Category Archives: Performance

What Does Being a “Partner” Mean in Business?

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I work in a world where most of the time I’m working for free.

I run a staffing firm. By its nature, staffing is working for free until someone thinks you have something valuable enough to pay for (a great candidate). The trick to being really good at staffing is to try and work for free as little as possible.

I also write and speak in the TA and HR space. I don’t call myself an “Analyst”, maybe I should because all my analyst friends do a lot less free work than I do! I partner with some vendors to do some work and most of those vendors make sure it’s equally beneficial for both of us. I’m pretty open to how something can be beneficial to me.

Many times I’ll get asked for a “favor”. Favor is another name for “free work”.

Those who asked for a favor are always very appreciative of the “Partnership”.

I don’t think of this as a partnership. A partnership is where both sides feel valued. Me giving you something for free isn’t a partnership. It’s me giving you something for free, and you giving me nothing in return.

I get the game. Many times I’m giving something away for free in hopes that my “partnership” will lead to something that is beneficial to me. It’s a type of “loss-leader”. I give you something now, and maybe in the future, you’ll want to give me something in return.

This works about 20% of the time in my world. Not very good odds, but I’m a sucker for someone asking me for help. It’s actually a great sales strategy that can be used by every profession. By nature, we are suckers for anyone asking for help. Most people want to help people who ask for help.

(Sidetrack note) – This works really well in recruiting. When you reach out to an employee for a referral, don’t ask for a referral. Ask for “help”! “Hey, Mary, it’s Tim in TA, I need your help!” “Tim! For sure, what can I help you with!?” Then you go into actually asking for a referral! You’ll be amazed at how this works, because they’ve already said they’ll help you!

In the real world of work, a partnership might not be that different from what my “partnerships” look like.

The biggest difference is while you also don’t want to “work for free”, doing something for nothing. Many times we are getting paid to do a job where we’ll do something for a lot of people, and we feel we won’t get anything in return. But that is the wrong way to think about it. Because you should be getting something in every partnership!

If you’re a partner with a hiring manager that manager should be giving you stuff back in return. Timely feedback, return calls, help reaching out to their network, providing praise and feedback up the chain that will help you, etc. If you are getting nothing, you are not in a partnership, you’re in a one-way relationship. Don’t kid yourself about being a partner!

Partners in business help each other, support each other, and respect each other. Don’t call yourself a partner if you’re aren’t willing or able to help out the other side of that partnership.

 

 

 

Are you “True” to your game?

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There is a phrase that is often used in a number of contexts, the phrase is:

“Stay true to the game” 

I’ve always almost seen it used when talking about sports, and almost always in basketball. But I’ve seen it used across pop culture for decades.

“The game” is that thing you do. Maybe it’s sales. Maybe it’s accounting. Maybe it’s basketball. My ‘game’ is recruiting. Third-party, corporate, RPO, the vendors that support recruiting, we are all in the same game.

“Stay true” well that’s a little more difficult to define for each of us. What does it mean to ‘stay true’ to recruiting?

If you pull out recruiting and think about what does it mean to ‘be true’ to anything. Think about that one thing you’re most passionate about. How are you ‘true’ to that passion? How do you think about it? How do you ensure it’s number one in your life? What do you give to that passion to demonstrate it’s your truth?

I think this helps to start paint the picture of what being true to recruiting is all about.

My game is recruiting. If I’m true to my game there are things I need to do. Here are some of things I do to stay true to my game:

– Consume anything about recruiting I can get my hands on.

– Network with people in recruiting at all levels that are better than me.

– Take calls and notes from others in the field who want my knowledge and share constantly.

– Constantly think and act in a way that will raise my game.

– Understand that being true to recruiting is a choice. My choice.

If I’m going to be true to my game I need to constantly search for ways to raise my game and raise the game overall as a profession.

I’m a busy guy (aren’t we all!). I run a staffing company (HRU Technical Resources). I write every day and share freely with the community. I wrote a book (The Talent Fix). I volunteered and I’m on the board of the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP) as the President-Elect, and I run the Michigan’s Recruiter’s Conference each year.

At the same time, I constantly push my team to leverage the latest and greatest recruiting technology on the planet, and push them to be life-long learners of sourcing and recruiting. I’m sure that isn’t the easiest environment to work in. But, I’m staying true to the game.

It’s Monday. You have a choice to make today. Do you stay true to your game, or not?

Do you even know what your “game” is? If you do, congratulations, you are already on a great path! A powerful path! Knowing what game is yours is more than half the battle. Once you find it, the work to stay true isn’t work, it almost becomes an obsession of sorts! In a good way!

So, my challenge to you this Monday is simple. In the comments below, tell me what your game is. Then, tell me what you’ll do this week to stay true to your game! Go.

Things I Learned at Greenhouse OPEN #ghOPEN

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Hey gang!

I’m on the road this week at the Greenhouse OPEN. What’s Greenhouse? It’s one of the top ATSs on the planet – but you already know that if you read my blog!

The Greenhouse OPEN is basically their user conference, where Greenhouse users and those considering using Greenhouse come together as Talent Acquisition Pros and Leaders to experience great recruiting related content from a corporate TA point of view.

I love attending conferences with great TA content, and Greenhouse has done a really great job growing this conference to 1,000 participants. You know it’s good TA content when it doesn’t matter if you use Greenhouse or not, to get a ton out of the sessions.

Also, being that Greenhouse is designed for corporate TA, and not having third-party recruiters in the room, you really get a ton of great sharing and conversation taking place between attendees.

Here’s some cool stuff I learned:

– Some organizations are using very specific, un-produced video, to source candidates! How? Instead of sending a candidate a blind email or text, the recruiter takes their iPhone and records a quick video to the specific person they want and sends them the link to watch. “Hey Tim, I found you and want to talk to you about…Here’s why you would be great…Etc.” The response rate from the organization using this is super high, as you can imagine.

– Organizations are worried about Recruiter Experience! You know what, you do not want your hiring process to suck for candidates. We all get that 100%! But, what about your recruiters? Does it suck to work as a recruiter in your environment? If it does, that might be worse for your organization in attracting talent, then if your CX sucks. We tend not to even give this concept of Recruiter Experience any thought at all, but we should!

– Across all industries, text response rates from candidates are running 70%-ish, in all kinds of roles from hourly to salaried, tech to healthcare. Texting candidates keep coming up as either something organizations can’t live without, or something they are not using, and don’t want to use. I find this really strange, as it seems like it’s a form of communication that everyone is using. Being able to have etiquette and rules of engagement are important.

– Not all employee referrals are created equal. Great employees are more likely to refer great referrals. Bad employees are more likely to refer bad employees. You don’t want bad referrals, so it’s best to have a program that allows you to segment and know who is providing you with your best referrals. Manually, this is difficult, but with technology like Greenhouse and Teamable, you can start to get a real sense of who should be referring more in your environment.

I’m going to keep advocating that you find ways to spend more time with other TA pros and leaders. We learn from each other when we are in safe, and encouraging environments to share. Does that have to be at a conference in New York? Nope. It’s great if you get the chance, but you can also start or find local outlets for groups of peers to get together.

I love that Greenhouse and others are showing the industry the way, and I thank them for bringing so many great and giving TA pros together. Such a powerful way to learn and develop as a professional!

5 Traits that Make Great HR Partners Great!

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I use to think the title ‘HR Partner’ was played out and it probably was for a time.  There was a point a few years ago when every HR Pro had to change their title from HR Manager, HR Director, etc., to HR Partner.  It always made me feel like we were all apart of a bad cowboy movie, ‘Giddy up, Partner!’

I’ve actually grown to really like the “Partner” in the title of an HR Professional.  While many HR Pros just changed their title, I’ve met some great ‘Partners’ in HR who have changed their game, to match their title change.

What makes a Great HR Partner Great?  Here are 5 things I think makes them game changers:

1. Great HR Partners know your business.  Now, wait.  I didn’t say they ‘knew their own business’, they know the business of who they support. But wait, there’s more!  They know the business of who they support, the way the person or team they support knows it. Say what?!  It’s not good enough to know the business of your organization.  You have to know how those you support know and support the business.

That could be different, based on the leader.  One leader might be ultra-conservative in their business practices, another risky. A great HR Partner knows how to support them in the way those they support, want to be supported – while still being able to do the HR part of their job.

2.  Great HR Partners have a short-term memory. Great baseball pitchers don’t remember one pitch to the next.  Each pitch is new. Each pitch has a potential for success.  If they remembered each pitch, the last one, that was hit for a home run, would cloud their judgment about the next pitch.

Great HR Partners are willing to change their mind and try new things.  They don’t carry around their experiences like a suitcase, pulling them out and throwing them on the table each time those they support want to try something new.  Don’t forget about your failures, but also don’t let your failures stop you from trying again.

3. Great HR Partners allow risk.  A great HR Partner is able and willing to accept that organizations have risk.  It is not the job of HR to eliminate risk, it is the job of HR to advise of risk, then find ways to help those they support, their partners, to achieve the optimal results in spite of those risks.  Far too many HR Partners attempt to eliminate risk and become the ‘No’ police.  Great HR Partners know when to say “No” and when to say “Yes”.

4. Great HR Partners don’t pass blame.  If you are a great HR partner and you work with great partners, you will all support each other in the decision making process.  A great HR Partner will never pass blame but will accept their share as being one of those who supported the decision to move forward.

This doesn’t mean you become a doormat.  Behind closed doors, with your partners, you hash out what there is to hash out.  When the doors open – all partners support the final decision that is made.  A Great HR Partner will have the influence to ensure they can, and will, support that decision when those doors open up.

5. Great HR Partners don’t wait to be asked.  A great partner in any capacity is going to support those they support with every skill they have available to them.  In HR we have people skills – so when those who we support have issues, we offer up our ideas on what we can do to help the team.  Great HR Partners don’t stop at HR advice!  In a time of brainstorming and problem solving the idea that goes unshared, is the worst kind of idea.

I might not know operations, and I will say that up front, but I’m going to put myself out there and tell my partners that eliminating the rubber grommets on bottom of the widget is a bad idea, because while it saves us $.13 per unit, it also makes our product slide around and that ultimately will piss off the customer.

Being an ‘HR Partner’ has very little to do with HR.  Those you support expect you have the HR expertise. What they don’t expect is how great of a ‘partner’ you can be.  Great HR Partners focus on the partnership, not on the HR.

How Many Beers Does it Take to Get Your Employees to Peak Performance?

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Did you see that winter Olympic athletes were using beer as a recovery drink!?

The science says that non-alcoholic beer, used as a recovery drink for sports, is better than normal sports drinks like Gatorade. From the NPR article:

Appalachian State University’s David Nieman has studied phenols’ health effects. On the whole, phenol-rich diets tend to lower inflammation and reduce the risk of sickness, he says. “[Polyphenols] have a very unique molecular structure that can actually regulate the genes that control inflammation,” in addition to general antiviral properties, says Nieman.

In 2011, Nieman and the University of Munich’s Johannes Scherr investigated the effects of beer, which contains around 50 phenols, on athletes — whose intense physical activity can compromise their immune activity. When marathon runners were instructed to drink 1.5 liters of nonalcoholic beer a day, their risk of upper respiratory infection was reduced. The activity of white blood cells, a good indicator of inflammation, was lowered 20 percent.

All over the world, we were trying to figure out why the Germans were kicking our butts in all these events and the secret was they drink a bunch of this new ‘sports’ beer!

If non-alcoholic beer helped athletes recover more quickly from grueling workouts, then it could allow them to train harder. Scherr credits the nonalcoholic beer’s salubrious effects to its high concentration of polyphenols, immune-boosting chemicals from the plants with which its brewed.

“After that, we really had the proof: It’s really healthy and not only a marketing gag,” said Holger Eichele, the chief executive of the German Brewers Association. From 2011 to 2016, German consumption of nonalcoholic beer grew 43 percent even as overall beer consumption declined, according to Euromonitor International. New brewing techniques helped to diversify and improve the flavor, and now there are more than 400 non-alcoholic beers on the market in Germany. Germans drink more nonalcoholic beer than any nation, except Iran.

So, making beer available to our employees became super popular as a ‘benefit’ to offer up over the past decade, as employers looked to attract millennials and show how ‘super cool’ they are to work for. Work hard, play hard!

What we didn’t know, was that we had it just a tiny bit wrong! We should be giving beer to our employees, but it should be non-alcoholic beer, not the normal stuff!

The one aspect of both articles I thought had particular interest to employers was the social aspect of drinking beer. All over the world, people drink beer in mostly social settings. We tend to see drinking beer as a social activity.

So, having a beer at work isn’t necessarily a bad idea, if it was non-alcoholic and it increased our employees to interact more with each other. Plus, if it actually helps your employees recover faster from those grueling all-night coding sessions, heck, we better give it a try!

Snoring on a Plane!

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

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

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

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

It shows lack of self-insight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Great_Recruiters – Real Time Recruiter Ratings!

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This week on The Weekly Dose I review the Recruiter rating technology, Great Recruiters! Great Recruiters is not a yelp-type rating site type of technology. There are some on the market that do that now, but just like Yelp/TripAdvisor/etc. you run into problems with a free market unsolicited feedback sites.

Great Recruiters looked to take what we all want as Talent Acquisition Leaders and make it super simple and fast to gather data about recruiter performance from those who are actually being serviced by that recruiter. Not only does Great Recruiters measure recruiter performance, but it also measures your candidate experience in a real, timely way.

The technology is built to use with any sized recruiting team in virtually any type of recruiting – Corporate, staffing, RPO, you name it. If you have a team of recruiters or one recruiter, you can get feedback instantly from candidates on how your recruiters are doing. Great Recruiters allows you to gather recruiter insights from known candidates (candidates you know the recruiter is working with) and also gives each recruiter a unique url to gather feedback more broadly.

What I like about Great Recruiters: 

– Recruiting leaders get a dashboard of their entire team with easy access to all the feedback on each recruiter. In fact, both the TA Leader and the Recruiter get an instant notification when new feedback arrives.

– Great Recruiters gathers both solicited and unsolicited feedback. The first one is what you think, it’s the one-to-one candidate to recruiter relationship. The recruiter works with a candidate, you can easily see that in your ATS, and a survey is sent out to the candidate. The technology also allows you to gather unsolicited feedback as well through a unique url. Maybe you have a recruiter at a career fair and you want to measure that experience.

– Great Recruiters measures five key traits on each recruiter: Are your recruiters Genuine, Responsive, Experienced, an Advisor, and Transparent. 1 to 5 scale, 5 being the best. If your recruiter averages a certain level they can obtain a Great Recruiter rating badge to use on their social profiles.

– There is also a box on each survey for freeform comments, and the data shows that roughly 60% of candidates will add comments. Plus, it also asks each candidate if they have anyone who they would like to refer to the recruiter, with the hope being a great experience will lead to more referrals.

– Great Recruiters does one more really cool thing. Within the dashboard which each recruiter has access to, for their own data, they also have access to a “Knowledgebase” which is a learning tool where your recruiters can capture their best practices and share them within the team.

I feel in love with this technology because I don’t know of one Talent Acquisition leader that is responsible for a team of recruiters who wouldn’t want to use this immediately! It’s the ultimate recruiter performance/feedback tool, that will drive better candidate experience. Plus, it’s a Detroit-based team that put it together!

Clearly, if you run a team of recruiters, let’s say 10+, this is something you need to demo. If you run teams of recruiters at 100+, I would demo and implement as soon as possible, because here’s what I know. About 10% of those recruiters on big teams are just cruising and your managers have no real data to turn them over. This tech will drive recruiter behavior and performance in a way you don’t have currently.

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The Weekly Dose – 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 The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

The Future of Executive Performance Reviews are Here! Are you ready?

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A small news story hit this past week and you might have missed it. It was about Facebook hiring a pollster to follow Mark Zuckerburg around to measure what people (all people) thought of him, not Facebook. Here’s a bit from The Verge:

“It was a very unusual role,” McGinn says. “It was my job to do surveys and focus groups globally to understand why people like Mark Zuckerberg, whether they think they can trust him, and whether they’ve even heard of him. That’s especially important outside of the United States.”

McGinn tracked a wide range of questions related to Zuckerberg’s public perception. “Not just him in the abstract, but do people like Mark’s speeches? Do they like his interviews with the press? Do people like his posts on Facebook? It’s a bit like a political campaign, in the sense that you’re constantly measuring how every piece of communication lands. If Mark’s doing a barbecue in his backyard and he hops on Facebook Live, how do people respond to that?”

Facebook worked to develop an understanding of Zuckerberg’s perception that went beyond simple “thumbs-up” or “thumbs-down” metrics, McGinn says. “If Mark gives a speech and he’s talking about immigration and universal health care and access to equal education, it’s looking at all the different topics that Mark mentions and seeing what resonates with different audiences in the United States,” he says. “It’s very advanced research.”

Facebook also conducted similar research on behalf of the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. Surveys measured awareness about Sandberg, whether people liked and trusted her, and how they felt about her speeches, interviews, and Facebook posts…The company further measured how Sandberg’s public image compared with Zuckerberg’s. The results were shared directly with Zuckerberg and Sandberg” 

Most Executives of very large companies don’t really get performance reviews. The board of directors will do something formally, but it’s all wink, wink, fairly surface level stuff, we’re all in this together, how much of a raise should we give ourselves this year kind of thing.

Can you imagine how your C-suite would respond to having themselves polled at every turn on an ongoing basis kind of performance feedback! I’ll tell you, most would lose their minds!

When I first read this, I thought, oh, this is just Mark looking into Presidency options, but when Sheryl was also put into the mix, and they were compared, that changes the dynamic. If you think about the impact of the C-suite in the largest companies in the world in terms of performance of stock price, earnings, revenue, etc., you’re talking billions of dollars to the positive or negative.

Look at what Uber’s CEO did to their brand! Can you imagine how that might have played out differently from the start if he was constantly being polled on his behaviors? Can you imagine how most executives would be if they knew they were constantly being polled on their behaviors!?

I’m not sure we need or want constant polling of executives. Bad things can happen with that as well. They become politicians bowing to the whims of the masses, and that might not be what’s right for the organization. But I do believe this Facebook experiment gives us some foreshadowing of how we might start tracking and measuring the performance of our most senior executives in the future.

Internal 360 feedback has always been a great tool to use to get feedback on our senior leaders. This kind of surveying takes it one step further in taking it outside of the organization as well.

If you want to see how this kind of constant feedback loop could go really wrong, check out Netflix’s Black Mirror Season 3, Episode 1 – Nosedive, that looks at our constant need for social reinforcement with “likes”! (Reader alert – Black Mirror as a series is super Alfred Hitchcock meets 2050 weird – don’t judge me for watching!).

Someone Is Banking on You Being Lazy!

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I work in an industry where I’ve been told for a decade technology is going to take my job. The staffing industry is a half a trillion dollar industry worldwide. The entire industry is built on us banking on the fact that someone in corporate TA is going to be lazy.

Ouch! That should sting a little!

So, I don’t really bank on you being lazy at my company. We do contract work so we are looking to fill contingent roles, not direct hire staffing, which is an industry almost completely built on lazy! For my staffing brothers and sisters out there, I hear you, I know you’re ‘just’ filling in when ‘capacity’ is an issue. (wink, head nod, wink)

There are other industries that bank you us being lazy. The entire diet industry! You’ve got overpriced awful foods, bars, shakes, workout gyms, at home gyms, etc. Because we won’t eat less and move more, because we are “lazy”, we pay a lot for that! Believe me, I pay my fair share! Just because I’m too lazy! Ugh, it’s embarrassing!

Direct hire staffing as an industry could be gone tomorrow if corporate TA just did what they were hired to do. You have an opening, you fill the opening. We aren’t trying to put a woman on the moon! This isn’t rocket science!

But, we don’t fill the opening. In fact, we do just about everything except fill the opening. We post the opening. We meet about the opening. We send whoever applies to the manager of the opening. We meet some more about candidate experience. We have another meeting about employment branding. One more meeting with the manager to see if anything has changed.

That doesn’t sound lazy, does it?

But, deflection of more difficult work is just another form of lazy.

My kid doesn’t want to go out in 90-degree heat and mow the lawn. It’s a hard, hot job. So, they come up with ‘alternative’ work that they have to do that just happens to be inside in the air conditioning.

As TA Leaders, we have to understand how are others are banking on us being lazy, and then make adjustments to stop lazy. So, how do you do that?

Well, I wrote an entire book on the subject – The Talent Fix – which is coming out in April – but until you can get it, here are some tips:

  1. Have clearly defined measurable activity goals set for each member of your TA team.
  2. Make those measures transparent so everyone can see them every day.
  3. Have performance conversations immediately when measures aren’t met.
  4. Course correct as measures need to be adjusted to meet the needs of the business.
  5. Rinse, repeat.

1 -5 above is like page 37 of the book. So, you can imagine what the rest of the 300+ pages will be like! 😉

If you follow the five steps above about half of your team will quit in 90 days. That’s a good thing, those idiots didn’t want to recruit, to begin with, they just wanted that fat corporate check and Taco Tuesdays. They were being lazy and it was costing your corporate bottom line.

The talent acquisition function is not a charity case. I think in the history of HR we’ve done some corporate charity where we let people keep collecting money even though they were costing us money. They weren’t giving back the value we needed for what we were paying. Great leaders stop this from happening.

Great leaders understand that there are people in the world that are banking on us being lazy.

What Happens When ‘Dad’ Doesn’t Like How His Daughter’s Boss is Managing Her?

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If you follow sports recently you can’t get away from Lavar Ball, the overbearing Dad of three really talented basketball-playing sons. His oldest, Lonzo, is a really talented rookie in the NBA with the Lakers, his middle son was at UCLA as a freshman, got suspended from the team for shoplifting, and his youngest was a top recruit in high school.

Lavar took the two youngest kids out of school and took them to Lithuania to play professional basketball.

Lavar was back in the news this week when he told ESPN that Luke Walton, the Lakers Head Coach, wasn’t doing his job and should be fired.  Luke Walton is considered by many to be one of the top young coaches in the NBA and is highly regarded by both players and other NBA coaches. The NBA coaches came to his defense in a big way.

One, in particular, was Steve Kerr, considered the top coach in the NBA, and Luke Walton’s mentor. Here’s what Kerr had to say:

“This is the world we live in now. I was thinking about ESPN and they laid off, I don’t know 100 people…many of whom were really talented journalists covering the NBA. So this is not an ESPN judgment, it’s a societal thing more than anything…I’ve talked to people in the media and said ‘Why do you guys have to cover that guy.’ They say ‘We don’t want to. Nobody wants to. But our bosses tell us we have to because of the ratings and the readership.’

So somewhere, I guess in Lithuania, LaVar Ball is laughing. People are eating out his hands for no apparent reason. Other than he’s become like the Kardashian of the NBA or something and that sells. That’s true in politics and entertainment and now sports. It doesn’t matter if there’s any substance involved with an issue. It’s just ‘Can we make it really interesting.’ For no apparent reason. There’s nothing interesting about that story. You know how many parents of my players have probably been at home thinking ‘Why isn’t he playing my kid.’ Yet we’re sticking a microphone in front of his face because apparently, it gets ratings. I don’t know who cares, but people must care or ESPN wouldn’t be spending whatever they’re spending to send reporters to Lithuania when they laid off people who were writing really substantial pieces…”

Don’t think this ends here.

We can already find examples and stories from corporate America of parents getting involved in their kids work-life. In the past, a couple of decades ago, you would have never heard of a parent saying anything about how their kids were getting managed.

Now we live in a world where everyone has a platform and the ‘threat’ of this happening to you, your organization, to one of your managers, is very real.

It’s easy to say that you wouldn’t engage. That you would only work through the ’employee’ in this manner. That’s what the majority will say. But, what do you do when that parent has a larger platform than your brand? When ‘that’ parent finds others willing to listen. How are you prepared to react?

I can foresee a time in the near future where HR leaders will be meeting with parents to discuss issues. It happens in what part of society, politics, entertainment, sports, etc. before it filters into other parts of normal, everyday society. You can ignore it, but those who do will probably be the least prepared to handle this when it hits them over the head.

I’m ready. Bring Big Momma into the office, let’s talk this out!

The fact of the matter is if I’m transparent about performance there will be nothing I haven’t said to your child that I won’t be willing to say to you. I’ll first ask the kid if they want Big Momma to come in, which I’m guessing they’ll say “no”, but if they do, let’s do this!

There’s one part of our society that is ready for this and it’s teachers!

Teachers have been dealing with overbearing parents who think little Jimmy walks on water for years. You know what teachers do? They do the exact same thing you and your managers do. You sit them down, all together, you give very specific examples of behavior and performance, and you shut up and wait for a reaction.

When I taught, I found most overbearing parents, when presented with facts, would actually support me and help me get better performance. In teaching, and in the real work world, I’ll take any help I can get to get better performance!

In Lavar Ball’s case, he’s just an idiot with a stage.