HR

asking different questions, solving different problems

The freaks, weirdos, and innovators – the people who stand out and stand different – are often different only because they are solving different problems than the rest of us. Put another way, their solutions are different because their goals and questions are different.

Southwest Airlines operates so differently from other airlines in large part because when they started out they were not competing with other airlines. Instead, they decided to compete against buses and trains and even cars. Their insight and innovations came from solving different problems.

When you look at all the different types of cars on the road it’s clear that different people are solving different problems. A turbodiesel pickup solves different problems than a sports car which solves different problems than a minivan or an SUV and they solve different problems than economy cars.

A few days ago a new car was released. It’s a performance luxury sedan that will accelerate from 0-60 in a hair under 4.5 seconds (that’s deep into sports car territory) and has a lower center of gravity and potentially better handling than any other sedan. The dealer and will come to the customer’s location for maintenance and can do a lot of repairs remotely using a built in wireless connection into the car’s computer. It costs about $55k – $105k depending on options and performance levels. This car clearly has BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, Audi, etc. right in its sights. Oh, and it’s a new company based in the US which is a sister to an aerospace company. Interested? Appearance and performance alone got my attention, but the most intriguing part is that it is 100% electric.

Actually, that’s not true. I really like the car, or at least what the car potentially promises, but what I most appreciate is that this company – Tesla – chose to solve a completely different set of problems. Other electric cars choose to be funky looking, easily identifiable, and aimed at environmentalists and Hollywood activists. The emphasis is on “electric” and they designed to appeal to those who are most interested in demonstrating to the world how Green they are.

Tesla, on the other hand, appears to have decided to build a really great car, a car whose appearance, price, and performance would appeal to anyone seeking a performance luxury sedan. It just happens to have an electric motor rather than a gas engine. They see the electric motor as a solution to performance, not necessarily environmental, problems. As a result, this car is competing against gasoline engines, not other electric cars. And that has the potential to be a complete game changer.

I haven’t driven one, I can’t speak to whether or not it’s a good car, and this isn’t an ad for Tesla. I am, however, impressed that they chose to blow up the old business model and change the game. Perhaps the most significant thing they did early on was define their competition rather than letting their competition define them. Just as Southwest Air did 40 or so years ago, they asked different questions and got different answers.

This can be done in any business, but takes courage and a willingness to stand apart. We even see this in Human Resources. The traditional question is: How do we stay compliant? The game changing question (with all due credit to Jason Lauritsen) is: How will HR support and increase company performance?

What question will change things in your industry? At your company? In your career?

 

feedback, the overlooked advantage

Organizations only improve when individuals improve. People simply cannot improve without feedback. Most people and most organizations struggle because the only thing harder than giving good feedback is receiving it.

Jason Lauritsen recently wrote a great post titled “Flipping the Script on Feedback”. Lots of interesting points about feedback, but what really struck me was his comment: …teach people how to receive [feedback] rather than spending so much time worrying about the way in which your managers deliver it.

I was struck by what a friend used to call a blinding flash of the obvious. Duh! We spend all this time trying to teach managers to deliver feedback well – which is important – and miss the most crucial link. If the employee is not good at receiving feedback, it doesn’t matter how well it’s delivered. If they are good at receiving it, then they will still try to benefit from it even if the delivery is poor. Obviously, training on giving and receiving feedback isn’t mutually exclusive, but his post serves as an important reminder that both sides of the equation are important.

As I think about it, I wonder why organizations don’t place much, much greater emphasis on developing every employee and manager to be truly great at giving and receiving feedback. After all, we will never (read as: NEVER) create a high performing organization, department, team, family, etc. without the ability to honestly give and learn from feedback. It’s a pretty straightforward equation: the more receptive to feedback (data) we are, the more people share ideas and information with us, the better the information we have, the better the decisions we make and actions we take, the better results we get. AND the better we are able to assess, evaluate, revise and improve.

I suspect that downplaying or dismissing the importance of feedback is simply another symptom of the misguided belief that business results are somehow separate from the people in the business.

Better people = better results. Period.

human resources’ top goal? (repost)

From time to time I see HR folks insisting that the primary purpose of Human Resources is to keep the company from being sued. This philosophy is at the very core of everything I find wrong with HR.

Yes, HR can play a huge role in preventing or mitigating employment lawsuits. This is an important result of HR, but the top goal? Prevent lawsuits vs. select and train really great people? Prevent lawsuits vs. creating an environment where people actually want to be there? Prevent lawsuits vs. helping managers be the best leaders they can be? It really seems to be putting the cart before the horse. After all, a company can get sued if it mismanages its money but no one ever says that the number one goal of the finance department is to prevent lawsuits. You can get sued for being abusive to customers or false advertising, but I’ve never heard anyone suggest that the primary purpose of customer service and marketing are to prevent lawsuits.

Want to know the #1 way to ensure that HR is never involved in any strategic level conversations? Want to guarantee that your company culture is rife with fear and managers don’t manage? Want to be stuck in the glorious tar pit of HR as bureaucracy? Spend all your time focused on not getting sued.

In the perfect little world in my head, HR’s #1 goal is to help the company perform at its best. Minimizing lawsuits is a by product of doing things right; it’s a means to an end but not the end itself. The best processes and practices will help the company perform in a way that comply with all the laws and regulations. However, “not getting sued” as an end goal will never, ever create high performance. It’s like a runner training for a marathon with the #1 goal of not getting injured. Sure, they don’t want to get injured, but the best way to not get injured is to not train. After all, you can’t pull a muscle sitting on the couch. But that doesn’t work because their #1 goal is to perform at their best on race day. Not getting hurt is a part of that, but it’s obviously not the focus. Instead, the runner knows that with good planning, preparation, and execution of a training program they will minimize their chances of getting injured while maximizing the chances of high performance.

It’s an idea worth repeating: HR’s #1 goal is to help the company perform at its best.  And if you do it well, you automatically reduce the chance of getting sued. But that’s an outcome of doing things right not the other way around. For example, adhering to all the anti-discrimination laws does not ensure that you hire great people. But when you are focused on hiring the best people you will naturally seek diverse talent pools because you don’t want to exclude the best talent because of arbitrary bias.

Can we move HR out of the dark ages now? Instead of operating out of continual fear of lawsuit, let’s create high performing companies by helping people be at their best.

all you need to know about training design (repost)

When training fails, it is generally because the learners haven’t understood the material on both an intellectual AND an emotional level. Intellectual level training focuses on the “what” and the “how”. What needs to be done and how do I need to do it?

We see this all the time. Where people say they don’t need training because they already know it, but they aren’t doing any of it. They haven’t truly connected with the “why”. Why is it important that I do it? What are the benefits of doing it or the consequences if I don’t?

There are only two reasons that humans do anything: 1) to seek pleasure; and 2) to avoid pain.  These are the same two reasons that humans learn anything. Why do we learn the newest version of Microsoft Office? To do our jobs better (pleasure) and to avoid failing at our jobs (pain). Why do we learn new exercises or diets? To get sexy and delay death.

So, no matter how much we read, research, discuss, and ponder, we never truly learn until we connect with the material at an emotional level. Everyone knows that smoking, drinking, or eating too much will shorten their lives. We know at the intellectual level, but often don’t get it at the emotional level (if we did, we’d stop). Until a person really, really connects with the consequences at an emotional level, intellectual warnings do zero good.

All great training – regardless of topic – teaches the what, how, and the why. And it does it in a way that each participant can individually understand and key into. Experience is the best teacher because it provides the emotional learning.

Will Rogers really understood this principle. He summed up everything important about training design in three sentences: “There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”

Design and evaluate your training programs accordingly…

 

Note: this is a repost of my very first blog post from almost a year ago. Hope you enjoyed.

nontroversy in the workplace

Want more engagement and less knee-jerk decisions? Eliminate nontroversies.

A nontorversy is a controversy that isn’t. It’s artificial, manufactured, or falsely amplified. It’s a non-issue that is given more time and energy than is due. It’s making mountains out of molehills.

Nontorversies are easily seen in the political arena and talk radio. They are used as daily distraction and attempt to discredit opponents over non-issues.

Nontroversies are created in the workplace by the rumor mills, passive-aggressive people, complainers, people who create unnecessary drama as a hobby, or those who play cutthroat corporate politics. Some common examples:

Continual complaining about issues they don’t really care about.

Inflating the severity of other people’s mistakes so it goes several levels up the chain of command before everyone discovers it was very minor.

Creating new rules and policies before investigating how prevalent and persistent an issue is.

Over-reaction to pending legislation. Panicking before even knowing what it’s going to look like in real life.

Focusing on the fad and buzzword of the day.

Continually positioning oneself (or department) as the hero whenever anything goes wrong, no matter how minor.

Two faced complaining and finger pointing.

Finding flaws in other’s work to make oneself look better.

Over-labeling events. Forever referring to that time five people got laid off as “Black Tuesday.”

Harboring anger and resentment for issues that happened years ago and have long since been resolved.

Trauma and drama sell. People seem to love to gripe and find flaws and complain about any change. Nontroversies thrive wherever there is a lack of transparent, authentic, honest communication but they can pop up anywhere. That is their nature. Yesterday’s nontroversy is today’s old (yawn) news. Today’s nontraversy will be replaced with another tomorrow. Nontraversies don’t need substance. They don’t need logic. They don’t have to have a long shelf-life. They just need to give us something to overact to today.

High performing teams and companies can’t (and don’t) waste time and energy on non-issues. What are you doing to eliminate drama ? How do you keep the nontroversies at bay?

customer service: if you want a 10, do 10 work

You want your employees to do well, right? Of course, and you know that you can’t manage what you can’t measure so you set up some way of measuring their performance. And then you discover that you truly get what you measure, regardless of whether that’s what you actually wanted or not.

A salesperson recently revealed the disconnect between measured and desired outcomes when a co-worker purchased a car a couple of weeks ago. The salesperson’s parent company has a big focus on customer service and providing an outstanding experience. Each customer is surveyed after the sale and any rating lower than a 10 (the highest possible) drew negative attention for both the sales person and the dealer.

On the surface this sounds great. You can just imagine the company saying that they want every customer to have a 10 experience so that’s what they will measure and reward for. The problem – for this salesperson, at least – is that the focus shifted from providing an 10 experience to getting a 10. This is key: the focus shifted from the customer’s experience to the salesperson’s ratings.

This sounds similar, but it is very different. Because the salesperson was so worried about his ratings, he never bothered to provide service worth rating. I need to mention that she is one of the kindest, non-confrontational, charitable people one could hope to meet. She does not gripe or complain maliciously, yet had little good to say about the salesperson. Some highlights of my co-worker’s experience:

The car was being shipped because what she wanted wasn’t in stock the day it was purchased. Rather than keeping her posted, she had to constantly hunt down and badger the salesperson to find out the status of her order.

Whenever she pointed out his poor efforts, he blamed other people. In fact, it sounded like he spent the entire time saying, “You are going to give me a 10, aren’t you? It was never my fault things went wrong. You need to give me a 10.”

She was told that if she gave the salesperson and the dealer a 10 on the survey they would give her a free oil change.

The salesperson said that if she wasn’t going to give him a 10 it would probably be best if she didn’t do the survey at all.

She had to endure a bunch of whining about just how hard his life is and why she really needed to give him a 10.

He was so obsessed with getting a 10 that she hesitates to give less out of a mild concern of some type of retribution.

The whole thing sounded boring, repetitive, insulting, and possibly immoral. If you want a 10, do 10 work. If you can’t do 10 work and your career hinges on it, find another career.

I wonder if the company knows how much their dealers and salespeople are aggressively gaming the system? Punishing for anything less than a 10 seems counterproductive because if forces people to be short-sighted and silly and ultimately creates an experience that discourages repeat sales. People make mistakes, things go wrong, customers can be unreasonable, some people will never give a top rating except at gunpoint, etc. Insisting on continuous very, very high performance is fine, but it places much greater emphasis on outstanding hiring and very thorough training.

A top performer will still stand out and rise above when things go bad and try to make it right because they are focused on delivering a great experience, regardless of the circumstances. Marginal performers will retreat into fear and self-preservation. Their well-meaning system forces these extremes.

How would you set it up differently if you were the parent company?

ten reasons you don’t need to make hiring a top priority

Hiring people – especially if you really do it right – takes a lot of time and effort. It’s hard work getting your processes to world class and training all the hiring managers. And any selection system worth its salt is going to be a involved multi-step process, never mind all the scheduling and follow up.

I get it. So I’ll let you off the hook. Below are ten quick reasons you don’t need to make hiring a top priority or spend any time improving your selection processes.

1. You need to free up time for disciplines and terminations. Who has time to hire right when you’re too busy firing?

2. Your company lives and dies by the philosophy that “there’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over.”

3. You enjoy turnover. The revolving door approach is a great way to meet new people.

4. Hiring top quality people would intimidate current employees. It’s best to keep standards low and keep people happy.

5. Your competition also has lousy hiring practices. Why be better than you have to?

6. Lawsuits are fun.

7. You see no direct connection between the people doing the work and the company’s business results. You probably also see no connection between the food you eat and your current weight. Time to buy stock in your competition.

8. You assume all people are the same so one is as good as any other. A cog’s a cog, right? Why spend a lot of time looking when any warm body will do?

9. You are so worried about today, you don’t have time to worry about tomorrow.

10. You hate the company and are currently looking for your next job, so who cares about the quality of employees at this company. It’s not your problem.

What did I miss?

 

never as good as i think i am

I have tried to train myself to view feeling comfortable in my job as a big warning sign. The flashing red lights start going off when I catch myself thinking, “You know, I’m actually pretty good at this.” Hubris is a dangerous thing that leaves us blinded to reality. It feels great, but it’s a dangerous place to be.

It was bicycling that tipped me off to the dangers and often re-reminds me of it:

A couple of times a year, I’ll be out on my road bike pedaling along and just be flying. Beautiful day, landscape rolling past, feeling great, and thinking I’m in much better shape than I thought. Then I’ll turn around to head home and realize that I had a strong tailwind. I wasn’t in great shape, I just didn’t notice how much I was being helped along.

I regularly mountain bike on a pretty challenging set of trails and it’s easy to start thinking I’m pretty good. Well, no. I just know my trails really well and that’s very different from being good. I recently rode a different set of trails and got my hiney kicked. Turns out I’m not quite as good, fast, or strong as I fooled myself into thinking. A painful lesson, but necessary.

Success is the product of good thinking and hard working. It’s important to celebrate our accomplishments, but it’s easy to over-congratulate ourselves for our successes. Yes, we have quite a bit to do with our triumphs, but sometimes they are helped by additional factors that we don’t notice and can’t control. The tailwind, familiarity, being a big fish in a small pond, a lack of real competition, staying within our comfort zones all help us think we’re doing better than we actually are.

Consider some of the key places we see this show up:

People often have a hard time making the jump to the next level of whatever they’re good at. For example, athletes who are superstars at the regional level, are just another decent player at the national level. Another example is MBA programs, where people who were the standouts as undergrads are just another face in the crowd, surrounded by lots of equally smart, aggressive, and talented people. That’s a humbling experience. Some relish the challenge and love being surrounded by people who push them to bring out their best. Others struggle to come to terms with the idea that they are just average in their new peer group.

When hiring, how do you determine that an applicant’s previous successes will translate to your company? We’ve probably all seen people with impressive resumes not do well because the new environment was too different and didn’t mesh.

Or what about the rising star employees who flame out when they are promoted too soon. They show some promise, have some early successes, and then get pushed to a level they are not yet ready for. Something unexpected happens that they don’t have the experience or luck to deal with and it all caves in. Worse, they start believing their own hype and because of their past successes they are given a lot of rope to hang themselves. When it all catches up with them it catches up hard.

This is also an issue with employee development: how do you develop people fast enough to keep them engaged, but slow enough that they can really,  truly learn what they need to know? How do you acknowledge and applaud them without instilling a false sense of confidence?

In our own jobs, we want continuous and never-ending improvement, but how do we push ourselves beyond our comfort levels when it’s so, well, uncomfortable? We want success, but easy success fool us into thinking we’re better than we are. If we don’t consciously try new things, experiment, and sometimes feel like we’re failing, it can prevent the growth that leads to bigger, long-term success.

Where are you feeling confident in your job? What would you need to do to make your job feel challenging? Where is the edge of your skills and what can you attempt that is slightly beyond the boundary? What new settings, projects, or tasks can you take on that might push you just a bit?

what the workplace needs now

Some days I’d love to just tweak the workplace a bit. Do less of some things and more of others. Little stuff to improve things. Below is a wish list of what the workplace really needs right now. Wouldn’t it be great if we could each do our part and contribute to creating a workplace where there’s:

Less doing, more talking.

Fewer problem solvers, more problem spotters.

Less direct feedback, more gossip.

Less honesty, more passive-aggressiveness.

More “I tried” and less “I did”.

Less personal responsibility, more entitlement.

Less guidance, more rigid rules.

Fewer innovators, more bureaucrats.

More doom, gloom, and threats and less optimism and celebration.

More blame, less accountability.

More talk about generational differences, less consideration for individual differences.

Less reward for merit, more reward for gut-it-out longevity.

Less team, more hierarchy.

More time spent figuring out what we can sell to customers, less time spent figuring out what our customers want and value.

More subjectivity, less objectivity.

Fewer facts, more rumors.

Less communication, more silos.

More personal fiefdoms, less big picture integration.

Less time spent studying how the world and consumers are changing, more time spent copying the competition.

Less concern about authenticity, more focus on branding.

More using social media for one-way information dumps, less two-way conversations.

Less asking customers, employees, etc. what they want, more guessing.

More jargon and buzzwords, less communication.

Less unity, more schisms.

Less focus on long-term issues, more focus on management fads.

Far less emphasis on helping people be their authentic best and far more emphasis on helping people create a plastic façade.

More yelling, less development.

More micromanaging (please!) and less leading.

More tantrums, fewer attempts to work out issues.

More learned helplessness, less empowerment.

Less training, more sink or swim learning.

Less planning, more last minute emergencies.

More talking at each other, less talking to each other.

More surprises, less strategy.

Less focus on getting things done, more focus on why we can’t.

More emphasis on personal glory, less concern for the team’s success.

Oh sure, we could do it the other way and reverse all of these, but it’s much easier to continue down the current paths. Reversing things would take vision, persistence, and continuous effort.

And that’s what the workplace really needs now.