Coaching for Managers 101 - Use An Observation As An Anchor

I know, it's simple. But I got in thrown in my face yesterday, and it was a good refresher.

You're a manager.  Sometimes you have to course correct with people who work for you.  In your honest but ineffective moments, you'll prepare some notes to get you started.

Your notes will almost always be full of glittering generalities and be too long.  You're trying to be too nice.

Lead with a true observation/example that's yanked from your life together.  Then frame the remainder of the conversation around that.  You'll be glad you did.

Tell them what you saw, and them tell them that's the trend you see.  Then talk about how to turn it around from there.

Use the Chik-Fil-A Mess to Teach Your Employees About Freedom of Speech...

I know.  You're hopped up about the Chik-Fil-A thing, where the founder of the company said the Atlanta-based, high-end fast food retailer was "guilty as charged" related to financial support of organizations that among other things, promote marriage as being an institution that should be granted to a male/female combination only.  

Which is viewed in many corners as homophobic and anti-gay.  Which is why the mayors of Boston, New York and San Franciso all felt compelled to weigh in on the Chik-Fil-A stance.  CFA has roots in the Southeast, and the Northeast and West Coast represent markets they'd like to expand to at some point.

Why not use this market-based controversy to teach your employees about freedom of speech and organizations?

Which is to say that freedom of speech is constitutionally protected.  But that doesn't mean that people can't turn their backs on you.  

My take to employees would be that yes, for the most part, you can say what you want.  But, if saying what you want causes others around you to be unable to work with you, you might have to go find another job.  That's just the way it is.  Freedom of speech is important, but it doesn't mean you can say whatever you want.  There are consequences.  If you're going to be hard-core about any controversial issue in the workplace, you have to be prepared for the backlash.

Sometimes hard takes on issues are perceived as anti-someone.  You can say it.  But you might not be able to work here if that stance causes you to be unable to do your job.  Just ask the Dixie Chicks, to complement the conservative stance of Chick-Fil-A with one considerable less conservative at the time.

Say what you want.  We'll defend your righ to to that.  You might just have to work someplace else.

But we can still be friends.  And we might to have to eat somewhere else.  Get it?

UPDATE - Lots of emails on this one, no comments.  Who can blame my readers - this whole thing is toxic.  Best email I've received is this one from "L":

"I was eager to catch your comments on Truett/Dan Cathy’s stance concerning traditional marriage.  I left the article confused, predominantly based on the last line of the post.  Are you encouraging people to avoid Chick-fil-A because of their stance on traditional marriage…?

The other part that was a little confusing was the apparent correlation of a company’s privilege to take a moral stand and a company employee commenting on a topic using “Freedom of Speech”.  Those are two different and detached topics.  Maybe your point was simply to use the topic as a springboard to open the conversation however the inference seems to slant somewhere else.  Part of that may stem from the use of the term “Mess” in the headline.   It seems to imply Chick-fil-A is wrong for what they see as their moral stance and they created a Mess rather than those who oppose them. 

Freedom of Speech and marriage are two topics very dear to me and this article seemed to blur lines that don’t need to be blurry.  My dad almost died defending them.  I guess I’m not sure what you were trying to say or imply…?"

That's a pretty comprehensive rundown.  Here's the non-cute version of how I feel...  I like it when both people and companies take stands related to what they believe.  But, on the people side, I think employees often confuse freedom of speech with protection from the fact that exercising it in a controversial manner may lead them so ineffective in their jobs moving forward that they may have to leave the company.  Companies, like people, can take stands.  When they do, the market decides, and right now CFA is under a lot of market pressure for sure.  That's my connection on the issue between companies and individuals.

I'm not calling for a boycott at all.  I'm a church-attending moderate republican who really struggles with all sides of this.  We might have to eat somewhere else because so many people are divided on the Chick-fil-a thing.  Lots of disagreement on this.  I'll defend Chick-fil-a's right to make their opinion known to the end, but the market decides on this one globally - not me.    And I, like so many others, have lost a loved one who fought for all the rights that this issue illustrates as well.  Still, when it comes to commerce, the right is there, then the market decides.  Interesting times for sure.

GOING GLOBAL: How to Be Global in Today's Workplace Even If You Only Speak English...

I know.  You're expecting something brilliant here, maybe a flow chart or a strategic Malcolm Gladwell video.

Wrong post.  I'm simply going to tell you how to start looking like a global manager or employee even if you're locked in to Peoria as your home base 100% of the time.  The basics to get started - check it:

Rule #1 to looking global:  ALWAYS DO THE MATH FOR THE PEOPLE YOU TALK TO RELATED TO THE TIME ZONE THEY ARE IN.  That's actually rule 1-5.  Being global, or even being bi-coastal in the states means that the people you talk to should be comfortable that you're dependable, accessible and in many ways, just like the people they're talking to across the hallway.

That means you don't tell them, "let's meet at 1pm" - and you're referring to 1pm your time.  Or even say, "let's meet at 1pm my time".  You want to be on their team even though you're not there - DO THE MATH FOR THEM.  Especially if you're requesting the meeting or are the leader.

Time zones mean friction.  You job with remote folks is to take friction out of the system.  Make them want to work with you by at least taking the time zone friction off the table.

Rule #2 to looking global, even when you're not:  Don't do all the meetings with people in time zones other than yours at times that are simply convenient for you.  I can't say it any better than my friend, Gerry Crispin, who laid out the following comment on this post of mine over at Fistful of Talent:

"Don’t make weekly calls of your team (matrixed or not) at times convenient for you simply because you are the team leader. Spread them around and get your tail out of bed at 3am on occasion."

Gerry actually has some deeper comments about working with a global team, so check them out on that post.

But, this post is about the basics.  You can't possible do all the cultural things you'll need to do in a global spot before you have the moxie and selflessness to do the math for the people you're trying to schedule.  

Walk before you run.  Then maybe your company will talk to you about that spot in London.  Or, maybe Lithuania might be a better fit for you.

HR CYNICS UNITE: The AllState Claims Guarantee (Paying People to Leave)

For those of you that don't know, I'm a runner.  No races, just like to get out and reduce stress by going 4 miles or so.

These days - I'm listening to a lot of Pandora when I run.  I use the free Pandora service, which means I get fed a 30 second ad every three to four songs.  The ads are usually the same time after time, which means I have a lot of time to think about what the hell they're pitching.

The big one being played now is the "Allstate Claim Satisfaction Guarantee".  The basic jist of it is this - if you're an AllState customer and you're unsatisfied with how a claim is processed, they'll give you several months of premium payments (whatever your rate is) and let you leave.  Sounds like a great deal, right?  If I'm not satisfied, they'll PAY ME TO LEAVE.  Nice.

But wait a second - that's just smart business.  Let's say you have a crazy wreck that they can't deny the claim on, but it shows you're clearly a negligent wildcard.  They pay 60% of what they should have on the claim, you complain and cite the guarantee, and viola - they pay you out and let you leave.  You cited the guarantee, they gladly paid you out and removed a crazy person who their research shows clearly will run up multiple claims in the years that come - a customer they lose a lot of money on. 

Sure you can go.  Here's your guarantee money.  Don't let the door hit you on the ##$ on the way out.  

Wait - we messed up on the claim and you're not a crazy person?  Let us evaluate your lifetime worth and future propensity to put a bunch of claims into the system.... Oh, you're a decent customer, even though you're making a claim now - we'll increase the payout on this claim to keep you.

The claim satisfaction guarantee is a great way to remove bad customers - i.e., the ones that aren't
profitable.

Zappos has always done the same thing with the "we'll pay you 2k to leave after training, no questions asked".  Because if you'll take 2K to leave after training, you were going to be a net negative anyway.

The satisfaction guarantee.  My gut tells me we should do more of these at various points in the talent cycle in our organizations.  Nobody likes Mayhem - like you.  

M&A FOR HR PLAYERS: Cost Per Customer...

Hey Kids, Can I Have Your Attention? (Quick - name the band, song and shooter game that features the the lyric and song... If you have teenage sons, they know the lyric... I'll throw the answer in the comments tomorrow...No Googling!)

But I digress... Shooter games, pop culture, technology. Let's get out of the normal HR world and talk about some metrics that can make you look smart when your company (small or large) is thinking about an acquisition.

Let's talk about Cost Per Customer...as it relates to M&A activity...

You heard that Facebook bought Instagram for over a Billion dollars right? Your first reaction was probably like mine - what were they smoking? That was actually your second reaction. Your first reaction was "how can I start a company like that and get PAID, yo...." So you think that price is crazy talk, right? Maybe. Maybe not.

One way to think about it in basic terms is cost per customer. It's a free service, but Instagram has 35 million users, so at a billion dollars, that works out to something like $29 per customer/user. Do you think Google overpaid a few years back for YouTube? What about Amazon overpaying for Zappos? And let's not forget the deal that made Mark Cuban a billionaire, Yahoo's purchase of broadcast.com. What were those deals worth from a cost per user/customer basis? Here's what the acquisition price says the same metric on those deals works out to:

--Zappos: Amazon looks to have bought them for $206 per user/customer (interesting since we know Zappos has revenue and I'm assuming they're profitable)

--YouTube: Google looks to have bought them for $49 per user (hmm. A little more apples to apples)

--broadcast.com: Yahoo paid a whopping 11,000 per user by my math (good bless Mark Cuban, a hard working guy who walked into one of the sweatest deals via timing and a bubble)

So based on those numbers, did Facebook overpay? I'm not sure they did, and after seeing the way kids are using Instagram both for pictures and as a social network on a recent vacation, I'd say they didn't.

Add cost per customer to your toolkit. Some interesting stuff results when you look at the world this way. You don't have to be right, you just have to have an opinion based on the language.

That's all it takes to look different from 95% of the other HR pros out there.

Post inspired by data at thebuildnetwork.com.

HRPA to SHRM: We Don't Need No Stinking Standardized HR Metrics...

Some of you may be aware that there's a big SHRM initiative underway to standardize different HR and Human Capital metrics across all companies.  On the surface, it's a noble cause.  Here's the feel good description of what's going on from from BusinessWeek:

"A group of 600 HR managers, academics, and advisers are drafting guidelines for standardizing measures of workforce diversity, turnover, job training, and the like. They are also drawing up a template for how companies should report such information to shareholders. Those involved in the project argue that companies and investors would benefit if a single set of metrics were used to gauge what they call “human capital.”

“In the financial-services sector, my supply chain is human capital—it’s relationships, it’s ideas,” says Erika Karp, head of Global Sector Research at UBS Investment Bank, who has been involved in devising the standards. A stockpicker choosing between two banks should favor the one that spends more money training and rewarding its employees, thereby lowering turnover, which is costly, Karp says. Investors will also gravitate to companies with a deep leadership bench. With the metrics, “you have more transparency on factors that result in better profitability,” she says. “It’s what a reasonable investor would want to know.”

Of course, no good deed goes unpunished.  By creating a platform that threatens to standardize, and therefore require, the collection of data and reporting of metrics along the lines of financial metrics to Walll Street, there's the predictable "give me freedom or give me death" call related to an implied threat that these metrics could be included in future regulatory burdens.  More from Business Week:

"The project, which is being spearheaded by the 250,000-member Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), has drawn fire from the HR Policy Association (HRPA), a lobbying group whose members include the top HR officers at more than 300 of the largest companies in the U.S. HRPA says the reporting standards would place an unnecessary burden on public companies, which are already shouldering a mountain of paperwork under Sarbanes-Oxley. Information on how much time and money companies spend on training and what kinds of workers they are hiring would be less valuable to investors than to rivals, HRPA representatives say. “These are all things the competition would love to know,” says Tim Bartl, a senior official. While most companies would agree they need to have a succession plan, a requirement to name candidates for the top job would irk some, says Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School. “In a lot of firms that particular question isn’t even known to the participants.”

I like the cause/drive to standardize, but I'm not sure I want SHRM to be the ones to blaze the path.  Still, it's easy to bitch and moan that we need better metrics and then be against this type of movement.  Seems like folks like me should either get involved and help determine the solution or stop complaining like the HRPA is doing.  Of course, no one told me that there was a viable threat of this creating an involuntary reporting burden, with that reporting potentially being reported across public companies?  Check please - I'll pass if that's the case.

Lies, damn lies and statistics.  Applause to SHRM for trying to bring us all to one language.  A wagging finger to the same organization if the plan was ever to mandate the reporting standards to public companies. Metrics like turnover numbers and the like mean nothing without industry, geographical and workforce context.

VOTE: Help Me Name My New Office

So here's the deal.  We're moving in a week to new space at my company - Kinetix.  Going to be pretty cool space, and as part of the deal we're naming every space, including common areas.  We've decided to open it way up - so the names for the meeting rooms, a few offices we have and the common areas for brainstorming are going to be named after Pop Culture references.

Pop Culture is a broad naming convention, but I like it.  It means that most of the spaces are going to be references to movies, music or things that resonate in our daily lives.

I need to name my office.  Will you help me by voting?  Here's the candidates for what my office (which is going to serve as a meeting room when I'm not there, which is often) may be called (links to the reference points included):

-Bushwood

-It's Tricky

-Tremendous Upside

-Save Ferris

-Dude Abides

Vote for me in the comments with why you like the one you voted for in the comments.  Got a better one?  Put it down as well.  Thanks for the help.

When The Talent That Works for You Has Their Own Side Projects...

It's complicated.  End of story.  I don't have a solution.  Sometimes people who work for you are going to have side businesses they're trying to build.  Who owns the product if they work on it during the day?  How much of that do you allow if you're getting great results from the person and you don't want to chase them away?

Better buckle up cowboy.  If you don't address it, you're heading for a train wreck.  If you do get in front of it and start some dialog around it, you're causing a train wreck.  

Which is to ask the following related to side projects outside your business your employees work on:  When would you like the train wreck to happen?

On my mind related to to the following snippet from a Business Insider profile of Kevin Rose, founder of Digg:

"Bored with Digg, he began working on a number of side projects—some of which gained some serious traction. The members of Digg's board, who wanted the savvy Rose around to help run the company he cofounded, were livid.

In summer 2007, Rose began working on a "secret" startup that would go on to become Pownce, a file-sharing application that presaged Dropbox. Digg's board insisted that Digg shareholders should have a piece of Pownce, given that Digg's founder and a top designer, Daniel Burka, were working on the project.

This was not helping morale at Digg, and that led the board to tell Rose he wasn't allowed to have any more side projects. Rose's design abilities were obviously a key asset to Digg. But if he was going to be this distracted, Digg would be better off finding someone else.

Rose took even more money off the table when Digg raised $29 million in its third round of funding in 2008, according to one colleague—with Adelson's approval.  "Adelson counseled us, saying, if you are offered those kinds of deals, you should take them because it's a great way to mitigate your risk," a colleague said.

But if Rose started another side gig, the board threatened to fire him, according to one colleague.  That didn't stick. Rose decided to begin work on WeFollow, a Twitter directory, in early 2009 without telling anyone. He unveiled WeFollow at the South By Southwest conference in 2009.

Once again, Digg's board was pissed, and asked Adelson to fire Rose, but Rose and Adelson had negotiated a mutual protective clause. Neither could be fired without the other's consent."

When do you want to the train wreck to happen?  Go read the whole article, lots of talent lessons in there....

CAPITALIST WEBINAR: Bootstrap Your Employment Brand By Figuring Out What Your EVP Is...

It's time you figured out what your EVP is.  Not your employment brand.  That's what you think it is - I'm talking about your EVP.  The Employer Value Proposition, which is what the people who matter think about "what's in it for me to work for your company?"  Which is your real brand, whether you realize it or not.

Confused?  Don't be. Just join Steve Boese and me as we deliver Bootstrap Your Employment Brand the FOT Way this Thursday at 1pm Eastern time - we'll serve up the following:

• A Quick-Hitting Approach to Building Your EVP.  Forget what you think your employment brand is.  If you took a poll of managers, employees and candidates, what would they say is in it for them in exchange for working for you?  We're going to break down a low cost way for you to determine your EVP and get some fresh ammo for your recruiting brand.

• How to Create Cool Content to Support Your EVP.  It’s easy to say that you’re going build content to support your EVP.  Problem is, you say that, then work happens and you look up and you’ve gone another quarter without doing much of anything.  The FOT team will walk you through how to develop a low-cost, low-pain way to develop quick hitting content that supports your EVP.

• What You Should Focus on When Gauging Your ROI, Ignoring Clicks and Other Measurement Gibberish. Your message is out and the feedback is rolling in, but how do you filter the relevant from the noise? FOT will bring in TweetMyJobs Co- Founder, Gary Zukowski, to tell you what really matters when it comes to measuring your return on investment in relation to your employment brand – it’s more than click deep.

• 2-Way Conversations or How to Eat the Dog Food and ease it down with a Kool-Aid chaser.  We’ll wrap up the webinar by walking you through how smart companies get team members fully engaged with the EVP and on the frontlines of building a talent pool that wants to work for you.

Don’t call it a comeback – your EVP has been there for years.  You’ve just never asked the right questions to figure out what people think is in it for them to work at your company.  Join FOT and Tweet My Jobs for this webinar and we’ll show you how to determine your real employment brand via the EVP and share it with the world.

Register today!

Steve Nash: More Evidence That Mobile and Social Make Your Company's Brand More Accessible/Attractive...

Of course, to be accessible you have to give up a bit of control, right?

Case in point.  Steve Nash.  Nash is an employee of the Los Angeles Lakers, recently traded from the Phoenix Suns.  My sons are big Suns fans as a direct result of Nash being with that franchise for years.

Traded to the Lakers?  I'm not sure if we can be Lakers fans in my house.  We'd be kind to Nash, but fans of the Lakers?  I don't know...

Then that changes - mainly because Nash is an employee of his new company (the Lakers) and he knows how to be accessible to customers by mashing up a mix of mobile and social.

Check out this video (taken by Nash from his phone) of interaction with LA citizens on a SoCal freeway:

http://llcdn8.twitvid.com/twitvidvideosv2/1/L/K/1LKG6.mp4?e=1342299840&h=6bf1d9739a3cb91eb9f39c0648b372ee

That's right.  Nash filmed himself in a cab taking a Keystone Light from some renegades on an LA Freeway after they recognized it was him.  See the crazed look of delight in their eyes?

We're in.  Order up the Lakers gear.  Due in part to an employee (Nash) being accessible and capturing stuff to represent the brand in a way that a Madison Ave. firm couldn't come up with in a million years.

Mobile+Social+Freedom for your company employees/agents can = Gold.