Category Archives: The Rules

College Athletes: You better have some experience!

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My oldest son is so close to being off the payroll and graduating college I can almost taste it! Because he transferred schools after his first two years he has a couple of classes to make up, but he has a great internship this summer, so he’s going back to school in the fall to finish up his senior year.

He plays college baseball, so a bunch of his senior teammates in the same grad class as he did graduate this past weekend. I got to speak with a bunch of these parents who are now excited for their kids to find jobs. You know we all love to hire college athletes, right!?! Right?

Here’s the thing. College athletes work their butts off and put in more hours than you can ever imagine between their sport and their classes. The work ethic. The competitiveness. Etc. Is why so many employers search out college athletes to hire.

But, with all of that comes one big problem. Most college athletes use the summer to get themselves ready for the next season. Becoming a starter takes place because of the extra work you put in on the offseason. So, we find a ton of college athletes don’t actually have much on their resume upon graduation, except for the fact they played a college sport, which now that they are in the real work world has very little value for most employers.

I get it, we are sports obsessed in America. We think little Johnny and little Suzy are the next Olympians and we spend enormous amounts of time and money chasing these dreams. I’ve personally spent more time and money than probably 99% of parents out there!

If I take off my Dad hat and put on my employer hat, this isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Great Enterprise Rent-A-Car found success hiring college athletes to work as Manager in Training. By the way, that job sucks! But, if you can make it through the first couple of years, you can make a decent career out of it. But do you think anyone is going to college believing that they want to be a Manager in Training for a rental car company?

I look at the resumes of so many college athletes, as compared to non-college athletes and there is one glaring difference, and that difference isn’t one was an athlete and one wasn’t. It’s that the non-athlete, many times, has 3-4 internships with real companies, doing real jobs, getting real experience. That has real value to employers.

I Love that my son got the experiences he did in college athletics, but he was also smart enough to say I’m willing to give up training all summer, to get internship experience because, in the end, I’m not getting drafted. He’s in the minority. Most either work jobs that have nothing to do with getting a career, or don’t work at all, and then upon graduation are surprised to find out they aren’t as sought out as they were lead to believe.

So, if your kid is playing a college sport here’s my advice:

  1. Unless they are high-level D1 and have a legitimate shot at going pro and making real money, don’t let a college coach make your kid feel like they have to use their entire offseason to keep playing their sport.
  2. Get a real internship, at least one, before graduation that is in line with your degree.
  3. If you bought into the hype and the pressure and your kid now has no experience in the real world, it’s never too late to go and do an internship, even for free, to get real experience. Even after graduation.

Here’s the reality. When a hiring manager has an opening, especially for entry-level grads, they will see resumes with candidates who have multiple internships with big brands, and those candidates come across a very sexy! They will also see resumes of candidates who were athletes in college, and they will be intrigued. Almost always, the candidate with real-world experience will kick the ass of an athlete without experience in an interview.

Have fun. Play sports. Also, get some experience!

Are you measuring the Intelligence of your candidates? You should be!

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Hire for Smarts. Train for Skill. It doesn’t sound right, does it?

The old adage is “Hire for attitude, train for skill”. The reality is, we probably have done this wrong for a long time. We hire for attitude, thinking we can train the person to do what we need if they just have the right attitude. Then Timmy turns out to be dumb and we can’t train him to do anything!

Lazlo at Google tried to tell us this, but we didn’t really listen in his “Work Rules” book. Scientist have been trying to tell us for years as well, that if you don’t have the ability to watch someone actually do the job you need them to do, the best bet across the board is to hire the smartest person you can, that actually wants to do the job you have available.

Smart + Desire to do the job = a pretty good bet on a hire. 

A new study just out doubles down on this concept that hiring smart people will actually give you an employee who is also more cooperative:

Our experimental method creates two groups of subjects who have different levels of certain traits, such as higher or lower levels of Intelligence, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness, but who are very similar otherwise. Intelligence has a large and positive long-run effect on cooperative behavior…Note that agreeable people do cooperate more at first, but they don’t have the strategic ability and consistency of the higher IQ individuals in these games.  Conscientiousness has multiple features, one of which is caution, and that deters cooperation, since the cautious are afraid of being taken advantage of.  So, at least in these settings, high IQ really is the better predictor of cooperativeness, especially over longer-term horizons.

The great thing about intelligence is it has nothing to do with actual educational success. A person can be a high school drop out, but still, be intelligent. You might also see a number of bachelor degreed individuals who test fairly low on intelligence. So, whether you are hiring for a low-skill job, or a high-skilled job, intelligence is a fairly good predictor in hiring, as compared to things like personality.

I would love to see a large organization, someone who does thousands of hires per year, actually measure the intelligence of those who term from their employment! We haven’t seen this, because of the obvious difficulty of getting a past employee to take an intelligence test, but I think the right organization/research partner could make this happen. I theorize that when taking a look at performance and tenure, you would see lower intelligent employees performing lower and having less tenure than those employees who have higher intelligence.

Cognitive assessments are actually fairly cheap and quick, and some organizations are using gamification to measure cognitive ability of applicants as an application pre-screener currently.

I have a bias against personality profiles. I think they are mostly witchcraft and sorcery. In my career, I just haven’t seen them consistently predict better hires during the interview screening process across all levels and kinds of candidates. So, I know I have that bias. On the other hand, I’ve seen cognitive ability raise the level of an organization when used consistently over time.

What do you think?

The First Question Every Leader Needs to Ask Themselves!

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I’ve been blogging now for ten years. Writing every day for eight years. If you go around writing and telling people you know something about something, guess what? They’re going to ask you to tell them about something, specifically as it relates to their circumstance.

So, I get asked my advice quite a bit about talent and HR issues people are facing.

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

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

I’ve begun to change my approach, though, because I knew as they knew, they weren’t going back to their shops and doing what I said.  The problem with my five minutes of genius was it was ‘my’ five minutes, not theirs.  It was something I could do, but probably not something they could do or would even want to do based on their special circumstances.

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

Right away people will quickly say, “Yes!”  Then, there is a pause and explanation, and sometimes from this, we get to a place where they aren’t really sure they really want to get better.  That’s powerful. We all believe that ‘getting better’ is the only answer, but it’s not.  Sometimes, the ROI isn’t enough to want to get better. Staying the same is actually alright.

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

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

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

I’m Afraid of Being Me Too’d!

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For the last ten days, I’ve been at HR and TA conferences. It was the longest, consecutive run of speaking I’ve done in my career. Basically, in ten days I did a total of 14 sessions. I now want to crawl into a dark sensory deprivation chamber for a week!

If you haven’t seen me speak, I do some hugging!

At one of my stops, I had a fellow come up to me during a private moment and ask me if I was afraid. “Afraid of what!?”, I asked. “Well, you are doing this hugging thing and I’ve seen you hug people outside of the sessions as well, aren’t you afraid of #MeToo? (I added the hashtag, he just said Me Too’d) I’m afraid if I did that, I would be #MeToo’d!”

I might be super naive, but I said, “No, absolutely not.” I hug in a context around my speaking. It’s about rules, and rules of hugging. It’s not me, drunkenly throwing myself at HR Ladies, trying to hit on them. In fact, it’s the opposite of that, I’m telling them we have rules about this kind of thing! (half making a joke about us HR pros and our rules!)

He persisted. “Doesn’t matter, Tim, it only takes one who feels like they might want to make an example out of you!”

Yeah, still, hard No. I’m a hugger. I’m an equal opportunity hugger. I hug all pronouns, very comfortably.

I think someone who is afraid of being MeToo’d is probably doing some stuff that they shouldn’t be doing. I’m not saying that someone couldn’t take a hug from me and spin it, but I hope with all my being someone wouldn’t do that. I also hope I’m smart enough not to put myself in a position where anyone would even consider that a hug from me was inappropriate!

I’ve had a career in HR and I’ve investigated some pretty nasty stuff where people were willing to do some pretty bad stuff to each other, for a million different reasons, mostly around hate and anger. So, I think I know what someone, improperly motivated, is capable of. I still was uncomfortable with the conversation, because it made me feel like somehow this person was trying to lessen the power of #MeToo.

“Well, someone could lie!” Of course, ‘someone’ could, but we would need to ask ourselves, why? And in 99.99% of those cases, there isn’t a why only some dude doing something stupid.

I’m going to keep hugging. I like hugs. I love the feeling of hugging someone who hugs me back for real. It makes both of our days a little better. I’m going to keep asking those I hug if they actually want a hug. That’s one of the rules!

No, really, just keep being wrong!

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I was with some HR Pros recently and one of them shared a standard HR axiom about what we do as HR Pros in the vain of maintaining consistency. If we are wrong in the beginning then we just keep being wrong!  It sounds idiotic doesn’t!?! But you see it every single day in HR. At one point someone made a decision, for who knows what reason, and no matter what the reason precedence was set and through hell and high water we will keep making that same decision!

We are HR! We are HR! We are HR! (keep the chant going!)

I’m this person.  Well, I’m trying not to be. You see in my organization we do the same stuff.  If my recruiters exceed their goals we have various rewards that get – one of those is the ability to have a flex day throughout their week, where they can work from home or come in late, leave early, etc.  It’s up to them.  In our environment, that reward is worth its weight in gold!  But (there’s always a “But”) when a holiday week happens where the person is already going to be off for a day, we have said no flex day that week.  Seemed like a reasonable plan.

But was it?

A reward is set up to be a reward it shouldn’t matter if the person has a vacation, or has a holiday, etc.  I had to ask myself why do we do this, take this away just because of a holiday? I trust my people, especially those working their butts off to exceed their goals, so why take it away? I was wrong.  So, I decided to change it and do the right thing.

Do you know what the first reaction was?  Yep, it was “Wait” that’s not how we did it before. A very normal reaction we have as leaders because we want to deliver consistency to our teams, and I agree with that concept for sustained engagement but there’s one thing that should override this. When you’re wrong!

So, do you have the courage to stop being wrong?

Most of your peers don’t. They get caught up in groupthink. They get caught up thinking they are being “consistent” and that is good. But being consistent on doing something wrong is just being consistently wrong!  You have a choice, keep being wrong or start being right!  What will you do?

Should Employees Have to Payback Payroll Errors?

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So, an in the trenches Recruiting and HR Pro, Kristina Minyard (@HRrecruit on the Twitters) brought up a really great question last week, that had a pretty big response. Kind of a black and white response, meaning you either were in one camp or the other. (BTW – go connect with Kristina – she’s a passionate HR pro who puts a ton of time into being a great HR pro)

Here’s her question:

This really isn’t a staffing agency question, which Kristna knows, but this was the specific example, it’s a payroll and employee relations issue that happens at all organizations, big, small, public, private, etc. anytime there’s a payroll mistake.

What are the two sides? 

Side 1 – It’s a company mistake, so the company should eat it.

Side 2 – It’s a mistake. It’s not the employee’s money. It should be paid back.

Which side do you fall on?

I’m guessing most of you would need more information. A situation like this needs details, right? Well, you don’t have any. You have the tweet, so what would your professional HR decision be?

What side did I take?

I’m fully and completely in the camp of – a mistake was made, the money should be paid back. Since this is my blog, I’ll lay out my argument!

1. By law, you can’t actually take the money out of an employees paycheck. The employee would have to sign an agreement, agreeing to have this money taken out of future checks in whatever payback schedule was agreed upon.

2. I look at this in a couple of ways. First, if the IRS overpaid you by $10,000 on your tax return, you would be legally obligated to pay back that money to the government, or you would be put in jail. BUT WAIT! It wasn’t my mistake! Yeah, so, you don’t get to keep the money it’s not yours! Second, if you underpaid an employee, do you think the employee would go, “it’s okay, I know it was a mistake, I’ll eat it’. No! Of course not, that’s ridiculous. So, why then should a company have to eat it? Because of a mistake?

3. It seems like the amount plays into this. Come on, Tim, we are only talking about $200 bucks! Just forget it about and move on. I have my SHRM-SCP and I’m 100% sure there was some stuff on the exam that talked about setting precedent. Precedent is a simple concept, although not always easy for employers to follow. It all boils down to this: what you do for one, you do for all. So, if payout this amount (to this white, male employee), but then we decide not to pay it out to another employee (a black, female) what do you think might happen? I’ll tell you in court.

4. So, if you agree with #3, you either have to pay it back every single time or never. Or, you need a payroll mistake policy that says, “if we make a payroll mistake less than $X dollars per week we will eat it, but any mistake over $X per week we will request repayment through a signed agreement”.

5. What if the employee refuses to pay back the mistake if the decision is made to request they pay it back? My answer? You fire them (this got me called “evil” – not by Kristina). Legally, if an employee is made aware they were mistakenly given money that isn’t there’s. Then they refuse to return it. You can fire them for cause, and because they were fired for cause you can without unemployment insurance benefits. Evil or not, that’s just the reality of the situation.

6. In a one-off situation, it seems ridiculous that you would ask for repayment and possibly go all the way to terminate this person for refusing to pay back the mistake. In an organization with hundreds and thousands of employees, where bigger mistakes, affecting more people, could be made, this seems very normal.

So, I’ll tell you I have had this exact situation happen many, many times in my career at organizations large to small, across many states, and never once have I had an employee refuse to pay back money that wasn’t really their money, to begin with. While it sucks, they understood. And part of that communication is letting them know, “this sucks, we’ve discovered a big mistake, and now we, together, have to figure out how to do what’s right”.

Kristina and I were on different sides of this. That doesn’t make her wrong and me right, or I’m right and she’s wrong. This is real HR. In HR, it’s our job to evaluate the risk of every situation an organization will face and advise on that risk. In Kristina’s analysis of this situation, she feels the risk is low and the employee shouldn’t have to pay back the mistake. In my experience, I feel it should be. Both, actually, could be the right answer, or the wrong answer. Welcome to the show, kids!

Okay, let me have it in the comments! What would you do in this situation?

The One Reliable Rule of Thumb in HR and Recruiting…

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The English phrase rule of thumb refers to a principle with broad application that is not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable for every situation. It refers to an easily learned and easily applied procedure or standard, based on practical experience rather than theory.

In HR and Recruiting we have a lot of these ‘rules’:

– Never give a reference check beside dates of employment.

– Employee files are confidential and should be guarded with your life.

– Don’t ask personal questions in an interview.

– If it’s important it should be written in a policy.

– Take every allegation of wrongdoing seriously and investigate.

– “It was a mutual decision for me to leave the job” means it wasn’t a mutual decision to leave the job.

– That which is measured gets done.

– Try not to ever set precedent.

– Everything falls apart around day 2 of your vacation.

– A candidate hasn’t really accepted the job until they actually show up to work on Day 1.

– If it’s on the ‘roadmap’ of your HR or Recruiting technology vendor, it means it’s not actually built and might never be built.

– The employee who is tattling on another employee is usually guilty of something.

– There are more than two sides to every employee harassment story.

– It’s not really an open enrollment meeting if there aren’t cookies in the conference room.

We love our rules in HR! It’s ironic that I love the profession so much because I’m a low rules kind of person. The reality is, in my couple decades of HR and recruiting work there really has only been one Rule of Thumb that has been the same at every organization I’ve worked in. Big and small. Public and private. Across all industries…

– Things change.

So, what is your favorite rule of thumb in HR and/or Recruiting?

 

 

 

 

Career Confessions from Gen Z: Texas Tops List for Women Entrepreneurship!!

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Did you know that, currently, there are more CEOs named “John” than all women CEOs combined? But fear not! There is hope on the horizon. Texas has recently been named the best state for women entrepreneurs based on several scoring categories.  All your exes live in Texas, and they might be entrepreneurs!

When I first saw the rankings, I expected to see New York and California at the top of the list, yet neither of those states was even in the top three! So, how did our great Lone Star State receive the number one spot? The rankings were measured by the following factors: general business climate, opportunity for women in business, economic and financial health, and livability for women. Not only did Texas score the highest average on these factors, but thanks to Texas’ generally low cost of living, paired up with exponential startup growth, Texas beat out New York and California (Focus).  Additionally, Texas has a progressive political climate in its capital and no corporate income tax.

While this is great news, it also opens the conversation of how we can improve the climate for women in business even more. Women in business, whether they live in Texas or Maine still face challenges. For instance, did you know that on average, women receive 45% less capital than men when applying for business loans? (fitsmallbusiness.com) Consider this, of all the investing decisions from venture capitalist firms, 94% of these decisions were made by men- one of whom probably is named John. So, while the business environment for women is improving, we still depend mainly on men to invest in our ideas and pursuits.

Recently, I attended a presentation hosted by Suzi Sosa, co-founder, and CEO of Verb Inc., a leadership software company. In her presentation, Ms. Sosa discussed her struggles as a woman in the business world. She told us when she was looking for funding for her company, her mentor suggested she change her hair, put more makeup on, and dress more “femininely”. She also disclosed that several married men who invested in her company propositioned her romantically afterward. She told us she felt pressured to change the way she looked and acted in order to “fit in” to man’s perception of business. In response to this, Sosa brought to light the fact that women need to help each other out more in order to shift this perception.  Sosa described her attempts to find new investors through her female connections in the Austin area, all of whom politely declined for fear it might make them look unprofessional in their respective business circles.

To clarify, I am not writing this as an attack on men, quite the contrary. I am writing this as a call to action to women. The business climate is changing for us, and for the better. However, if we truly want to be on par with men, we need to start by being more confident in our own abilities.

As a junior in college, I have started to notice not only fewer women in my classes but also less participation from them; we don’t ask as many questions and we don’t give our input as much as our male peers do. College should be a healthy environment for women to learn to trust their business guts and to question the status quo. But, whatever the reason might be, we as women are less participative in business classes, which then transfers into the greater business world. While this may sound like a bit of a bummer, the good news is we have the power to change it. It is time that we, as women in business, start speaking up, ask more questions, and learn to trust our guts.

The climate is shifting in our favor, and self-confidence is key. However, self-confidence alone is not enough for us to break through the glass ceiling. It seems that women in business are continually pitted against each rather than encouraged to help one another. If we want to be seen as true equals in the business sphere, we need to invest in each others’ ventures, bring fresh faces into our business circles, and not be afraid to advocate for our own ideas. I’m grateful for Texas and its opportunities for women in business, but there’s always room for improvement and for more women CEOs.

Elena Moeller is currently junior at the St. Edward’s University and Intern of all trades for Proactive Talent in Austin, Texas. Being born and raised in Minnesota I grew up playing hockey, riding snowmobiles, and fishing. One thing you should know about me is that I have never been labeled as shy- I live for getting to know new people and learning new things. This has enabled me to travel the world, become fluent in Spanish, and live in Milan, Italy where I learned a bit of Italian! I find I am happiest at work when I am able to spark my creativity and create something that is useful for our company but is also an entertaining read.

The Judy Rules!

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For those who don’t know my mother passed away unexpectedly late last week and earlier this week, I gave her eulogy. Thank you to the hundreds of friends who reached out to me. I completely overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and support.

For those who don’t know my mother started the business, I run today, HRU Technical Resources, and was a big part of the business for forty years. Click on this link and take a look at the picture of my Mom – that was taken the first week she started the company. She was 32 years old! 

As you can imagine, as a son, I never in a million years thought of giving a eulogy to my own mother, and the woman I’ve worked for, for nearly two decades. At work, she was Judy, at home, she was Mom. Growing up, I’m sure my boys were very confused!

She was the queen of rules and so when I sat down to write the eulogy I came up with the Rules that I think symbolized her life the best. I wanted to share because I think there’s learning in them for all of us. Enjoy:

Rule #1: It only costs a little more to go first class.

So, she told me she stole this from my Poppi (my grandfather). And for those who travel, you actually know this is far from true! It costs a ton more to go first class!

But she said this all the time, and for her, it really meant if you’re going to do something, do it right, do it “first-class”. No one wants second-class, so if you have the time and resources, go all the way.

It’s really a great way to live your life. First-class doesn’t mean the most expensive. For Judy, it was more of how you made others feel and what experience you could give them. When the grandkids came to visit, she wanted them to feel special, she wanted them to have a first-class experience.

Rule #2 – You have to say Yes to adventure.

Judy was fearless! When she was younger she road motorcycles, water skied, did all kinds of crazy stuff. She wanted to live on the edge and experience things. We have pictures of her riding jet skis, snowmobiles, mopeds, etc. She loved speed.

She also loved to travel and see all kinds of places – mostly in the U.S. She often said that there were so many places to see in the U.S., she couldn’t see flying all over the world, when she still had so many great places to see right here at home.

Judy was that person who was pushing you do stuff you probably didn’t want to do, and she was such a great salesperson, you usually ended up doing it!

Rule #3 – Call them again.

I remember coming into her office one day when I first started working as a recruiter for her. I had called an entire file of resumes and no one wanted the job I had to fill. I went in and said, no one wants this job, I called every single one, I don’t know what to do next.

She simply looked at me and said, “Call them all, again!”

But I already called them! Are you listening to me!

Yep – call them again.

So, I leave, pissed off, and go back to my desk and I’m like what the heck am I going to do calling all these guys again. But I did it. I called them again, and I’m like, “I’m sorry, I know I just called you, but I really need to find someone for this job. Is there anything you can do to help me?” And guess what, they did!?

Judy knew if I called them again and asked them in a different way, or asked them different questions, they all had some piece of knowledge that would help me. I didn’t do it the first time. I only asked them the one question – do you want this job. They didn’t. But Judy knew they knew someone who might or someone who knew someone, etc.

While you would think this is only a recruiter story it isn’t. It’s a life story. It’s about getting something positive out of every interaction you have. Yes, they had something I needed, and if I could give them something they needed, it would most likely work out for both of us.

Rule #4 – People have no idea how successful they can be until you push them out of their comfort-zone.

This was more of a core philosophy of Judy’s then a rule!  Judy saw something in most people that they didn’t see in themselves.

She really didn’t know anything else. If she knew you, and she cared about you, she was going to push you past a point you felt comfortable with. What she knew in her soul was that each of us had the ability to be successful, but the vast majority of us are unwilling to push ourselves to the point of being uncomfortable.

So many people hated my Mom for doing this. They thought she was a tyrant! But some actually had that lightbulb moment afterward and got it. “You know, I never would have reached this level if it wasn’t for Judy pushing me beyond a point that I never thought I could reach!”

I think this is what she enjoyed most out of running a company. She LOVED to see people succeed beyond a point they never thought they could achieve. There was no greater joy for her. Even beyond her own success, what she really wanted was to see those who she cared about succeed.

Rule #5 – Only you can decide what attitude you have. No one else can choose that for you.

My mom was mostly a positive person. If she caught herself feeling down, she would force herself back to positive. If those around her were negative, she would get very irritated by that and work to get them to be positive.

Without knowing it, she was actually using a very good psychological trick. Have you ever watched a video of a baby laughing? The pure joy of that. No matter what attitude you’re in, you can’t help but to smile or even laugh yourself.

Judy knew that even if she wasn’t feeling positive, if she made herself be positive, it would actually change her brain chemistry and she would start to feel positive, and once she was feeling positive, she would be positive.

It seems too simplistic to work, but it works! Turns out, if you want to be positive, just start acting positive and pretty soon positive stuff will start happening!

Rule #6 – You don’t need a man for anything, unless there’s a car door, then you need a man to open your car door!

Remember when they were full-service gas stations!? The guys would come out and pump your gas why you stayed in your car. Clean your windows, etc. Now everything is self-service.

When self-service gas stations first came into vogue – Judy would drive up and just sit there and wait. Eventually, someone guy would get out of his car behind her and come up to her window and ask if something was wrong. She would say No, and hand him $20 dollars telling him to fill it up! And they would!

Don’t get me wrong – my Mom loved men. She loved being chased by men. She loved them getting her flowers and gifts. She loved them taking her to dinner and dancing. She loved the game. But it was a game for her. There were very few things in life she needed from a man, and she loved that feeling!

Rule #7 – If you force me to make an immediate decision, you’re going to get an emotional decision. If you give me time to contemplate this decision, you’ll get a much better decision.

This rule saved my relationship with my Mom/my Boss. For those who don’t know. My mom fired me. She fired me because I was young, and stupid, and full of fire and emotion (thankfully she hired me back a decade later!). I forced her to make decisions at the moment, and Judy did not like to be forced to do anything.

Upon my re-hire, many years later, we sat down and had some really great conversations and learned how to communicate with each other, and I learned this was something she actually needed. Judy was street smart, she wasn’t book smart. So, many of the things I wanted to do, as the business evolved were complex and she needed time to think about them and understand them.

If I gave her time, she almost always came back and we would make a better decision. Sometimes we don’t have the time, but if you do, give it and let the person do some thinking on it. 

Rule #8 – If you look unsuccessful, you’re most likely going to be unsuccessful.

My mom hated causal Fridays!

She wanted all of us to wear suits and be clean shaven and smell good. Wear a gold watch and drive a Cadillac, and that car better be clean, inside and out.

Now, you might look at this as old school thinking, but what she knew was it wasn’t about you. It was about how others view you. We all have a choice of who we work with. Do you want to work with a slob or someone who took the time and care to make themselves look great for you?

The world changes – but this still holds true. Why the fashion of the day changes and the world has become more casual in general. We are still drawn to people who have that look like they have their shit together. Especially, if we are going to be spending some money with them!

Rule #9 – When in doubt, laugh.

Something most people don’t know, my Mom loved laughing! She loved watching stand-up comedians, going to comedy clubs, watching comedy movies. Anything that could make her laugh, she was all in.

That’s where I come in.

I truly believe God put me on this earth to not only make my Mom laugh but to make all of these women in my life laugh (My grandmother is the matriarch of our family, my Mom was one of five daughters and my sister was the first grandchild, I was the second). Their lives haven’t always been easy. Quite frankly sometimes life sucked and was hard. There will probably be some hard times to come. Today is a hard time.

But, when I get them around the kitchen table and we start telling stories, I can get them laughing so hard they are literally crying. My mom loved to laugh and my gift to her was being able to make her laugh so often throughout her life.

This great big dance we do in life comes with some hard times and great times, and all along the way, when in doubt, laugh at it all!

 

You’re Banned From Changing My Mind…at Work!

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Did you see Facebook’s internal announcement to their employees about banning an employee’s ability to change the mind of a co-worker about Politics and Religion? I think I need to use these for my family get togethers!

An internal memo was leaked (God Bless internal memo links) from Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer on some new workplace rules that Facebook is putting into effect immediately on all communication channels, and they are:

  1. Don’t insult, bully, or antagonize others
  2. Don’t try to change someone’s politics or religion
  3. Don’t break our rules about harassing speech and expression

Sorry workplace trolls at Facebook, your Employee Experience just took a major blow! (BTW “Workplace Trolls” is a great podcast name)

As you can imagine I have a few thoughts on this!

My actual first reaction to this had nothing to do with “the rules”, but had everything to do with who was communicating this message! Why is this coming from the CTO and not the CEO or CHRO? Definitely different than most organizations.

This tells me one of two things: 1. The CTO made these up on his own; and/or 2. Facebook’s leadership team wanted to make this seem like it wasn’t that big of a deal, so let’s not have it come from the CEO or CHRO, which normally would handle formal employee communications like this.

This is a bit of an employee experience course correction that I think we’ll start seeing in many organizations over the next couple of years with a softer economy. In an ultra-low unemployment economy the inmates run the asylum.

As we back to a bit of normal unemployment environment, employers will focus less on becoming a playground you get paid to attend, and more of a ‘back to work’ mentality. You shouldn’t have time to berate Billy all day because he worships Pokemon. Get your a$$ back to work!

Over the past couple of years with #MeToo and Trump, our workplaces have become littered with landmines of employee strife. We want and value inclusion, and at the same time this increases the communication issues and the need for rules like Facebook are instituting.

So, what do you think? Does your workplace need to adopt rules like this?