be high-status “superconformists,” embodying the group’s most-typical characteristics or aspirations, says Deborah Prentice, a social psychologist at Princeton University. People inside and outside the group tend to infer the group’s norms by examining these leaders’ behaviors….

So, here’s what I’ve discovered over my 18 years in HR – if you make a certain HR metric (let’s say Turnover) very public and your leaders talk about it publicly – you can change nothing but just that communication – and that metric will almost change for the positive overnight.  That’s funny right?  “Why is that funny, Tim!” It’s funny because we spend so much time in “Retention Committee” meetings, and “Retention Strategy Team” meetings, and meeting with vendors who guarantee to drop our turnover by 10%, and build programs that cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours – when all we had to do was print off about 50 black and white 8″X11.5″ paper with the words: CURRENT EMPLYOEE TURNOVER 9.7%.  Tape them all over the halls, on the back of doors, inside the elavator, oh, yeah and have the CEO talk about it.

About 23 minutes of work – about $5 in office supply expense – and your turnover is lowered!

“Well, yeah, that might drop turnover a little – but we are really more concerned with the leader behaviors that created turnover in the first place…”   Blah, Blah, Blah…

Look, it works for more than just turnover:

  • Referral Program – post how many referrals were hired in the last month, 6 months -what total % of your hires.
  • 401K utilization – post how much money was left on the table from people not taking advantage of their match – show a picture of pile of money!
  • Safety Training Compliance – post a list of names of those individuals who haven’t finished the class.

And, don’t forget, make your executive talk about it – a lot.

Here’s the key to make it work – because I know some of you’ll will actually do this and lose your minds and go overboard.  So, DON’T MISS THIS – you can’t get results with this if you try and fix everything at once.  This takes sustained focus.  Post the signs of current Turnover week 1, the next post will show the current and the improvement/or even if it gets worse, week 3 the new metric….week 26 the new metric…get it?  Stick to one thing you really want to change.  You can do turnover one week and 401K enrollment the next – it won’t work.  People won’t get that it’s important, if you keep jumping around trying to change everything – and your leader will lose credibility.

Now if you have some budget money, you can go beyond copy paper postings – you can build a dashboard, make posters, t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.  The key is to make it public – very public – the more in your face the better – and don’t stop sticking in their face.  Think forehead tattoos!