FRIDAY CHILL: Introducing My Latest Before and After Performance Makeover (PHOTOS)

Yeah, I'm a volunteer coach at the local park, which has about 1,000 kids all vying to be the next Derek Jeter.  This year's team was the 9YO Angels, which started off a little something like this (email subscribers click through for photos):

That's an actual photo. Equal parts happy, tired and a little distracted.  Waiting for me to get out of the cage with the last player to arrive for the photo. I saw this photo and was reminded of this team:

Anyway, we worked hard and turned it into this:

Yes! League Champs! Congrats to all the Angels, including the ones that saw reduced playing time if their parents didn't subscribe to this blog.  I'm joking - as far as you know.

And yes, we had a brother roll up with one of the players on an off-road dirt bike:

If I'm lucky, once they get a little older that will turn into a late roster addition like it did for the Bad News Bears (pictured above).  

Congrats to the Angels - fun season.  And yes, the little guy who appears in profile shot on the sidebar of this blog is one of the Angels.  Like Vince Vaughn once said, he's all growns up.

Meet Another HR Capitalist - Jeff Lucier (Ottawa! HR for Non-Profits! Rock and Roll!)

The best part of my job as a HR Leadership blogger is I get to talk to some really cool people.  I'm going to do a better job at sharing some of those conversations with you.

Hell, let's do that today... I do a podcast over at Fistful of Talent called The CYA report, and on today’s show we have Jeff Lucier, Director, Human Resources and Organizational Development at United Way Ottawa, on human resources in the non-profit sector.

I'm talking to him about running a HR shop inside a non-profit, which is something I haven't done, but some of you have pondered for sure.

He's a HR Capitalist - just like you.  Take a listen now, on your way home tonight - whatever - it's perfect smartphone fodder for when you can't look at the screen.  See player below for the podcast (email subscribers may have to click through)...

PS - Connect wtih Jeff by clicking here...

HOW MANAGERS BECOME CAREER AGENTS - They Help Employees Build Portfolios...

We did a FOT Webinar yesterday with our friends at Halogen Software entitled, "Get My Agent on the Phone - How Smart Managers Position themselves as Career Agents."

I'm a big believer that the best managers aren't the best because they parrot what they've read on the business bestseller list - they're the best because they attend FOT Webinars.

I kid - they're the best because they serve as a career agent for the employees who report to them.  They're not authoritarian - "do this because I told you so"... They view and commuincate everything they do through the lens of the employee.

One of the things we shared and talked about - managers who are truly agents for their employee's careers have a way at measuring performance goals by getting employees to do cool things towards that goal - that they then can market internally and externally to the broader world.

See the slides below and ping me if you want to throw it around. (email subscribers may have to click through to view)

GROWTH CAN BE UGLY: LinkedIn Clarifies that Working Girls Aren't Welcome...

I called the use of LinkedIn by professional escorts back in March. Check out the data from that post below:

"The keyword "sexy" generated 13% of my profile views generated by a keyword search.

Sexy.  Boom.  That just happened.  See the graphic to the right."

So 13% of the keyword searches that led to a click-through of my profile started with the word "sexy".  I later found that the following text in my profile (talking about my other blog, Fistful of Talent) was the source of the keyword in question. Here's what it says:

"The origin of FOT is simple to trace. In late 2007, Kris Dunn (KD) got a call from a major conference company: “We want to hire you to create a Talent Management blog for our new website”, the suits said, “Like the HR Capitalist but without all the boring HR stuff like legal issues and employee relations tactics – just the sexy stuff.”

I thought that proved that lots of people are using LinkedIn for... Let's say "interesting" reasons. Check out what I wrote in March:

"VP of HR" produced 1% of the profile views from all total keyword searches that ended up on my profile. "Sexy" returned 13%.

You tell me what people are using LinkedIn for.  I'm out."

LinkedIn announced yesterday that working girls/guys are specifically prohibited from using its platform to market services.  More from The Verge:

"LinkedIn has set itself up as one of the premiere sites for professionals to connect and look for employment, but one controversial category of workers appears to be getting the cold shoulder: sex workers are now prohibited from using the service to advertise their wares or their experience. This new restriction appears to cover both larger agencies like VIP escort services as well as individual workers. The change comes through an update to LinkedIn's user agreement that rolled out last week; it now states that "even if it is legal where you are located, [users may not] create profiles or provide content that promotes escort services or prostitution." It appears that even those whose sex-related careers are legal, LinkedIn doesn't want to promote such content on its site.

Unsurprisingly, there's been a bit of an online backlash from sex workers who used the site to connect with clients — and there's a sense of discrimination because of the more risqué nature of their businesses. "I'm fully legal," says Madison Graham, a prostitute at Dennis Hof's Love Ranch North in Carson City NV. "I'm a legal business, and I should be treated with the same respect as any other legal business." But as a private site, LinkedIn is well within its rights to make these decisions, and it's not really a change from its earlier policy. "To be totally clear, our policy has not changed," Madey said. "We didn't allow profiles to promote these kinds of activities before, and we still don't."

The moral of the story? Growth is ugly. Provide a way to network and connect, and you never know how use of your service is going to evolve. 

LinkedIn has an escort problem, and it's likely that they'll have other problems related to splinter groups they don't want broadly identified with their service. Tumblr, just acquired by Yahoo, is widely reported to have an adult content problem. Gotta be proactive related to killing that type of stuff if you're going to keep upselling corporations with recruiting accounts.

No word on whether the escort InMail response rate was higher or lower than that of Java Developers.  

On the plus side, even though lots of people found me this way, no one ever "reached" out.

PHOTO: Keep It All In Perspective This Week...

Because when you really start thinking about it, the only thing that matters is that kids like this got a puppy. The rest is details.

Taken on my way to the ATL at the Oxford Starbucks.

CAPITALIST WEBINAR: Teach Your Managers to Be Career Agents For Your Employees...

Authoritarian managers? Sure, they get things done. They get results.

But as they grind away for results from a position of power, there's a dirty little secret. At some point, the talent that works for them is going to walk away. For a better, or even lateral, job. For hope that there's something better out there.

The managers who get the best results over time aren't authoritarian. They look and feel like career agents for the people who work for them. They approach everything related to performance from the lens of the employee's career.  Like this:

"I'm not here to just grind on you to get results. I'm here to make you better, so you're going to have fun, make more $$ over time and accomplish your career goals while we get results for the company."

"I'm willing to do that even if it means you promote yourself by taking a better job with another company because we made you better."

Think about that last statement for a second. Powerful. Only a handful of managers out of 100 make their employees feel that way.  And they're the ones employees are most loyal to - no coincidence, my friends.

It's called the manager as a career agent.  Do you buy it? 

If you want to buy the concept but really don't know how to guide your managers to become career agents for their employees, send them to the webinar I'm doing with Halogen software entitled “Get My Agent On The Phone: How Smart Managers Position Themselves as Career Agents Via Performance Management” (click to register).  Join us next Tuesday, May 21st at 1pm EST, and we’ll hit you with the following ways you can help your managers become career agents for employees:

• By making sure the goals they set represent the Five Most Important Things (5MIT) for the employee in question. Smart managers skip discussing the busy work and get to what’s going to change the game – for the company and the employee. We’ll give you the 411 on how to do that as an agent for your employees.
• Offering up ways each of the Five Most Important Things might be measured in the months that follow. You want measurements – we get it. We’ll show you how to set the expectation your direct reports are going to be measured on, without actually taking performance or development off the table. PS – They’ll love you for this if you deliver it in the right way.  Think “employee portfolio”…
• Having Thoughts on what “Good” and “Great” performance looks like in each area. That’s right – we’re going through a goal setting process not because HR told us we had to, but because it can set us up to be a great performance coach for the rest of the year, and help us get the employee where they want to go with their career.
• Including a section that details “What’s In It for Me?” for each area of focus. Being an agent is about talking about how chasing great performance in the area in question could be great for the employee’s career. We’ll show you how to frame this as the agent/coach. It’s the most important thing you can do.
• Putting it all in an easy to follow, informal format. If you go beyond one page, you’re making goal setting too complex. List everything we’ve described to this point in one page, and make the headers conversational in nature, and you win. We’ve even got some formats we'll share with you.
• Having a plan that screams "career agent" when you coach on a daily basis and maybe even start having 1-on-1s on a regular basis that you don't dominate, you authoritarian #$#$!

You can be viewed as a career agent for your employees rather than a run of the mill corporate bureaucrat. Join us for “Get My Agent on the Phone“ and we’ll show how the secret sauce to goal setting and follow-up conversations can dramatically change the positioning of what you do in performance management.

See you next Tuesday!

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!

RULE #1 For the New World HR Pro: You Gotta Ask...

I'm on record as saying that HR pros can learn a lot from Sales Pros.

At the top of the list is learning to negotiate.  Of all the negotiation skills available, the most valuable one is the first-strike position, or more to the point, simply asking for what you want.  Check out the example given by a VC I love to read, then I'll give you three scenarios you can force yourself or your team into to practice the skill.

Because if you get over your fear, you quickly learn that no one dies when you ask.  Most people actually want to give you what you ask for, mainly because they get asked so rarely.

More from Mark Suster at Both Sides of the Table:

When I lived and worked in London my wonderful assistant was Deborah Halliday, who was raised a very “proper” British young lady. Her brother played rugby for the English rugby team and went to Oxford. That’s kind of like having a brother in the NFL in the US.

If there was any society in which being a hustler was out of step with the norm is was England. Yet I was a foreigner so I got away with being different.

I used to ask Deborah to book my travel plans in France and Germany were I went 1-2 times / month. There were online tools to book this stuff but the Internet booking sites were early.

I would tell Deborah, “I found this hotel near the Champs Elysees for 170 Euros. But I don’t want to pay that much. Tell them I’ll stay if they’ll give it to me for 120 Euros.

“What? You want … what?”

“Mark. You can’t do that! You can’t just name your own price.”

Me. “Of course I can. Tell them you found a hotel down the street for 100 Euros but I prefer to stay at their hotel. Haggle. See what you can do.

Deborah. She was mortified. Bless her cotton socks. I put her outside of her comfort zone.

Me. “Deborah. You don’t ask, you don’t get! What’s the worst they can tell you? “No?” If so, we’ll call back an hour later and pay 170 Euros. It’s not like they’re going to tell you ‘no’ in an hour. You might as well try!”

Classic Mexican Road strategy.

Here’s the thing. They NEVER said ‘no.’ Such were the times. They weren’t fully occupied.

She began to love it. It was liberating. I taught her to make it a game. I would challenge her to see how cheap she could get rooms. I can still hear her giggle at how ridiculous it was in her mind’s eye. And yet how eye opening it was that you could have almost anything you wanted. If you just asked.

You gotta ask.  Want to practice as an HR pro?  Here's three scenarios where you can ask for what you want - but most HR pros never do:

1. You have a candidate who has told you they need 75K.  They're currently making 68K.  Offer them 69K and pitch - tell them why it's a great deal.

2. You've got a meeting you're hosting and need a conference room - call a hotel and ask for the room for free, on a date they usually have a hard time filling.

3.  The next time someone tells you that you're holding them up from making a term that needs to happen, immediately tell them you should go talk to the person that manages them- now - to have a robust conversation on the risk and what has and hasn't happened to that point.  

In short, ask for what you want.  If you're part of the 95% that the Suster references in his complete post (and it's probably higher in HR), you need the practice.

Start teeing it up - no one gets hurt.  All they can say is "no".  

ASK THE CAPITALIST: How Long Should Hiring Managers Have To Give Feedback on Candidates?

Hi KD - 

What's a best practice related to how long a hiring manager should have to give you feedback post-submittal or post-interview on a candidate you've provided to them?

Signed - Ignored in Texas

--------------------------------

Ah yes - hurry up recruiters! Give us candidates! Feed us!! 

Then once we have them, we'll be sure to....um....<crickets>

Hiring manager feedback is tough to get.  Should it be that tough?  No.  Will it remain tough to get? Yes.

Feedback - especially from a hiring manager who has openly claimed they need and expect help - should come within three days of you submitting a resume/submittal and two days of a live interview.  If it's more than that, it's way too long.  It should actually be two and one respectively, but let's walk before we run.

Best ways to get compliance with that - get everyone to agree that the clock is always ticking for top talent (pitch that candidates start to think something is wrong and scatter regardless of the reality), then get agreement that you're going to start reporting that as a metric, just like you would Time to Fill and Cost Per Hire.

Then embarrass the outliers. 

Have fun with that.  Remember - you're doing it for the kids.

KD

The Dirty South, NASCAR and This - All The Proof You Need the World Is Now Global...

You think the world isn't global everywhere?  You better think again - this picture I snapped reminded me of the reality over the weekend:

That's right - a pickup truck in Birmingham, AL.  You expect the small decal on the back windshield - a Jeff Gordon NASCAR sticker.  What you don't expect is a donkey-sized Manchester United sticker, and you especially don't expect both together.  

But that's the world your employees see these days.  A pickup.  NASCAR.  Premiere League Soccer.  +whatever else they sprinkle in from a shrinking globe fueled by a 24/7, always on media world.

Look at the stickers in your parking lot - you'll probably see some surprises.

Here's Why You Should Never Be Afraid to Fire Someone Resistant to Change...

Check out the chart below as Exhibit A:

Change and taking risks is difficult. Of course, if you don't have the right number of people in your organization who are comfortable asking "what's next", it's going to catch up with you.

Raise your hand if you thought in 2001 that AOL's sub base would decline by 90%.  Anyone?

They didn't think so either.  They undoubtedly had opportunities in hundreds of areas, including broadband and video. They stuck with dial-up. Ugh.

More from Dan Frommer at Splat F:

At the end of March, almost 2.7 million people still subscribed to AOL service, the company reported this morning. That’s about where Netflix stood at the end of 2004.

Since then, Netflix’s subscriber base has grown — 29 million at the end of March — and AOL’s has declined at a remarkably parallel rate. But that makes perfect sense: Nothing says “dialup” more than AOL, and few services have benefited more from the growth of broadband than Netflix. (The paths cross in early 2008, just as Netflix’s streaming video service was starting to take off

• Worth noting: Netflix now has more subscribers than AOL ever had. (The distinction changed hands late last year.) This makes sense, given the rise of mobile devices, cheaper computers, connected videogame consoles/TVs, and just the increasing popularity of the Internet, thanks to broadband.
• Worth pondering: What will eventually cause Netflix’s decline? Missing the next era of Internet technology? (Something mobile-first or mobile-only?) Internal crumbling? Or are Netflix’s best years just getting started?

Andy Gove once said, "Only the paranoid survive.".  I like that.

Fire a change-blocker today.  Include the AOL chart with the documentation you do on the term.

Practical and Trendy Uses of Social #Hashtags for Leaders..

Hey Age-Related Protected Class People...

Yeah - you.  Especially those of you that are hiring lots of young professionals and manage people.

Do you know how to use a hashtag on social properties like Twitter and Instagram?  In case you didn't realize, Instagram is the new Facebook for the young guns.  And hashtags, introduced originally by Twitter, play in heavy rotation on most social properties.

Figure out what a hashtag is here.

It might be your chance to connect and act like you know what you're doing.  Or it might make you look so old that even Kevorkian wouldn't take the case.

Here's an appropriate use of hashtags by Kliff Kingsberrry, head coach at Texas Tech.  Observe and learn:

Hashtags can be used even in formal communications these days, as shown above.  Of course, to properly use hashtags in formal communication, you probably need to be active on social and properly mixing your work and personal activities in broadcast mode on the platforms.  Get started, Marge.  Take a flier, Henry.

#getwiththeprogram

#donttellmetogetoffyourlawn

#lookyoungerthanyoufeel

#supriseme

Why Companies Stack Rank The Performance of Employees...

Capitalist Note - On the road talking to some folks about Performance today. Reminded me of the question asked in this post title, and the comments are probably better than the post.  Enjoy...

A sharp reader named Amanda writes:

"If you're a strong manager who regularly provides feedback and coaching, and you aggressively manage poor performance (either to improvement or out of the org), then why should it be impossible for you to have a team of strong to high performers? Furthermore, why wouldn't a company want that for all their teams?"

Which begs the question - why do companies stack rank performance and poison so much water?

The answer is pretty simple - most managers can't, won't or aren't boxed in enough to do what it takes to aggressively manage performance.  So poppa (the company) has to come in and say the following:

"We haven't trained you as a manager to truly manage performance on your own.  And you know what?  Even if we did, you'd avoid doing what's required because there's a bunch of daily straight talk involved.  So here's what we're going to do - rather than us training you and then you throwing away all that training because it's human nature to avoid confrontation, we're just going to have you rank your employees 1 through 10.  We may fire #9 and #10.  That's all you have to do - see you in December for that, right around the holidays.  Please go back to avoiding tough conversations."

Companies stack rank because it's the path of least resistance, the lowest common denominator for what needs to be done.

Amanda's one of the good ones.  The problem is most people won't do what she suggests.  Enter the stack rank.

MEETS VS EXCEEDS: The World Needs Ditch Diggers Too...

You're a manager of people.  Somebody on your team is just muddling through, meeting expectations and basically doing average work.  They're capable of more.  They don't seem to be feeling your "up with people" or "A-player" only vibe.  

You're telling them what great performance looks like in multiple areas. You look across the table and all you see is a zombie who's wondering what the special is at Buffalo Wild Wings at lunch. You've become Charlie Brown's teacher - that's what they hear when you talk.

What do you do?

You're only shot is to tell them what's in it for them if they chase the higher performance level you're promoting. What do they get if they chase that? That's what you have to figure out and promote.

It's a problem of motivation.

Figure that out and properly position it - and you have a chance to get better performance.

If they're still not responsive, you've got a ditch digger.  And the world needs ditch diggers too.

But do you need a ditchdigger?  That's another post for another day.

Is Your HR Practice a Battleship or a Blueberry Pancake?

A lot of you know who Seth Godin is - blogger, author, marketing thought leader, blah/blah/blah.

He's known for quippy, quick posts.  Like anyone else who writes daily, sometimes they're gold, sometimes they're good, sometimes they're "meh".

He nailed it today talking about companies and organizations either being "battleships" or "Blueberry pancakes."  See the whole post here.

The comparison makes for a good question for HR leaders - are you building a battleship or a blueberry pancake?  Here's some of the difference per Godin:

"The typical industrial-era organization is like a battleship. Hundreds or thousands of people onboard, and most of them are essential--but most of them aren't actually directly responsible for the work that we hired the battleship to do. Without the fuel people, the navigation team, the folks in the med corps and on and on, it doesn't work.

One more thing about the people on the battleship: just about everyone has a punchlist, an itemized inventory of what they need to get done. And many of them are rewarded for doing that set of tasks more efficiently, more elegantly and with better quality than expected. Great people means the system works even better, but it's designed to survive with people who are merely good at what they do.

The typical professional services company, on the other hand, is a lot like a blueberry pancake. While there's an essential support team, the firm is all about blueberries working in parallel. Each blueberry can work independently, and sometimes they even work on projects that might have conflicting outcomes or views of the world. I don't care how many people report to you. I care about how connected and how brave you are.

As the firm gets bigger, it doesn't get thicker. You don't make a better pancake by making a thicker one. You make a better pancake by hiring ever better blueberries."

And, as you might expect, Godin provides more fodder for why most companies (and I'm saying HR practices) don't center they're strategy around the latter - blueberries:

"And, as you've guessed, most of the blueberries don't know exactly what they'll be doing in six weeks, and most don't work from a manual about the industry's best practices on how to do what they do. It's hard to measure blueberries, but a talented and motivated one can also change the world."

Which brings to mind this important point for HR leaders - even if you have to build a battleship to get things done, you ought to always have and protect talent that is like the blueberry Godin references.

Blueberries don't want to serve on a battleship. But if you protect them and give them the right environment, they'll be part of your team anyway.  

A DEEPER QUESTION: How to Measure Passion in an Interview...

You want candidates who are passionate about what they do for a living, don't you?

Of course you do. But passion for a profession is tough to get a grip on.  Find out whether the people you are interviewing have passion for what they do (or are simply paying the bills) through some of the following interview strategies:

1. Ask candidates how they stay up to date in their field.  If you see a glut of reliance on professional training and formal activities that happen in company time, you're probably not dealing with passion.

2. Ask a candidate to give you a big question in their field they'd like to solve and why. Ask them what they've done related to starting to figure out the answer.  Probe hard on the answers they give.  See any creativity?  You might have passion.  See lots of glittering generalities?  That's fake passion. 

3. Ask a candidate how they find others in their profession to connect with, and how often they connect with others in their field outside their company.

What do they talk about?  What type of information is exchanged? How have those connections helped them?

4. Ask Motivational Fit questions - When have your been most satisfied in your work at Company X?  Least Satisfied? If the answers show a consistent theme of talking about BS factors rather than a clear line towards being able to do interesting work related to their field, it's hard to project them as passionate in their field.

And no Skippy - passion for something that's not work related doesn't count for you as an interviewer - it's nice to know you run marathons, but it has no impact on things that emulate from passion for the profession - continuous improvement, innovation, etc.  It does tell me you're not going to cost a lot for healthcare, though.  Thanks!

Start asking questions that give you line of sight for professional passion on your candidates. No fake passion or passion that doesn't produce results.

Or just keep looking for people that want to make the donuts and go home.