How to Talk To Your Young Snot-Nosed Boss

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Tim Sackett

This isn’t necessarily a unique phenomenon in our society, but as the Baby Boomers continue to age and many taking on non-leader roles within our organizations, these older employees are now finding themselves reporting to bosses much younger than themselves. Many times these younger bosses have a lot less experience doing the job, make common new leader mistakes and flat out don’t know how to communicate with subordinates that are as old as their parents and/or grandparents!

So, what can an older employee do to help out this situation?

There was a great example of this recently with the payment startup company Clinkle who was founded by 22 year old Lucas Dulpan. Dulpan needed an experienced COO and found it in former Netflix CFO and much older, Barry McCarty. The fact of the matter is, Barry has much more knowledge and experience running this type of company than Lucas. So, how do you deal with is obvious situation? From Jason Del Ray at Business Insider, here’s how McCarty describes it:

Jason Del Rey: What does your role entail?

Barry McCarthy: Well, Lucas is the CEO. I work for him. I want to be unambiguously clear about that. He’ll continue to focus on product and engineering. My primary focus will be everything else.

Jason Del Rey: Do you believe Lucas can be the long-term CEO of a giant payments company?

Barry McCarthy: Absolutely. And if he’s not, then I will feel like I have not served him as well as I could have.

BAM! That my friends is called Servant Leadership. You support the leader, in this case Lucas, by serving that person with all the positive intent and direction that you can humanly provide. What McCarty understands, because of his vast experience, is that it’s not about him getting noticed. Those who know the industry will know that he did his job exceptionally, and that is what really matters.

What to know how to best get along with your younger boss? Stop trying to do their job, and start helping them do their job. Lift them up, make them the star and everyone will see what you did to make that happen. You win. Your boss wins. The organization wins. Isn’t that really the goal?

Is LinkedIn’s Recruiter Certification A Scam?

Posted on October 22, 2013 by Tim Sackett

At LinkedIn’s (LI) annual Talent Connect Conference last week they announced the addition of a certification program for recruiters. I love the idea! Much like SHRM has their PHR, SPHR and GPHR certifications, no real recruiting certification has taken hold. A number of organizations have tried, the most successful probably being American Staffing Association’s Certified Staffing Professional and AIRS Internet Recruiter certification (CPC through NAPS for my Agency friends), but all seem woefully incomplete and none have really ever gained traction as ‘the’ certification to have if you’re a true recruiting professional. That’s why LinkedIn’s announcement intrigued me. LI has the brand recognition and money to really own this space if they decided to.

Unfortunately, I think the new LinkedIn Recruiter Certification is going to cause confusion in the corporate and agency recruiting ranks.

Here’s why it’s probably is worthless:

1. LI’s Recruiter Certification has very little to do with actual recruiting and everything to do with how well you know how to use LI’s Recruiter product.

2. If you get ‘certified’ from LI you get to add a ‘badge’ saying you’re a ‘Certified LI Recruiter‘, which is cool enough, but I think that title is easily used to give a false impression of what it really means. “Oh, you’re a ‘certified recruiter’ that is really impressive!” Instead of the reality ‘Oh, you’re a ‘certified LI recruiter’ which means you know how to use one recruiting tool really well.

3. LI is charging people to get ‘certified’ on a product they are paying for. Does this seem odd to anyone? Anyone? Let me see if I get this right. I pay around $8K per seat annually, and you make me pay another $199 every two years to show you I know how to use the system I’m paying for. Yes. Okay, I thought so. Can you now punch me in the face?

4. Most of the content you get tested on to gain certification, from LI’s on certification program book, seems to be process oriented. Do you know how to post a job? Do you know how to search? Do you know how to effectively use InMail? Is this the kind of ‘certified’ knowledge we need for the recruiting profession? Can you do the process of recruiting?

Here’s why it’s going to be wildly successful:

1. LI gives you a certification badge. Recruiters are extremely hungry for validation. We see our HR brothers and sisters with PHR and SPHR, dammit, we want something at the end our name too!

2. LI knows that Talent Acquisition leaders will easily pay a ‘little’ extra to ensure their people are using and understand their big spend (LI Recruiter).

3. People like being a part of a tribe. LI has a special invite only group for LI Certified Recruiters. Want to make something popular? Make it exclusive!

4. Many HR Leaders don’t get ‘recruiting’ so they will believe this is hugely important and teaching their recruiting team how to really recruit. It’s not, but no one really looks into the details for $199.

It does really open up a broader conversation about why no one has really been able to create a recruiter certification program that is widely respected and used. It might be that recruiting, like sales, is hard to train and even harder to come up with concrete components around what makes a recruiter really good at recruiting. There are so many opinions on that subject and ways to do the job effectively.

Does being a Certified LinkedIn Recruiter make you a better recruiter? No. Will it make people think you are? Yes.

Is it a scam? Well, it definitely seems a little ‘scam-ish’. I won’t say it’s a complete scam because they are very up front at what they are delivering for your money. Does LI really need the extra $199 per recruiter? Sure! Every company needs incremental revenue, LI is not different, they’re aren’t a non-profit. God bless them for coming up with a great idea on getting another $199 per recruiter out of your organization.

Here’s my question: Would you pay $199 to become ADP certified? What about Oracle? Halogen? SuccessFactors? That’s what this is. Your HR vendor partner charging you to become a certified expert on their system. This isn’t transferable. You can’t leave your company who uses LI and go to a new company who uses Monster and say “Well, I’m a ‘Certified Recruiter’. You’re not. You’re just certified on one system. By the way, your two years is up, please send another check.

It’s Hard To Judge People

Posted on October 21, 2013 by Tim Sackett

I was out walking with my wife recently (that’s what middle aged suburban people do, we walk, it makes us feel like we are less lazy and it gets us away from the kids so we can talk grown up) and she made this statement in a perfect innocent way:

“It’s really hard to judge people.”

She said this to ‘me’! I start laughing. She realized what she said and started laughing.

It’s actually really, really easy to judge people! I’m in HR and Recruiting, I’ve made a career out of judging people.

Candidate comes in with a tattoo on their face and immediately we think – prison, drugs, poor decision making, etc. We instantly judge. It’s not that face-tattoo candidate can’t surprise us and be engaging and brilliant, etc. But before we even get to that point, we judge. I know, I know, you don’t judge, it’s just me — sorry for lumping you in with ‘me’!

What my wife was saying was correct. It’s really hard to judge someone based on how little we actually know them. People judge me all the time on my poor grammar skills. I actually met a woman recently at the HR Tech Conference who said she knew me, use to read my stuff, but stopped because of my poor grammar in my writing. We got to spend some time talking and she said she would begin reading again, that she had judged me too harshly and because I made errors in my writing assumed I wasn’t that intelligent. I told her she was actually correct, I’m not intelligent, but that I have consciously not fixed my errors in writing (clearly at this point I could have hired an editor – I probably have at least one offer per month!) — the errors are my face tattoo.

If you can’t see beyond my errors, we probably won’t be friends. I’m not ‘writing errors, poor grammar guy”. If you judge me as that, you’re missing out on some cool stuff and ideas I write about.

As a hiring manager and HR Pro, if you can’t see beyond someone’s errors, you’re woefully inept at your job. We all have ‘opportunities’ but apparently if you’re a candidate you don’t, you have to be perfect. I run into hiring managers and HR Pros who will constantly tell me, “we’re selective”, “we’re picky”, etc. No you’re not. What you are is unclear about what and who it is that is successful in your environment. No one working for you now is perfect. So, why do you look for perfect in a candidate? Because it’s natural to judge against your internal norm.

The problem with selection isn’t that is too hard to judge, the problem is that it’s way too easy to judge. The next time you sit down in front of a candidate try and determine what you’ve already judge them on. It’s a fun exercise. Before they even say a word. Have the hiring managers interviewing them send you their judgements before the interview. We all do it. Then, flip the script, and have your hiring managers show up to an interview ‘blind’. No resume beforehand, just them and a candidate face-to-face. It’s fun to see how they react and what they ask them without a resume, and how they judge them after. It’s so easy to judge, and those judgements shape our decision making, even before we know it!

Recruiting Is Worthless

Posted on October 18, 2013 by Tim Sackett

Paul DeBettignies a while ago had an article over at ERE – Where Have All the Recruiters Gone – which gave me the idea for this post. In Paul’s post he wonders why recruiters are networking face-to-face anymore. I think many of us in the recruiting field who have been in the field pre-internet, probably wonder this and many more things as we look at how the industry has totally transformed over the past 20 years. A person today can get into recruiting, sit at a desk, have great internet skills, marginal phone skills and make a decent living. They probably won’t be a great recruiter – they probably won’t make great money – but they’ll survive – they’ll be average or slightly above. It’s why the recruiting function in most organizations gets a bad rap! In corporate circles I’ve heard it called “worthless” many times – and for some this is their reality.

Recruiting is Worthless, if…

…you’re a hiring manager and you never have face-to-face conversations with your recruiter when you have an opening, and when you don’t have an opening.

…you’re recruiters believe it isn’t there job to find talent, talent will find them.

…your organization believes it’s the recruiting departments job to find talent. It’s not, it’s the hiring managers job to ensure they have the talent they need for their department, recruiting is the tool that will help them. This “ownership responsibility” is very important for organizational success in ensuring you have the talent you need.

…your recruiting department acts like they are HR – they aren’t – they are sales and marketing. Too many Recruiters, in corporate settings, don’t want to recruit, they want to be HR – which makes them worthless as recruiters.

…if your recruiters have more incoming calls then outgoing calls.

…if your recruiters believe their job begins Monday thru Friday at 8am and ends at 5pm. The best talent is working during those times and most likely won’t talk to you while they are at work. That’s not a slam on you or your company – they are great employees, it’s what we expect from a great employee.

…your senior leadership team feels they have to use an “executive search” company to fill their higher level openings, because our recruiting department “can’t handle it”.

…if they are victims – “it’s not my job”, “we can’t do that because…”, “marketing won’t allow us to do…”, “our policy won’t allow us…” etc.

…if they just send hiring managers resumes of candidates that have come to them, without first determining if the person is a fit for the organization and a fit for the hiring managers position – before sending them on.

…they haven’t developed the organizational influence enough to change a hiring managers, hiring decision.

Recruiting is worthless if in the end they have failed to show the value of their service back to the organization.

Recruiting is the one department in the organization, besides sales, that truly has the ability to show ROI back to the organization, yet so few of us take advantage of the opportunity we have! There is nothing more important, and have a bigger competitive advantage, than our organizations talent – and oh by the way – THAT IS US! We control that. Recruiting isn’t worthless, unless you make it worthless.

Top Cities To Find The Best Workers

Posted on October 17, 2013 by Tim Sackett

Movoto Blog (a real estate blog) recently listed the Top 10 hardest working cities in America. The data is based on number of people working full time, unemployment rate, commute time and number of residents in a household who hold a job. Here’s the list:

I’m sure a lot of time and research was put into this list. I also don’t believe any of these cities have the hardest working people!

Here’s my criteria of how to find the hardest working workers in America:

1. Don’t look in California. I like California, the weather is great, but let’s be real, no one truly believes the hardest working people live in California. That eliminates numbers 2 and 9.

2. Texas is big and friendly – but if you’re looking for hard working you don’t need to look at Texas suburbs, or any suburbs for that manner. That eliminates numbers 3, 4, 5 and 7.

3. No one really works that hard in South Beach, which eliminates numbers 1 and 8.

4. If you work for the government, or are connected to the government, clearly hard work is missing. This eliminates most workers in number 6.

5. If you live within 3 miles of a beach, or work in a beach community you really don’t work that hard. This eliminates our last city at number 10.

So, what is fundamentally wrong with this list? The theory that a low employment rate in a city would equate to hard working workers. This is a completely no causation with these two things. Also, that commute time equates to hard working, if anything I could argue long commute times lead to less hard work because the worker believes that their commute time is part of their work time.

So, what cities do have the hardest workers? That’s easy! Think of the crappiest places ever you would not want to live! If you’re working in Gary, IN, you really want to work! If you’re working in Fairbanks, AK in the dark and cold for most of the year, you have work high ethic! If you show up to work in any city where there is good chance you’ll see gunfire throughout your shift — Bingo — you’re a hard worker! If you work in a company and in a position where daily you might lose your life or a hand, you’re a hard worker!

Want really hard working people for your company? Find the worst places in the world to work, and recruit those workers. They’ll love you, they’ll show up each day and they’ll work their butts off. Want some workers who have to leave at 4pm to make their 10U soccer coaching gig, or don’t show because the surf is up, or just feel like they should use one of their 47 PTO days — you might not have such good luck on the hard working side!

Are You An Employee Friendly Company?

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Tim Sackett

If you were to ask any HR Pro or Executive from any company if they were ’employee friendly’ I can guarantee you 100% of the time, their answer would be ‘Yes’!

But are you really?

I’m sure you would point to your some of your policies to demonstrate to me how employee friendly you are. You would show me your policy on flexible work arrangements or your personal time off (PTO) policy, maybe even your anniversary policy. These would prove to me that your truly are employee friendly.

What I wouldn’t see would be policies that aren’t so employee friendly. Like the policy of only allowing lunch to be reimbursed when traveling if you were with a client (you have to eat lunch when you’re in the office and we don’t pay, this is no different!). The policy that forces someone traveling for the day to come into the office if they get back before 5pm, even thought they left on a Sunday to get to the client location. The policy that forces you to use your PTO when you decide to stay home during a snow storm, instead of trying to make it in to work in dangerous driving conditions. The policy requiring you to ‘sign out’ a laptop to take home to do work at home. The policy requiring a ‘doctor’s note’ when you stay home sick (just what our healthcare system needs, employees coming in with colds).

The reality is, most policies are written in the best interest of the employer. It’s the employer who writes them, so we can assume that they’ll weighted to ensuring the employer is protected, first and foremost. Put it this way, we have way too much tax policy/code in our country. Do you think that is in place to protect you, the individual, or the government and/or the companies that pay billions of dollars to lobby for company friendly tax code? Companies don’t top being companies when they start writing employment policies.

Employee friendly companies usually have one very common thing — they have few policies. Treat people like adults. Do what’s best for all stake holders, employees, shareholders and customers. Don’t put up with idiots who try and take advantage of your awesome employee friendly policies! That’s the real issue, right? We have policies because of the 5%. Hey, one time we had this guy and stole a laptop he used to take home for work. So, now we have a policy to make sure that never happens again. If we told people they would get paid if they stayed home when it snowed, people would stay home when there was 1 inch!

If you manage ‘the exception’ through policy, you’re really good at bad HR. You are not employee friendly. I blame unions for most unfriendly employee policies, because unions will take everything to the letter of anything written (and I like to blame unions for the downfall of American manufacturing, the economy and Santa Claus not bringing me presents once I turned 13). Common sense is thrown out the door. You said in paragraph two that employees should use their judgement when coming in if they feel road conditions are dangerous, and Mr. Smith felt like 1 inch of snow is dangerous, so you can’t fire him and you have to pay him. Mr. Smith stayed home because of bad road conditions 27 times in the past 3 months.

So, are you employee friendly?

A New Way To Retain Employees!

Posted on October 15, 2013 by Tim Sackett

(I just returned from the 2013 HR Technology Conference where I got to see all the latest and greatest HR technology, and speak to some wickedly smart people. So, for the next week or so, my plan is to share some of the products and insights I gained from this experience. So we are clear, no companies I write about have paid me to write about them. I requested Diet Mt. Dew be delivered and no one brought one. Enjoy…)

I swear last product I want to talk about from HR Tech! This one is near and dear to my heart because it’s about employee retention! I know boring right! No sexy, stealthy way to find talent or Jedi Mind Tricks to get your staff to perform better, just good old solid how the hell do we keep our people from leaving! HR to it’s core.

The company is BlackBookHR, there new product is called Sense and it won best new HR Tech product of 2013! I continually referenced them as BackDoorHR (because deep down I’m a 12 yaer old boy at heart). I’m sorry about that Chris Ostoich, the Founder and CEO of BlackBookHR. Chris is a really great person, with a really great story. He’s one of those guys you route for. He couldn’t really even afford to have a booth at HR Tech, but won the prize for best product anyway! (He told me he could afford a booth, but thought there were better ways to spend the money – he’s right!) Also, he brought his Mom out to Vegas to see him get the award! Pure Midwest, baby!

Sense is a software which sets an engagement baseline for your entire staff. Don’t worry that takes about 5 minutes for your employees to complete. Then, each week Sense goes out and within 30 seconds re-measures to the baseline of each employee (through an email interface and quick point and select questions).

Here’s a quick example: An original question might be — “My company gives me the tools and resources I need to do great work?” On a scale of 1 to 10 I say, “Yep, they do at an 8”. Everything is going great at an 8, then a few months later my boss tells me he’s cutting some tool out of my budget I rely on. That Friday Sense asks me the same “tools and resource” question, but this time I answer “1”. The system ‘senses’ something went wrong with my engagement, and that I could be a flight risk, so HR is told. HR then determines how to elevate this to my supervisor, or do they handle it themselves. Pretty cool!

Sense also does one other very cool thing and shows you how an employee influences within your organization. Not all employees are created equal. Some have major influence and connections, and one of those employees leaves, usually others follow. Sense will show you who those employees are in your organization as well!

Beyond cool, is that some very big Fortune 500 types have been using this and the metrics show that it actually works. Like reducing many percentage points off your turnover works!

How did Chris know this idea would work? He lived it!

Chris isn’t from HR or even from IT. He was a finance dude who had a feeling he could easily be talked into leaving his current company. He saw others like him, and thought there is a way to stay connected and at least giving the company a chance to hang on to him, and show him some love, on those times when he was most vulnerable to leaving. Long story short, he shared his idea with his company, and they listened, and they told him to get his ass back to work! He did, on his own, building Sense!

Check it out – quickly! Sometimes the simplest ideas and products have the biggest impact to our bottom line. I have a feeling Sense won’t be around as a stand alone product for long. My guess is Oracle, SumTotal, Halogen, SuccessFactors, etc. will come knocking on Chris’s door and offer him a huge pile of cash to integrate it into their own suite. It’s that good.

Dice Open Web Review

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Tim Sackett

Let me start with a little background. My company does IT and Engineering contract placement (that’s really high-end temporaries for those who don’t know what I’m talking about) and contingent technical staffing. We were a paying Dice.com costumer for many, many years until 2010. In 2010 I stopped paying Dice because they were not delivering the talent we needed.

Fast forward to SHRM National 2013 in Chicago. Dice sponsors the Bloggers Lounge at some big conferences, as they did for SHRM and HR Tech this year. As part of that sponsorship Dice gets to pimp it’s new products to a captive audience — that’s business, you want a free soda and wifi, you get to hear about our new stuff. This was when I was first introduced to Dice’s new Open Web product. Being in recruitment for 20 years, I was a bit skeptical. You know, job board trying to hang onto last little bit of hope by launching something new which is probably just a new way to searching their database, type of thing.

I was wrong!

The product demo seemed similar to products like TalentBin, but also was seemed much more far reaching. I don’t recruit in Silicon Valley, I recruit in Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Dallas, I need a product that can find talent everywhere. This is what I found with Open Web. In fact, what we found was it finds way more than just IT talent! Dice’s Open Web product builds profiles of potential candidates from over 50 different sites. The expected sites like: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. To the unexpected sites like: Github, Quora, StackOverFlow, About.Me, Google Profiles, Gravatar, Instagram, etc. It takes all this data from all these sites and makes unique resume style profiles of candidates that didn’t apply to Dice. With each profile is a number of ways to contact the candidate based on where the candidate was found (might be email, might be twitter, etc.) If Open Web finds a Dice candidate resume it will also link that resume within Open Web as well.

Basically, Open Web is a finder of passive candidates. Thousands of passive candidates! Candidates we could not have previously found in our Monster, CareerBuilder, LinkedIn subscriptions. All in one place, with a ton of information you don’t normally get on a resume.

While we found a completely new pool of talent, we also found some hiccups! Contacting someone from a major job board site like LinkedIn, people expect to get contacted about jobs. Open Web, for the most part, is uncovering socially active, passive job searching candidates. You have to be ready to sell them fast and different than folks you find at CareerBuilder and LinkedIn. With a passive candidate you have a small window to make an impression, before you get thrown to the side. It’s real recruiting! Not many recruiters, today, are use to ‘real’ recruiting. The cool part of Open Web is that with all the data you get in the profile, you can easily come up with something to help you make that impression.

Being a former Dice customer, I asked Dice to let me try out Open Web in a live environment on real searches in my own shop. It has worked just like the demo. Also, we found it works on much more than just IT, in fact, finding both engineering and some skilled trades types for orders we had with an automotive client. It’s building from searches on the whole web, not just a certain geographic area. Of course because of the sites it searches, you’ll find more IT profiles than some others. If you have done so check out Dice’s Open Web product, it’s going to be a big hit!

Cool New HR Tech…that you might even be able to afford

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Tim Sackett

Here’s a run down from the HR Tech Conference Expo:

BambooHR: Tagged as your “1st HR system” or “we love you, if you use spreadsheets as your HR system” – Ben Peterson, the CEO, was by far the coolest and nicest and real CEO (and maybe person) I met all week at HR Tech. They don’t like to use ‘HRIS’ because small and medium sized businesses and HR shops don’t even really know what that means. BambooHR is an easy to use HR system and nicely designed, for a very, very cheap price. Don’t let the price scare you off — cheap, in this case, doesn’t mean they try and a one-size and process fits all perspective down your throat – they’ll customize for you – and still be cheap! If you are looking for your first HR system, or to up grade your old system, and you don’t look at these guys, you should be fired as an HR professional.

Blissbook: “Employee Handbooks to Smile About”. I know, I know — Tim, you’re talking handbooks!? Here’s the deal. They have a super cheap, super cool UI (user interface — BTW, no one at HR Tech talks English, they only talk tech). So, you can put your handbook online and add video, and hyperlinks and all kinds of stuff, and they make it really easy. Don’t think PDF of your handbook on your careers site, it’s more than that. Think of it as a cultural narrative of your organization having it’s own website. One issue I see them having, the examples they show are really cool and hip. So you think you can do the same thing, the problem is content isn’t easy to write to be cool and hip. If you aren’t creative, neither will your Blissbook.

SumTotal: SumTotal is like BambooHR, if BambooHR was a gigantic enterprise total HR solution for your business. Let’s be clear, SumTotal is a big company, like Oracle, ADP, SuccessFactors, etc. Big companies have the resources to do some really cool things, and Sum Total did that this year. They added the industry’s first Context-Aware user experience. What’s Context-Aware? You know when you go online to a store and look at a really nice pair of shoes you want, you put it in the cart, but last second you decide, I just can’t get these today. We all do it. Context-Aware marketing is the Ad a few days later on the side of another site you’re reading where those exact same shoes you were looking at pops up and now are 10% off! How does this work in an HR system? Let’s say you have an employee who is not reaching their sales goal. SumTotal’s new addition will recognize the employee is missing their goal, and without prompting or any HR or manager interaction at all recommend a training course for this person to take to better help them make their goals and maybe even a mentor in the company they should speak with who could help them become better at their job. I don’t do this justice — trust me, it was super cool!

Work4Labs: Work4 does Facebook recruiting, in an industry where no one has really figured it out yet (do you hear that Facebook?). Work4 makes an solution that makes it really easy for companies to get their jobs posted on their company Facebook page and help them navigate, very easily, how to search for talent on Facebook’s Graph Search. Also, they do this for a rather cheap price! (Cheap meaning the cost of one or two headhunting fees, so you can see a very quick ROI) Matthew Brown, Head of Product and co-Founder, might be 24 years old, which also helps let you know these guys get Facebook!

WePow: Formerly known as Wowser. WePow is a video interviewing platform. They’re really good at branding. They gave out royal blue Converse Chuck Taylors at their booth and had pairs for all the big name pundits in our industry: Kris Dunn, Steve Boese, Gerry Chrispin, John Sumser, William Tincup, Laurie Ruettimann, etc. Those kinds of things make a splash and get a good buzz going about their product. Apparently, I’m not a big name in the industry, I didn’t get a pair of shoes (which is really the only reason they get mentioned here!). Also, apparently, they are “like HireVue” when I asked their booth crew what they did. Thanks HireVue for being so good at marketing you now have become the Kleenex of video interviewing.

YouEarnedIt: New up and coming awards and recognition firm, designed around delivering a product that small and medium sized businesses can use. Think Achievers, for smaller companies, and a lot less money. Much more accessible for smaller companies because you aren’t forced to purchase their catalog of merchandise/awards which usually carry an industry standard 20% markup. They do have that as well, but much more cost effective than the giants in the industry.

More next week – I’ve got two companies – one really well known and one hardly anyone knows doing some really cool things!

The #1 Isssue At Every Organization

Posted on October 10, 2013 by Tim Sackett

There are a few things we just come to know as fact in organizations. If you were to ask anyone, at any level of your organization to come up with just one issue they have at their organization, hands down, without a doubt, across all organizations, the number one issue would always be communication!

Before I traveled to the HR Technology Conference, Halogen Software asked me to complete a Myers-Briggs Assessment (MBTI). It had been many years since I did one, and they wanted to show off some upcoming additions to their talent suite and how they are utilizing MBTI to address the communication gap found in all organizations. Halogen didn’t tell me anything about what to expect, so my guess was they were going down some lame path of using my Myers-Briggs in some sort of new selection functionality, but what I found was really something completely different and awesome!

By the way, my MBTI was ENTJ (What the what!? Don’t you love acronyms!) Basically, ENTJ, is one of 16 possible Myers-Briggs profiles of an individual and one of the most rare. ENTJ is an executive profile, they get things done, they make decisions quickly and move forward. Yep, that’s me. My good friend, Kris Dunn, also took the assessment and was profiled as an ENTP. Only one letter difference separates us, so basically we are the same in many ways: quick thinking, extroverted, creative, well read, etc. The one letter difference means I like to get things done and KD likes to talk about getting things done! 😉

Why do I bring Kris into the mix of this communication tool that Halogen added to their product? Because communication happens between two or more people. The reason all organizations have communication problems somewhere in their organization is because we try and solve communication individually. “It’s Tim’s problem, he’s just a bad communicator.” “Our managers don’t know how to communicate.” “Our executives don’t know how to communicate.” Halogen found out a way to put a tool in the face of every single person in your organization that helps them become better communicators, with every other single person they work with!

What Myers-Briggs does is not only show us how we are from a personality standpoint. It also shows us how we like to receive and give information. Halogen has integrated the assessment within their product, but took it a few steps further from a development standpoint and it allows you as an individual to compare your type to a co-worker’s type. So, I’m having trouble getting along with Kris. I go in, compare my MBTI type with Kris’s type, and the software gives me ideas and examples of how I can better communicate with Kris. Simple and effective. As a manager this is awesome, because I can now see how do I communicate with my team on an individual basis. It was really powerful, and I didn’t see anything else like this being done from any other company. It was one of the cooler advancements into an existing product I saw at HR Tech this year.

I can’t tell you how many times I meet with company executives who are looking to try and make their organizations better, or their leaders better, and it always comes back to communication and them wanting me to help them make individuals (or their organization as a whole) better at communicating. The problem is, and which MBTI points out, this isn’t a one-way problem. It’s two-way! Want to solve your communications issues? Find out how you get both sides to communicate like the other wants.

The Tim Sackett Project

TA & HR Expert, Dad, Backup Point Guard on my over 40 men's team