Category Archives: SHRM

Leaders Secretly Hate Succession Planning!

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Do you want to know what you’ll never hear anyone on your leadership team say publicly? Well, let me stop before I get started, because there are probably a ton of things leaders will say behind closed doors, off the record, and then open the door and say the exact opposite. Welcome to the PC version of corporate America.

One of the obvious, which always causes a stir is veteran hiring. I’ve written posts about Veteran Hiring many times, in which I state that companies will always, 100% of the time, publicly say they support veteran hiring, but behind closed doors they don’t really support veteran hiring. At best they want to offer veterans their crappiest jobs, not their best jobs.

If they did truly support veteran hiring, we would not have a veteran hiring crisis in this country! If every organization who claims they want to hire veterans, would just hire veterans, we would have 100% employed veterans! But we don’t. Why? Well, it’s organizational suicide to ever come out and say we don’t really want to hire veterans.  The media would kill that organization. Yet, veterans can’t get hired.

Succession planning is on a similar path. Your leaders say the support succession planning. They’ll claim it is a number one priority for your organization. But, every time you try and do something with succession planning, it goes nowhere!

Why?

Your leaders hate succession planning for a number of reasons, here are few:

1. Financially, succession planning is a huge burden on organizations, if done right. Leaders are paid on the financial success of your organization. If it comes down to Succession Planning, or Michael getting a big bonus, Succession Planning will get pushed to next year, then, next year, then, next year…You see Succession Planning is really over hiring. Preparing for the future. It’s a long term payback. Very few organizations have leadership in place with this type of long term vision of success.

2.  Leaders get too caught up in headcount. We only have 100 FTEs for that group, we couldn’t possibly hire 105 and develop and prepare the team for the future, even though we know we have a 6% turnover each year. Organizations react. Firefight. Most are unwilling to ‘over hire’ and do succession in a meaningful way.

3. Leaders are like 18-year-old boys. They think they can do it forever!  Again, publicly they’ll tell you they’re planning and it’s important. Privately, they look at some smartass 35-year-old VP and think to themselves, there is no way in hell I’ll ever let that kid take over this ship!

So, what can smart HR Pros do?

Begin testing some Succession Planning type tools and data analytics in hot spots in your company. Don’t make it a leadership thing. Make it a functional level initiative, in a carve-out area of your organization. A part of the organization that is highly visible has a direct financial impact on the business, and one you know outwardly has succession issues.

Tinker. Get people involved. Have conversations. Start playing around with some things that could have an impact in terms of development, retention, cross-training, workforce planning, etc.  All those things that constitute succession, but instead of organization level, you are focusing on departmental level or a specific location.

Smart HR Pros get started.  They don’t wait for the organization to do it all at once. That will probably never happen. Just start somewhere, and roll it little by little. Too often we don’t get started because we want to do it all. That is the biggest mistake we can make.

Just do some HR today!

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If you’re highly active in HR and Talent Acquisition in the social space (read: blogs, sites, pod/videocasts, webinars, conferences, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), you might be caught up in this mindset that what you’re doing is not what you should be doing.

You’re being told what you should be focusing on by idiots like me, and thousands of others, most of whom don’t even work in HR or Talent Acquisition at this moment.  That’s not a bad thing, some are brilliant and took their brilliance to the consulting/analyst/vendor side of the fence because the money was better, or the balance was better, or both.  This isn’t a consultant vs. practitioner post.

This is a post to remind you that it’s alright if you just put your head down and do actual HR and Recruiting work for a while.

That it’s okay not to be instituting the next best practice or innovation.

That it’s okay not to be focusing on recreating HR and Talent Acquisition in your organization.

Sometimes we just need to keep the train running down the tracks.  Allow ourselves to catch our breath. Get and build a strong team around us, and get ready for big things in the future.  In the meantime, we just do what we do.

We make sure our employees are doing alright.  Is there anything we can do to help them be better?

We make sure our employees get paid correctly and benefit card works when they show up at the doctor.

We make sure to kick managers in the shin, under the table, when they’re being idiots to their teams.

We make sure new employees have the tools they need when the show up on their first day, and they feel welcomed.

We give bad employees the gift of finding a job they will truly love, by letting them find that job on their own time.

Sometimes when I’m writing I forget what it’s like to have a million priorities in your day, and knowing you won’t get to half of them. That’s the daily grind in HR and Talent Acquisition.  So, I write about how you should do this or do that, how you should be all innovative and shit, but I get that many days (sometimes weeks and months!) you just need to do the basics.

I’ve been there.  I struggled to just do the basics many days.  When thinking of being the best and innovating seemed so far away from reality that you felt like giving up.

That’s when I would tell myself, “Today, I’m just going to do HR”.  Focus on what I’m good at. Focus on what I can control.  Make it to the next day, where just maybe, that day would allow me to get better.

Bad is Stronger than Good in HR!

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I spoke at a conference recently and one of the things that came up during my presentation was a conversation around “Must Do Moves”.  Must do moves are those things in your organization that you grab a hold of, as an HR leader, and make sure they happen.

I asked the group a question:

Do you have anyone in your organization that you need to get rid of?

100%, all hands raised up immediately, “Yes!” If you work in an organization that has a decent employee size, let’s say 100+, you almost always have a least one or two folks you would be better without. (for the record, my staff is less than 100, and I don’t have anyone I need to get rid of, they all rock! Don’t hate, I just follow my own advice!)

As HR Pros we hear about this in meetings with your executives and hiring managers, “Oh if we could only replace John, we would be so much better!” My point to the HR Pros in the audience is this is a value item that we can own in our organizations.  Must do moves. Especially those moves that make our organizations stronger,  need champions in HR.  When it comes to staff moves, we are that champion.

What we realize, but many of our hiring managers fail to realize, is that Bad is Stronger than Good, when it comes to employees.  We hear all the time “Addition through Subtraction”, and yet we struggle in our organizations to make this happen. Most likely this happens in your organization because you are trying to make your hiring managers, manage, and have them make this decision.

When in reality they have made the decision and they told you. They hate conflict, even more than you do, and this was their cry for help. Take it and run with it, make it happen.  It’s the one thing in HR we are all really good at, process and planning.  Put a plan together to get rid of your Bad and make it happen.

I didn’t just say go fire that person. That’s not a plan. Well, it is a plan, but not a very good one. I said make a plan to get rid of the bad. That means working with the hiring manager to determine timing, back-fill options, sourcing, recruiting, progressive discipline, all that good stuff, but make it happen.  Really, make it happen!  Executives like doers!

They like doers that get rid of Bad in our organizations. We own the Bad people in our organizations. Any time you have a Bad person in your organization you need to take on the persona, “this Bad person is my fault and I’m taking care of it.”  Bad is Stronger than Good, so you have to fight hard against Bad.

Want to look and be better in HR? Own the “Must-Do Moves” in your organization.

DisruptHR Detroit 3.0 – Limited Tickets On Sale Now!

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DisruptHR Detroit is coming back to Downtown Detroit on September 19th from 5:30-8: 30 pm. Once again we want to give a big shout out to Quicken Loans and the HR and TA teams of Quicken Loans for hosting this great event onsite at The Madison!

We changed things up a bit this year – still great speakers (see the list below) and still great food, drinks, and fun – but we are going smaller, more intimate, can we say a bit more Disruptive! On top of this great, cool venue (that is literally across the street from Tiger Stadium) we have the founder of DisruptHR, Jennifer McClure, making a celebrity speaking appearance!

Here’s the deal though, we can only fit 150 folks into the venue! We’ve already sold half those tickets! Last year we sold 300+! So, if you want to come this year, you better be quick and go buy your tickets! We will sell-out and I apologize in advance, but there’s no way for us to increase seating capacity for this event. The cost is $30 per ticket, which includes the speakers, food, drink & parking!

DisruptHR Detroit 3.0 Speakers:

– Becky Andree: SOS! I am Drowning in Complexity

– April Burton-Welch: HR Perspective: Let’s Be Fair, Firm & Consistent

– Adam Klug: Texting Candidates – You’re Not Doing It, but You Should!

– Jennifer Laidlaw: Your Training Did Nothing!

– Jill Melton: Words Can Kill – Words Can Heal! Choose Wisely

– Clarene Mitchell: Don’t be shy…Create Your Own Digital Footprint!

– Greg Mood: Jerry Springer-type HR Stories!

– Joan Morehead: What’s your brand of IPA, and it’s not about beer!

– James Reid: Employment Issues: Drugs Sex Money Rock’n Roll

– Michelle Snay: Show IT the love, HR!

– Jennifer McClure: (She’s surprising us with her title!)

We would also love to thank our sponsors for this event:

Headliner – 

Ultimate Software

Food and Drink Sponsor –

Marsh & McLennan Agency

Gold Sponsors –

Grace & Porta

Purpose Point

HireVue

SkillScout

Silver Sponsors- 

O.C. Tanner

Background Check Central

The Employee Walk of Shame

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I’ve lost jobs and I’ve called old employers to see if they would want to hire me back. I’ve usually gotten a response that sounded something like, “Oh, boy would we want you back but we just don’t have anything. Good Luck!”  Many of us in the talent game talk about our employee Alumni and how we should engage our Alumni but very few of us really take true advantage of leveraging this network.

I was reminded of this recently when a friend of mine took a new job.  You know the deal, shorter drive, more money, growing company and oh, boy, just where do I sign!?  The fact was, it was all they said, shorter drive, more money and they were growing, but they forgot to tell him was our operations are broken beyond repair, you will work 7 days a week and probably 12-14 hours per day because of the mess we have, but keep your head up it’s the only way you won’t drown here!

So, now what does he do?

He already had the going away party, bar night out with the work friends with the promises to do lunches and not get disconnected, packed up and unpack the office into the new office.  Let’s face it, big boy, you’re stuck!  Not so fast.  He did the single hardest thing an employee can do he called his old boss after 7 days and said one thing, “I made a mistake, can I come back?”

Luckily for him, his past boss was a forward-thinking leader and so this past Monday he did the 2nd hardest thing an employee can do he made the “Employee Walk of Shame“.

You can imagine the looks from people who didn’t know him well, “Hey, wait a minute, didn’t you leave?” Having to tell the same story over and over, feeling like he failed, like he wasn’t good enough to make it in the new position.

HR plays a huge part in this story because it was HR who can make this walk of shame a little less rough.  Let’s face it, it is different.  You just don’t leave and come back as nothing happened. Something did happen, there was a reason he left and that reason isn’t going away.  A transition back needs to be put into place even though he was gone seven days.  It’s not about just plugging back in, it is about re-engaging again and finding out what we all can do better so it doesn’t happen again.

It’s also about making sure you let those employees who you truly want back, that they are welcome to come back (assuming you have the job) and not just saying that to everyone.  There are employees who leave that you say a small prayer to G*d and you are thankful they left!  There are others where you wish there was a prayer you could say so they wouldn’t leave.

Make it easy for your employees to do the Walk of Shame, it helps the organization, but realize they are hurting, they are embarrassed, but they are also grateful!

The Single Greatest Trait an HR Pro Can Have!

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HR 101.

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

What’s that ‘one’ thing?

You’re going to be surprised in your career with some stuff!

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

Surprises make and break great HR Pro careers.

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

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

It’s Super Hot outside, do I need to come to work?

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With all the heatwave stuff hitting the news this week I’m assuming someone has gotten this request. I get it, if you’re working outside, this could be dangerous! I’m not talking to you!

I’m talking to the moron who works a job inside, but somehow they think it’s too hot outside to get their butt to work and work in air conditioning! The true HR pros know what I’m saying!

I’m in the north, in Michigan, so we get this when it gets super cold in the winter. Again, if you work outside, super cold is dangerous so it’s a concern for us as HR pros and leaders. If you work inside, what you’re really saying is “yeah, I hate to work. I hate this job. I hate this company. I’m trying to figure out anyway not to come to work…”

Nope! You don’t need to come to work! In fact, you don’t ever have to come to work again. You. Are. Fired! (Like “fire” Fired with hot flames, beat it!)

I want to hear from you on this super hot Friday! Hit me in the comments!

Have you, or do you expect, getting some calls today from any of your employees asking if they need to come to work because there is a heat emergency on the news!?!

Enjoy the Nelly cut!

DisruptHR Detroit 3.0 Speaker Applications Now Being Accepted!

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For those who don’t know, I’m involved with DisruptHR Detroit with an amazing team of HR pros and leaders, and we are putting on our 3rd event on Thursday, September 19th at 6 pm.

Great DisruptHR events start with Great content and we are now Accepting Speaker Applications for DisruptHR Detroit 3.0!

Due Date is August 2nd!

Tickets for this event will go on sale on August 5th and we’ll announce the full slate of speakers and the agenda on August 9th.

The location of DisruptHR 3.0 will be downtown Detroit at The Madison. Click through to the DisruptHR Detroit site for more information.

Who makes a Great DisruptHR Speaker? 

Anyone with a passion for HR, Recruiting, People and pushing the envelope around what, why and how we do what we do every day in the world of work!

We especially love practitioners of all experience levels. You don’t know have to be a twenty-year vet to be great at DisruptHR! You can be an HR pro in your first year on the job. It’s all about passion and ideas!

So, what makes a great DisruptHR Talk?

  1. It’s 5 minutes – so you better be tight around what your topic and idea is!
  2. 20 slides that move every 15 seconds – you don’t control this, we do. So you better practice!
  3. No selling products or services – Yes to selling ideas and passions!
  4. Make us feel something – laugh, cry, anger – have a take and be proud of that take!
  5. We see and feel your passion.

We’ve built DisruptHR Detroit to be a supportive hub of HR and Recruiting. We want people to come and challenge us, but know you’ll be rewarded with an audience that will support you and cheer you on. These talks aren’t easy, and we get that! The audience gets that!

How can you speak at DisruptHR Detroit 3.0?

APPLY to Speak it’s easy! It’s a great development opportunity for those looking to get on stage and have some professional experience speaking. You actually get a professionally produced video of your talk that you can use as evidence of your ability. It’s also a great networking opportunity with the Detroit metro HR and Talent community!

It’s Time for our HR Community to Give Back! #SHRM

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I’m asking a favor. I do this extremely rarely as a blogger. But I know the power of our HR community worldwide! We have a bright, shining star in our industry who is in need of a miracle.

If you haven’t heard SHRM’s Field Service Director, Callie Zipple has recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 Cancer.

Callie isn’t her diagnosis. If you’ve had the pleasure of meeting her you know she’s a tiny ball of pure energy and smiles. She loves her job. She loves our industry. It pours out of her like a fountain.

She graduated from St. Norbert’s College’s HR degree program in 2010, under the mentorship of my friend and Professor at St. Norbert’s, Matt Stollak. He wrote a post about her – check that out.

This is from Callie’s Go Fund Me page that he sister set up for her:

“Callie is a 31-year-old, Harry Potter loving midwestern girl. She loves her husband Shane and Frenchie Gryff madly. She is an HR professional and wonderful wife, daughter, sister, human being. This past week Callie was diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer and started chemo immediately post-diagnosis. It’s a very aggressive cancer but she’s young and going to fight as hard and as long as she can.”

I got a chance to spend time with Callie twice this year. Once at a local SHRM event in Kalamazoo, where she showed up and we got to meet in person for the first time. And then at SHRM National this year where I was drilling her with questions about her popular podcast she does with SHRM.

Callie is the perfect spokesperson for SHRM. She’s positive. She’s high energy. She’s helpful. She’s hopeful. Callie sees the best of our industry. She sees potential in all we do. She isn’t naive to the realities of how hard HR can be, but she leans on the side of ‘we’ll figure it out together”.

Callie’s Go Fund Me page is seeking $100,000 to help her battle her diagnosis. Currently, she only has $25,000. She has a gigantic battle in front of her. She is going to go through hell to beat this. She needs our help.

What you begin to understand, even with great health insurance, is beating cancer takes money. Insurance only covers certain treatments. It won’t cover everything and it won’t cover stuff like travel and loss of income from missing work, etc. Beating cancer becomes Callie’s full-time job and it’s an expensive job, but the most important job of her life.

So, I’m asking for your help. Help Callie in her fight. If you can give $5 dollars, give $5 dollars. $10, $100, whatever you can do, please do. If you can’t afford to give money, please share this post socially online – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

Give to Callie Zipple’s fund to Beat Cancer! 

The Worst HR Advice I’ve Ever Given to an Employee

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A few days ago this thought came to me: “What is the worst advice I’ve ever given anyone?’  Usually, in a case like this the first thing you think of is usually correct!  In my case, I came up with a number of things right away, none of which really seemed like the worst advice, and more of me making fun of what other people think is ‘good’ advice.

Here’s a sample:

1. Don’t be afraid to fail.

2. Follow your passion!

3. Don’t play office politics.

4. Yeah, go get that Masters degree in HR!

5. Just keep it to yourself, I’m sure no one will find out.

See what I’m talking about?!  All of the above statements have been shared as good advice, but I tend to think of them as terrible advice.

Then it came to me. The worst advice I have ever given to an employee in my HR career.

Here it is:

“Just wait and see what happens…”

This advice was given to an employee who really wanted a different position in the company, outside of their department.  It was going to come open because we all knew the person in the position was going to get promoted. I was early in my career, and I believed our ‘process’ would help this person out.  Just wait, I thought, and once this person takes their new position, you can post for their old position.  How naive I was.

The person who got promoted had a ‘plan’.  That plan had nothing to do with my process or the employee who was wanting that position.  The plan did have the old employee putting one of his buddies into his old position, and seemingly everyone knew of this plan except me.  This was the day I learned that everyone has a plan, and in HR it’s really my job to know what those plans are, and manage expectations early.

The person I told to wait, now didn’t trust me, and truly believed I knew what was going to happen.  The reality was, I should have known, so I really couldn’t blame the person for being upset with me.  My own bad advice probably taught me more about HR than almost anything else I have ever learned in the profession.  As soon as you hear of possible moves, you better get involved.  Waiting to see what happens usually ends up with stuff happening, without you knowing!