Category Archives: Motivation

The 3 Conclusive Steps to Getting Sh*t Done

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There are times when I struggle to get things done.  I’m a really good starter of things. In fact, I love starting things.  I can always see how I want it finished (a little shout out to Covey – Begin with the end in mind).  But like most things you start, eventually things get bogged down, and getting them over the finish line can be hard.

It’s probably why most projects fail, it gets tough, so we stop and move onto the beginning of something else because that’s fun and exciting.  I’ve learned this about myself over the years and I do two things to help myself. First, I surround myself with people who have great resolve to getting things done, the type of folks who don’t sleep well at night because they know there was that one glass left in the sink, and they should really get up and put in away.  I love those folks, they aren’t me, I hire them every time I get the chance.  I even married one of those types she makes me better!

Second, I force myself to not start something new, until I finish what I’ve already started.  This can be annoying, I’m sure, for those around me because sometimes projects have to go on hold while you wait for feedback, or other resources, etc.  This makes me antsy, I like to get things finished!

I was re-introduced recently to a quote from the novel Alice in Wonderland that I think really puts in perspective what it takes to get something done.  The quote is from the King of Hearts and it is quite simply:

“Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

Your 3 Steps:

1. Begin

2. Go till the end

3. Stop

We make it much harder than that, but it really isn’t.  I like simple stuff, it fits into my mind quite well.  It might be the best advice I’ve gotten in a really long time.  I don’t need pre-planning, or post project assessments, or update meetings, or budget reviews, etc.

Naive?  Probably.  But, sometimes you just need to begin, go to you come to the end, then stop.

Do you and your HR Team have High HR Self Esteem?

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I was talking to an HR Pro recently and it struck me how negative they were about their organization and their HR shop in general!  Don’t think this is going to be one of those blog posts about if you don’t like your job you should quit and follow your passion.  I don’t believe in that bullshit, that’s how people lose their homes and their families.  They get stupid.

This is for my brothers and sisters who are running HR shops.  You need to fire those folks. Really, I mean it.  Get up from your desk, walk out to their desk and tell them they can go home — forever.

It’s one thing to have a bad day, it’s a completely another thing to have a bad career!  You know exactly who I’m talking about.  You see them every day.  It’s like watching Eeyore on steroids.

I try and figure folks out.  I love asking, “Why you so mad?” Which just usually just makes them madder, but it’s fun to ask.  I have high HR self-esteem.  I like what I do.  I like what we do in HR.  I truly believe that an HR shop in any organization can be the most valuable part of that organization if they have the right folks running it.

Folks like me, with high HR self-esteem.  Folks who don’t believe the bad press HR gets.  Folks who don’t believe the haters.  Folks who at their core, understand how attracting, finding and keeping the best talent in your industry is a true game changer.

It’s alright by me that operations, finance, marketing, etc. all think the same thing. They all think they’re the most important part of the organization. That’s okay. I know.  I know we (HR) are! Knowing this allows me to let them believe their little fairy tale because I know it’s important to keep them happy.  So, I let them believe.  Don’t tell them, please.  ‘Belief’ is important for their continued satisfaction.

I’ll take the blame for when a bad leader turnovers another hire.  I’ll throw myself on the sword when communicating out another policy change made by executives, but one in which they’ll gladly give me ‘credit’.  I’ll let marketing take credit for the major sales increase, when I know it was my talent find that brought on the winning strategy for our organization.  I’ll let finance take credit for millions of dollars in ‘savings’ when I know it was the changes to our work structure that allowed us to make those savings.

Having high HR self-esteem does that.

I only ask one thing from my fellow HR leaders.  The next time you make a hire in your HR shop, please make sure that person has high HR self-esteem.  I can’t take any more HR pros who don’t like what they do.

DisruptHR Detroit Speakers Announced!

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Detroit HR and TA Disruptors!!!

A month ago we announced that DisruptHR was coming to Detroit and asked for speaker submissions! Today we are happy to announce the 12 individuals who were chosen to speak from an outstanding group of submissions!

The event is September 27th at 6 pm in Detroit at the Garden Theater! REGISTER TODAY!

Here are the first ever DisruptHR Detroit event speakers (in alphabetical order):

Susan Bailey – “Go Ahead…Don’t Take Care of Your Employees and See What Happens”

Jasmine Burns – “Who Said Sales and Recruiting Aren’t the Same Things”

Shenandoah Chefalo – “Building a Resilient Workforce”

Rita Fields – “When Your Emperor Has No Clothes: Staying Motivated When You Work for a Jackass!”

Travis Furlow – “Paperclip Thinking: How many ways can we…”

Christie Hecht – “Confessions of a Millennial”

Nicholas Larche – “Your Employer Knows Where You Are, How You Shop, & Has Seen You Naked!”

Steve Lowisz – “The Drift & Shift”

Greg Modd – “No Excuses, Just Results”

James Reid – “HR from a Legal Perspective: Stories better than fiction”

Susun West – “Stop the Havoc!”

Patrick Wright – “True Intelligence vs. Artificial Intelligence”

I’ll be your host and Emcee for the evening, so you can expect tasteless jokes and hugs!

Also, we have some very generous sponsors and we’ll have prize giveaways, food and drinks all night. The Garden Theater is a wonder location right in the heart of midtown with attached parking.

Come support the speakers and become a part of the revolution that is pushing the envelope in HR and TA across the world!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Did Your Employees Ride the Bus to School?

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It’s that time of year when parents and kids make a big decision, to ride or not ride the school bus! From the Project archives.

I read a very funny quote today from a comedian, Jenny Johnson, which she said

“If you rode the school bus as a kid, your parents hated you.”

It made me laugh out loud, for two reasons:

1. I rode the bus or walked or had to arrive at school an hour early because that was when my Dad was leaving and if I wanted a ride that was going to be it.  Nothing like sitting at school talking to the janitor because he was the only other person to arrive an hour before school started.  Luckily for me, he was nice enough to open the doors and not make me stand outside in the cold.  Lucky for my parents he wasn’t a pedophile!

2. My kids now make my wife and I feel like we must be the worst parents in the world in those rare occasions that they have to ride the bus.  I know I’m doing a disservice to my sons by giving them this ride – but I can’t stop it, it’s some American ideal that gets stuck in my head about making my kids life better than my life, and somehow I’ve justified that by giving them a ride to school their life is better than mine!

When I look back it, riding the bus did suck, you usually had to deal with those kids who parents truly did hate them.  Every bully in the world rode the bus. Let’s face it their parents weren’t giving them a ride, so you had to deal with that (me being small and red-headed probably had to deal with it more than most).

You also got to learn most of the life lessons on the bus, you found out about Santa before everyone else, you found out how babies got made before everyone else, you found out about that innocent kid stuff that makes kids, kids before you probably should have.  But let’s face it, the bus kids were tough! You had to get up earlier, stand out in the cold, get home later and take a beating after the ride home, just so you had something to look forward to the next day!

You know as HR Pros we tend also not to let our employees “ride the bus”.   We always look for an easier way for them to do their work, to balance their work and home, to do as little as possible to get the job done.  In a way, too many of us, are turning our organizations and our employees into the kids who had their Mom’s pick them up from school.

I’m not saying go be hard on your employees, but as a profession, we might be better off to be a little less concerned with how comfortable everyone is, and a little more concerned with how well everybody is performing.

Too many HR Pros (and HR shops for that matter) tend to act as “parents” to the employees, not letting them learn from their mistakes, but trying to preempt every mistake before it’s made – either through extensive processes or overly done performance management systems.  We justify this by saying we are just “protecting” our organizations but in the end, we aren’t really making our employees or organizations “tougher” or preparing them to handle the hard times we all must face professionally.  It’ll be alright they might not like it 100%, but in the end, they’ll be better for it.

HR 101: Prepare to be surprised!

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HR 101. If there is one thing I could give a new HR Pro it would be this simple advice. No matter how prepared you think you are, you really only need to prepare yourself, for one thing, being surprised.

You don’t really get judged on your daily stuff.  Let’s face it, 99.9% of the time that goes off without a hitch.  You get judged on how you handle surprises.

Surprises make and break great HR Pro careers.

There’s really the only way to prepare for surprises.  You need to expect that a surprise will always happen. That one employee you can’t lose or the entire project will blow up, be prepared to lose them.  Talk about it, plan for it, and basically come to grips that it will happen.  Then it will happen, and you’ll be the only one not surprised by it.

The best HR Pros I’ve worked with had this one common trait, they were unshakeable when surprised. Almost like they expected it.

3 Ways You Can Make HR Better

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If you’re sitting in your HR office right now reading this, about to create some new HR stuff, stop, you’re wasting our time (and by “our” I mean all of us employees in the organization).  “Wow, look who woke up on the wrong side of the bed!”, you’re probably thinking!

It’s not that I don’t think being creative is important. It is, it’s Hugely important.  Being creative in HR just isn’t important.  I know you think it is, that’s because you want to be creative, so you make yourself believe that’s important.  But the reality is, anything you can do, I can do better.  No, not because I’m better than you.  I mean I probably am, but that isn’t the point.  I can do it better because all I’m going to do is take what you’ve already

I know you think it is, that’s because you want to be creative, so you make yourself believe that’s important.  But the reality is, anything you can do, I can do better.  No, not because I’m better than you.  I mean I probably am, but that isn’t the point.  I can do it better because all I’m going to do is take what you’ve already done and make it better.

In fact, I’ll do a few more things while working on improving your thing:

1. I’ll make it cheaper

2. I’ll make it more simple to use

3. I’ll make it fun to do

See! Stop being creative, and just start making other people’s things better.

From an article in Fast Company:

The line between becoming a pioneer and a “me-too” flop can be unclear when you’re in the weeds of development. Uncertainty is an easier destination to arrive at than confidence, especially when the truth is, there’s no such thing as making anything that’s really new. Everything is an evolution of something else. But you can make something better. When in doubt, ask yourself if you’d use your new product instead of the market leaders. If the answer is yes, keep going. If it’s no, then stop and rethink.

This obviously talks about products, but services and what we offer in HR are very similar.  Is that program you’re developing in HR better than what your competition is developing in HR?  If yes, carry on. If no, make it better.  It isn’t hard. It will take some hard work, but it’s not mentally challenging.  When I see people unwilling to make their HR Shops better, I know one of two things are at play:

When I see people unwilling to make their HR Shops better, I know one of two things are at play:

1. They’ve given up on the organization, and they need to go, or;

2. They are fundamentally lazy and need to go.

It’s a painful truth most leaders just don’t want to realize.

Just make it better.

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

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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!

HR and Recruiting are not Rocket Science!

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I hear one thing over and over from people who read my stuff or see my presentations:

“It’s not rocket science.”

It happened just last week. Some HR guy sent me a message and said, “I don’t get it?” Meaning, he didn’t get what I was trying to say like there was some deeper meaning to my straightforward point. Nope, I was just pointing out some common sense, which seems rather in short supply these days.

I take that as a compliment.  I’m not trying to ‘wow’ anyone with a couple of college credits and my top-notch brain.  I’ve never been known for being the big brain type.  I’m the common sense, straight forward type.  HR and Recruiting, to me, shouldn’t be hard and complex.  It should be simple and easy to understand.

That’s the problem.

Too many HR and Talent Pros want to make it seem like ‘our’ jobs are very complex and difficult.  This is very natural, every profession does this.  If HR is easy, you won’t be valued highly by leadership.  So, let’s make it hard.  The last thing anyone wants to do is come out and say, “Hey! A monkey can do my job, but keep paying me $80K!”   It’s very difficult culturally to come clean and say, “You know what?  This stuff isn’t hard.  It’s work.  We have a lot to do.  But, if we do what we know we have to do, we’ll solve this!”

But that’s HR and Talent Acquisition. It’s work.  Many times it’s a lot of work!  But we aren’t trying to solve the human genome!  We are trying to administer some processes, get our employees better, find ways to keep them engaged and happy and find more folks who want to become a part of what we are doing.  Not overly hard.  It’s not rocket science.

I think the complexity in HR and Recruiting comes into play with ‘us’ not being aligned with what our leadership truly wants.  Many times we flat out guess what we think they want out of HR. Sometimes we assume what they want, and try and do that. Very rarely do we actually find out exactly what they expect, and just deliver that.

There are a number of reasons for this.  First, we might not agree with what our leadership wants or expects from HR.  So, we give them what we want and expect from HR.  This never works well, but is tried often!  Second, our leadership changes what they want and expect, as they see better ways to do HR and Recruiting.  Change is a bitch.  It’s more of a bitch when it’s happening to you.  Third, we might not have the experience to deliver what is wanted or needed.  So, you get what we can give you.

This seems to be why delivering great HR and Talent Acquisition becomes rocket science.  Simply, we can’t have basic communication with our leadership and some self-insight on our capabilities of what we can actually deliver.   Couple this with most people’s unwillingness to ask for help, because they fear others will look down on them for not knowing, and you’ve hit the HR rocket science grand slam!

HR isn’t hard. Recruiting isn’t hard.  Dealing with expectations, and our own insecurities, that’s hard!

The Most Important Question You’ll Ever Ask a Hiring Manager

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How are those hiring manager “intake” meetings going?

You know, those meetings you have with a hiring manager every single time they have an opening.  You sit down with your hiring manager, face to face, and ask them a page full of questions.  Why is this position open? What would make a candidate most successful in this role?  What color of skin would you like this candidate to have? Boobs or no boobs? Whoops! Scratch those last ones, we would never ask those…

The reality is Talent Pros really only have one question they need to ask hiring managers. That question is this:

“Do you trust that I can find the talent you need?”

Ultimately, this is all that really matters for your success.  If they trust you, they’ll give you all the information you need to be successful.  If they don’t trust you can find the talent they need, they tend to hold stuff back.

Yes, I know that doesn’t make sense, but that’s real world talent acquisition stuff! Welcome to corporate America, a lot of stuff doesn’t make sense!

Most hiring managers have no faith you’ll find them great talent.  They have this belief because of so many bad Talent Pros before you failed them.  So many before you didn’t really go out and find the best talent, they just delivered whatever warm body came into the ATS.

I just come out and ask the question.  The first answer you’ll get from 99% of hiring managers is a weird, “Well, sure, I do.” If you really dig into this answer, you’ll get the true answer which 90% of the time is, “Hell no! Why would I?  Your department has really never gotten this right!”

Thank you! That’s what I really needed.  I needed to get that out in the open, so now we can really build trust, and make great things happen.  They’re mostly right. Talent Acquisition fails many of our hiring managers for a number of reasons. Right now, your hiring manager doesn’t need to hear those reasons, they need to hear why this time will be different.

Then, you have to live up to ‘different’! You have to be better.  You have to get it right. Getting it right earns trust.

Once they trust you, great things will happen. Earn that trust.

7 Things HR Pros Should Be Doing to Deliver a World-Class Employee Experience

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Webinar Alert! Tomorrow at Noon EST – it’s me and the 7 Things every HR Pro in the World should be doing to Deliver a World-Class Employee Experience.

Want to join me? You’ll get SHRM and HRCI credit!

Plus, you’ll get to have lunch with me. Well, only if you sit at your desk and eat lunch, and you’re in the east coast time zone, or you can have your fifth cup of coffee with me if your in the west coast time zone, or maybe you’re just central and you get up early and like to eat an early lunch. Look, I’m

Look, I’m fairly intelligent, but I’m sorry I don’t know your eating habits, so just log in and you do you, and I’ll do me, and we’ll all learn something about creating great employee experiences!

Here are the details:

“Our employees are our most important asset,” said every CEO … ever! But what if we truly treated our employees like our most important assets? Would you do things differently than you are right now?

HR expert and world-renowned HR blogger Tim Sackett and Ryan Higginson-Scott, an HR leader at Optimizely, will bring their fun and engaging style to the hottest topic on the planet — building an employee experience everyone wants to be a part of. The program will introduce you to the concept of employee experience, why it matters and, more importantly, dig into what you can do right now to begin designing and developing a world-class employee experience in your own organization. You’ll walk away from this session with at least seven great ideas that can move your employee experience from average to great.

Learning objectives:

  • Learn how best practice organizations are designing a strategy to improve the employee experience.
  • Develop a launch strategy and plan for your organization’s employee experience.
  • Understand the metrics and KPIs around world-class employee experience.

Sounds sexy, right!?

REGISTER HERE!