ways to make HR awesome

If you think the purpose of HR is to prevent the company from getting sued, please quit and go work for the competition right now.

Realize HR has customers.  Make life simpler, easier, better for your customers. Solve your customer’s problems.

Become so good at customer service that people brag that your company has the Nordstrom’s of HR.

Consider the possibility that the purpose of HR is to help leaders make better decisions. [So says David Ayre of Nike and I agree with him.] Own it, rock it, develop processes around it. Make it your mission to help leaders make better selection, training, retention, and de-selection decisions.

Making a difference in people’s lives and impacting results is fun. Administration is the necessary evil of HR. Nail administration so you can move on to the fun.

Develop a love and understanding for business. Read the HR mags if you want, but also get into Forbes, Fortune, WSJ, Fast Company, Time, The Economist. Maybe inc. or Entrepreneur. Become a business person who gets HR rather than an HR person gets business (or worse, an HR person who is vaguely aware of this thing called “business”).

Ditch the HR mags and read the scholarly journals like Personnel Psychology.

Attend conferences focused on the core business of the company you support. Maybe skip the HR conference this year (blasphemy!) and attend a manufacturing, banking, engineering, retail, etc. conference.

Leave your office. Go talk to people outside your department.

Attend conferences for the departments you support. Do you have any idea how much you would learn and how much you would freak people out if you attended, say, a CFO conference?

Spend a day observing and shadowing a key customer.

Play to win. Have fun. Make a freakin’ difference.

Other ideas?

creating HR value

Creating value is about making things simpler, easier, better, quicker, or more effective for the customer. If it’s not solving our customer’s problems – and solving them better than the other options – it’s time to seriously re-evaluate why we’re doing it. Unfortunately, bad HR doesn’t get that: 1) HR has customers; and 2) it’s all about customer service.

[I originally wrote this in response to a great blog post by Tim Sackett but it stands alone pretty well.]

4 types of people at work

At risk of oversimplifying, we tend to view people at work in one of four ways based on their productivity and personality. Selection, promotion, and development decisions are made based on what category we see people in.

It looks a little like this:

 

Jerk

Good with People
High Results

Tolerate?

Super Star
Low Results

Why are they here?

Tolerate?
  1. Good with people and gets great results: we all love these folks. They’re great to be around and they get things done. Co-workers like them, customers like them, and management likes them. We hate, hate, hate to see these people go.
  2. Pleasant person with low results: we tend to like them, wish they’d do more, but make allowances for them because they are easy to work with and don’t cause anyone trouble. They do a great job of building relationships and are liked by customers and liked or tolerated by co-workers and management. Nice compensates a lot for low productivity.
  3. Jerk with high results: we can’t stand them, but they are often tolerated by management because they get things done. They often don’t realize how much they are getting in their own way and how much higher their career would climb if they were easier to get along with. They don’t understand that relationships matter.
  4. Jerk who doesn’t do anything: universally hated. Don’t be this person; don’t manage this person. Any manager who keeps one of these folks on the team instantly loses credibility. They thrive in teams with weak managers and cause a disproportionate amount of damage to the culture and work environment. In an ideal world, everyone in this category would be working for your competition. Realistically, there are a few in your organization right now acting as giant brake on progress.

What do you think? Spot on? Too simple? What are your experiences with these four types of people?

keep it simple, make it easy

Want to know a secret of great businesses, of great customer service, of just getting stuff done? If you want someone to do something, make it as easy as possible for them to do it.

The best example is Amazon and their 1-click checkout. It doesn’t get any easier to give a business my money. Although it sounds intuitive, there are tons of examples of businesses that do the opposite. For example, I used to live near a dry cleaner that didn’t take debit cards (?!?). They never understood that forcing me to go to an ATM before getting my cleaning pretty much ensured I used a different cleaner.

There are many examples that are much, much subtler. This is on my mind because just this week alone, I was assaulted with several examples of people wanting something from me but making it very difficult to do:

  • A company I’m a certified trainer for emailed to let me know that revised materials were now available on their website. But no mention of where. It took me a good five minutes to track them down when a hyperlink in the email would have taken them no more effort and would made it a snap for me to find (and use) the new materials.
  • A friend forwarded a newsletter on training and l liked it enough to go to the website to subscribe. Unfortunately, they REQUIRE me to give name, company, address, email, phone number, some demographic info about the company, etc. I just wanted a newsletter, not a relationship. If they had only asked for an email I would have subscribed then they could have wowed me into buying their products. Instead, they made it easier for them to do a sales call to me, but made it harder for me so now they won’t get the chance.
  • I received an email that wanted me to provide some information and then told me where I could find the address to send it rather than just providing the address. What? The odds of me replying went down substantially.
  • I’m attending a training in the fall and was sent a reminder that “to sign up if I hadn’t already”. There are – maybe – 30 people eligible for the training and they couldn’t look at the roster and send out the reminder to only those who still need to sign up? Instead I received an email that I didn’t need to get UNLESS I haven’t signed up yet and only thought I did so now I have to email them just to confirm.

That was all just this week. Great customer service – great leadership – means finding ways to remove barriers to action – not adding them.

from the archives: you job is to maximize profits… sorta

broc edwards's avatarfool (with a plan)

Leaders talk about their fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits for the business owners (shareholders). This is largely true, but in my opinion, incorrect.

From my point of view, their fiduciary responsibility is to maximize profits based on their clearly defined business strategy. This sounds the same but it isn’t. Not even close. Let’s consider some examples. (But before we do, I need to offer the full disclosure that my understanding of general business strategy far exceeds my specific investment knowledge. I’m approaching this from a business philosophy perspective NOT a business law perspective.)

A conservative investment company with a strategy that prizes long-term soundness above rapid growth has a responsibility to make different decisions and take different actions than an investment company that is trying to grow as fast as possible. I’m not suggesting that one strategy is better than the other – both have their place – but…

View original post 327 more words

quality? depends on how you look at it

Quality is one of those words that we think we know what it means, except that it has several possible meanings. We know we want high-quality service and products, ads tout the excellence of items, critics and reviewers use quality as a measuring stick, but what do they mean?

Let’s consider cars as an example. Does “high-quality” refer to the build materials, the fit and finish, refinement, dependability, or longevity? Yes. No. Maybe. Stereotypically, Hondas and Toyotas last forever and are very high quality in terms of both dependability and longevity, but not known for refinement or build materials. There are several expensive German cars that are (again, stereotypically) known for the quality of their interiors, fit and finish, and refinement, but also have a reputation for fragile and expensive electronics, transmissions, and other sort of crucial parts. Then there is an old joke that General Motors cars run poorly longer than most cars run at all. So, in a weird way a Honda, Mercedes, and Chevrolet can all be considered high quality?!? That’s unhelpful.

Is a bicycle frame welded together by a craftsman in a small, low volume shop higher quality than a frame welded by computerized robots and vigorously inspected for even the smallest variances in a state of the art factory?

Which is higher-quality: the hastily built mcmansion with the expensive amenities that needs continual maintenance or the small, but solidly built house with very basic and cheap appliances and fixtures? It depends on what we mean by “quality”.

Talking about quality clearly puts us in a situation where the answer is meaningless unless we have a sharply defined question. What do we mean by “quality”? What do we need it to do? What outcomes do we expect? What tradeoffs are we willing to make?

What does quality mean in your business? What do your customers think in means? Are you sure?

Until we’re clear on the question, the answers won’t do us any good.

my first triathlon: getting out of my own way

I was going back over some old writing and came across something that holds true even after six years. It’s a bit long, but a significant part of my journey. Perhaps you can relate to the idea of getting out of your own way:

 

I recently entered and finished my first triathlon. It was a short distance event so I was confident that I could finish as long as I didn’t push myself too hard early on, but I had no way to judge how well I would do. An hour thirty-nine minutes and some seconds later I finished a strong third in my age group, only two seconds out of second place and three or so minutes from first. I’m not sure I can convey in words how pleased I was with my finish or how pleased I was that I was pleased. You see, in the past I would have had a much different attitude about the event and about my results.

 

There are several lessons I take from my success in this event that have strong parallels in success in the rest of my life.

 

  1. I entered. This may sound minor, but was a huge step. I am a semi-reformed perfectionist and would not have entered a triathlon even a short time ago. The philosophy of “if you are going to do something, do it right” was often distorted in my mind to “if you can’t do something right, don’t do it.” I had not swam in 20 years and was not good at it way back when. To enter this event I had to let go of my perfectionist ideals, accept where my skills were, and take responsibility for developing my skills.
  2. I gave myself time to prepare. Once I make a decision I typically want to follow through on it RIGHT THEN. Instead, I selected an event that was several months out to give myself time to properly prepare.
  3. I did not over-train. In the months between deciding to do a triathlon and the actual event I did a lot of traveling and working and was quite ill for a couple of weeks. In the past I would have compensated for this by pushing myself to the point of exhaustion and injury. This time, I created a flexible plan and stuck to that plan as well as I could and accepted when I couldn’t.
  4. I allowed time to taper and recover. “Tapering” is reducing the amount of exercise before an event to allow the body to rest and recover. A comment by a former world-class triathlete resonated for me: It’s better to be 10% under-trained than 1% over-trained. Instead of fretting and trying to get one more workout in, I took almost a week off before the event and then took off another week after to allow time to rest and recover. Previously, I would have exercised right up to and immediately after a race.
  5. I had no expectations – I focused on purpose, not outcome. Having never entered a triathlon meant that I had zero expectations for outcomes beyond doing my best and learning what I could.
  6. I enjoyed my results and did not get caught up in the misery of the perfectionist trap of “if only” and “I could/should have done better.” This learning is a fantastic milestone for my personal development. This is one of the first big events of my life that I did not dismiss, downplay, or even beat myself up because I could have done it better. Because anything can always be done better I have deprived myself of much joy and celebration over the years and it would have been very easy to kick myself over the two seconds between myself and second place. Instead I chose to look at the long-term learning rather than defining my life by one instance. Long-term, I gained some great knowledge that will serve me well in every triathlon from here on out.
  7. I compared myself to no one but myself. This is a big one because not too long ago I would have brooded over not being able to set the same time as the experts, nevermind other people in my age group. This time I was able to let go of all of that and enjoy the knowledge that I did my absolute best for the knowledge, ability, and experience that I currently have.

 

Connections to facilitation:

If you replace “triathlon” with “facilitation” (or almost anything that I’ve done) you get a pretty good snapshot of where I was as a facilitator even a year ago and where I am headed. I tended to:

  • Demand instant results from myself. There is a huge difference between setting challenging goals and expecting to meet those goals immediately without allowing time for growth, development, and learning.
  • Drive myself to frustration and exhaustion by over-preparing. While it is critical to be prepared and confident, I often undermined my confidence with 11th hour preparation and would enter the session feeling frazzled and off a roll.
  • Be very focused on outcome instead of purpose. I typically set artificial measures for myself and would forget about why I’m a facilitator, would neglect the joy of the experience, forget that it is a process and abuse myself when every participant didn’t have massive and immediate shifts. In being focused on outcomes I would see myself in degrees of weakness and get very frustrated that I was not immediately at the level of my mentors, nevermind their greater knowledge, ability, and experience.
  • Push myself in mind, body, and spirit by arriving at sessions weary from travel and over-preparation, giving it my all, and then arriving home exhausted and strung out on sugar and caffeine from trying to stay awake while traveling. I would then get about three hours of sleep and expect to immediately be in top form the next day.

 

In retrospect, it is easy to see how I was limiting myself, but the painful irony is that I got results. My perfectionism and drive created success, but several times in my life I’ve hit plateaus or even gone into decline because after reaching a certain point of success, the harder I push the more I limit myself and the worse I do so I compensate by pushing harder, which leads to stalling out and then a downward spiral. In other words, what made me successful at one level actually prevented future development and success.

 

I have been improving over time with letting go of my perfectionism and focus on outcome and my progress is really underscored for me with this triathlon. Going forward I’ll be focusing even more on:

  • My purpose and doing my best. By removing artificial measures and expectations I am much more likely to relax, have fun, and be at my best than if I stress over outcomes. Ironically, this will lead to much greater outcomes.
  • Having a specific plan and purpose for my development whenever I’m practicing rather than putting in time and practicing just to practice. Exercising (and resting and recovering) with focus and purpose creates much faster and more sustainable results and it stands to reason that the same is true with facilitation.
  • Having a specific plan and purpose for my development in each session.
  • Looking to my long-term results and development.
  • Treating each session like an athletic event by allowing time to taper and recover. I want to enter each session fresh and rested in mind, body, and spirit and then allow myself time to recover once I’m home again. Recovery may be a day off or could just be acknowledging that I won’t be at my best. After all, I might go for a bike ride the day after a triathlon but would not expect to break any personal records so why should I expect different from my ability to work?

 

One thing I know for sure is that I have not fully appreciated the depth of these realizations. Although I am excited about applying this learning I know that these are key lessons that I will continue to get at deeper and deeper levels. I welcome any insights about the shifts that you are experiencing as you become better and better in your own life.

 

all or nothing

Three corners in, running in the top five, and a double jump coming up. I hadn’t tried to clear it in practice and was going to roll it, but realized that if anyone behind me went for it they would land on me. Too late, I twisted the throttle, but came up short. The impact from hitting the second jump bounced my motorcycle off the track with me in a handstand over the handlebars. After too many slow motion seconds I augured into the dirt, digging a small trench with my helmet. While I quickly assessed damage, all my competition simply motored away, leaving me behind. Front runner to last place because of a simple lack of commitment.

Ok, not everyone is a motocross fan so let me explain. The example above really did happen and pounded (literally) a lesson into me about commitment. (Don’t worry, I’m getting to the business application.)

Some things we can “sort of” commit to. Or ramp things up just a little bit to test the waters and ease into the pool. Other things require full on cannonball-into-the-pool level of commitment. You can’t ease into it off the diving board. Do or don’t do. A double jump is a series of two jumps just close enough together that you can land on the backside of the second jump. They are also usually close enough that if you don’t jump both you’ll need to take the first jump much slower than normal to be able to safely approach the face of the second jump. So there are really only two safe choices: approach it as a double jump or approach it as two single jumps in a row. There is no in-between; there is no easing up to it. It’s back off and slow down or go for it.

This step up in commitment from small to large with no middle ground shows up in real life. Starting your own business, commission sales, moving from a home business to a regular retail space, becoming a manager, entering new markets, launching new products, starting a family, etc. are all actions that require an intense level of commitment. To do it half-way is to crash horribly, burning up resources without succeeding. They all require full on, full out levels of commitment and the enthusiasm, knowledge, and skill required to clear the gap.

That level of commitment is way outside the comfort zone. With it, you may still crash. Without it, you will definitely crash. A very real danger is that as you approach the moment of truth, there is the chance to hesitate, to back off, get spooked and try to do it half-way.

I’ve seen plenty of racers leave in an ambulance because they committed to something they didn’t have the skill to pull off, so I can’t say that every opportunity is the right opportunity for you to commit to. There is a difference between stretching and being stupid. I can say that in many situations you either have to commit to going slow or commit to going full out. The gap makes going medium far more dangerous than the other options.

At least, that’s what the deep gouges in my helmet suggest.

life’s not fair

My son, 1st grader that he is, was moping along as we walked across a big parking lot to get something out of the car. Playfully I said, “C’mon son, head up shoulders back, walk like you’re going somewhere. Life’s good, let’s rock!”

“No, it’s not.” He responded. “Life’s not fair, so it can’t be good.” That kind of stopped me. Then I thought, how often do kids hear or tell each other that “life’s not fair” when they complain that they can’t get something they want? They hear it so much that there’s little reason for them to doubt it.

What I didn’t tell him, but he will start hearing more often is that perhaps life isn’t fair, but complaining about it doesn’t do any good and all any of us can do is start where we are and work with what we have.

Further, statistically speaking from a global perspective, life may not be fair and – like many of us – it’s probably not fair in his favor. Born in a first world country in a stable, educated, two-parent, gainfully employed household, healthy, attending a good school system, etc., etc., and etc. is, statistically speaking, a huge leg up on a large percentage of the world, and a decent head start  over even many of his peers. Heck, eating breakfast every morning will give a kid a statistical advantage.

Realistically, if you’re reading this you’re probably in the same boat in that you’re literate, have access to the internet, have a little free time, and likely aren’t spending your day struggling to find clean water or enough calories to keep you alive. The problems you face are at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, not the bottom.

Interesting though, is that we tend to judge ourselves against people similar to us. This means that, we don’t compare ourselves with the entire planet, only the few people we know. We can be very well off comparatively (e.g., indoor plumbing, central heating, and air conditioning, reliable transportation, etc.) and feel very poor. Studies have shown that, illogical as it seems, people would rather make less overall money as long as they were doing slightly better than their peers. That is, we’d rather make $60,000 in a group where the average salary is $50,000 than make $70,000 in a group where the average salary is $80,000. We have a hard time understanding our absolute blessings, but are pretty astute at recognizing our comparative blessings.

Son, recognize your advantages, count your blessings and practice deep gratitude, and always, always strive to make the best of any situation. Life isn’t always fair. Everyone’s got issues, everyone’s got wounds, everyone’s fighting their own battles. Judge your success based on your own dreams, effort, and potential rather than comparing yourself others. You got it good, kid. Now go make it better.

And put your head up, shoulder’s back, and walk like you’re going somewhere.