Yesterday I posted and said that every leader in the world has a shelf life of 5 years or less.  At the five year mark, if not way before that point, all the value you brought to the table and all the ways you were different as a leader cease to be unique.

Everyone has heard it before.  As one of my sons once famously uttered as a 4-year old at the dinner table, "It's the same 'ole s###".  Turns out he heard that from this Nickelback song in the SUV.  All the bad stuff can be tracked back to Nickelback.

Kids...

Anyway, once things become stale for you with your peeps, you really need to reinvent yourself as a leader.  Here's 5 ideas to freshen your game up.  Think about it and try some of these out after the holidays:

In order to reinvent yourself as a leader, you can:

1.  Become a better coach.  Maybe you ought to actually invest yourself in making those around you better at what they do.  Most of us don't do this enough.

2.  Act like a career agent for the people around you.  The most powerful thing you can do is care about someone's career, up to and including being open to tell them when they ought to take a opportunity outside your company.  When's the last time you invested time in that?

3.  Start giving highly public recognition in an authentic way.  Talk like you talk to your best friend and tell the company why someone absolutely rocks it out a couple of levels below you.  

4.  Make yourself deeper in the functional area you lead and include the people that report to you on the journey.  Nothing creates conversation better than great professional development opportunities you aren't afraid to share with other people below your level in the company.

5.  Stop acting like a complete Narcissist.  Try acting like a human being.  That's general, but damned if it's not effective.

None of these suggestions are earth-shattering but they all have one very important thing in common - they all serve to interrupt a boring, predictable pattern you've let yourself lapse into.  They also all include other people.  Open your freaking door - both literally and figuratively.  

After all, you're trying to prevent the kids from saying that's it's just the "same "ole ****".  Even if Nickelback is not part of your iTunes rotation.  

Shelf life for leaders.  It matters in business, it matters in sports, it really matters anywhere that leaders are in play.

You come in as the new guy/gal.  You're fresh. People are scared. They lisen.

So your approach is fresh and they're scared enough to listen.  Until they're not.  Once they're not listening, you better get to reinventing yourself, because you're out at some point if you can't.

Punish me. Motivate me. Just don't bore me.  Consider this conversation I had a while back:

Dateline:  Office of a CEO this week, City in the Southeast.

Topic: Strategic Plan that's 10 Years Long

Me: "Are you going to be around for 10 years?"

CEO: "I doubt it."

Realization:  Every leader has a shelf life, even when things go well.  I'd put that shelf life, when things are going well, at 5 years.  After that point, the leader has two options:

--Option 1. Get out. People stop listening to you if they've heard your game 100s of times before.  Complacency follows - from you and them.

--Option 2. Reinvent yourself, dramatically so.  It's the only way to get fresh to the point where people will listen to you for beyond 5 years.  Think Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails.

Worker bees have shelf lives too.  Move beyond 5 years in any job, and when times get tough, you're hoping you don't get impacted by a RIF when the axman cometh.  Because you really haven't done anything to freshen yourself up.

NOTE:  You're hoping.  That's no way to live.

First jobs - I'm talking about your first job after college, not you throwing newspapers in the neighborhood - although that completely rocked.

First jobs (or early jobs - doesn't necessarily have to be the first one, you just have to get to it quickly) have the potential of transforming your career.  Some of your who are early career or even in college should be focused on this - and parents of young professionals should be as well.

What's type of job can you get right out of college that will transform your career?  It's pretty simple:

Get the type of job that's going to give you 5-10 of experience in 2 years.  Bonus points if you get the chance to do work that someone with 10 years of experience should be doing.

That's all you need to know.  That type of job is what makes you more valuable than your peers for the rest of your career - because that experience and what you learn in that type of job makes your better than your peers for the REST OF YOUR CAREER.

Where do you find these types of jobs?  Look hard enough and you can find them, but beware!  They're not always jobs that make you comfortable.  In fact, the type of job that I'm talking about almost never makes you comfortable.  

I know - that's incredibly general.  That's why on my podcast (you didn't know I had a podcast? What the....) called The CYA Report, Tim Sackett and I talk to Chicago HR pro John Hudson (who's worked for a bunch of great companies, including the Oprah Winfrey holding company) about first jobs that can change your career.  John had that type of first job at a recruiting firm called Aerotek, and it changed the rest of his career.  He uses what he learns every day and thinks about everything he got out of that first job often.

The podcast is embedded below (email subscribers, click through), just click the play button.  Listen to it on the way home - just throw on your earbuds and stay mentally alert on that drive or commute.

All episodes available on iTunes [click for archives]

My company gets the opportunity to be involved in thousands of hires ever year.  It's an interesting test tube, especially since we help other companies hire.  So, it's not our culture we're hiring for most of the time, but the individual cultures of the client who partner with Kinetix.

As part of that, I've grown up a little bit related to assessments.  Growing up is healthy, I encourage everyone to give it a shot.

What have I learned about the behavioral traits of candidates?  Plenty.  Let me give you some notes related to a very important trait that most assessment platforms cover - Detail Orientation.

You know Detail Orientation - People who are high details are list builders, and they have a list to guide them ever day.  They have coded priorities in the list, and they get stressed if they are not in a position to cross things off the list.  People who are low details (I'm just below the mean) are not list builders.  They are less organized that the high detail people.  Tasks can slide from day to day and from week to week and they sleep like a baby.  The high details person can't take that.

Apart from the definition, here's 5 things I've learned about Detail Orientation in the last 3 years:

1.  On a team of any size, you need high details people to get #### done.

2.  Low details people will drive high details people crazy.  Crazy, I say...

3.  High details people don't generally drive low details people crazy.  They think the high details people are adorable when they're freaking out.

4.  If allowed to, high detail people will create a culture where crossing things off a list trumps the value of creativity and ideas.  Turns out you need both.

5.  One of the most powerful combinations known to man in today's business world is Low Rules Orientation, High Detail Orientation.  That means someone likes the chaos of an unstructured situation and wants to create the solution (aforementioned creativity and idea generation comes with that) but has the detail orientation necessary to execute on the plan.

What did I miss?

You know that someone can do the job through knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) + work experience. 

Don't forgot to dip into the DNA of what makes them tick.  Here's a whitepaper I did a while back called "Would You Hire OJ?" to serve as a thought-starter to thinking about the value of what makes someone tick.

I see it all the time.  Managers have a block setting performance goals that don't have clear metrics.

A big key when it comes to setting performance goals—you want the goals to be measurable, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have metrics for every performance goal you set. In broad terms, your performance goals are going to be measured one of two ways:

1. Quantitatively – means there’s a metric or a statistic you can pull from somewhere to measure your Team Member’s performance for the goal in question; or
2. Qualitatively – means there’s no metric or statistic you can pull from, so you’re left with the difficult position of measuring performance via “manager observation”.

Which I actually prefer, because when it's done well, it results in better coaching conversations.

Just because you can’t measure a goal via a metric or statistic doesn’t mean you can’t include the goal in your goal setting for the position in question. What it does mean is that you have to be very clear about what successful performance looks like for that goal. Instead of a metric or statistical goal, you’re going to be describing the behaviors that lead to successful performance, then committing to have candid feedback sessions about what you’ve seen in the review period.

Remember—the manager should be the expert. Walk the walk and spend the time, and you can bring subjective measures into performance goal setting. However, if you don’t spend the time setting expectations about what success looks like with the “manager observation” areas, you’re going to have a mess on your hands.

Of course, manager observation takes work - both when you set goals and are tring to describe what success looks like, but also when you are giving feedback and contrasting what you saw vs what was expected.

Metrics are the crutch of managers who don't like to tell people they could do more.

Big title, right?  Here's the thought behind it today.

HR gets paid to have an open door, and to encourage people to raise their hand if they see issues that don't look right.

Sometimes, the issues raised are things that are plain to see.  Tom's a total jerk.  Jane has anger management issues.  Everyone knows it and sees it.

However, most of the time things are much more murky, and when murkiness combined with Title 7 issues collide, allegations made can label someone as something terrible - a racist, bigot, ageist, etc.

Bottom line - in today's politically correct world, it's easy to aggressively label someone as any of those things, and the world generally believes it's true until it's proven that it's not.  24 hour news cycle culture.

Thus is the slippery slope of HR.  We have to encourage people to raise their hands, but some people will go from 0-100 mph without a need for facts.

The clear answer is in the history of the individual.  What's their track record like related to being a racist? A bigot?  An ageist?  The problem is that most onlookers aren't aware of the track record and HR has no means to provide the full record.  Too often the community that is your company votes off of one reported incident, most of the time without complete info on that incident.  You can clear someone of the label in your investigation, but the scarlet letter remains, impacting promotions, 360 scores, future relationships, etc.

Which means the burden for HR has never been higher.  You have to keep the door open, but if you're a deep HR pro, you also have to protect good people from being labeled by people seeking to destroy them for whatever reason - because they don't like them, or maybe just because they're difficult people who don't care.

There's a lot of bad people in the workplace, which is a microcosm of society.  HR needs to make sure bad allegations made by imperfect people are as aggressively challenged as bad actions by people who fit the racist/bigot/ageist label.

The job has never been tougher.

"You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim"

What did you do with your holiday weekend?  

Me? I chilled out and then went to the Iron Bowl in Auburn, AL, the 2013 version that's being called the game of the century.  You know the drill by now - The Iron Bowl is college football, Alabama vs Auburn in the annual grudge match.  The 2013 version was #1 Alabama (dynasty) vs #4 Auburn (always the underdog in this matchup).  

The game was close.  It looked to be going to overtime until Alabama coach Nick Saban made a classic decision that ignited "Karma".  An Alabama player stepped out of bounds and it looked like time had expired.  Then the Alabama sideline started wearing out the officials to put one more second on the clock.  They could have let it go, but politic they did.

They got the one second.  Then they make another KARMA igniting decision - they decided to try a FG that had about a 5% probability of connecting.

And Auburn ran the missed FG 109 yards for the game's winning touchdown with no time remaining on the clock.

KARMA.  You know what I'm talking about.  You ask for something that you really know isn't quite right. You then get your wish, and you try to stretch the break you've been given into something more.  

KARMA.  That's what Alabama got.  In the old days, the second never would have been put back up.  It was more like .2 of a second, and that would have been attributed to clock operator margin of error.  But in today's world of technology, you can get the review.  Then you can decide what to do with the break you've been given on a technicality.

KARMA. Let's examine some of the ways that your managers and employees tempt fate by asking for things that aren't quite right, only to have their "smart" request come back to bite them in the ***:

1. You make a hire.  It doesn't go well and some conduct related thing is moving your hire to term.  You man up and save the day, and that new hire rewards you by doing something that's fundamental worse in the month that follows your "save".  You look like a moran.

2. A sales pro who's a high performer is accused of harassing a team member.  There's no evidence, but everyone knows he's a bad guy.  You save him because he can sell.  3 months later he's in another harassment situation, this time with texts to prove it. Whoops. 

3. A customer service rep has a couple of horrible run-ins with clients.  You give them a second chance they probably don't deserve, and you end up loosing one of your biggest clients 2 months later due to bonehead things the rep you should have fired said to the mega-client.

Here's your formula for KARMA in the workplace: <Somebody shows their *** + You save them against what your mom would have told you to do = Future horrible result/KARMA>.

Don't spit into the wind.  Don't save people who shouldn't have been saved. Don't kick the FG you know you won't make in the biggest game of the year.

KARMA.