CareerCurve™

We live in a small world that is getting smaller all the time.  The more I read about the different topics important to HR such as engagement, retention, and attracting talent the more and more I am beginning to see that Human Resources plays a major role in an organization’s success.

I wrote a post a while ago regarding HR’s role in controlling employer brand.  I am also of the opinion that a brand is the culture of an organization and the culture is the character.  Character is typically related to an individual’s integrity and core values.  But if culture is to the company as character is to the individual, doesn’t every organization have a character too?  Character then drives reputation and a company’s reputation has everything to do with its success.  HR directly affects this reputation. 

I recently read an interesting article that discusses growth strategies and defining employee engagement.  The first few paragraphs really intrigued me because it refers to a successful company who has a strategy that HR can truly embrace and nurture.  Employees come first and this supports the idea that the culture starts there, and therefore, with you. 

How much does Human Resources have to do with customers, though?  Is there a direct correlation?

Going back to my first statement, this world is small and getting smaller everyday.  You never know who may someday become a customer, who chats with a customer regularly on Facebook, and how the way you deal with people will impact a customer relationship.  It is no different than an individual living life filled with integrity and values.  If you do the same with everyone you interact with, candidates and employees alike, you boost the reputation of your company and may even directly impact a customer relationship.  I read this article about how a candidate’s interest in a position and the lack of follow through by HR caused the company to lose a client.  It really made me think about all the ways that HR contributes to the business as a whole and how your actions can really affect relationships, even if you don’t know it.  This article should be food for thought about the importance of your role.

Have you considered the direct correlation between your actions and your customer relationships?  Do you believe there is a correlation?  Do you have any experiences that reflect how your actions impact your customers?

How can performance reviews work if they don’t take into account many of the intangibles that are often not even recognized, let alone monitored?  Let’s say for example you have a team working on a project and one personality on that team has an endless supply of optimism.  Are you aware of it if you do not interact with the team all day?  Can you place a value on that?  Depending on how challenging the project is and the personality of the other team members, this could very well be the instrumental ability required to get the project completed on time and under budget – a positive mindset and  a never give up attitude. 

There are employees whose strengths drive the entire team dynamics but are these personality traits taken into consideration at review time?  Aren’t these just as important as many of the tangible skills required to create a functional and productive team?

A performance review is designed to motivate and engage employees.  Many times they have the opposite effect.  A negative review will lower morale but a positive review has virtually no effect.  Imagine you are working productively and you receive a good review.  Is this news to you?  Do you feel more motivated or do you feel as if you are a professional doing your job and wow, someone recognized that?  Don’t most people believe they do good work? (And many don’t do good work, so haven’t you just increased the odds that most everyone will be disappointed by their review?)

Are reviews motivating to your employees? Can an employee be motivated by a review that discounts many of their strengths?

Does your company have a review process?  Have you been trained to give feedback?  If you don’t think they are effective, what do you do instead to evaluate your employees and their value to the company?

I apologize in advance if this turns into a rant.  I’m about to hop up onto one of my biggest soapboxes.  I am very interested in whether HR is seeing any ramifications yet in employees or applicants. 

What is with the whole attitude surrounding kids’ sports these days?  We can’t keep score at games because we don’t want anyone to know the other team is better than them.  We can’t let kids on the same team compete for starting positions because that puts too much pressure on them.  We can’t punish anyone who doesn’t show up for practice because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.  We go for ice cream after every game instead of only when we win.  We can allow kids to practice with their team but not participate in meets or games if they feel nervous. After your part of the meet or game is done, you can leave.  Everyone gets a trophy.

I don’t understand what happened to change the way “competitive” sports (and I use that term loosely) are run now versus when I was a kid.  And what are we teaching our children?

Here is a list of life lessons I learned by participating in sports as a kid:

Competition – It is much more fun to win than to lose.  But you compete mainly against yourself and if you’ve done well, you can feel good about losing.

Goal Setting / Ambition – Lots of hard work pays off and achieving your goals feels awesome.  Once you do, you set new goals.  And you do your best, all the time. 

Dedication – A team is a group of people who depend on you to do your part.

Teamwork  - You win as a team and you lose as a team.  There is no I in team.  Your teammates will encourage you when you are struggling, will teach you things you do not know yet, and will share both your successes and failures with you.   You do the same for the other members of the team.

Commitment – When you commit to being on a team, you do not quit.  You may choose not to join again in the future, but you committed to the season and you will show up.

Humility – Sometimes your best is NOT good enough.

Respect – Your coach is the head of your team and is there to push you to be your best.  You may not like what they are saying or making you do, but they are above you in the hierarchy and you will treat them with respect.  Likewise your teammates, even if they have a bad day.

Sportsmanship – How to lose gracefully.  And more importantly, how to win gracefully.

Coping Skills / How to Manage Emotions – How to manage nervousness, pressure, disappointment in yourself, and disappointment in a team member, just to name a few.

I believe wholeheartedly that we are doing a disservice to our children by the way competitive sports are handled now.  At some point they are going to try to get a job and how are they possibly prepared for that?  We have now taught them that the world revolves around them (me, me, me), they don’t have to work hard to be rewarded, and no one will criticize them.  Their feelings will never be hurt, they’ll never be turned down for a job, and they are entitled to all kinds of great things just because they exist.   Participation is the only requirement to be successful.  Do we want a generation of people who strive for mediocrity? 

This does not even remotely resemble the real world.

Are you seeing the effects of this yet?  When you are interviewing applicants, do they have a sense of entitlement?  Do you find yourself dealing with a lack of these life lessons with your current employees?  Are candidates and employees dedicated, committed, and respectful?  Or do you now spend a lot of energy trying to create this mindset?

The challenges facing HR executives today are huge.  You must be able to engage your employees, increase morale, gain trust in an untrustworthy economy, retain your top talent, optimize your workforce, and attract new talent in what is fast becoming a competitive job market.  And there’s more.

Another skill a successful manager requires is a way to create a sense of excitement with the employees so that deadlines are met and the team you are managing works together to accomplish the overall goals.  So how do you make them excited?

Going back to my mantra – COMMUNICATE!  If everyone is brought into the overall game plan of an organization you can then create excitement.  If you can lay out the long term goals of the company as a whole and generate excitement for the road the organization is on, you will see an increase in the excitement level of your employees.  This will help achieve all of the requirements I list in the first paragraph with an added bonus.  People who are excited are impatient.  Excitement creates a sense of urgency. 

Think about any situation where you really understand what you are trying to accomplish.  Let’s say you want to go on vacation.  When do you want to do that?  NOW!  As you backtrack through the process of what needs to take place to make that happen, how are you feeling?  Anxious to get started!  Well, I need the money so what am I going to do to get it?  Maybe I’ll clean out my house and have a garage sale, maybe I’ll sell a bunch of stuff on craigslist, maybe I’ll take side jobs, maybe I’ll redo my budget and cut some expenses so I can stash a few bucks a week.  I know though, that I will be excited to start, creative in thinking of ways to make it happen quicker, and highly motivated.

If you can relay to your team the passion and excitement of the future of the organization and they buy in, you will see all sorts of positive results.  Excitement is the key.  They will think outside the box to create solutions that will be more effective with quicker results.  They will be more motivated.  They will recognize their contribution and be anxious to display their value.  They will be engaged and will want to stick around to be there when the goals are met.  And they will want to do all this NOW!

All of these things lead to increased production and happier employees and this makes you a better manager.

So I was reading about John Wooden passing away and learning more about him as a coach, a professional speaker and a person.  What a fascinating guy!  I found a site where a couple pages of quotes are listed and it got me thinking about how relevant these quotes are across the board in every area of life.  I thought about how effective it would be to really absorb these both for personal growth as well as professional growth.

Isn’t being a manager essentially the same thing as being a coach?  There is an ultimate goal and the manager’s job is to make sure everyone understands the goal, help get the best performance from each individual member, and combine those performances to achieve the ultimate goal as successfully as possible.  Is there really any difference between basketball and corporate life?  A team is still a team and they function the same way, no matter what the forum.

I think in order to be an effective manager, one needs to think about managing from the point of view of how they can help get the best from their team instead of focusing on what each individual can bring to the table.  If you can focus on how you can be a more effective manager, your team will perform at their highest levels. 

Below are some of my favorite quotes by John Wooden that reflect the type of thinking necessary to be a good manager.

A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment.

Be prepared and be honest.

Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.

Never mistake activity for achievement.

The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team.

You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one.

A theme that seems to have developed in my posts is coming through again.  Humility is important and when you want to get people to achieve certain results, start with improving yourself.  John Wooden is a great example of this.  Rest in peace, John.

I am very intrigued by the role (and havoc) that Social Media is playing in the workplace.  It would be very interesting to be able to compare the number of businesses that have been hurt by it versus the number that have been helped.  My gut tells me that if your organization is an ethical and fair place to work, there should be no fear.  If you have something to hide, watch out.  (Check out Drowned Rabbits)

That being said, you can’t please everyone all the time and there will always be a disgruntled employee out there ready to speak negatively about their company to anyone who will listen.  This has always been true, but social media sure broadens the reach and power these people have.

Unfortunately, it seems like the answer is to regulate, regulate, regulate.  I will go back to my previous post regarding trusting your employees.  How much money and effort should a company invest in trying to control that which is pretty uncontrollable?  There is no doubt that social media can cause a lot of problems for businesses.  But people are people and you cannot control what they will do. 

Don’t most people in the world understand that there will always be others who want to get a rise out of people?  It seems to me that this is not a new issue.  Only the vehicle with which to abuse company time and spread negative messages is new.  Most individuals will take corporate bashing with a grain of salt.  One well-known aspect of social media is a lack of reliability – you can’t believe everything you read.  What is the main issue from a manager’s point of view?  What employees are saying, or the time they are spending on the company dime to say it? 

I think another important consideration is the ability to do all this social media stuff on cell phones.  If it is on the computer at the office at least you can monitor it but if you try to prevent that, won’t people just use mobile devices? And then who knows what they’re doing or how often?

Do you work hard to control this or do you have faith that the company’s reputation will prevail?

I would think that one of the best solutions would be to have some guidelines that ask an employee to respect what they are being paid to do just like with email, surfing the net, and making personal calls.  Guidelines make you think, but a list of punishable offenses complete with threats of firing just creates ill will.  I have a friend who worked at an organization where the employees couldn’t even use Yahoo or LinkedIn.  Want to guess what the morale was like at that office?  I like the idea of “Give and You Shall Receive.  Trust and respect your employees and they will give you trust and respect in return.  (Here comes my idealism again.)  What if you allow them the freedom to participate in social media and they say all good things?  Now you’ve just done your organization a huge favor.  What does it say about a company whose employees like what they do and how they do it?

Another risk of restricting use is a passive aggressive revolt.  What if your employees join forces and form groups in social media where they go specifically to bash their company?  What if they let anyone join who wants to know what goes on there?  Negativity will just feed on itself and will hurt the company’s reputation and brand in the long run.

I’d love some comments from HR people who have to enforce strict rules as well as those who don’t have any at all.  I’d also love to hear any stories of successful management of social media.

I posed some questions in my previous post regarding trust in an organization – how much it matters and what are the benefits.  As I’ve read other articles and participated in conversations on this subject it would seem as though it matters.  A lot. 

There have been some surveys recently that show that trust is very low right now out  in the workplace and that this is a dangerous trend that HR leaders would be wise to pay attention to.  This article references some of the issues that arise in an environment that lacks trust. 

One interesting point that is mentioned is the lack of trust not only between management and employees but between co-workers as well.  I hadn’t considered the impact of this in my previous post but it seems as though this trend can be just as dangerous.  It appears as though some companies actively discourage trust between co-workers to avoid unionization, which can result from a group trusting each other but not their managers.  The result  is decreased productivity. 

To discourage trust means that personal relationships in the workplace barely exist.  I suppose logic would show that less time spent on personal conversation means more work gets done.  I can’t buy into this though because happy people work harder.  Don’t they? If you don’t trust the people you work with, you don’t talk to them much and I would imagine when you need a break, you are more likely to waste time surfing the net, sending personal emails or calling your friends that you do trust.  None of this helps your company in any way. 

Is 15 minutes of personal conversation by the water cooler really that detrimental in the long run?  Wouldn’t personal relationships at work create more of a team environment where people ultimately work more efficiently?  When there is trust with your co-workers, don’t you use that time to talk about work anyway?  I know I do.  I  have personal conversations with the people I work with and they always end up being work related.  The difference is we are not chatting to complain or avoid working but just want to touch base and catch up.  We usually end up brainstorming and problem solving.  We are always trying to help each other do a better job.  Maybe the important thing to consider when assessing the role trust plays with co-workers is not to calculate the time spent in personal conversations, but instead to focus on what those conversations are about.

I have been following a few conversations regarding trust in an organization – how to instill it, maintain it, and how important is it?  I am of the mindset that I can deal with anything, as long as I know what it is I’m dealing with.  I highly value someone being “straight” with me, even if it is something I don’t want to hear.  Actually, ESPECIALLY if it is something I don’t want to hear.  It has to be hard though, for the person who has to relay messages from higher ups, to create and build that trust within a company.  How can you be trustworthy when the message you are delivering is not necessarily your own?  Also, you may not have a say in how much information is distributed.  Your job may be to provide certain pieces of information while withholding others and that is not conducive to trust.

In order to get trust you have to give it, and while you may be privy to certain things that are going to affect your coworkers, you may be required to keep these details to yourself.  How is it possible to have both – do your job the way you are supposed to but still work with a team that trusts you and what you say?   As an employee, I think it is possibly the most important part of a fulfilling career.  In my opinion, an environment of honesty has a wonderful domino affect.  Believing in your boss allows you the opportunity to show the same to your employees.  This instills loyalty, hard work, and a strong work ethic.  This is all assuming I am not in the minority in appreciating the truth, whether good or bad. 

Is trust that important?  Are there genuine benefits to focusing on this in an organization or is our society too skeptical and cynical at this point for it to matter?