8 hours & a lunch

thursday quote day - ralph waldo emerson

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming

All the best!
deb

what's wrong with AIG, businesses, and the country

I'm not any happier about the AIG bonuses than anyone else.  I'm not any happier about the economic news than anyone else.  But I see a pattern here.

We continually seem to be surprised.

We continually act as if all these things we're seeing on the news now haven't been going on for ages.

The Big 3?  The auto bailout?  People have been writing about the auto industry being in trouble for years (some, even decades).

Corporations not performing well but paying out big bonuses to the higher echelon of the company?  This really isn't news.  

These things have been going on for a very very long time.

But we are a reactionary society.  In politics, we react to whatever the latest fire is. 

A political example:

Think back to the summer of 2001.  What were we talking about?  Shark bites.  Shark bites were hitting the news.  But there was also a lot of talk about 'corporate responsibility' in light of Enron and Qualcomm and so on.

That was where our focus went.  

Until 9.11.

Then it became all about national security.  

(And then Iraq.)

Until September 2008.  And since then, it's been "Oh!  The economy!"  

In business, anyone who lives in an area that relies heavy on manufacturing has been watching plants close and jobs being lost for a few years now.  

Personally?  We wait until the scale tips whatever number is just too much for us before we begin to focus on our health and work out again.

Problems, ignored, do creep up on us.  But mostly because we wait until they're out of control to address them.

We wait.  We wait until it's a crisis.  

We don't pay attention until there is trouble.

We wait until there is a fire to put out.

We don't learn how to manage change, or better yet, deliberately create change (in our businesses or our lives).  We don't remain vigilant.  We don't learn how to problem solve and we don't teach our employees how to do it either.  

I hope that this is one thing we learn and change moving forward.  I hope we learn how to not wait until there is a 'credit tsunami' or an economy on the verge of collapsing. I hope we learn to continually improve in our businesses rather than waiting until we have to layoff half our workforce.  I hope we learn to pay attention to the warning signals and the voices out there that start pointing to problems early.

We'll never be perfect at it.

But we can get a lot better at it than we are today.

All the best!

deb

thursday - quote day - change/growth

That's right, folks.  "Thursday - Quote Day" returns!  (I'll pause for the applause and jubilation that will surely ensue.)  I let it go.  I've tried to start it back up.  But so many of you told me you liked it, so I'm bringing it back.  For reals, this time.  Promise.  

So here we go:

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow - Alice Walker

They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. - Andy Warhol

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. - Leo Tolstoy

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers. - M. Scott Peck

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him - Vicktor Frankl

We know what we are, but know not what we may be - William Shakespeare

All the best!
deb

more on the memo to CFO's saying 'don't trust HR'

So, we're all writing about this article Kris Dunn pointed to at CFO.com called "Memo to CFOs:  Don't Trust HR", right?(And I talked about his assertion about HR out of hiring yesterday.)  But who is Richard Beatty, who gave the speech?

Well, Richard Beatty is a professor at Rutgers (his Vita can be found here).

He and the co-authors of "The Differentiated Workforce" wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in December 2005 called "'A' Players or 'A' Positions" that lays out much of what it seems might have been presented at the speech and covered in the CFO article.  

One thing I found interesting is that Beatty mentions the same customer service survey in both, but in the CFO article concludes:

Usually in such a situation, HR professionals try to figure out what the top performers are doing right, then train the others accordingly. That is faulty thinking, insisted Beatty, who asserted that selection is a more powerful predictor of performance than training.

However, in the article he co-wrote for HBR, the conclusion from the same survey is that 'intensive training' or 'more careful screening' would result in company performance improving 'tremendously'.   

So ultimately, I agree with Gautam Ghosh that "the article is flawed is that the professor of HR obviously is mixing up things or choosing his arguments in front of an audience that takes his pronouncements as face value."  And that we're looking at someone angling for some consulting work.  

But, you HR folks out there might find that HBR article interesting anyway.

All the best!

deb

cut HR out of hiring

So, when Kris Dunn first posted about this article, I pretty much ignored the article.  For one thing, I'm out...doing my own thing now.  

For another thing, I generally agree with the "I Hate HR" articles and the fact that many, many HR people don't speak in numbers, the language of business.

It's true.  There are a lot of bad HR people out there.  Just like there are a lot of bad marketing people and bad R&D people and bad financial pros.

But there are good ones too.

And since I have so many friends still slaving away in corporate America in the HR world who are good at what they do, I can't help but respond.  (I'm only linking to one because there's just not enough room to link to you all. Forgive me.)

Today, I want to talk about this quote:

Beatty said that it is most important to think outside the HR department box when it comes to filling the strategic positions that create the bulk of a company's value. To that end, he suggested that companies might be better off appointing someone from outside the HR department to manage strategic talent. He pointed to Precision Castparts Corp., a $7 billion machine-parts manufacturer, as one company that has bypassed HR in several situations. For one, it reassigned an operations executive who ran a third of the company's 150 plants to take control of scouting for and retaining strategic talent.

Such tactics are warranted because while "the language of organizations is numbers, HR isn't very good at data analytics," Beatty said. "They don't think like business people. Many of them entered human resources because they wanted to help people, which I'm all for, but I'm also for building winning organizations."

It's the CFO's job to make sure that the work of analyzing and, as necessary, reconstituting the work force gets done by someone qualified to do the job, added Beatty, and there has never been more at stake than there is now.

"The labor market is in a position to provide you with better talent than you have ever had," said Beatty, co-author of the new book, The Differentiated Workforce. "If you don't emerge from this market with better talent in the roles that really make a difference, I don't think you're trying."

That's an overgeneralization, don't you think?  OK.  I'll concede that a lot of HR people out there don't think like business people.  But there are plenty that do.  

As for cutting HR out of the hiring process, is this guy serious?  

1)  How many HR pros do you know who don't involve the appropriate level of management or at least 12 other people in the hiring process?  I'm sure there are some HR people who do it alone out there.  But I don't know any.

The last sales guy I saw hired?  He interviewed with everyone.  He talked to everyone from the GM to the engineering guys to the President of the company.  And they all agreed on giving him an offer.  

2)  How do you identify what levels you cut HR out of?  Who are the 'strategic people'?  The C-levels only? Middle management?  Because, you know, the people at Precision Castparts who make the parts?  Surely, they don't matter.  Nor do those people in the call center example used earlier in the article.  Maybe HR could just hire those people.

3)  Do you know why the HR pro had to sit in on the interviews while that sales guy was talking to 12 different people?  Because the managers and others interviewing him were very likely to ask questions they can't legally ask.  Yep.  I'm sure HR would love for managers and supervisors to be trained to a level where that sort of thing doesn't happen.  But that would require training, and you don't like training either.  (Not to mention that those numbers you like so much? HR is there to keep those numbers from going out to lawyers and payouts from lawsuits due to discriminatory hiring practices.)

4)  And who are these guys hiring out on their own?  Their college buddies?  Or, okay, let's give them the benefit of the doubt.  Let's say they're talking to someone else in their field who they know who has been at the top of their game for years.  

The last guy I saw like that?  Was about to get a big payout due to a company closing down and really only wanted someplace to rest his weary head for three to four years before retiring.  But these guys were so in awe of him that they couldn't see that.  

5)  Finding stellar talent sometimes has to do with the pond you're fishing in.  An operations manager once moved from a big city in one part of the country to a small town in another part of the country.  He started demanding that HR do better hiring.  He'd rant and rave about how poor a job HR was doing. 

What he didn't understand was that the talent pool in his new home was different.  He had the best talent in the area.  Well, he had the best talent he was willing to pay for.  Which brings me to my final point.....

6)  Are CFO's going to pay for hiring those strategic, key, highly educated, well-experienced people?  Because the last time I checked, it seemed like CFO's are mostly telling their HR pros to do the dirty work of laying people off.  Or worse, laying people off and rehiring at lower pay levels.  What about the talent that's walking out the door right now?  

There are, typically, a lot of areas where HR could cut back.  For that to happen, though, the management at these companies have to get better at managing people.  Which, by the way, doesn't all come down to numbers.  

All the best!

deb

P.S.  What Kris had to say about hiring strictly on the letters after someone's name and missing out on 'bootstrapped pros'?  He's dead on.  (Then again, Kris usually is.)

P.S.  More on what the article had to say about training coming soon.

toyota's 'why not?' contest

Toyota, as always, is looking for ideas and ways to continuously improve.  In their first principle of the Toyota Production System, they also talk about doing what's right not only for the customer, but also the economy and the community.  Now, they're looking for ways to be more 'green'....and they want your help.  So they're running a contest.  (By the way, TMMK?  The Kentucky plant?  Pretty friggin' impressive.  ;-) )

Take a look around!

All the best!

deb

unethical behavior - what will people do to keep a job?

Amanda at MWW sent me a link to this recent Time article called "Lie, Cheat, Flirt. What People Will Do to Keep a Job"

Of 1200 respondents, the article states:

13% of the survey respondents said they would outright lie or exaggerate to keep their jobs — even though such behavior is forbidden by many companies' ethics policies. About 2% said they would take credit for someone else's work or flirt with the boss to get ahead, and 4% would lie about having common interests with their boss to deepen their bond with a superior.

I think those numbers are a little low, quite frankly.  (Then again, 2% are the number of people surveyed willing to be honest about their answers.  And 'kissing butt' and playing politics is nothing new in corporate America. Right?)

The article attributes these 'startling numbers' to the recession and people's fears about losing their jobs.  

People probably are more willing to go to lengths they probably wouldn't have gone to a year or two ago to keep their job, and deepening economic fears can continue to have this type of negative effect on our working population.

However, I'm not so sure that those same 1200 people, if interviewed a couple of years ago, wouldn't have responded the same way.  So I don't find the numbers necessarily 'startling' and wouldn't get up in arms over such a survey.

Still, many companies think that a recession means that there are plenty of people out looking for jobs, and they can let up on concerns about talent management or how they treat their people.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  A recession means that there is less margin for error in your business.  A recession means it's more important than ever to get it right.

If you don't?  If you use the recession as a fear-based motivator for your employees?  If you keep dangling the threat of layoffs in from of them?  Not only will your stressed-out workforce resort more and more to the types of behaviors listed in the survey, but they'll eventually leave.  Maybe not today.  Maybe not tomorrow.  Maybe not until the recession is over and the economy has improved.  But soon, and for the rest of their lives.

Short-term thinking is one of the things that lead us into this mess.  Long-term strategies are still necessary, including when it comes to your workforce.  

All the best!

deb

P.S.  If you're one of those who has been laid off, or are concerned, see my series on layoffs that can be found in the sidebar under 'popular posts'.

If you're a leader in a business laying people off, see my posts onthinking twice about doing what we always do in a recession or theperils of short-term thinking -- or at least how to lay people off the right way -- as well as my training programs that you can use to help your business going forward,.

make a referral week (the catch-all version)

So, the Communicatrix wrote about "Make a Referral Week."  She's making referrals in different categories everyday, which you can see at the end of her post here.  And I decided I wanted to join in. http://www.rockyourday.com/

So today, I want to list a few people who didn't fit into the categories earlier in the week.  These are all people who are cool, good at what they do -- and who you should check out.  Since the list today is longer, descriptions will be shorter.  But trust me, all of these people rock!

1)  Dave Navarro - Speaking of rocking, there's Dave Navarro (no, not that one) at Rock Your Day.  He's got great stuff on productivity, getting over procrastination, marketing, stuff you need to get your business (and you) going.  

2)  Carmen Van Kerckhove - Carmen is hands down the best in diversity training that there is.  (And come on, we all hate diversity training, right?  You won't when Carmen does it.)  She and her team also blog at Racialicious.  

3)  Tom Volkar - If you're working for a company and hating every minute of it, dreaming of the day you'll jump out on your own, Tom is the guy to get you through that transition.  (He told me one thing about money that changed my perspective entirely and made a difference for me.)  Read his blog, "Delightful Work"

  

4)  Chelsea Sanders - Chelsea's Blue Line Media is the place to go for photography, video work, and websites.  (She's also a wedding photographer, in her 'spare time.')  Not only is her work awesome, she's a lot of fun to work with!  Her blog can be found at 'Life is Too Beautiful.'

5)  The GirlPie - I can't even tell you what The GirlPie does.  I can't even tell you her real name.  What I can tell you is that the way she describes herself in her bio?  "Like your not-so-stinky big sister, I might butt in, tell you what to do, tease, or crack you up "inappropriately" -- but I've ALWAYS got your back ~"  That's totally true.  Not only that, she's like your big sister who knows stuff.  Lots of stuff.  She'll teach you how to use TweetDeck one day, refer you to a piece of software that makes your life a lot easier another day and tell you to break up with your friend who keeps stealing your stuff the next.  And she's funny.  Follow her at Twitter.

6)  Kelly Parkinson - Kelly's work speaks for itself.  One look at her Copylicious website and you'll see.  She's a copywriter, and a damn good one.  One of the best, really.  She even got recommended by the Communicatrix yesterday.  Here's the thing though.  More than just being a stellar writer, Kelly understands marketing as well as anyone I know.  Seriously.  You'll start talking about 'I was thinking this' and within about five minutes, she'll come back with, 'So you want to do this and say that and....'  and before you know it, she's given you five more things that you hadn't thought of before.  I guarantee it.  She's also nice, and funny, and really really good at playing tennis. (Oh.  And her blog is here.)

Hope these recommendations helped you find awesome people to do some awesome work for you this week!  I've had fun putting the lists together.

All the best!

deb

make a referral week (special mentions)

So, the Communicatrix wrote about "Make a Referral Week."  She's making referrals in different categories everyday, which you can see at the end of her post here.  And I decided I wanted to join in. 

Today, I am going to refer a couple of truly awesome people - both of whom will help you 'biggify your business' but in different ways.  Yes, folks.  It's Havi and Naomi day.

I've talked before about my love of all things Havi and that still stands.  She's got a different, yoga-sometimes-woo-woo approach to things.  But it works.  (Even for the more cynical and bitchy types around like me.  ;-) )

What does Havi do?  Well, from the "Is This You?" page on her site:

Most of my clients and students are bright, thoughtful, creative independent professionals (or people who *want* to be independent professionals) . They know that their tangled life patterns are getting in the way of what they want. They also know that they have something amazing to share with the world, but don’t feel comfortable yet with the whole “putting it out there” thing

So she helps with all that.  She helps untangle habits and patterns that keeps people stuck.  She gets you unstuck.  And trust me, if you're starting your own business?  Your stuff?  Your stuff will affect your business and you're going to have to deal with this.  And Havi?  Well, she's awesome at it.

She has an awesome blog that is as entertaining as it is helpful and informative.

And she also has a new online community that pretty much rocks in the way of helpfulness whether you're looking for support or action steps -- it's a whole group of people really helping each other out.  And it's cool.  

And then there's Naomi.  Where Havi is all sweet and gentleness and light?  Naomi will curse like a sailor and tell you in no uncertain terms what it is exactly that you need to do.  Which is why I love Naomi too.  (I tend to lean towards communicating more like Naomi, so I like the whole direct approach thing.)

Naomi runs IttyBiz, which is all about marketing for small, home-based businesses.  She'll teach you about online marketing and how to do marketing on a budget and well...marketing in general.  And she'll be damned funny while doing it.

I love it most of all when these two work together.  You get Havi saying things like, "Of course you're procrastinating and here's why and by the way, that's really okay."  And then Naomi will say something like, "That's true.  And great and all.  But in the meantime, get off your butt and do (this)."  It makes for a perfect combination.  

If nothing else, just start hanging out at their blogs.  You'll get it soon enough.  You'll see.  

All the best!

deb

going against the grain (using goals to standardize behavior)

Senior management often loves to standardize.  Standardize processes so you can achieve the same, desired result time and time again.  And me?  I'm all for this.  Standardized processes gives you a baseline, a beginning point, to begin to let your employees creatively come up with improvements.  That's all well and good.  

So what's the problem?  The problem is when the goal-setting process in yearly performance reviews are used as an effort to standardize human behavior.  Because you can't.  

It usually goes something like this.  Let's say, there's a VP of HR.  We'll call her Martha.  Martha is very good at what she does.  She's also very empathetic.  Empathy is something she values, and she sees this as one of her strengths.

Now, Joe reports to Martha.  Joe is a valuable employee who does a great job.  But he tends to think more strategically and his communication style and tends to be more direct.  

At performance review time, Martha gives Joe his evaluation.  He receives good marks across the board.  She then gives him some things to work on during the coming year.  One comment?  "Joe, you need to be more responsive and empathetic to the employees. And tone down your directness."

This type of thing makes me want to set my hair on fire.  (OK.  Not my hair.  I kind of like my hair.)

Usually, Joe then goes off to try to be someone he's not....he goes off and tries to be Martha....and he ends up not only being miserable, but his performance in the areas where he was doing well suffers. 

We all like people who are like us.  But not only do good managers value different attributes, they learn how to use them to fit together within the team.  The best way to get the best out of people is to help them use their strengths and be who they are naturally.  

You can standardize a process that an employee uses to do a job.  But you cannot standardize human behavior.  Being clear on the direction that you want your team to go in is necessary.  Knowing your team well, and what their strengths are is necessary.  Then, goals can be aligned in a way that gets Joe more intrinsically motivated and helps him be more of who he is - and therefore, more valuable to the entire organization.

All the best!

deb

P.P.S.  Click here for information on how the Toyota Production System can apply to any business, including yours.  Or take a look at my online programs here.