Category Archives: Motivation

Why do you still give out performance ratings?

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Let me give you a quick breakdown of how 100% of your employees feel about the performance rating they will receive this year:

Performance Rating on a 1 (you suck and should be shot) to 5 (we couldn’t live without you): 

Rating of 5 – 

The message you were trying to send: “We value your contribution. You go above and beyond. You are a top employee. Keep up the great work. We hope others follow your example.” 

The message the employee actually received: “Yeah, I know I’m the best, and now you better pay me or I’ll take this awesomeness on the road to someone who appreciates it!” 

Rating of 4 – 

The message you were trying to send: “You really increased your performance this year. We love having you on the team. There are still some things you can do to be great.”

The message the employee actually received: “Why am I not a 5!? What the hell! I’m way better than every other person on this team. You suck, this job sucks, I knew I should have worked at the other place.” 

Rating of 3 – 

The message you were trying to send: “You’re meeting expectations for the position. We are thankful for that and your input to the team. We would love to help you strive to reach your goals with us and we have some suggestions.” 

The message the employee actually received: “Why do you hate me? I’ve given you everything. I bleed for this company and this is how I’m treated? I better than most people on this team!” 

Rating of 2 – 

The message you were trying to send: “You’re underperforming for the position, but we really think we can help you reach your potential. We have a plan that will take you to the top if you decide that’s what you want to do, and we want to support you in reaching it.” 

The message the employee actually received: “So, this is my 90-day notice? You’re basically paying me to look for a new job, that’s cool. I wasn’t really feeling this one anyway.” 

Rating of 1 – 

The message you were trying to send: “Look this isn’t working out. You aren’t doing the job you were hired to do and we need that to happen immediately, or else. Are we clear?” 

The message the employee actually received: “So, I’m not fired?! Awesome! Can I now go back to not doing the job and you still paying me? Cool!” 

You don’t need an employee rating system! Employee rating systems are your home phone land line. You’ve had it for so long and although you rarely ever use it, you just can’t give it up!

We know that the rating systems do almost nothing but cause problems with morale. We use them because we can’t trust our hiring managers to give out raises fairly and equitably. So, a five gets a four percent increase, and a four gets a three percent increase, and…

The reality is study after study has told us for decades to not tie performance ratings to pay increases. Set job-related metrics and goals, and tie your pay increases to those. These are many times different than actual performance in the job.

So, how do you replace your ratings? Force your managers of people to make actual measurable items of performance and then create a framework of conversations on an ongoing basis around expectations, metrics and development. If an employee wants to make more money in a position, it shouldn’t be about being better than another employee, it should be about reaching measurables that are more valuable to the organization.

Your rating system system, is basically worthless.

 

Does Uber’s HR Really Suck?

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Clearly by now if you’re in HR you’ve read this post by a former female engineer from Uber. It’s very detailed and sounds almost exactly like most companies in the world. No, not the part of ignoring sexual harassment, but almost every other part! Worker gets wronged. The company seems to do nothing. Worker gets more and more frustrated. The company loses patience with the worker. It always ends bad. 

The former IT Engineer at Uber, Susan Fowler, left the company and on her way out she, figuratively, burned every bridge in sight with a scathing blog post about her experience!

From her post:

When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man’s first offense, and that they wouldn’t feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he “was a high performer” (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn’t feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.

I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that this didn’t seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company’s best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn’t be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been “given an option”. I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern-talking to and didn’t want to ruin his career over his “first offense”). 

Ouch, that’ll leave an organizational mark! Go read the post, there’s much more than this little bit.

I’m in HR so I realize a few things about this scenario:

  1. There are always, at least, two sides to every story. If what happened to Susan, actually happened as she wrote, shame on Uber. But, there are always two sides.
  2. Susan just happens to have launched a new book and is writing another. The timing on this couldn’t have been better to sell books. (that’s just the cynical HR guy in me).
  3. The former head of HR at Uber during Susan’s time there, Renee Atwood, left to go be the CHRO at Twitter after only 2 years. After seven months she then left that role at Twitter. This might speak to the lack of leadership at Uber in HR during Susan’s tenure, it might not, it’s just one piece of data. Prior to Uber and Twitter, Atwood had only held Director level roles at a giant banking company. Taking on the full show is a completely different monster, then a narrow hr director role in a giant organization.

So, the blogosphere is ripping Uber apart for being a bad organization. They might be right, maybe they’re awful. What I hear from reading Susan’s piece is a disgruntled employee that sounds like they were in a bad situation. In her post, one HR pro points out to her that the common denominator in all of this is Susan. Which she takes offense to, and if everything is as Susan says, rightly so.

I can’t get over how familiar all this sounds and feels, though. I’ve been the HR pro sitting across from a ‘Susan’. A ‘Susan’ who claims to have ‘evidence’ but really has nothing. Who claims to have witnesses, yet none come forward. Who claim some very, very bad stuff, yet, I found it not to be true, and some really solid people getting tarnished in the process.

Uber might really suck at HR and be awful people. I can’t tell that from one person’s story. I’m in HR, I need to see all the sides!

What do you think?

The Dumb HR Guy Guide to Recertifying for HRCI & SHRM

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“My three years is up!”, he said as if it was a prison sentence. If you’re a regular to the professional recertification process of HRCI (SPHR, PHR, GPHR), you know this feeling well. Your HRCI certification lasts for three years and you can then retake the test or turn in continuing education credits for recertification. The first round of the new SHRM recertifications won’t take place until later this year for the SHRM CP and SCP certs.

It’s pretty simple. The first time you got your HR certification you took a test. For most of us, it sucked! It was hard, we had to study for weeks and months, and in the end when you walked out of the room you had no idea if you passed or not! It was at that point you made a pack with yourself, “I will never take that exam again!” With that statement, you signed yourself up for the three-year sentence!

Most professionals certification in other fields work in a very similar manner. In lieu of taking the certification exam over, you can do continuing education and receive credit. If you get so many credits over a certain period, you don’t have to take the test and you continue to have a valid certification. It’s a good business deal for both sides. I don’t want to take a test again, and the professional body would rather keep collecting my money.

With the breakup of HRCI and SHRM, we HR pros now have a decision to make:

  1. Maintain my HRCI certification only.
  2. Maintain my SHRM certification only.
  3. Maintain both certifications.
  4. Screw them both, this is too confusing!

I’ve maintained that having both certifications is ridiculous. You don’t need both, there isn’t enough differentiation in the eyes of employers, and there is still confusion in the market over which one you really need.

February 20th is my birthday. My SPHR certification through HRCI will expire. So, now I have a decision to make. I’ve maintained my SPHR certification since 2001. I still remember sitting in that room taking the test, finishing, and having no idea what the heck some of those answers were! I was proud when I got certified. It’s a hard certification to get and give up.

Most of you aren’t like me. In fact, I did a quick poll of some of my HR friends to find out how they recertify. It came down to three basic ways to HR pros recertify:

  1. You put in your recertification credits immediately as you earn them. This is 40% of you. These are my smart friends.
  2. You have a set schedule for inputting your earned credits (Monthly, quarterly, bi-annual,etc.) This another 40% of you. These are my slightly less smart friends.
  3. Dumb HR Guy way – you wait three years then put them all in at once. This is about 20% of us.

So, I made the decision to recertify my SPHR through HRCI. I go to and speak at a lot of conferences, I lead webinars, I get enough credits in one year for all three years, so this should be super simple!

Okay, let me stop for a second and explain, it wasn’t. But, it’s mostly my problem and my Dumb HR Guy way of doing things! Also, I think HRCI and SHRM could make this process a little easier, so I’ll give you some tips that I hope will help you not be dumb like me!

Tip #1 – Each thing you do for recertification comes with a “Program ID #”, turns out these numbers, and remembering these numbers are pretty important to the simplification of recertification! Also, both HRCI and SHRM have different numbers, which adds to the complexity of this. My suggestion to both would be to each have a simple search function on their recertification website allowing you to look up these program ID #’s so you don’t have to save all this documentation or find a way to remember them. Which leads me to Tip number two.

Tip #2 – Don’t be a Dumb HR Guy! Once you get your “Program ID #” input it into your recertification application right away. This is one million times easier! Now, SHRM also has made it super simple by providing a new mobile app so you can actually do this task in seconds while you’re at the event and you first get told the Program ID #. Super cool, super easy, go download it now if you have the SHRM CP and SCP. I’m guessing HRCI is probably not far behind in launching their own mobile app, it just makes sense for this kind of thing.

Tip #3 – Both HRCI and SHRM make it very hard for you to find Program ID #’s because they think you’ll cheat. Even though both audit and the reality is people applying for HR recertification would rarely cheat just based on their demographic and fear of being caught, let’s make it super hard for our ‘members’ to find the information you want. Even if you call them, they are not very forth giving on those IDs! Basically, we HR pros are untrustworthy to the associations we belong to. Oh, what’s the tip? It’s not one, I was just still upset over not easily being able to find the Program ID #’s of the events and webinars I attended to make it easier for me to fill out my recertification! Okay, rant over.

Tip #4 – HR blogging is pretty much worthless in the eyes of HRCI and SHRM. You get a max of like 6 credits over three years. I write every day, doing research, keeping up on the biggest HR topics on the planet, working to advance the HR profession, but somehow I don’t get credit for that. Instead, I go listen to Charlie at a local SHRM monthly luncheon talk about 401K participation for the third straight year, with the exact same presentation, and I’ll get three credits for attending those three exact presentations over three years. Doesn’t seem equitable, does it?

The moral of this story is this. SHRM and HRCI have figured out there is one really good way to recertify and if you follow their way, you’ll find this process easy and awesome. If you’re a dumb HR guy like me, you’ll find it painful.

The other moral is this, I’m recertifying for both, even those I still think it’s ridiculous. Until employers show us which certification they prefer you can’t be left not holding the one that will be most valuable to you. Unfortunately, right now, you don’t know which one that is!

 

The Single Point of Failure in Your Candidate Experience #TheCandEs

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The Talent Board (founders of the CandE Awards for the employers with the best candidate experience) recently released their 2016 Talent Board North American Candidate Experience Awards Research Report. This report is well written, packed with exceptional data, and one that I look forward to reading each year.

As you think about your own candidate experience, and as I read this report, one thing screamed out from the pages:

Dispositioning Still Sucks!

From the report:

Disposition Communication Is Still a Struggle. In 2016, 47 percent of candidates were still waiting to hear back from employers more than two months after they applied. Plus, only 20 percent of candidates received an email from a recruiter or hiring manager notifying them they were not being considered, and only 8 percent received a phone call from a recruiter or hiring manager notifying them they were not being considered…

What Candidates Want After six years of candidate experience research, candidates still have one basic expectation of employers when it comes to screening: feedback and communication. Screening and dispositioning is one of the most intimidating aspects of the recruitment process as the majority of candidates do not get the job…Sixty-five percent of candidates receive no feedback after they are dispositioned and only four percent of candidates were asked for direct feedback during dispositioning

Candidate experience is a bit like going to that new restaurant in town. You’ve heard good things. You’ve seen some marketing. It looks awesome from the outside, so you decide to give it a try. Reservations were a snap and easy to do. You get sat almost immediately. Wait staff is tremendous. The menu is easy to understand and enticing. The food comes and it’s brilliant.

You almost can’t believe a place could be this good. You decide you must try the dessert. So, you order it and it comes out. The first bite is taken and it tastes like you have a mouth full of crap! It’s the worst! Oh lord, I’ll never forget that taste!

This is your dispositioning in your candidate experience. It doesn’t matter how good you do on all the steps if you don’t awful on the last step. Still, most of us still suck at dispositioning. It’s the single point of failure on almost every organization’s candidate experience.

Dispositioning sucks so bad, we call it dispositioning! Candidates don’t call it dispositioning. The real world doesn’t call it dispositioning. It’s called, “sorry, you suck, we selected someone we liked way, way better than you”.

So, what can you do about it?

First, you must understand why it is you suck at this. The majority of the people in the world hate conflict. They’ll do anything to avoid it. Telling someone they won’t get a job they applied for, that they truly believe they’re the best for, is big time conflict! HR and Talent Acquisition professionals based on their career path, are probably even at a higher percentage of being conflict avoidant.

Once you come to grips with this, you can design a dispositioning process that actually works for both sides. The other part is to understand the goal of dispositioning is to not make someone happy or satisfied because they won’t be, it’s to inform and educate. Your measures, then, around dispositioning measure those facts, not satisfaction.

I’ve never met someone who didn’t get a job they really wanted and they were ‘satisfied’ or ‘happy’. No, they were pissed and couldn’t understand why. This is why dispositioning, and the measurement of, is so difficult.

Here’s what I would do: 

  1. Set realistic goals around dispositioning. “We will let each person know if they got the job or didn’t within one week of the position being filled.”
  2. Find a process that communicates this message in the best way for the level of position and interaction with the organization. Mass apply positions with no interview, probably is best through email or SMS. High-level white collar job that went three interviews deep, yeah, that gal better receive a phone call and explanation.
  3. Pick people to communicate that have been trained on how to give dispositioning feedback to candidates.
  4. Let everyone know in your company how this looks, since most of your best hires come through referrals, most of your worst dispositions come through referrals.
  5. Spell out your dispositioning process to candidates up front.

Moneyball Rules: Offering More Experienced Workers Less Money!

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For years I’ve been trying to get people to understand this Moneyball concept as it relates to hiring, but few really listen. I know you saw the movie, Moneyball, where a major league baseball general manager finds success by signing and drafting ‘undervalued’ players. The players are undervalued for a number of reasons, it doesn’t matter, what matters he was able to get talent on at a discount rate!

Don’t you want to hire employees at a discount rate!?

Hired.com recently came out with a survey that once again demonstrates the most undervalued talent in any market are older workers, 50 years old and up. Apparently, once you become 50 years old, you start becoming worthless! Don’t kill the messenger, “you” are the ones saying this:

Basically, our average salary offer increases every single year of age. It makes sense because as you age, you gain more experience, more experience is more valuable. Or is it?

The chart, also, shows that once a worker turns 50 years old or so, employers (but not you…) start offering those workers less money, even though they have more experience!

Why!?

This has nothing to with wages! This is pure age bias shown towards younger workers. We believe, even older hiring managers, that once someone gets to a certain age, and Hired.com shows us that age to be 50 years old, older workers start losing their effectiveness even as they gain experience.

Somehow, in our minds, that 35-year-old, with three screaming kids and soccer practice four nights a week, is more effective than the 50-year-old with no kids at home, who is willing to work wherever and whenever you need them.

So, now you can play Moneyball!

You already know that most employers in the world hate old people. Thus, there are tons of gray hairs limping around out there willing to take all of your crappy low-ball offers, and they’re probably more loyal for those low wages then any younger worker you have on staff.

Yeah, for capitalism! You get great talent at low rates. Who needs H1B’s when we have old people!

“Well, Tim, it’s not about age bias! It’s about fit and culture and inclusi… I mean, we hire the best available candidate for the job!”

I’m sure you do.

Your reality is as hiring gets tighter, you can continue to overpay for younger talent with less experience, or you can pay a cheaper wage for more experience. Sooner or later, someone is going to ask the right questions. Are you going to have the right answer?

 

America First: The White Collar Workers Who Got Outsourced

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Your liberal friends want you to believe everyone who voted for Trump are racist, low paid, middle-aged white dudes from the Midwest. It’s nice and clean when you put it into that box. It fits the narrative they are selling really well.

 They don’t want you to know about the black female in California who lost her high paying salaried job to an H1B worker. Or the Asian-American male and female who lost their jobs, as well. Or the 60-year-old plus Hispanic male who lost his job. Those folks also are hoping ‘America First’ takes off.

This from the New York Times (I think this is still ‘real’ news, the NY Times?):

Audrey Hatten-Milholin, 54, was notified in July that she would be laid off from the University of California, San Francisco, at the end of February after 17 years in its technology department. Along with eight others, she filed a complaint in November with California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, charging that replacing her and others with “significantly younger, male” workers “who will then perform the work overseas” was discriminatory.

“We are at a disadvantage as Americans,” Ms. Hatten-Milholin said. “They look at it like, where can we get it cheaper? And for U.C., it’s not here.”

From the same article:

In other words, it’s true that cheaper labor helps employers increase profits and grow, and having more skilled workers in the United States contributes to economic innovation. But at the same time, individual American employees do face more salary pressure from newcomers who will work for less. And in some cases, they risk losing their jobs entirely, especially older employees who earn higher salaries.

After 11 years working in the I.T. department of Northeast Utilities, a Connecticut-based company now named Eversource Energy, Craig Diangelo was among 220 employees laid off in 2014. Before leaving the company, he was told he needed to train his replacement if he wanted to receive his severance.

Mr. Diangelo, who is now 64 and was receiving $130,000 a year in salary and bonus, said he trained an employee from the Indian outsourcing firm Infosys who was an H-1B visa holder making $60,000 a year. There was also a team of workers in India making $6,000 a year that shadowed him on the computer.

There’s a reason Tech companies are screaming as loud as they can for the current administration to expand the H1B program and it’s not because they can’t find candidates for their jobs. The candidates are there, but the companies don’t want to pay the salaries of the American candidates who are available!

About half of all the H1B’s issued annually go to outsourcing firms. What are those? These are basically companies who perform modern day indentured servitude. They find a foreign worker with great skills who desperately wants to come to America, pay them a very good rate as compared to where they are coming from, but much less than a similar American worker. Since the outsourcing company holds the H1B, they basically have this person at the lower rate for six years.

The tech companies get great talent, for a much lower wage than a similar American worker. Everyone is happy. Well, almost everyone. Miss Hatten-Milholin and Mr. Diangelo from above, they’re not too happy, they are really hoping this America First thing takes off.

If you really dig into what the new administration is trying to do with the H1B program it’s not to eliminate it, it’s to bring it up to an equal footing of the American worker. If the American worker gets paid $100K to do the job, you also have to pay the H1B worker $100K for the same job. The theory being if everything is equal American companies will hire American workers. Or, in the case where a true shortage exists, then hiring H1B workers will make sense without limits.

Ah, equality, it’s what I love about America. There are at least two sides to every story, this side rarely gets shared.

Maybe You Should Just Do The Job You Were Hired For

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It seems like frustration is at an all-time high. On a daily basis people are coming unglued over things they have no control over, and never will.

We are told to be more empathetic. We are told our employees need us to be “X”. You fill in the “X” because it changes pretty much article to article, generation to generation, leader to leader. One day I’m just supposed to care more. Then next day I need to listen more. The next day I need to understand more. Today, I need to be more flexible.

Somehow we’ve gone from running businesses to managing a day care.

I’ve stopped listening to people who don’t do the job I do. To the people who haven’t done the job in the past decade. To the people who claim to be experts but haven’t worked in my field, ever. 

Instead, I’m going out and talking to my employees. The young ones, the old ones, the ones in between that we’re not supposed to pay attention to anymore because they don’t matter because they’re not young or old, or female, or a minority, or gay. I’m going out and talking to them all equally. Since I need them ‘all’ to move my organization forward.

It doesn’t matter what my employees are telling me. That’s for me, to help them. The thing that will help my employees, most likely won’t help your employees. You work in a different culture, location, industry, climate, etc. No one is a better expert on my employees than I am. 

Just like you will be the expert of your employees, your team, your department, your organization.

 But, here’s what I think you’ll find out:

 – Your employees are all individuals with very specific problems, concerns, and desires.

– Their problems start close to them and then move outward. Sure it sucks Trump is making massive change and they want to help America and the World, but first, they have an issue with daycare and paying student loans, and a health scare. Those problems are bigger than the world problems you keep shoving down their throat. Help them solve the problems close first, then solve the world.

– Your millennials employees became adults, and you keep treating them like they just left college and are still kids.

– Your ‘new’ youngest employees are much different than millennials, and they’re not. They’re still young people with young people problems and passions.

– Your employees want to be successful. Across the board, it’s a driving, motivating force. You helping them become successful is the most important thing you can do as a leader. What’s successful? That is also very individualized. Your challenge, as a leader, is to find a way tie their success to the organization’s success. It’s hard to do, and you have to figure it out for your employees.

We keep letting other people tell us how to do our jobs. Have fun with that. I’m going to do the job I was hired to do, the way I know it needs to be done because no one knows how to do this job, better than me.

Compromise Kills Innovation

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The most innovative leaders of our time were mostly assholes. Why? They refused to budge on their idea. Everything in their body told them what needed to be done to make their idea happen, and they refused to compromise on even the smallest details. This is how greatness happens.

True change only happens when someone is unwilling to listen to their critics.

This is also the exact way more careers are killed than any others. It’s all or nothing. Greatness happens at the edges, not in the middle.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t fit well in most corporate environments. Most MBA programs don’t teach you to be a tyrant. Leadership development, in today’s corporate world, is about bringing everyone to the middle. Finding ways that we can all get along. Even suppressing those who push the envelope too far.

We want everyone to line up nice and pretty. To play the role they were hired to play. To be the poster children for compromise.

It’s important for leaders to understand this concept if your job as a leader is to drive innovation and change. You don’t drive this through compromise and you need some renegades on your team, that quite frankly you might not even enjoy being around.

It took me so long to learn this because I was a renegade as an employee. I couldn’t understand why my leaders kept pushing me to compromise when I knew the right way to do something, the better way to do something, the new way to do something.

Once I became a leader I acted the exact same way towards those who were like me. Get back in line. Run the play. Do what the others do. That was the leadership I was taught. I didn’t value those who seemed to be fighting me, just as I use to fight. New leaders struggle with this because we take it personally.

We feel like those renegade employees are actually fighting us. When in reality they’re fighting everything. It’s our job as leaders to understand that the fight they have is super valuable if directed at the right target! To get them to understand they don’t need to fight everyone and everything but pick some fights that help us all and then support that fight.

This isn’t everyone you lead. It’s actually a really tiny number, but it seems bigger because they take up a lot of time and cause a lot of commotion amongst the drones who want to stay in their box. But, this is how change and innovation are born. By one person who is unwilling to compromise because they know a better way and they’re willing to fight to make it a reality.

This isn’t to say it will always work. Most ideas fail, but those who are willing to make an uncompromising stand for their idea, stand a better chance of seeing that idea succeed.

Dear Timmy: When Should I Leave My First Job?

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Dear Timmy, 

I graduated college a couple of years ago and took a job with a good company. I’m an engineer and I like my job and I like the people I work with, but I’m getting calls from recruiters telling me they can get me a lot more money. My question is, when can I leave my first job so that it doesn’t look like I’m a job hopper? 

Thanks,

I Don’t Want To Look Like A Job Hopper

—————————————————–

Dear Job Hopper, (just kidding!)

Why should you leave?! If you want more money, go ask for more money!

That’s the real issue, right? Instead of having a conversation about your value on the open market, you would rather leave a company and job you like. This makes absolutely no sense, but people do it all the time because they are unwilling to have a conversation that makes them feel uncomfortable!

It’s pretty silly when you think about it. I’m willing to risk a job I like, a company I like, and Coworkers I like for a 10-20% raise. Instead of just going to your boss and saying:

“Hey, Tim, I’ve been getting a ton of calls from recruiters. Each time they are saying they can get me a job making 20% more than I’m making now. You know, or if you don’t you should, I really like working here. I like you as a boss, I like the company, and I like what I’m doing. But, I also would really like 20% more pay! Is there anything you can do to help me?”

Now, it’s critical you do this before you start engaging with recruiters and going out on interviews. Why? Because once you do that, now your loyalty will come into question.

Most organizations are willing to pay you more, but they really only want to pay people more who are 1. Good performers, and 2. Going to stay around. If you’re already interviewing, without giving them a shot to make it right with you, you are basically just showing them you’ll eventually just take off again the next time someone calls offering you a dollar more.

When should I leave my first job? 

That is a very different question than what you are really asking. There’s no reason to leave your first job if all of your career needs are being met. So, you need to ask yourself, about this first job,

  • Am I doing work I like to do? (Not love. Love your family. Don’t love your job. Like your job.)
  • Am I in a position where I’m being developed in a way that will continue to help my career going forward? (Remember, you own your own development. Don’t wait for an organization to ‘put you on a plan’, build your own plan. What you need is an organization that allows you to do this, and supports you to do this.)
  • Do I feel valued by my organization and my boss? (Value comes across in a lot of ways. Don’t discount working with and for people who truly care about you.)
  • Am I being paid at the market for my education, skills, and experience? (Everyone can get paid over the market, but you give up stuff to get that money. Usually, you give up working for good companies and good people.)
  • Does this position, company and location still fit where I want to be personally with my life? (Sometimes your personal life changes where you want to be professionally, and there is not much organizations can do about that in many cases, but sometimes they can.)

So, whey should you leave your first job?

You should leave your first job when the answers to the questions above show you that it’s time to leave. You should not leave your first job because you are unwilling to have a conversation that makes you feel awkward or uncomfortable, in fact, to me that would be the first sign that you’re not ready to leave that first job!

Employee Betrayal is Something You Never Get Over

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You probably missed this recently, another lawsuit, another former employee ‘allegedly’ stealing company secrets and taking them to their new employer who just happens to be developing the same or similar product as their past employee. This one is interesting because it evolves one of the company that everyone in tech seems to want to work for, Tesla.

Here the information on the lawsuit:

Tesla filed a suit against its former director of Autopilot, Sterling Anderson, on Thursday, alleging he attempted to recruit engineers from Tesla to join the self-driving startup he and the former CTO of Google’s self-driving arm, Chris Urmson, were establishing.

The suit further alleged that Anderson downloaded “hundreds of gigabytes of Tesla confidential and four proprietary information” documents to his personal computer. When he was terminated, Anderson returned the documents, but not the backups he created, the company alleged.

In addition to making offers to a dozen Tesla employees — only two of whom accepted, according to the suit — Tesla is also alleging Anderson worked on the company Urmson was starting, called Aurora, during company time. Recode first reported that Urmson was starting his own self-driving company and that he was recruiting big names from many players, including Tesla and Uber.

There’s always two sides to every story, but this one always plays out about the same way. The original company hires you, trains you, develops you, gives you the opportunity to be a part of something great. The employee then says “F-you, I’m using all of this knowledge to benefit someone else. I mean it’s my brain, not yours.”

That’s really the extent of every employer-employee betrayal, like this one. Of course, in their minds, both sides are correct.

The reality is, and Mr. Anderson knows this, he would have never gotten the information into his brain if he Tesla never put him in a position, and billions of dollars of development, to get such knowledge. As you can imagine, Telsa feels betrayed. Mr. Anderson feels like he’s completely innocent. The courts will decide.

This has gone on since the beginning of time and will continue. Companies spend way too much money on developing ideas to have them just walk out the front door. As of today, it’s illegal for companies to kill employees who try and take this knowledge to the competition or start their own company on the back of all the work they got from their previous employer.

Here’s what I know. As a leader, you never forget this betrayal. You can forgive, but you won’t forget. It’s less about the ‘stealing’ of secrets and more about the break in trust. You were a part of the team, and you decided to leave and go play for the other team (and you took our playbook!). That employee will be forever dead in your eyes. They burned the ultimate bridge.

The employee would argue the other side. “Hey, wait, I should be able to take my skills and work anywhere I want!” For many employees, this is the case. For some, for those who get brought into the ‘circle of trust’ and get to see the secret sauce recipe, you give up this right. Or at least, you give up the right to go to another employer and share trade secrets. The line of betrayal is fine and sharp. You never really want to find yourself on either side of it, because no one wins.