Category Archives: Performance

Elevator Pitch For Job Seekers

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I think anyone who has been in HR and/or Recruiting for about 27 minutes can give you an overview of what the typical ‘Elevator Pitch’ is from a normal candidate.  It does something like this:

“HI MY NAME IS TIM! (Way too fast and Way too excited and Way to desperate)” Followed by 1 minute and 47 seconds of them vomiting their resume all over you.

Would that be fairly active, HR and Recruiting Pros?

The problem with this from a job seekers point of view is this isn’t really what you want to do.  An elevator pitch is supposed to be used to get someone interested, not compress your resume into 2 minutes.  So, the bigger issue for job seekers is how do you make your elevator pitch interesting. Here are some ideas:

1. Don’t write it out.  You don’t want to recite something you’ve read.  You’re speaking – it has to sound like you are naturally speaking.

2. Use normal words anyone can understand.  So, what do you do? “I invigorate the youth of today to strive for greatness in everything they do.” Oh, so you’re a teacher.

3. Practice it out loud to a friend who will tell you that you suck. If you don’t have a really great friend like that, find one.

4. Say something that causes the person listening to you to respond.  “Do you ever have a time when you get really frustrated with your computer because it won’t do what you want it to do?” Yeah. “Well, I make programs that help you not get frustrated.”

So, what should an elevator pitch be? It should be a conversation starter.  Just enough for the person you are speaking with to want more, not to want to get off on the next floor and run.

 

Hiring Back An Employee Who Left You

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Did you see what happened last week on the college football carousel?  The University of Louisville hired their ex-coach, and current Western Kentucky Coach, Bobby Petrino.  For those who don’t know the Bobby Petrino story check out his detailed coaching timeline on SB Nation (it’s awesome!) – I’ll give you a five second tour:

I. Hired Head Football Coach at University of Louisville – doing great (2004)

II. Hired Head Coach NFL Atlanta Falcons (Jan. 2007) – didn’t do great

III. Leaves mid-season and takes University of Arkansas Head Coach job – did good (December 2007)

IV. Head Coach Arkansas, has a motorcycle crash with a 25 year old female assistant on the back that wasn’t his wife and that he was having an affair with, and that he hired – Power drunk. (April 2012)

V. Fired as Head Coach at Arkansas – not good (April 2012)

VI. Hired Head Football Coach Western Kentucky University- did good (December 2012)

VII. Hired Head Football Coach University of Louisville. (January 2013)

There’s a bunch of other luggage along the way that SB Nation points out which leads me to only one question – Was it a good hire by Louisville to take Bobby Petrino back?

I asked a couple of my friends and fellow #8ManRotation authors this same question – here are their responses:

Matt (akaBruno) Stollak:

How much time off does a mercurial talent deserve before being brought back?  Is Jim Tressel looking at the Petrino hiring and thinking he is up next?

Similarly, how does Louisville Football Core Values (http://ftw.usatoday.com/2013/06/louisville-footballs-core-team-values-include-no-guns-no-drugs/) continue to exist when Petrino has blatantly violated #1 and #2.    Is it all about winning?  What message does it send to staff and players?

Steve (Mr. HR Tech) Boese:

Even a cynic like me is surprised by this move. I guess the argument was he hit rock bottom and now has done the football equivalent of finding Jesus or something, But it is also about positioning, Louisville does not want to be a stepping stone job between the MAC and the Big 10 or SEC, (they are delusional about this, but I think it is true). So at some level they see this hire as a the best they could do with that in mind. No successful power conference coach would leave for Louisville so with Petrino they find the closest they could to that ideal.

Petrino going to Western Kentucky after his biggest screw up at Arkansas and before coming back to Louisville also serves to give Louisville some cover on this. It is kind of like Western Kentucky took at least some of the flak for letting the guy back in to the world of coaching and at least in theory that will diminish the heat that Louisville is going to take.  Kind of like Petrino went to jail (getting canned at Arkansas), then got released to probation, (Western Kentucky), and now the ankle bracelet has been finally cut off (back to Louisville).

Here’s my take:

The best hires that most companies will never make are the ones like this.  He was great for us.  Went someplace else and had a meltdown. Now we won’t hire him back either.  For some reason, he was great with you.  Don’t discount what certain environments, certain cultures, etc. will do for someone’s performance.  Bobby Petrino is a broken man, coming home to where he had his most success.  This might turn out to a great hire for Louisville.

What do you think?

 

The Future of HR, again.

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2014 will be the year Retention returns to HR.

Retention almost died during the great recession.  For almost 10 years HR pros were able to roam the halls of their organization and almost never had to worry about the issue of retention.  There weren’t many jobs.  Most people in times of hardship, hunker down and don’t move.  It was like a perfect retention storm! There are HR Pros who graduated out of HR programs, started their careers in the past 5 years, that have never known a time when retaining your employees was the number one priority!

That is about to change.

This year Retention of Employees will once again become a major issue that HR will be looked at to solve.   Here are some important things to remember when you begin to look at ways to retain your employees:

1. “It’s really easy to do.” That is what your executives think, so you’re in trouble.

2. You will get blamed for high turnover.  Buy a helmet, life sucks that way.

3. You will blame your crappy managers that you haven’t given any management training to in at least 5-7 years.

4. You will tell at least half the people in your organization – “We don’t have a retention problem, we have a compensation problem.” You’ll be partially right, but won’t have the competitive data to back it up, so you’ll come across a a whiny victim.

5. You’ll make at least one info-graphic trying to explain ‘Retention vs. Turnover’ to your executives.  It will fail.

6. At least one executive will come up with the brilliant idea of ‘Retention Bonuses’ and think $1,000 at the end of a year will stop people from wanting to leave your organization.  Everyone who stays throughout the year will get a $1,000 bonus but won’t know why they got it.

7. To combat your inability to retain employees, you’ll blame recruiting for not being able to find talent.  This will work until your head of recruiting gets fired and the new head of recruiting comes in and says this one line – “The best recruit is the employee we don’t have to replace.” Again, retention will be on your desk.

8. Employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Instead of recruiting, you now pass off your problem to the training department.  Managers will now be forced to go through soft skills leadership classes. You buy yourself 6 more months of retention not being your problem.

9. You’ll buy a ‘new’ assessment that claims to increase retention by picking the right people to begin with.  You’ll never really find out if this worked or not, because you’ve been changing so many things no one will really know.  But the HR vendor will take credit and you’ll start in their white paper and get asked to speak at their annual conference!

10. Retention will still be an issue in 2015, but by then you’ll turn everything you’ve done, and your 7% increase into retention, into a new position with a new company in town who has a worst problem than your old company. See #1 for your plan with the new company.

Employee Narcissism At All-Time High

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Do you feel that our fixation on employee feedback is perpetuating our narcissistic society?

It’s a question I thought of recently and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.  On one hand, I truly believe we have a major issue with narcissism in our society that is getting worse, not better.  I also believe giving feedback to employees, on the work they do, is very valuable and needed to have a strong workforce.

So what gives?

We are told Annual Employee Evaluations are broken and not enough.

We are told you must give feedback to your employees frequently throughout the year.

We are also told that we have multiple generations that have gotten ‘hooked’ on feedback, like a junky is ‘hooked’ on crack.  You get up and you put up a selfie waiting for your ‘followers’ to comment, to ‘like’, to give you a fix.  You get to work, one more selfie – just a quick hit.  Out to lunch, with my bestie, just one hit before I return to the office.  Okay, it’s late afternoon, I’m going to need a little more to make it until 5pm, hello bathroom selfie, you’re my savior. Look at me! I’m home, bottle of wine selfie should at least get me through the evening.

Is it a stretch to compare the desire for social feedback to our desire for work feedback?

Here’s what I know.  The more feedback you get, the more feedback you desire.  If that is the case, is your new constant feedback evaluations at work creating a monster that you’ll never be able to satisfy?  I feel like by solving one problem (lack of feedback), HR is helping to cause, or at least sustain, a bigger problem we are facing with an employee culture that is becoming overwhelmingly narcissistic.

Maybe the bigger question should be, what are we going to do with rampant narcissism that is running amok in our organizations?  Have you created Anti-Narcissism training yet in your organization?  If so, what does that entail? I’m thinking it must have some sort of aversion therapy elements (post a selfie and you get a shock from you desk chair!). Or maybe a little  public shaming, which doesn’t seem to work on Narcissist, they actually like it – ‘oh look, someone is talking about me!’

I’m not sure what I dislike more in HR – employees who spent all of their time trying not get noticed, or employees who spend all of their time trying to get noticed!

 

 

 

 

Celebrating Winning More Than Success

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I’m writing today because I didn’t win Mega Millions last week.  Radio Sports Talk Show host Colin Cowherd mentioned this concept on his show the day after the big drawing – We celebrate winning, more than we celebrate success.

We cheer on those who won the Lotto.  We feel successful athlete, coach, entertainer, doesn’t deserve the millions they get.

The problem is the person who won the lottery just got very, very lucky.  They didn’t work hard.  They went down the mini-mart and laid down a dollar bill and had some balls drop out that matched the numbers on their ticket.

The athlete, coach, entertainer, etc. has put in thousands of hours of hard work to perfect their craft.  They’ve taken the G*d given talent they were given, worked extremely hard and are now paid millions of dollars.  It’s really, what Colin said, is the ‘real’ American Dream.  Not winning the lottery (which I constantly argue is the last real American dream).

I think we should celebrate success over celebrating winning.  Anyone can win.  Only those who have talent and hard work gain true success over the long term.

When you think about how you celebrate in your own organization, do you celebrate winning or success?  Do you even know the difference within your own environment? I like to think I know the difference, in my environment.  I know who is successful, I know who is just winning.  Winning can happen to almost anyone, it’s dumb luck.  Success happens to those who consistently put in the work.  They might not always win, but they are always in a position to win.

I want to celebrate that.

Problem Solving 5 Push Ups At A Time

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Have you noticed almost no one in business uses push ups to solve problems, or laps.  I never liked running, and it takes to long to get your team back on task, so I use push ups as ‘motivators’ when coaching. Here’s how it works:

1. You screw up.

2. You drop and give me 5 push ups, immediately.

3. You go back to trying to do it right.

It works really well.  You didn’t call for the ball. Drop and give me 5.  You forgot to box out your man. Drop and give me 5.  You missed your serve. Drop and give me 5. You missed the steal sign. Drop and give me 5.

No, not after practice, or the game. Now.

“But coach, everyone is watching in the stands. I’m going to leave my team one person short.”  Yes.  Yes, they are watching. Yes, you will leave your team short.

Give me 5, now.

There’s something about correction in the moment.  I don’t really think it’s about embarrassment, I think it’s about understanding this is so important, we are doing to address it right here, right now.  Not later.  Not after. Now.

Individually or as a team.  Always effective.  Don’t like turnovers.  After each turnover, the entire team has to do 5 push ups on the floor, game clock running.  You want to know what happens?  The other team kind of giggles, referees always wait, and parents don’t lose their minds.  Oh, and turnovers go down.

It’s not hard doing 5 push ups.  It’s about taking a moment in time to show what just went wrong is important.  We need to take a moment to think about it.  That moment needs to last as long as it take you to do 5 push ups.

It works really well when coaching both boys and girls.  I’m wondering how well it would be in coaching adults in the workplace. It’s not about punishment, it’s about letting everyone know what’s important.  Being crystal clear.  Suit and tie, khakis and button-down, pumps and dress, drop and give me 5.   I’m not convinced adults would see this the same as kids, but I wondering what the real difference is?  Definitely not normal.  Effective ideas rarely are.

What do you think?  Would push ups work as a motivator in your environment?

5 Things HR Can Learn from Airports

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I know many of you will be getting on an airplane over the next few weeks to fly and see friends and family over the holidays.  Some of you fly all the time, so this will be something you experience often.  Many of you rarely fly, so you get really frustrated because you feel it should work better.  We work in HR everyday.  We get use to the stuff that doesn’t work, but we shouldn’t.  We should be like infrequent fliers, everything that is wrong should bother us greatly.

1. The airport never appears to have anyone who wants to take responsibility for anything.  Every airline is on their own. The security folks only handle their ‘area’ of concern. Food vendors only do their thing.  Does it sound familiar?  It’s your department and/or organization.  Some needs to take charge of stuff no one else wants to take charge of.  HR can fit that role perfectly.  Too many times in our organizations we/HR sees things that need someone to take responsibility. We need to be that person.

2.  The one thing about 90% of air travelers need to do after landing is go to the bathroom and charge something (phone, computer, tablet, etc.).  Airports figured out bathrooms, I’ve never had to wait to use the restroom in an airport.  I almost always have to wait to use an electrical outlet!  Should be an easy fix – go buy 100 power strips and increase the amount of charging points by 5 times.  But no one does this.  HR has this issue. We see things that can be fixed, by doing something simple, instead we don’t fix it, because we want to fix it permanently.  Believing is we fix it ‘temporarily’ we’ll never fix it the right way.  Do the temp fix first.  Tell everyone it’s a temp fix. Then work towards a permanent solution.

3. Airports use to treat everyone the same.  Everyone had to check in at the counter. Everyone had to wait in the same security line.  Airports figured out this doesn’t work for those they need most, frequent fliers.  Now, those who fly often, get treated differently.  They can by pass the TSA line through special pre-check lines.  They check in before they even get to the airport (most people can do this, but frequent fliers learn the tricks!). They have special clubs to sit in and get away from the rest of us.  HR needs to treat employees differently.  The only employees/people who want to be ‘treated’ the same, are those who are low performers.

4. Planes won’t crash is you have a little fun. For years Southwest was the fun airline.  They showed you could still fly planes and and have a little fun.  Others are beginning to follow in that same path.  HR is not known for being ‘fun’. In fact, we are probably known for not having fun.  We like to tell ourselves this comes with the territory of having to fire people. “Tim, this is serious business, there is no room for fun in HR.”   You can have fun in HR.  You need to have fun in HR.  Our organizations need proper role models of how to have fun.  People will still have to be fired, might as well have some fun along the way.

5.  It only costs a little more to go first class.  Actually it costs a ton more, but have you ever really seen an empty first class?  And, no, it’s not all frequent fliers filling those seats.  Some people are willing to pay more for a better flight experience.  You might not be willing, but some are.  Your employees are the same way about a lot of things.  Don’t think you know what is best for them, because it’s best for you.  They might want something totally different.  Well, we (in HR) like having half day Fridays in the summer, so we are willing to work 9 hour days Monday through Friday to get those. Everyone will want this.  Unless your the department that can’t take a half day on Friday because your clients need y0u there at 4pm on Fridays.

Here’s a tip to get you through your holiday travel, if you get stuck in an airport.  You aren’t forced to stay at the airport.  If you have an extremely long layover, grab a taxi and go someplace nice to eat, or even a movie.  It beats waiting 4 or 5 hours fighting over who gets the outlet next.

Riding the School Bus made me Tough!

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Re-run Friday – this post originally ran in January of 2011.  I still find Jenny Johnson one of the funniest people on Twitter and Instagram, check her out, she’s brilliantly funny. Also, my kids still hate the school bus!

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

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

It made me laugh out loud, for two reasons: 1. I rode the bus or walked or had to arrive at school an hour early because that was when my Dad was leaving and if I wanted a ride that was going to be it.  Nothing like sitting at school talking to the janitor because he was the only other person to arrive an hour before school started.  Luckily for me, he was nice enough to open the doors and not make me stand outside in the cold.  Lucky for my parents he wasn’t a pedophile! 2. My kids now make my wife and I feel like we must be the worst parents in the world in those rare occasions that they have to ride the bus.  I know I’m doing a disservice to my sons by giving them this ride – but I can’t stop it, it’s some American ideal that gets stuck in my head about making my kids life better than my life, and somehow I’ve justified that by giving them a ride to school their life is better than mine!

When I look back it, riding the bus did suck – you usually had to deal with those kids who parents truly did hate them.  Every bully in the world rode the bus – let’s face it their parents weren’t giving them a ride, so you had to deal with that (me being small and red-headed probably had to deal with it more than most).  You also got to learn most of life lessons on the bus – you found out about Santa before everyone else, you found out how babies got made before everyone else, you found out about that innocent kid stuff that makes kids, kids before you probably should have.  But let’s face it, the bus kids were tough – you had to get up earlier, stand out in the cold, get home later and take a beating after the ride home, just so you had something to look forward to the next day!

You know as HR Pros we tend also not to let our employees “ride the bus”.   We always look for an easier way for them to do their work, to balance their work and home, to do as little as possible to get the job done.  In a way, too many of us, are turning our organizations and our employees into the kids who had their Mom’s pick them up from school.  I’m not saying go be hard on your employees – but as a profession we might be better off to be a little less concerned with how comfortable everyone is, and a little more concerned with how well everybody is performing.

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

No, but really, how am I doing?

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Here’s the main responses 97% of managers give a subordinate when they ask “how am I doing”?  Actually, the reality is, most employees will never verbally ask this question, they ask it with their eyes.  They make some sort of worthless small talk, or update you on something that is work related, then you get ‘the look’.  It’s that look you get from a dog when you talk to a dog and the dog doesn’t speak human, so you get the head tilt ‘I’m trying to turn your human words into dog words, but it’s not working’ look.  It’s a waiting, a waiting for you to tell me, how am I doing!   Here’s what most of you say:

1. “Oh! You’re doing great!”

2. “Hey! Just keep up the great work, you’re doing fine!”

3. “Yeah! Well, just keep working hard!”

That really encapsulates the only feedback an employee gets when it’s not review time.

“No, but really, how am I doing?”

Here’s some hints that can help you out, if you get pressed beyond the three go-to answers above:

– No one wants to hear they suck, even if they really suck.

– 99% of people feel they are doing better than you think they are doing. Put that into context before you respond.

– People love to hear that you told someone else they are going great. That’s like positive feedback on steroids.

– Comparing how they are doing to someone else in your group, is never a good idea for team dynamics.

– Using a scale, is always a cop-out. “I’d say your a solid B-!” “On a scale of 1 to 10, you’re easily a 6.5!” What does that even mean!?

 What should it sound like when one of your employees asks you ‘how am I doing’?  I think it should sound something like this:

“Great question. Let’s talk about it. How do you think you’re doing?”

Wait for it, it’s not a deflection, but you need to know what you’re walking into! Let them tell you. Make them tell you. Your answer really depends on where their mindset is.  If they think they walk on water, but you want to drown them, you’ve got a giant gap you need to cross.  If you’re both close in your assessment of the performance, it’s an easier conversation.  Regardless, I think you should really give them something when they’ve asked for it.  First talk about what your expectations are.

“I’m glad to hear you feel your doing well on the project.  I agree with you.  Remember, we set out some goals prior for this project, and I don’t want to lose site of those, and what we’ve determined will be successful.  As of right now, you are right line with where we need to be at this point.  If you want to know it out of the park, be exceptional, you will need to do…”

Give them a chance to be great. Truly great. Not ‘meeting’ expectations.  Too often we tell someone is doing ‘great’ when they are doing their job. The job they got hired for, and nothing more.  That isn’t great, that’s meeting expectations.  Most people aren’t happy with meeting expectations, they want to do more.  You have to be clear on what that looks like.

 

 

 

Former HR Lady Makes It Big!

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Don’t know how many of you saw the press release yesterday, but General Motors announced their new CEO would be former GM HR Lady, Mary Barra. Let’s not forget, she will also be the first women to run a major automotive company in history!  From the article CNN/Money:

“Since August, Barra has served as executive vice president of global product development and global purchasing and supply chain, according to her company bio.

For more than two years before that, she was an executive VP focusing on international design, engineering, program management and quality. Earlier, she was vice president of global human resources. Barra started at GM when she was 18 as part of a cooperative education program.

She was paid $4.9 million in total compensation last year, according to corporate documents. That includes a salary of $750,000.”

Bam! It pays to be in HR!

“Women represent a minority presence in the auto industry, comprising 21% of the total workforce. According to federal data, 39,000 of the industry’s 185,200 employees were women. And women hold about 3.3 million of 12 million jobs in the broader manufacturing sector, or about 27%.

Jared Rowe, president of auto product researcher Kelley Blue Book, said that it’s smart for an automaker to put a woman in charge with a background in product development, considering that “the bulk of the buying decisions are actually made by women, when it comes to purchasing vehicles.”

He also said that Barra’s long history with GM is vital to the company’s leadership.”

I would say GM is smart in deed to hire a women to run the company, but in reality Wall Street will ultimately be the judge on her performance.  That’s the way it goes with large publicly traded companies.  I do feel, growing up in Michigan, currently working and living in Michigan, and my company being a supplier to GM, this is not your parent’s and grandparent’s GM!  The auto industry is an ‘old boys’ network for sure, and GM making the courageous decision to hire a female as CEO, definitely speaks to a broader change in our society.

When people think of Michigan, they think of a broken Detroit and of a broken auto industry.  For those of us who live in Michigan, we are seeing something very different.  The auto industry is strong, and so many companies are hiring in all sectors.  The recession hit us hard.  It taught us a ton.  GM’s failure was a huge part of that.  If you don’t think GM learned anything from it, this hiring should at least be symbolic to show the world it is a different company. One that, while not perfect, is striving to be better.