Category Archives: Motivation

The Next Great Trick in HR to Become World Class!

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Oh, Tim must be talking about the great A.I. tech that’s coming out, or the next great tech that will replace staffing agencies, or the next website that will change the entire industry forever – “Oh hey! Google Jobs.” I’m sure he’s going to be talking about using Fitbits to increase our organizational wellness! No, it’s probably how if we write one sentence of feedback a day to each employee our engagement and retention will go up 3,000%! I heard that one at SHRM this year!

 I keep searching for the next great trick that will help me to lose weight and keep it off. Why hasn’t science created a pill that allows me to eat and drink anything I want and I can stay skinning? Seriously, the person who develops this will rule the universe! 

In America, we love tricks! I think it harkens back to the Baby Boomers who got us hooked on TV Dinners and every TV infomercial products that ‘magically’ could do everything we needed without us doing anything, besides making four easy payments of $19.99.

It’s mostly all crap.

 We are hooked on tricks and over-night solutions to fix everything that is wrong with us. Personally and professionally. We live an instant gratification world. I get pissed when it takes more the thirteen seconds to get my fast food meal from the drive-thru, I mean hasn’t A.I. figured out that I’ll be stopping before I figured it out. These robots suck! 

 So, here’s the Next Greatest Trick in HR:

 Do great sh*t!

Yep, turns out the next great trick has always been the trick. Just do really awesome stuff! As I come off the conference season I look back at my notes and all the cool stories and ideas and there is one common theme. All the best stuff, the best ideas, were great from the beginning and had a team that wouldn’t allow that great stuff to die!

And by a ‘team’, it’s usually one person taking a stand, believing, caring a little too much. A try-hard. Who just wouldn’t let it go.

Rusty Rueff, says, “Make big changes, to big things”.

The trick to world class HR is do great sh*t. Then do more great sh*t. And don’t let anyone in the organization tell you to stop doing great sh*t. You need to become the Department of Great Sh*t!

That’s tricky.

The Key Trait of Every Great Employee #SHRM17

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For twenty years I’ve been hiring and firing people.  I’ve been lucky enough to have some really great performers, a bunch of good performers and also a few really crappy performers.  It seems like every time I turn, someone has an answer for me on how to hire better.  For years I have given the advice, if all else fails, hire smart people.  It’s not a bad strategy. For the most part, if you hire the smartest ones of the bunch, you’ll have more good performers, than bad performers.  I’m talking pure intelligence, not necessarily book smarts.

But, just hiring smart people still isn’t perfect.  I want to hire good, or great, people every single time.  How do you do that?  That’s the million dollar question.

To me, there is one trait we don’t focus enough on, across all industries.  Optimism.

Your ability to look at a situation and come up with positive ways to handle it.  Think about your best employees, almost always there is a level of optimism they have that your lower performers don’t.

I can’t think of one great employee I’ve ever worked with that didn’t have a level of optimism that was at least greater than the norm. They might be optimistic about their future, about the companies future, about life in general.  The key was they had optimism.

Optimistic people find ways to succeed because they truly believe they will succeed. Pessimistic people find ways to fail since they believe they are bound to fail.  This hiring thing can be really difficult.  Don’t make it more difficult by hiring people who are not optimistic about your company and the opportunity you have for them.

Ask questions in the interview that get to their core belief around optimism:

– Tell me about something in life you’re are truly optimistic about? (Pessimistic people have a hard time answering this. Optimistic people will answer quickly and with passion.)

– Tell me about a time something you were responsible for went really bad. How did you deal with it?

– The company has you working on a very important project and then decides to cancel it. How would you respond?

Surrounding yourself with optimistic people drives a better culture, better teams, it’s uplifting to your own leadership style.  I want smart people, but I truly want smart people who are optimistic about life.  Those people change the world for the better, and I think they’ll do the same for my business.

The Perfect Change Model for HR #VueDD17

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I’m out in Park City, UT this week at Hirevue’s Digital Disruption conference. The conference is designed for TA pros and leaders looking to ‘disrupt’ their current TA shop and the agenda is packed with great content and speakers.

Rusty Rueff kicked off the conference with a great keynote on disruption and change. (Side editor’s note: Rusty joined a growing trend of keynotes bringing their notes on stage with them and referring to them often to ensure nothing was missed. Many ‘professional’ keynoters would consider this taboo, but I find it refreshing and more authentic)

Rusty offered up this change model:

#1 – Compelling Vision: The only way you get change started is to have a great compelling vision of what this change will be.

#2 – What’s In It For Me (WIIFM) – If you need your employees to drive change you quickly have to define what’s in it for them, and it you better make it compelling. “You get to keep your job” – is not a compelling WIIFM for most people in 2017!

#3 – Lead the Way – Servant leadership is they key. Are you doing what you say needs to be done, and are you helping in every way to get everyone on board with you?

#4 – Change the work – If you want to change the way you work, you need to change the work. What!?! So many times we want to make big changes but we are unwilling to change how we do things. That’s a problem. If you can’t attract talent, you need to stop what you’re doing, and do something new!

#5 – Make it stick – Big change is hard and it’s super easy to go back and do what you’ve always done when the initial change seems to be worse or not having the results you wanted. You must be courageous to see your vision through to completion. You might fail, but if you don’t make it stick, you’ll never know for sure.

Rusty focused on big change to big things. In the end, this is what matters.

If you focus on making small changes, or even big changes, to small things, it really has little impact. Focus on making big changes to those things that are most important to your organization that isn’t working. Swing for the fences.

This is super hard for us in HR and TA. We never want to break anything, even when it’s not really working. We’re scared of screwing something up more than it’s already screwed up. I can’t tell you how many executives I speak with that fire HR and Talent leaders simply for this reason alone. The fired leader was unwilling to take the chances needed to fix what was broken.

Are you ready to make big changes to big things?

Is Love intrinsically bigger than Fear?

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The most famous quote from Machiavelli’s book “The Prince” is:

“Better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”

Uh, oh, Tim is quoting Machiavelli, this blog has jumped the shark!

I heard this quote recently on the HR conference circuit. HR speakers seem to come in two types:

1. Love is bigger than fear. This is popular and most fall into this camp. It’s a feel-good play. The first rule of HR speaking, it’s always better to make the audience feel good, than to give them something they actually need.

2. Machiavelli’s assessment, It’s better to be feared. Less popular take, but I do hear it in the form of stuff like, “I’m not here to be your friend, I’m here to get results!”

I also have smart friends who pull Machiavelli’s name out anytime they want me to feel like I’m on the wrong side of something, “How ‘Machiavellian’ of you, Tim!” Okay, I get it, you’re smarter than me, how ‘Machiavellian’ for you!

The normal breakdown of leadership goes like this. You would rather be a beloved leader than a feared leader. Those leaders who are loved will be more successful than those who are feared. You have to be one or the other. Or do you?

I think all leaders deep down in places we don’t talk about at parties (A Few Good Men reference!) want to be loved, or at the very least, well liked. It’s human nature. No one really wants to be hated. It’s stressful, people don’t want to be around you, it makes for uncomfortable hugs, etc.

On the love side, love can make you do some crazy things, but so can fear. I would drive all night to help my wife or kids with something if I thought they really needed me, even if they or I could probably find another alternative. I would also probably work all night if I thought I might lose my job and I need to pay my mortgage. Love and fear are powerful in getting us to act.

I think fear is bigger when it comes to crunch time scenarios. I might ‘love’ my boss a ton, but when the project is on the line and the company might lose a major project and cost us hundreds of jobs, fear is driving the truck, not love. Love won’t bring those jobs back, fear might just win those jobs back.

As leaders, this our dilemma. I want my team to love me, but I also need a touch of fear on the edge. It’s an imperfect balance.

What I know is love isn’t the only answer, no matter how many memes you make or posters you put it on. I don’t know if Love is bigger, it’s definitely more popular, for obvious reasons, but great leaders have used both. I want you to love me, I need you to fear me a bit, in the end, I’ll probably use both to get the job done.

Do you really want to get better?

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I’ve been writing about HR, Talent, and Leadership every day going on seven years. If you go around telling people you know something about something, guess what? They’re going to ask you to tell them about something, specifically as it relates to their circumstance.  So, I get asked my advice quite a bit about talent and HR issues people are facing.

There is a bucket of questions I get asked that fall into the same type of category.  These questions all have to do with how do we ‘fix’ something that isn’t working well in their HR and/or Talent shops.  How do we get more applicants? How do we get managers to develop their people? How do we fix our crazy CEO? Etc.

I used to go right into how I would solve that problem if I was in their shoes.  Five minute solutions! I don’t know anything about you, or your situation, but let me drop five minutes of genius on you for asking! It’s consulting at its worst! But it’s fun and engaging for someone who came to see me talk about hugging and my dog for an hour.

I’ve began to change my approach, though, because I knew, like they knew, they weren’t going back to their shops and doing what I said.  The problem with my five minutes of genius, was it was ‘my’ five minutes, not theirs.  It was something I could do, but probably not something they could do.

Now, I ask this one question: Do you really want to get better? or Do you really want to change?

Right away people will quickly say, “Yes!”  Then, there is a pause, and an explanation, and sometimes from this we get to a place where they aren’t really sure they really want to get better or change.

That’s powerful!

We all believe that ‘getting better’ is the only answer, but it’s not.  Sometimes, the ROI isn’t enough to want to get better. Staying the same is actually alright.

We believe we have to fix something and we focus on it, when in reality if it stays the same we’ll be just fine.  We’ll go on living and doing great HR work.  It just seemed like the next thing to fix, but maybe it actually is fine for now, and let’s focus on something else.

Many times HR and Talent pros will find that those around them really don’t want to get better, thus they were about to launch into a failing proposition, and a rather huge frustrating experience. Better to probably wait, until everyone really wants to get better.

So, before you go out to fix the world, your world, ask yourself one very important question: Do you, they, we really want to get better?  I hope you can get a ‘yes’ answer! But if not, the world will still go on, and so will you.

T3 – @Globoforce pre-launches Life Events #WorkHuman

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Hey, last week I was at WorkHuman powered by Globoforce and they had a new product launch that kind of left many in the audience in tears! How often can you say that about a tech launch – take a look:

So, Life Events is designed to increase the quality of your work relationships. Some of us are lucky enough to have this naturally in our work environments, and we completely take it for granted when we have it.

Here’s what Eric Mosley, Globoforces CEO, had to say about Life Events:

“The lines between an employee’s life and work are constantly blending—more so now than ever before,” said Eric Mosley, CEO of Globoforce. “Our goal through Conversations and Life Events is to encourage more human-focused interactions that help create a community of growth, collaboration, and inclusion. If we work in environments where we can trust our managers to have our best interest top of mind and feel strong connections with our colleagues, we are more likely to actively participate in our success, our colleagues and the companies we work for.”

I truly believe that most people want to live one life. They want to be the same person at work as they are at home. Technology like this helps build that bridge. Job satisfaction, engagement, etc. all tend to rise as we feel we have stronger connections at work.

Does this change the world? No, probably not, but it might just make your work world a little better. I thought it was one of the more unique features I’ve seen in the space for a while and it definitely plays to a workforce that is comfortable with sharing their lives via video. While you might not be, the majority of our upcoming workforce is.

Coming later this year, check it out on the Globoforce platform.  (BTW – all the people in the video are actual Globoforce employees, and the story is completely real!)

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

The Sackett Commencement Speech!

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(I’m on vacation today at my nephew’s graduation! So, I thought to re-run this post made sense! Enjoy!) 

It’s that time of year when universities and high schools go through graduation ceremonies and we celebrate educational achievements.  It’s also that time of year when you get bombarded with every great commencement speech ever given.  There is clearly a recipe for giving a great commencement speech.  Here are the ingredients:

1. Make the graduates feel like they are about to accomplish something really great, and not just become part of the machine.

2. Make graduates believe like somehow they will be difference makers.

3. Make graduates think they have endless possibilities and opportunities.

4. Make graduates think the world really wants and need them and can’t wait to work with them.

5. Wear sunscreen.

I think that about sums up every great commencement speech ever given.  Let’s face it, the key to any great speech is not telling people what they need to hear, but telling them what they want to hear!

I would like to give a commencement speech.  I think it would be fun.  I like to inspire people.  Here are the main topics I would hit if I were to give a commencement speech:

1.  Work sucks, but being poor sucks more. Don’t ever think work should make you happy.  Find happiness in yourself, not what you do.

2.  You owe a lot of people, a lot of stuff.  Shut your mouth and give back to them. Stop looking for the world to keep giving you stuff.

3.  No one cares about you. Well, maybe your Mom, if you had a good Mom.  They care about what you can do for them.  Basically, you can’t do much, you’re a new grad.

4.  Don’t think you’re going to be special. 99.9% of people are just normal people, so will you.  The sooner you come to grips with this, the sooner you’ll be happy.

5.  Don’t listen to your bitter parents.  Almost always, the person who works the hardest has better outcomes in anything in life.  Once in a while, a person who doesn’t work hard, but has supremely better talent or connections than you, will kick your ass.  That’s life. Buy a helmet.

6.  Don’t listen to advice from famous people.  Their view of the world is warped through their grandiose belief somehow they made it through hard work and effort. It’s usually just good timing.

7. Find out who you care about in life, and make them a priority.  In this world, you have very few people you truly care about, and who care about you in return.  Don’t fuck that up.

8.  Make your mistakes when you’re young.  Failure is difficult, it’s profoundly more difficult when you have a mortgage and 2 kids to take care of.

9.  It’s alright that sometimes you have to kiss ass.  It doesn’t make you less of a person.

10.  Wear sunscreen.  Cancer sucks.

So, do you feel inspired now!?  Any high schools or colleges feel free to email me, I’m completely wide open on my commencement speech calendar and willing to give this speech in a moments notice!

Maybe we got this Culture Fit thing all Wrong! #WorkHuman

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So, I’m sitting on a plane flying back from the WorkHuman conference and I’m going through my notes. Here’s one of the things I wrote down:

“Instead of culture fit, what if we focused on culture contribution…” 

I don’t even remember who said it that sparked me to write it down, but I loved it. I want to say it was Adam Grant, seemed like he was saying a bunch of stuff I liked during his session.

It struck me immediately when it was said. It’s one of those times when you go, “Holy crap, have we missed this all along and no one said anything!”

The problem is, hiring for culture fit is really hard. There are technologies and experts who will tell you they can do it, but it’s mostly smoke and mirrors. When you sit down and interview people, you mostly don’t get culture fit, you get ‘I’m comfortable with this person’ and that turns into you saying, “they’d be a great fit in our culture!”

Hiring for culture contribution actually is a bit easier and probably more effective! I can easily interview someone and ask for concrete examples of the cultural contributions they currently provide at their organization or have provided, and what they’ll provide when they come to my organization. Sure they could lie or exaggerate, but that happens already, so that’s nothing new.

What I like about culture contribution over cultural fit is I can measure cultural contribution! Don’t tell me you fit, show me you fit! There’s millions of ways employees can contribute to culture, so it’s not like we are limiting hires to only those who ‘want’ to be involved.

I don’t know. What do you think?

It was just a note on a scrap of paper, but man it seems really profound. Hit me in the comments if you’re doing anything with cultural contribution in your organization.

How Are You Helping Your Transgender Employees? #WorkHuman

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Hey, kids! I’m out at the WorkHuman Conference this week! This the third event for WorkHuman and it’s really becoming a world class conference. I mean, let’s be honest, if you have Michelle Obama on your agenda, you’re completely legit!

One of the keynotes from yesterday was Chaz Bono. I’ve never gotten a chance to see him speak so I was very interested. I was probably hoping for some great Sonny and Cher stories, but also, just naturally interested in hearing was he had to say about his transition from a woman to a man.

In our society, for the most part, we get very little interaction with the trans community, so I still feel fairly naive about everything surrounding the transgender. I’m sure there are many HR and TA pros out there who feel the same way. I loved that Chaz was super transparent, open and comfortable sharing his story.

A couple of really great takeaways I got from listening to him was that the actual process of transitioning, the mechanics of physically doing it, are far less complicated and painful, than the social and emotional pain transgender folks go through. We all seem super interested in the mechanics, but to a transgender person, that seems much less important in the overall process.

Chaz is in a really great place now, professionally and personally, but that clearly wasn’t always the case. Even he was amazed at how gratitude and being grateful for where you are in life can ease the hard times and pain that he went through over his lifetime of figuring out who he really was.

You don’t forget the super bad times in your life, but as you become more grateful, those times don’t seem as bad, even when many of those times were completely horrific. I struggle with being grateful for where I’m at in life, I can only imagine the difficulty Chaz went through to get to this place he is now.

The one big question I left with was how would I (HR) help out a transgender employee? What could my organization do? What should I personally be doing?

Chaz really broke this down simply to the root. We (HR) need to make it completely safe for our transgender employees to be who they are. It’s the number one issue that all transgender individuals face. Is it safe enough for me to be who I really am?

Will the organization accept me? Will my peers accept me? Will my boss accept me? Will our clients accept me? For those of us in HR this seems simple. Of course, we will!!! Chaz, and other transgender individuals, know the reality, most of the time, they do not feel safe enough to be who they truly are.

So, how do you help your organization’s transgender community? You work, constantly, to ensure they have a safe environment to be the person they want to be. That starts before the individual needs it. It starts with great diversity education and programs, it starts with a leadership team that truly values and supports inclusion.

For me, it starts with having a better understanding myself.

Turns Out, Millennials Actually Don’t Want Your Feedback!

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It’s conference season and I got a chance to see the ever-popular, Marcus Buckingham.  Marcus has the great English accent, high energy and great leadership content to share. He’s strong every time I’ve seen him, going on way too many times at this point in my life!

Here was the money-shot quote Marcus dropped on the audience this time:

“Millennials don’t want feedback!”

We’ve all been told by thought leaders and Millennial experts for a decade that all Millennials want is feedback and work-life balance!  They don’t want money or power or ice in their beer.  Just feedback and time off.  Marcus put a stop to all of this, and had the data to back it up!

In reality, Marcus told us the truth.  Millennials and the rest of us don’t want feedback, we all just want attention. Pay attention to us!  Stop by frequently and see how we are doing, give us some insight into our near future, help us get our jobs done.  But, please, don’t give us feedback on what we are doing wrong!

No one wants that.  The whole reason performance reviews fail is because they don’t deliver what we truly want, attention, not feedback.  So, our “HR” answer to this is to do what?!? Let’s do more frequent, smaller, feedback sessions! NO!

Unfortunately, this is going to be big old Titanic to turn around.  The wheels have been in motion too long to stop what we’ve already started.  HR technology platforms and your processes are already in place. Your managers have already been trained, and now you want us to stop?!?

Basically, yes.

Those organizations with high engagement are not the ones who are giving more feedback. They are the ones who are paying more attention to their employees.  Yes, there is a difference.

This is fraught with issues for most HR pros and organizations because it feels a little pie in the sky-ish.  There is an assumption that you pay attention to your employees and they’ll just magically do what they’re supposed to do, and we live happily ever after, cats and dogs living together.

We know that isn’t reality.

Some employees need to be managed to get the most out of them.  They need to be held accountable. I do think there is a balance that we can get to when it comes to paying attention to our employees like they want, and being able to ‘manage’ them like the business needs.

Managers need to know that even with those employees they’ve worked with for a long time, it’s critical that they don’t stop paying attention to what they’re doing, professionally and personally. Also, our employees need to understand that, yes, we care about you, but that doesn’t mean you can just not perform the job you were hired to do.

I don’t need engaged employees that don’t do the job they were hired to do. I want engaged, productive employees.  It’s all about balancing your approach, and I love that Marcus put to bed the concept that Millennials just want feedback!