Author: broc edwards

first day jitters

“Will I like it here?”

“Is this going to be a good year?”

“Will I like the person in charge?”

“I wonder what the people sitting around me are like?”

“Where will I put my stuff?”

“Where are the bathrooms?”

“Is lunch any good here?”

“I hope work will be interesting.”

“Did I wear the right clothes? I wonder what others are wearing?”

“How early is too early to show up? How late is too late?”

“How long will it take to get there?”

“I don’t want to be here.”

“Will I make any friends?”

“Should I have styled my hair different? My hair never looks right.”

“Which door am I supposed to go in?”

“Wonder what I should do first when I get there?”

“Is anyone else new here today?”

“Hope I don’t do anything that makes me look stupid.”

“Should I have brought anything else?”

“My stomach hurts.”

“I hope they like me.”

 

First day of school at 8 years old or first day of work at 56, it’s all the same. Insecurities, doubt, and “what if…?” questions loom large.  I wonder what the answers will be.

you kind of remind me of…

Matt Serra (not me either) [photo from sherdog.com]

Ben Kingsley (not me) [photo from wikipedia]

Yesterday, a woman told me I reminded her of Ben Kingsley. That’s kind of fun. A while back I was told I reminded someone of Matt Serra. That’s kind of fun too. But other than height and hairstyle – cropped or shaved – there’s not much connection or much in common. At best, I have Mr. Serra’s acting ability and Mr. Kingsley’s mixed martial arts skills (if only it were the other way around!).

I always find it interesting to hear which celebrities people are told they look like. The associations are always positive. I’ve never heard anyone say, “Hey, you remind me of that actor I hate. Dude can’t act and he’s supposed to be a real jerk.” But maybe the focus on celebrities we like has more to do with being polite and avoiding conflict than it does with having only positive bias. We tend to not voice our negative biases directly to the person. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist though.

Out in the real world, we are strongly affected by both positive and negative bias. There are people we like and those we dislike within seconds of meeting. Sometimes it’s obvious why, but usually it’s just a feeling. Generally, there are four big factors at play:

1) We humans like to divide the world into “us” and “them”;

2) We humans like people who are like “us” (or at least we give them serious benefit of the doubt);

3) We humans make assumptions based on past experiences with people like “them” (or at least people we think are similar to them); and

4) We humans like to believe we are fully, wholly, 100% rational and we don’t have these biases (other people do, sure, but not us).

In the silly extreme, these biases are causing you to hire me for acting roles. It’s making you think I’d excel in the caged octagon. You’re making decisions about me and the future of your company because I remind you of someone you like, someone who is good at those things.

The cosmic joke’s on all of us and it’s hurting results. It’s destroying creativity and innovation. It’s perpetuating the stagnation and silos. It’s keeping people in roles they aren’t good at and keeping others out of roles where they’d excel. It’s shutting down new ideas, improvements, and progress. It’s destroying the potential for productive conflict and driving away those who would do better. It’s creating a culture of sameness and mediocrity where everyone fits in and no one stands out.

And that’s not good enough. What’s the business case for ensuring diversity (of thought, perspective, experience, skill, ability, demographics, etc.)? What’s the need for rigorous selection systems and ongoing interviewing training? What’s the reason for continuously developing managers? Us vs them is the psychology of surviving.

We need the psychology of thriving.

judging performance

My daughter was a little dismayed and disappointed to discover that I’m not being evaluated by judges when I speak at conferences. It’s funny to think about, but how would she know different? She knows the emphasis and worry I put on doing great presentations and given the popularity of contest shows like America’s Got Talent and Last Comic Standing it’s probably very natural to assume I’d be in front of HR’s versions of Howard Stern or Rosanne. It would certainly change the flavor of conferences if the presenters got immediate, constructive feedback from a panel of judges.

It is fashionable right now to declare the demise of the performance appraisal. The logic seems to be a combination of: 1) we need feedback more than once a year; 2) many managers are terrible at it; 3) people don’t like being evaluated. But, killing off the appraisal because we need more feedback is sort of like ending Christmas because we believe people should be nice to each other more than just during the holiday season. I fail to see how doing less solves the problem of needing more. And, regardless of format or frequency, providing feedback is a core function of the manager’s job so it’s probably time to just go ahead and get good at it. Likewise, when we’re getting paid to do work it’s hardly unreasonable that we’re expected to do it correctly (and maybe even improve) so receiving feedback is just part of being employed.

Can we do performance appraisals (lots) better. Absolutely! Can we completely eliminate them? I’m not yet convinced. Can we completely overhaul the entire format? Probably need to.

My daughter’s confusion got me thinking. What if performance appraisals were done by a panel of judges? Seems to fit in with the American reality TV ethos.  Of course, few jobs could be accurately judged by a group of impartial outsiders and almost no one would want to hear their performance appraisal in front of the entire company. So, as amusing as it is to consider, that’s probably out.

Yet, feedback from several perspectives is useful. So perhaps it’s a manager and two or three peers. Co-workers generally know the true performance far better than the manager, especially if we evaluate interpersonal/team skills. It should be pretty easy for performance management software to randomly assign appraisals to peers and keep the feedback anonymous. Need to do appraisals more than once a year? Great, how’s quarterly, monthly, weekly?

The technology is there. Back in May, Workforce reported that companies such as Facebook and Hewlett-Packard are essentially crowdsourcing performance data on a continual basis. I suppose it’s similar to how companies are continuously gathering customer feedback. (It also allows companies to eliminate HR as a gatekeeper to performance management – I’ll let you decide if that’s good or bad.)

But technology can’t do what we need most. To have direct, human, ongoing discussions with people about what they’re doing well and what they need to do better. The interesting thing about the TV shows with panels of judges is watching how much the surviving performers improve over the course of the show by using the feedback they receive week after week. Beyond all the drama, cut-to-commercial, spectacle, there is solid, honest here’s-what-you-did-well-and-here’s-how-you-can-do-better feedback. We all need that.

HR’s most pressing issue?

What is HR’s most pressing issue right now? I don’t know the answer. I’d like to think it’s something along the lines of attracting new talent into the field, or learning to think of things from a business perspective, or figuring out ways to remove the silos and other barriers throughout organizations that prevent good work from getting done, or using emerging technology to our advantage, or radically improving the employee experience, or getting better at shaping culture by synchronizing our efforts with the company’s strategic direction, or creating employment brands and match and mesh with the business brand, or better developing and supporting better leaders in making better decisions (that’s a lot of “better”, I know), or making diversity a competitive advantage instead of a box to check, or helping the company create better results through rehumanizing – or just plain humanizing – work, or taking a hard look at the seismic shift business is currently undergoing and redefining what HR is and means in the age of social business.

Those seem to be just a sampling of the pressing issues our field is facing right now. None of those are easy to do and there are precious few right answers, yet they are all areas where HR could radically increase its value to the organization.

Although there are plenty of sharp HR folks thinking about those things, I’m not convinced any of those areas is where we have focus as a field. But I suppose infighting and credentialing power plays are important to focus on, too.

The Innovation Book: a completely biased unreview

The Innovation Book by Max Mckeown (@maxmckeown) was announced this week. You might know that I’m a big fan of Max’s books and his ability to distill huge concepts down into useful ideas. For me, a review of any of his books could be done as: “Max wrote it? Buy it, read it, use it, love it.” But this book is a bit special to me.

I have a strong interest innovation, but in our over-hyped, over-jargoned, over-#hashtagged world, the word loses meaning. It’s open to mis-interpertation, mis-use, and just plain missing the mark. Too often, we confuse innovation with technology or a direct line to profitability. We think of it as easy and straight-forward and talk about it as though it comes without cost or pain or failure. None of which is true.

The opening line of the first chapter brings some much needed clarity: “Innovation – or practical creativity – is mainly about making new ideas useful.” Practical creativity. Businesses like the results that come from successful innovation, but how many can stomach the process of innovation? It amuses me to think of business leaders telling their teams and divisions, “We need to be more practically creative if we’re going to stay competitive.” It’s true, of course, but creativity is a non-linear process full of starts, stops, failures, break downs, blind alleys, and happy accidents. It requires experimentation, iteration, and comfort with not knowing where things are leading. It means activity, decisions, and actions that may not pay off any time soon – certainly not this quarter – and requires a mindset of investing in the future. It requires giving up the known for unknown and business dogma for business heresy. That leader might as well say, “We need to spend more time and resources experimenting with ideas that might not work if we’re going to stay competitive.”

But we do want innovation, so how do we put practical creativity to good use? The Innovation Book is both guide book and user manual. Across the book’s six parts, it looks at how to increase your own ability to be more innovative, create environments and cultures to lead others to innovation, refine creative ideas into practical usefulness, and avoid the pitfalls that can prevent new ideas from never quite catching on.

The book shows examples of innovation winners – generally uncelebrated people and businesses whose new ideas pushed the world forward in often unglamorous ways. From non-stick cookware to feminine hygiene to medical products to corporate turnarounds, Max shows that innovation is so much more than being the next hot Silicon Valley startup.

On the flipside, we learn from examples of innovation losers – people and businesses at the tops of their games who painfully missed, ignored, or outright rejected changes in their industries they should have been leading. Money, technology, and a name brand don’t always lead to useful ideas, smart decisions, or happy endings.

The final section of the book is a tool kit with a couple dozen innovation models presented to provide guidance, frameworks, and different ways of thinking about and approaching innovation. As much as we humans might crave the One Right Answer and want the Five Point Plan For Guaranteed Success, the models are a useful reminder that there is no single way to approach innovation and no certainty of success. There are many, many approaches to choose from as you explore the unmapped areas of new ideas.

Unfortunately, I cannot provide an unbiased review because, well, I am biased about this book. I gave input on two pre-publication drafts and developed and facilitated a six-session class based on the book while the text was still being revised and updated (I wrote about the experience: here and here). The best review I can give for the book is to share an endorsement I provided for it: Strips big ideas down to their essence, making the complicated understandable and turning the theoretical into real-world practical.

In other words: Max wrote it. Buy it, read it, use it, love it.

one goal

You should have one goal in life that takes more than a lifetime to achieve. ~ Unknown

 

Goals are important. They help us accomplish the outcomes we want by giving us clarity, direction, purpose, something to move toward. Without goals we tend to wander adrift, moving but often in circles, getting bounced around instead of advancing forward. Goals are important on the personal level and on the professional level.

The nice thing about goals is you have them, whether you think you do or not. Even if you’re unclear on what you do want, pretty much everyone knows what they don’t want.  Writing goals down in highly visualized detail complete with action steps, etc. can be truly helpful, but it’s all far from necessary. The goals you are most likely to achieve are the ones you give consistent, persistent thought and attention to. As Earl Nightingale noted: “You become what you think about most of the time.”

So that’s all good. Figure out what you want, keep your focus on it, and your chances of accomplishing it go way up. Simple enough. Then I came across the quote at the top and I’m stuck on this idea of having one goal that takes more than a lifetime to achieve. We could easily rephrase it as: If you can accomplish your biggest goal in your lifetime, you are thinking too small. Yikes! That creates a radical change in how we think about things.

It doesn’t mean choose something so big you don’t bother trying. It means choose something so big that you care about so deeply, you’ll get started rightnowtoday. So big you can’t let a day go by without trying to make some progress. So big you’ll start seeking out others to help and begin planning and organizing and seeking resources. And you’ll be amazed. Bill Gates (and others) have noted: “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” If that’s true, imagine how much we underestimate what we can accomplish in 40 years.

Forget realistic. What do you care about? Go do that.

 

why so serious, HR?
The Killer HR Robot, destroying fun in the name of credibility!

The Killer HR Robot, destroying fun in the name of credibility!

HR has a credibility gap. We just don’t get the respect we deserve. Or, at least, it seems HR likes to think HR has a credibility gap. There is no shortage of HR folks who think they don’t get the respect they deserve. Maybe they don’t, but it’s interesting to see what they think will create credibility.

I attended the Illinois State SHRM conference recently (a great conference that’s worth crossing state lines for) and a participant, fairly new to HR, expressed concern that we weren’t allowed to have fun in HR. Um, pardon? Apparently her boss and other HR leaders in their community felt that having fun destroys credibility. They believed executives wouldn’t respect HR if we were ever viewed as having fun.

A significant part of my career has been in leadership development and I’ve traveled around and spoken to and worked with leaders in many companies, in many industries, in many countries. Never once did any leader say, “You know what destroys leadership credibility? Fun! I hate it. When I’m looking for strategies to get the most out of my employees, forget someone who can link selection, development, and retention to solving business problems, I want an HR leader who is bitter, dour, mean, and boring. Get me someone who can put fun to the side and make this a culture where our employees hate being here. That’ll solve our business problems!”

Fun doesn’t have to mean frivolous. Fun doesn’t have to mean silly. Fun doesn’t have to mean you don’t know what you’re doing. Fun doesn’t have to mean you don’t take serious issues seriously. Fun can mean that people create significant results and enjoy doing it; that although they take their jobs seriously, they don’t take themselves too seriously. It is entirely possible to be outstanding at what you do AND have fun.

Work isn’t always fun. Often, it’s difficult, complicated, and unpleasant. Which is why I think it’s doubly important to bring fun to it when we can, to find ways to make it more enjoyable, to find the joy in our work. If nothing else, to have fun working together. To look forward to being around our teams. HR can’t make every day a great one for each and every employee, but there is so much we can do to create a positive culture, a great employee experience, and a strong employment brand.

It saddens me to think about the culture and employee experience and business results these anti-fun HR managers are creating. No one looks forward to going to work, giving it their all, and staying around year after year in a miserable environment. I can only imagine the recruiting, retention, and performance problems these companies have.

And they think “fun” will ruin their credibility? Too late.

 

heroes and friends

Social media gave me heroes. When I first started playing with social media I was awed by a handful of standout people working hard at sharing knowledge, shaking up the status quo, and kicking at the boundaries of their fields. Their larger than life perspectives arrived in my little corner of the world without fail through blog posts and Twitter updates. I began digging down, finding their influencers, and one hero led to another and another and another.

I discovered the magic of social media and learned the obvious secret. I could contact – contact! – these heroes and they would respond. Their ideas were big, but they weren’t the untouchable rock stars on the 15 foot high stage. They were open, liked sharing ideas back and forth, and responded quickly.

Then, I personally paid to attend a conference over 1,000 miles away for the chance to attend presentations by several of my biggest heroes, learn from them, and meet them in real life. That conference changed my world. After a few embarrassingly starstruck-tweenage-girl-meeting-the-boyband-of-the-week moments I realized these online celebrities of my world were, just people. People reaching out to the world and trying to make a difference in between all the dull-normal moments of life. Yes, they were outstanding at what they did, but they still had jobs to go to, spouses to hand them chore lists, kids to take to the zoo, and minivans in need of replacement. Their weekends looked like my weekends; their workweeks like my own.

Another conference followed, then another, and another. At each one, I arrived meeting another hero or two and left with much learning, fantastic discussions, and more friends.

Conferences took away my heroes and gave me friends. Friends dedicated to personal missions of changing the world of work. Friends who give their time and advice freely and eagerly. Friends I count on to push me, cheer me on, and inspire me to play bigger in this world.

If you go to conferences, when you go to conferences, I encourage you seek out your heroes. Go find them, meet them, talk to them. It’s good to have heroes; it’s better to have friends.

 

bold

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

Boldness does not come easily or naturally. Although we admire boldness, we humans struggle against it. We weave boldness into myth and legend, make a virtue of it, then actively discourage it. We celebrate boldness while striving to blend in out of fear of standing out.

One of the biggest societal sins we can commit is simply non-conformity. Standing out. Being different. We humans are wary of differences and look for anything telling that’s out of the norm. It creates a division, a wedge, an “us vs them” schism with those around us. It announces, “I am not one of you.”

Even those who rebel against the majority tend to conform to the rules and norms of their own group. The most rebellious are sometimes the most conservative of all. The biker or punk rocker or hipster programmer has just as many unspoken rules about what to wear, where to live, and what to drive as the banker or lawyer or accountant.

The penalties for standing out range from being ignored with the cold shoulder to being discredited and marginalized to being cast out, ostracized. The instinct to punish or reject anyone different persists so well and so strong we’ve had to create laws to prevent discrimination on the can’t-be-helped differences.

But what about the can-be-helped differences? Those who choose the non-conformity of being bold? Those heretics who bring different perspectives or dare to argue against the Truths of Best Practices? For those who aren’t doing as well as we are we point, criticize, and judge their non-conformity as evidence of inferiority. If they are doing better than us, we complain, resent, and discredit.

Yet, no person or organization ever stood out by being the same. No one ever got ahead by holding back. The world has never been changed by those wrapped in the warm, safe blanket of average. The joke is on use as we laugh when they go against the conventional wisdom that no longer works and we continue to predict their failure as they go about succeeding.

Boldness exists as a virtue in myth and legend, but in the everyday it’s easier and safer to say “no” than “yes”. More prudent to replicate the past than create the future. We seek to offend no one and become offensively inoffensive. Our businesses, our actions, our lives look like everyone else’s around us. We choose safe over meaningful, stable over fulfilling, secure over interesting, known over bold. And it’s keeping us trapped.

Bold fails. Bold succeeds. Bold is colorful. Bold is never boring. Bold is courageous. Bold risks. Bold leaps. Bold opens itself up to failure for the freedom and joy of the opportunity. Bold creates. Bold is a spark, a moment, a conviction, an inspiration. Bold is tenacious persistence. Bold is meaningful. Bold is unique. Bold is crazyscaryjoyful.

We need more bold.