Not surprisingly, no one in the HR/Talent community is talking about a major study released by the Marines last week that shows all male combat units perform better than mixed male and female combat units. More from Time:

The results of study speak to the dangers of the Golem effect. Research has shown that when less is expected of a specific group, less is exactly what they will achieve. For decades, women in the Marine Corps have been subject to lower performance standards, starting at recruit training. The passive acceptance of second-rate results for women flies in the face of the mythical characterization of the Marine Corps as the most elite of all of the services.

Although female recruits have historically underperformed in every quantifiable category at boot camp, the Marine Corps has never acknowledged this to be a fundamental obstacle to the success and credibility of female Marines. Ultimately, the impact of lowered expectations for female performance at boot camp were reflected across the spectrum of the study’s results.

A Marine Corps mantra is “Every Marine a rifleman.” However, until last year, female recruits achieved an initial qualification rate on the rifle range between 68% and 72%, compared to male averages between 85% and 93%. It became normal for up to a third of every cohort of female recruits to require remediation on the rifle range or be recycled in training.

So, does this have workplace application?

I think it does speak to the lowering selection standards amongst different groups of people you have coming into your organization. It also speaks to the concept of Inclusion and what importance your organization puts on Inclusion for your success.  The results of the Marine’s study is not surprising. They lowered standards for female recruits, continued to lower standards through training, then measured them against all male units which had higher standards.  The mixed groups would almost always fail under these circumstances.

It’s also not surprising that in a combat setting inclusive groups would perform lower than exclusive groups.  Combat units thrive when they act as one, not independent.  Inclusion doesn’t help this concept, it hinders it. You will find the same thing in manufacturing environments, call centers, etc.

Inclusion doesn’t make every workplace environment perform better.  In some workplaces, increased inclusion will actually bring down overall performance.

The larger issue with the Marine study, though, is that the Marines lowered incoming standards for females, which ultimately led to lower performance in the mixed groups.  More from Marine Lieutenant Colonel, Kate Germano: 

“The gender normed physical fitness test allows women to settle for mediocrity while their male peers are held to more stringent standards including dead-hang pull ups and a faster three-mile run requirement. Considering these disparities, it should not be a surprise that men would outperform the women in the study, nor should the female lower extremity injury rate be considered startling.

The Marine Corps force integration plan summary touts the fact that the recruiting force has seen a 4.5% increase in female enlistments since 2008. But does an increase of women in the Marine Corps really equate to talent management if the women are simply expected to do less? No matter how many women there are in the Marine Corps, if low expectations for performance are maintained, women will never measure up to their male counterparts in any capacity, much less the field of infantry.”

I’m wondering how many HR & Talent Pros are facing something similar in their own workplaces.  With the push to make all workplaces more inclusive, regardless of the results, I tend to believe there are probably more, but few willing to go as public as the Marine Corp did in this study!

Don’t confuse this issue. This isn’t male vs. female. This is a false belief that all environments perform better by being inclusive, which isn’t the case. Especially, if you’re going to hold the inclusive group to lower standards!

Kris Dunn and I presented to a packed room at SHRM on Monday on the topic of HR technology and what HR Pros need to be thinking about and doing to bring their own shops into the next decade.  It was great. The attendees asked a ton of questions and were so engaged.

I know I’m going to catch crap about saying HR ladies are brave, when their are HR guys as well at SHRM. The reality is about 85% of the attendees are female. So, while I’m sure there are brave HR guys, my example has to do with one of the HR ladies.

Literally,  minutes after it got done I overheard someone making fun of an HR pro who made a comment about ‘getting onto LinkedIn’ to find some talent, because they had not yet been on LinkedIn.  This is the real struggle.  It made me upset that this person was being made fun of.

Here was an HR lady who was brave enough to come to a technology session, working on her own development, trying to get better.  I started out the session telling folks that I feel like an idiot when it comes to technology.  I’m definitely not an expert.  I’m interested, and I’m following that interest. The reality is I’m just scratching the service of what HR technology is all about.

As compared to most of the people in the room I probably know a thousand percent more about HR technology then they do.  There is this continuum of novice we are all on, when it comes to our level of knowledge. Some are at the level where they don’t know about LinkedIn.  That’s okay.  We all start somewhere.  That’s where I started.

She was brave to have the guts to ask the question.

It takes guts to let people know that you don’t know something, but you want to learn.  That’s what is great about industry conferences about SHRM. Most attendees are in the same boat.  They want to share what they know and learn what other know.  All to help themselves and their organization.

It’s not easy.  It’s not easy to admit you don’t know something, when it seems like everyone else does.  It takes someone who has some courage to open themselves up to the opinion of the masses. My hope is that we all come to this safe place to learn and help develop each other.

I’m proud of all the HR pros who came to my session and raised their hand and asked questions that might have gotten them judged.  That takes guts.  It made the session great, because it was real.  Real questions, from real HR pros, wanting real help.

It wasn’t something at 30,000 feet.  It was ground level, real world HR and it seemed like everyone really liked it.

Thanks for showing us the way brave HR lady!

Monday’s big keynote speaker was the ever popular Marcus Buckingham.  Marcus has the great English accent, high energy and great leadership content to share. He’s strong every time I’ve seen him, going on way too many times at this point in my life!

The big bomb he dropped on the SHRMies this session was the money-shot quote of the conference: Millennials don’t want feedback!

We’ve all been told by thought leaders and Millennial experts for a decade that all Millennials want is feedback and work-life balance!  They don’t want money or power or ice in their beer.  Just feedback and time off.  Marcus put a stop to all of this, and had the data to back it up!

In reality, Marcus told us the truth.  Millennials, and the rest of us, don’t want feedback, we all want attention. Pay attention to us!  Stop by frequently and see how we are doing, give us some insight to our near future, help us get our jobs done.  But, please, don’t give us feedback on what we are doing wrong!

No one wants that.  The whole reason performance reviews fail is because they don’t deliver what we truly want, attention, not feedback.  So, our “HR” answer to this is to do what?!? Let’s do more frequent, smaller, feedback sessions! NO!

Unfortunately, this is going to be big old Titanic to turn around.  The wheels have been in motion to long to stop what we’ve already started.  HR technology platforms and your processes are already in place. Your managers have already been trained, and now you want us to stop?!?

Basically, yes.

Those organizations with high engagement are not the ones who are giving more feedback. They are the ones who are paying more attention to their employees.  Yes, there is a difference.

This is fraught with issues for most HR pros and organizations because it feels a little pie in the skish.  There is an assumption that you pay attention to your employees and they’ll just magically do what they’re supposed to do, and we live happily ever after, cats and dogs living together.

We know that isn’t reality.

Some employees need to be managed to get the most out of them.  They need to be held accountable. I do think there is a balance that we can get to when it comes to paying attention to our employees, like they want, and being able to ‘manage’ them like the business needs.

Managers need to know that even with those employees they’ve worked with for a long time, it’s critical that they don’t stop paying attention to what they’re doing, professionally and personally. Also, our employees need to understand that, yes, we care about you, but that doesn’t mean you can just not perform the job you were hired to do.

I don’t need engaged employees that don’t do the job they were hired to do. I want engaged, productive employees.  It’s all about balancing your approach, and I love that Marcus put to bed the concept that Millennials just want feedback!

The recruiting world has grown in complexity with each passing year.  Staying on top of the macro trends (mobile, social, etc.) and the moving target related to how candidates find jobs (aggregation, job boards, referrals, etc.) is a full time job.  Throw in the difficulty of measuring the effectiveness of your recruiting spend and it’s enough to make you say, “No Mas.”

Never fear, the gang at FOT is here to help you get a reset via our roadmap for building a high performing Talent Acquisition/Recruiting function.  Join FOT’s Kris Dunn and RJ Morris for our June webinar (sponsored by the recruiting experts at CareerBuilder) on June 24th at 2pm Eastern (1pm Central) entitled, Moving Past Smile and Dial: 5 Ways to Build a Recruiting Function Your CEO Will Love, and we’ll hit with the following roadmap to help you build the perfect recruiting machine:

—The Front End: There’s never been more competition for the attention of candidates, so you’ve got to look GOOD.  We’ll help you understand the value of front-end items like a robust Careers Site, Talent Networks, Job Descriptions that don’t put people to sleep, and ATS messaging designed to make people smile—not cringe.  We’ll also give you a roadmap for how to use Social Media in a way that makes candidates feel like your company gets it.

–The Back End: The worst enemy of any recruiting function is disorganization, so we’ll cover critical elements of your back office like ATS functionality, the mission critical nature of having your own searchable candidate database as a strategic advantage, automated job distribution/postings and more.  Your recruiting function is only as good as your back end, so we’ll help you understand how to build it out.

–Building Your Recruiting Strategy: How many recruiters do you need?  How do you calculate your investment in recruiting?  What should that investment be?  How do you measure the effectiveness of your Recruitment Marketing Spend?   Good questions. We’ve got the answers in this strategy section.

—Creating a Coaching Culture in Recruiting and Measuring Your Success: You can do all of the things listed above well, but if you don’t actively coach your recruiters, it probably won’t matter.  We’ll give you some benchmarks for recruiter performance goals and walk you through how successful recruiting managers treat recruiters like salespeople – ultimately wanting filled positions but coaching up and down the recruiting funnel.

Whether you’re a Recruiting/HR Leader looking to remodel your recruiting function or an up and coming recruiter looking to understand the strategic side of the recruiting business, join us for Moving Past Smile and Dial: 5 Ways to Build a Recruiting Function Your CEO Will Love on June 24th at 2pm Eastern (1pm Central) to get ramped up.  As a bonus, we’ll also provide a FOT Checklist – 10 Things To Do Today to Maximize Your Ability to Attract Great Talent – to all who register.  This checklist is a great tool to cross off what you’ve already done well, then use it as an avenue to show what you’re missing when asking for more budget for your recruiting function.

REGISTER TODAY!

It’s getting close to being that time of year when you start to deliver messages out to your employees about upcoming benefits open enrollments.  True HR and Benefit Pros know that the heavy lifting of open enrollment is done in the summer and fall.  Getting communications ready, making tough decisions on what to offer, and not to offer, all start to take shape in the ‘HR offseason’.

That’s why I’m hosting a webcast tomorrow (Tuesday June 16th at Noon ET) in conjunction with ALEX and SHRM, to help HR and Benefit pros prepare and give them some tips and tricks of delivering tough news.  Unpopular messages are always tough, and great HR pros deliver them in a way that is straightforward, empathetic and helpful.

Also, I’m bringing in a special guest, Dawn Burke, the tremendous and brilliant VP of People at Daxko who is in the trenches and has to deal with this kind of stuff every day.  We’ll be playing a game I made up called Real Life HR, with a Real Life HR Lady! Where I, and you, get to see if we can stump the HR pro with real life benefit communication issues!

It’s going to be fun! It’s going to insightful! It’s going to kick of this years communications better than ever before.

Sign up for free! Tuesday June 16th at Noon EST.

Click to REGISTER