Big news this past weekend on Osama Bin Laden finally getting found and killed by U.S. Forces.  I’m told by the media it is suppose to be a day of celebration as we finally made due on what Al Qaeda did on 9/11 – but you know what?  I don’t feel like celebrating.  We lost thousands of innocent people on 9/11 – we have lost more since fighting this war on terrorism – and it’s sad.  It’s sad because I know killing Bin Laden isn’t going to stop Al Qaeda, it isn’t going to stop terrorism – this is bigger than one person.

I have the same feeling today as I had when OJ was acquitted and people were celebrating in the streets.  I didn’t understand it and it left me with an empty feeling.  A feeling that we as a society still didn’t understand the other side – a side that would celebrate a murderer (allegedly) going free. 

So today, we are out again in the streets celebrating. Celebrating we got our guy. Celebrating that we finally got back at the man who caused our nation so much pain.  I don’t feel like celebrating – I feel like getting down on my knees and praying to G*d that this will all stop – that we won’t feel the need to celebrate revenge, that we can get back to celebrating life.

God Bless the men and women of our Armed Forces who gave their life to stop this monster – I wish they wouldn’t have had to do it in the first place.

Matt (@akaBruno) Stollak put together an eBook of some of our favorite Sports related HR posts from an impressive group of HR bloggers and myself (see how I didn’t include myself in the “impressive group of HR bloggers” – that’s called self-insight my fellow HR Pros!). 

Here’s our Line Up:

– Kris Dunn – The HR Capitalist; Head FOT’er , KinetixHR and smooth shooting 2 guard, maybe a 3 if he’s playing with all white guys – but on this team we have him play the 5 – plus he’s probably the only one who can actually play anyway.

– Lance Huan – Of the @TheLance, Rehaul, TLNT fame – definitely a point guard build, but with a Barkley personality.

– Steve Boese – HR Technology, HR Happy Hour host, and he works someplace but doesn’t like to talk about it (we think he might actually be a spy!) – a solid two guard who likes to spot up in the corner, wearing the old school Chucks.

– Matt Stollak – @akaBruno, St. Norberts HR Professor straight out of Green Bay (err, DePere), the prof that you always wanted in school, we have him play the 3 the primarily because most teams don’t run well with 3 point guards on the floor at the same time.

– Me– The Tim Sackett Project (that’s original), FOT’er 4 Life, HRU EVP – playing the 4 spot because although I have a personality like Barkley, I also have the backside to match – which means I can box out anyone!

So, check out our eBook –  The 8 Man Rotation

A funny thing happened a couple of years ago – I went to go run my Mom’s business. That in of itself isn’t funny – the funny part took place during a 5 minute conversation before we (she) decided it was final, I was coming in to run the show.  Here’s how the conversation went:

Mom: So, what should we call you?

Me: Well, I don’t care, as long as the check clears.

Mom: Very funny, I’m the President and CEO.

Me: How about VP?

Mom: We already have a VP.

Me: How about COO?

Mom: We aren’t that big.

Me: How about Executive VP?

Mom:Perfect. You can have my office in the corner, be ready to take over in 3 months. (4 days later she left and I was the new Executive VP in charge)

Now, this was more than 4 days in the making – I had previously spent 8 years working at HRU, then 10 years working corporate recruiting and HR positions across a number of industries with some fantastic companies – so I was groomed so-to-speak. Plus the fact I can remember sitting on my Mom’s bed at night when I was a kid while she called candidates about positions she was recruiting for – you could say I was bred to do this job.

So – what about the title?

I was reminded a couple of days ago when a good friend of mine got a new title – going from Sr. Manager to VP of Talent or something (all before she turned 30).  It reminded me of me – I had a goal (like most young ambitious people have) to be a VP before the age of 35.  I was young enough, and naive enough, not to really care about what I was going to VP of – I just needed that title!  That title would give me so many things:

• Prestige
• Honor
• Responsibility
• Credibility (I mean they just don’t give out VP titles to anyone, right? Right?…)
• Perceived Importance to the Organization
• Etc, etc., etc.

Ben Horowitz had a great article at Fortune recently – Titles and Promotions – where he theorizes titles are important because:

1. Employees want them—while you may plan to work at your company forever, at least some of your employees need to plan for life after your company. When your head of sales interviews for her next job, she won’t want to say that despite the fact that she ran a global sales force with hundreds of employees, her title was “Dude.”

2. Eventually, people need to know who is whom—As companies grow, everybody won’t know everybody else. Importantly, employees won’t know what each other do and whom they should work with to get their jobs done. Job titles provide an excellent short hand for describing roles in the company. In addition, customers and business partners can also make use of this short hand to figure out how to best work with your company.

Beyond these core reasons, employees will use titles to calibrate their value and compensation against their colleagues. If an employee with a title of Junior Engineer believes that she is a far better programmer than her counterpart with the title Senior Architect, this will indicate to her that she may be under paid and undervalued. Because titles will be used to calculate relative value, they must be managed carefully.

So, do I think titles are important – No, I don’t – Yes, I do.  No, because I’ve learned now after almost 20 years in HR – titles are meaningless to who actually performs and gets the job done. Yes, because, like Ben says above, enough people care about them, that as HR Pros we have to care.  Let’s face it, very few people have the internal fortitude and confidence, to work without stripes.  Most employees like to know who’s in charge and who is caring the “A” card in the decision making tree.   Whether I like it or not, titles matter to many people for many reasons and it’s our job in HR to figure out how to best utilize this tool, than, for the benefit of our organizations.

But for the record – no matter what my title is – I still report to Mom!

I was reminded of something recently – getting out of the box – isn’t comfortable.

Now – I know what some of your are thinking – “But, Tim, you need to get out of the box to challenge yourself, to push the limits, to get you and your organization better!”

Really?

Or have we been sold this by this eras snake oil salesmen and women (leadership trainers, life coaches, every motivation and leadership book written in the last 20 years)?

I’m not sure.

Here’s what I know:

1. People perform better when they know their boundaries. (their box)

2. There is comfort in knowing what to expect, with comfort comes sustained performance long-term.

3. In reality, a very small percentage of your employees will actually perform above their average performance being “out of the box”.

We as HR Pros tend to a little overboard sometimes, in the attempt to “help out” the cause within our organization – that can be both good and bad.  Things are going as well as they could be, so we push to get everyone out of their box and reinvent themselves, in hopes that this will lead to better performance and higher organizational results.  When in fact, many times, it will lead to the exact opposite.  Not everyone is wired to get “out of the box” – in fact probably at a minimum 80% of workforce should stay in their box, and keep plugging along with their solid performance that they are already giving you.

The trick to great HR in getting great performance – is to find those race horses who you can push out of the box, and they show you a whole other level of performance that you and they didn’t know existed.  But if you keep pushing plow horses out on to the track in hopes of turning them into a race horse – you and they will fail.  So, don’t drink the Kool-aid and believe everyone can and wants to be out of the box thinkers and performers – not everyone does – and you limit yourself by thinking in such general terms.

Business Week asked this question recently and had Dan Finnigan, CEO of Jobvite (one of my favorite CEO’s and very cool product as well – even if he never sent me the iPad from my HR Tech Conference interview – let’s face it I work cheap, but not free!) and Daniel Kite, President of Sun Street (I don’t know him, so I don’t care) debate over the topic: Should employers stop waiting for the economy to strengthen further and start hiring right now. Dan went Pro, and Daniel went Con – from the article (Dan Finnigan’s Take):

Such industries as technology and health care are accustomed to competing for scarce talent—even throughout the downturn. The technology sector has seen fierce competition for talent with employee poaching, out-sized compensation, packages, and retention battles. This trend will grow only more widespread. By 2015, 60 percent of newly created jobs will require skills held by only 20 percent of the population, according to the American Society for Training and Development.

And the severity of the recession only exacerbates this shortage. The downturn shocked everyone into a new reality: that no job is really safe. As a result, many Americans have kept their heads down at their current jobs but are keeping their eyes peeled for a better one. Jobvite’s nationwide survey, Job Seeker Nation, found that 53 percent of those employed feel open to a new job—and are doing more than just hoping for it. Instead of waiting for the economy to improve their prospects, they are developing their skills, building connections, and cultivating new job opportunities via outlets such as social networks.

Smart employers recognize this and are not sitting still. Companies are now more concerned about their hiring pipelines, because they can’t count on a ready supply of applicants. “The economic recovery means we have to build relationships with a pool of promising talent because we no longer have that quick turnaround in the hiring cycle,” says Sarah Widner, who heads up human resources for Total Attorneys, a Chicago firm that delivers professional services to law practices.

Daniel Kite goes on about common sense and why would any business ever hire talent just for the simple fact that it’s available, yadda, yadda.

My take?

You staff for the business you want – not the business you have.  Think about that for a minute – because most HR Pros do the exact opposite – they only staff for the business they have – and that’s not very strategic mindset – that’s a conservative mindset and one that keeps your butt out of hot water.  Which might be your goal – I know a ton of HR Pros (all good people – well some aren’t so good) that spend most of their time just trying not to screw up.  I also know some very dynamic HR Pros who completely lead their organizations to bigger and better things – and they learn how to leverage risk.

When you hire in these times – there’s risk.  As an HR Pro, it’s our job to make sure we take calculated risk by hiring people so great, they can’t help but to make our organizations better.  If you do that – in my opinion – that’s common sense.  Hire great people, in the right positions, get out of their way – and watch your business grow.

Dan – send me my iPad.

Seems like everyone today is building a brand, just the other day I started www.timsackett.com and you can’t believe how it’s changed my life – now I have to work on the weekends!   I think we in HR tend to have a lot to do with this employee-personal-branding thingy we have going on over the past couple of years.  In fact, I really think much of this got started when we started down this path of succession planning and performance management and began labeling employees things like “A Player”, “Key Contributer”, “Rock Star”, etc.   Before all these cute little labels came out (well, I guess their cute if you’re on the top side of those labels, I’m not sure you think their cute if your company has labeled you “Bottom Feeder” or “No-Po”) it was usually a conversation about meeting or exceeding performance, or needs improvement, etc.   Nobody was out building their brand under “Exceeds Performance”.

That was so 2005 – now every HR shop has to have their own creative labels  – and in the end all this has created is a bunch of employees who beginning to believe all this hype we keep piling on top to them.  Jeff Schmidt at Business Week had an article recently on the 12 signs you’ve started to buy into your press clippings as an employee. They are:

1. You Dismiss Questions (“Take My Word for it…” – you know that guy in the meeting – he doesn’t need to show you proof, he’s an “A” player)

2. You feel there’s no need for change. (A yeah, I created this beast – it doesn’t get any better!)

3. You quit asking questions. (Remember when you started out and you asked questions constantly – well, yeah, now you know everything, so you don’t need to do that.)

4. You dont’ reach out. (I mean what’s the point – so I can listen to someone elses lame ideas.)

5. You fall into a routine. (Look the executives know I’ll deliver, and they know I don’t work on Friday afternoons)

6. You look down at your peers. (Once you’re here – you might as well pack it in – and become a consultant.)

7. You lack self-awareness. (Like right now, while reading this, you don’t realize this is you! Some very talented high performing employees have this as their biggest career derailer.)

8. You quit pushing yourself. (I mean like what’s the use, these trolls I work with do half a what I do on their best day.)

9. You grow sloppy. (When small errors or mistakes start to creep into your work, and you deflect, you’re losing your focus.)

10.  You focus more on producing hype, then producing. (When you start to worry about who is going to see this project, instead of how this project will impact our organizaiton – you’re in trouble.)

11. You fixate on status. (Remember what use to keep you up at night, now it’s how to knock down someone else to get into that corner office.)

12. You become dismayed when something’s amiss. (When something goes wrong you can’t believe it, you’re speechless, you dont know what to do – the old you would have had an answer.)

Building brand is one thing – but once that brand is only a brand without substance, well you’ve reached a point of no return.  In the end performers will always prevail over the perso

I ran into something last week – a Staffing firm – calling a current client we do business with – offering to do what we do for half the cost.

“Sounds great! Half price recruiting services – sign me up!”

At least, that’s what I told our client.  I told them to go for it, do it – how could you turn down such a great “Recruitpon” – you have to buy!

The client was “ahh, Tim, you want us to go and use another firm?”  and I was like “ahh, no – but if you can get what I’m giving you for half price, don’t you from a business standpoint, have to do it!”  and the client was like “well, I was just hoping we could keep you guys, but get it cheaper.”  So, I was like “sure we can do it cheaper, which parts do you want me to cut out?” 

You see where this is going.

We aren’t the highest price recruiting company around and we aren’t the cheapest – I feel you get what you pay for.  When you hire HRU – you get me (and a bunch of talented pros that get it, that I have the pleasure of having on my team).  I’m a lot of things – but I’m not normally half off. 

I bet that would work though – a “Recruitpon” – let’s face it 97% of the recruiting companies out there will do just about anything to get a shot at your business.  Maybe your first question should be: Why?  Don’t you wonder as a corporate HR Pro – why does this company want to work with us – I mean really?  Why?  They’ll be able to tell you why “you” should work with “them” – but I bet they’ll stumble a bit at telling you “why we want to work with you” – and don’t let them off the hook on how they are the “solution” to all of your problems – really – all of my problems? Great  – come rub my feet…

It’s the single hardest thing I have to get across to my team – there are many companies we don’t want to work with – and only a few that we really want to work with.  I want to work with companies where I like and respect the people we have to work with – I will enjoy making those calls, having those meetings, etc.  If I don’t like working with you – that’s a misearable relationship – at any price – or even with a Recruitpon.

BTW – don’t run out and try to buy www.Recruitpon.com it’s already gone – it’s hard to stay ahead of a headhunter…

Last week I got the opportunity to speak at the 2011 HR Metrics Summit in Chicago.  Interesting group of HR folks that attend Metrics seminars – combination of HRIS, large shop analytics folks, some talent pros, etc. – all with one common denominator – they like numbers, gathering numbers, reporting numbers, talking about numbers – mostly I sat in the corner, quietly and watched.  One theme, that came up time and time again, was the concept of manager self-service – since building dashboards and integrating self service modules tend to go hand-in-hand with metrics – if you want the mangers to do stuff on their own – you better give them the data, right?

As I was listening to a presentation of one major Fortune 500 HR Pro who was going through a case study of how they were going through the process of moving to Manager Self Service for HR administration (think your normal daily HR admin stuff – new hire paperwork, address changes, compensation data, benefits info, etc.).  On there manager self service dashboard, this HR Shop decided to not give the HR Generalists access to the same information that the managers had.  The theory behind this was, if HR still has access, the managers will continue to call and get the information, rather than look it up themselves through the dashboard.  The HR Generalists were trained, as well as the managers, on how to find the information, so if a manager was struggling to find something, the HR Generalist could walk them through it.  This process probably sounds similar in many ways to many HR folks who have gone through this – minus the HR folks not having access.

Here’s what was really interesting about the case study to me – even after they went forward 100% with the self service dashboard, the managers still called HR.  The HR Generalist, being savvy, discovered if the manager would give them their user-name and password, could go in and do what the manager needed, faster than just telling them how to do it (kind of goes against the concept of “Teach a man to fish…”) – but again not unlike probably what many HR folks have seen in their careers.  It got so bad, they actually ended up setting up a “HR Call Center” for managers to call into for these types of needs. Overall result? HR Administrative work, in HR, was reduced by 40%. Really!  Hey, sounds great right?! 

Wrong! Here’s the deal.  The HR Shop reduced it’s “admin” work by 40% – but it didn’t decrease the Orgs “admin” work by 40% – it just moved it around.  Also, the concept of  “Manager/Employee Self Service” is built on an assumption, a huge assumption, managers want to do this stuff themselves, rather than call HR to have it done.  While that may be the case for many managers and employees – it might not be the case for many others, and in many cases the majority of others.  Manager/Employee Self Service dashboards/portals are a favorite project for HR Shops – big and small – because we get to use technology and the hope is it will take mundane admin work out of HR, and let us do the real cool strategic stuff.  But that is a dream sold to you by the software shops selling you the “solution”.  One problem – what about the managers and employees who don’t want Self Service?

You know – I’ve been in a lot of HR Shops – and no one has ever brought up that question when we were all running down the Self Service path. Not one.  So, you want to be a business partner and be more strategic?  Maybe, just maybe, stop thinking about how something helps you, and start thinking about how the changes you make, impact the groups you support.  Self Service can be great for many managers and employees who want it – but it’s not a 100% solution.  So, people, maybe some very high performers in your organization, want you to help them – they want and need to focus on their operation and making it better, and guess what – performing their own new hire paperwork, isn’t helping.

From one of the Sackett Nation followers (thx Mom!) –

Tim:

I’m a young HR Pro with some great experience and education – 1 company for 8 years – but recently I’ve been contacted by our main competition about a position that would be a step up.  Better title, more money – but I would feel like a total sell-out if I went over there.  What should I do?

Loyal Beyond My Years

***************************************************************

Dear Loyal,

Here’s what I know –

1. Those who stay with one company – make more money over the long run – assuming you stay the professional route and don’t go all consultant on me.

2. Going to the competition doesn’t make you evil, it makes you human – but don’t assume you will like it more.

3. I’ve left really good companies, with really good people – for better position and money – and it didn’t improve the quality of my life.

4. Within an industry, having perspective of multiple players (i.e., working at the competition, or two) makes you more valuable.

First, consider the fact, if one company is interested in you, maybe there are others. Why do you really want to leave your current position? If your current position matched pay and title, would you stay? If it’s about growth, what are the next 2-3 moves after this one, at the new company?  I know this will surprise some people but I’m super conservative when it comes to career advice to others – especially so, when someone tells me they really like their current position and company (but are attracted to more money and title).

So, what should you do?  I’d go through the process if you feel it’s a company you would like to work for, and if it’s not the right company, I’d go speak to your boss and tell them the competition contacted me about a job and I turned them down.  I turned them down because I really like my job here and the company – I also would like more money and a better title!  I understand you might not be able to give me all that, so I’ll settle for the money part.  Then shut up and make your boss say the next words.

Two things might happen: 1. You’re good – you’ll get some more money (maybe not as much as if you’d made a move) and maybe a “Sr.” prefix to your title.  2. You’re not that good – you won’t get anything, and maybe shown the door.  That’s why I don’t like giving people advice of what I would do – I have had both scenarios happen to me – they are very real outcomes.

Good Luck!