Monday Inspiration: Posts to JAZZ You for the Week Ahead

I have a confession to make. I am not one of those people who jump up on a Monday morning raring to go, at least not all the time. So sometimes I need some inspiration to get my day going. Today was just such a day. (Too much baseball too late) So I headed to my reading list to see what could get me going. Here is the list, hope it gets you going too. (The nice thing was that apparently some of my stuff was on other peoples lists. http://www.maximizepossibility.com/employee_retention/)

1. First out of the chute is HR Plays Too Much Defense written by Paul Herbert on Fistful of Talent. Paul's premise is that too often HR acts out of an abundance of caution and says "no" instead of considering alternatives. It is a good read, and even better are some of the comments made. (I weighed in on this one.)
2. Next up is Bosses: Give Frequent and Usable Feedback written by Wally Bock at his Three Star Leadership Blog. Wally is dead on about how and when bosses want to interact with employees and he provides great advice on how to help them  overcome their reluctance to provide constructive feedback.
3. Ann Bares, a favorite of mine, offeres up The Immeasurable Value of Being Needed. What a great title. I have had some interactions with people along these same lines and it was nice to be reminded of my stories.
4. My good friend Cathy Martin, the metrics maven, offers up 7 Ways to Tell If Your Metrics Matter. If you are struggling with instituting metrics and are wondering why you are mired down these seven questions may provide you with some clarity. READ AND HEED.
5. Lastly is a profile found on Rehaul, written by Lance Haun. Lance profiles Ben Eubanks in HR Star: Ben Eubanks. Ben is an up-and-comer in the field of HR. He is creative and hardworking and you need to pay attention to him and his blog. He represents THE generation that will be doing all of the HR in our organizations and they are going to change things and he will be one of their thought leaders.

So there you have it. If you need a kick in the fanny this today, do some reading, get inspired and then get to work.

Five for Friday: Great Blog Posts to End The Week

Not everyone has time to read blog posts. I probably do more than most given that I am a consultant and a blogger myself. It is my research. So to help you along I am posting links to five I think are great to read as a way to end the workweek.

First up is Kris Dunn at The HR Capitalist. His post is Your Company's United Way Campaign = Union Avoidance. It is that time of year for United Way during a time where unions are more active. So this is instructional. It is important to read the comments on this one.

Second post is by Laura Schroeder writing in Compensation Cafe. Her post is entitled What's My Line? She tells a story to show how versitility is an important trait in a new hire and how many companies are missing the boat today because of an abundance of candidates. She has a great line at the end that I thought was as good as the one she remembers from her youth.

The Third post comes from Ben Eubanks at Upstart HR. Ben wrote about a subject that I asked him to write about when he was soliciting ideas. I asked him to write about being a young man in a profession becoming dominated by women. You can read his answer in Men In HR- A National Geographic Exclusive. He has gotten many responses so I suggest you read them. Makes for some interesting conversation with you colleagues. You can also click through and read my original post on the subject Are Men in HR Going the Way of the Dinosaur? There are some people that seem to think that men have never been in HR... well if you have some gray hair you know better.

The fourth post is written by attorney Jon Hyman at the Ohio Employer's Law Blog. He has a great post that points out all the BAD LEGISLATION that is currently pending out there. Actually reading this is a bad way to end the week, but it is better than reading it on Monday and starting out the week in a crappy way. So head on over to WIRTW #145 (the bad legislation edition).

And lastly is a post from Wally Bock. Wally is not an HR guy. He is a leadership guru. In this post he tells a great story about the Wright Brothers to illustrate a point about innovation. So read Learning from the Wright Brothers and make sure you then put the Three Star Leadership blog on your "must read list." After all he is followed and tweeted by Tom Peters. (He follows me too on Twitter, but I don't think he has ever retweeted me like he does Wally.)

Performance Evaluations, Proper Metrics and Fairness

In my "home town" of Atlanta there is a big controversy regarding potential cheating on standardized tests in the Atlanta School System. The cheating does not involve the students. It involves teachers and administrators. Late last year a principal, and several others were convicted of erasing answers and "correcting" the tests in order to inflate the scores from their school. Now several other schools are showing similar patterns of erasures and answer changing. So an investigation is underway.

The underlying problem is not student cheating, but student performance. Principals and teachers are measured on the success, or lack thereof, of their students on standardized tests. Now there is alot that goes into a student being successful beyond just the teacher. These include parent involvement, home environment, peer pressure, cultural considerations, outside influences and more. I am not here to discuss these issues, rather I want to focus on the subject of performance evaluation.

The key to effective performance evaluation is having the right metrics. That is why an "off the shelf" evaluation form is not worth the paper it is printed on. To my way of thinking here are the key components:

1. You have to understand the job,
2. You have to know what needs to be measured,
3. You have to explain it to the employee,
4. You have to get their agreement that those measures are important,
5. You have to course correct as appropriate through the evaluation period (after all, you can't continue to measure sales of a product that is no longer made 6 months in),
6. You have to define the behaviors that are important to the organization (such as NO cheating or erasures),
7. You have to show the employee that they met the standard or did not,
8. You have to administer the system with even handed fairness, and
9. Finally, you have to take action based upon these results. Reward, or don't. Correct or terminate.

In my 20 years of consulting with small business I have found few managers who are willing to put the time or effort into developing an evaluation system like this. I suspect the same may be true of bigger businesses as well. In the school system issue I am not sure if they have the right metrics or not, or the right measure of student success. I will leave that to "the" experts. But it is clear they have not reinforced the no cheating aspect of performance. The consequences of that remain to be seen.

Performance evaluation seems to be a hot topic today. Wally Bock, of Three Star Leadership, addresses this in terms of Presidents day in President's Day and Performance and Tim Sackett of Fistful of Talent  discusses Forced Rankings Are for Winners. Both are excellent discussions of aspects of performance and are well worth the short time it will take to read them.

How have you address the issue of effective performance evaluation in your organization? Educate us with a comment.

When It Comes to Leadership Companies Are In a World of Hurt

Talent Management Magazine reported the results of a leadership survey that presented eye-popping numbers on the lack of leadership many companies are facing in their future. The article, Many Companies Do Not Have Enough Future Leaders Onboard, reported the results of a survey done by OI Partners. They survey 212 large and midsized companies and found:

• 54% of companies in the survey said they do not have enough qualified successors now working for them to succeed their executives and managers.
• Only 32% of companies report currently having enough management successors in place.
• 14% of companies are not sure whether they have enough future leaders already in their organizations.

My experience in working with small companies is that their leadership situation is even more dire.

The rest of the survey went on to describe what an opportunity this presents to employees or prospective employees. And indeed this is true. But from a company standpoint this is very worrisome or should be.

Where does your company fit into this survey? Do you have enough leadership talent? You had better look around. If it the talent is not there it will not automatically appear. Yes, some very ambitious employees may take it upon themselves to read and study and get personal experience to make themselves better leaders, but you cannot count on that.

Unfortunately many companies have the approach that once we give someone a title they are automatically imbued with all the supervisor, managerial and leadership skills we would want. "DING, you are now imbued with great leadership skill, go forth and lead." Well, it does not work that way. So how can you give people the leadership experience? Here are some of my suggestions:

1. Mentoring. But this only works if you are a good leader and teacher.
2. Structured classes and structured reading. If you do this test the knowledge and try to have it applied quickly.
3. Project work. Rotate various employees through project leading opportunities.
4. Allow mistakes. Errors produce learning, but only if the opportunity to correct is allowed. Immediate punishment leads to learning the wrong thing.
5. Get your employees involved in postions on nonprofit boards. It is amazing how much you learn, both good and bad, while serving on a board of directors.
6. Have your employees read leadership blogs, such as Great Leadership by Dan McCarthy and Three Star Leadership by Wally Bock.

What am I missing? How do you develop leaders?

From The CEO: It Is All About Talent

WorkForce Management online published an article last week entitled What the CEO Wants From HR. The article starts with the statement "At successful large companies, interaction between the CEO and the chief HR executive revolves around building and maintaining the very top layer of corporate leaders—and little below that." The article goes on to say that in larger companies CEOs are only interested in the talent development activities of HR, especially the development of the upper management levels. It further says that CEOs are not interested in the operational aspects of HR and they have little tolerance of HR leaders who try to position HR operations as a strategic initiative. They expect it do be done and done well but they are not really interested in the day to day. And that is they way it should be.

Well I have news for WorkForce Management. In my experience working with small business the same desire on the part of CEOs is true. They want to know that HR is doing their job and doing it well but they don't want to know the operational details. They are concerned about having the right people in the right place to do the best job. They don't care what ID the person presented for the I-9. That only becomes a concern when the HR person screwed up and the company is in trouble. At that point operations becomes an issue! In his book, Human Resource Champions, Dave Ulrich says that one of the key competencies for HR is to be the Administrative Expert. And he says if you do NOT do that WELL you will basically fail at all else you do because you will have no credability. And that is very true. Not only will you have no credability you most likely will have no job.

If you are in HR and trying to be that "strategic player" you have to remember it is all about TALENT, getting it, developing it and keeping it. But that does not mean you can't let compliance and admistration fall by the wayside. Those things still have to be done and done well. The CEO just doesn't want to hear about them.

Thanks to Wally Bock for having the pointer to the article in his blog Three Star Leadership.

Carnival of HR up at Fortify Your Oasis

Some how I missed this one, but many of the best HR bloggers did not. Catch Cathy Martin, Wally Bock, Dan McCarthy, Ann Bares, Lisa Rosendahl and 18 other great contributors over at Fortify Your Oasis for the June 10th edition of the Carnival of HR.

Leadership Carnival for June 7th

Dan McCarthy over at the blog Great Leadership has posted this month's issue of the Leadership Carnival. This is a great collection of blog posts dealing with leadership issues. They cover talent managment, defending against unions by having a happy workforce, leadership development, inspiration and more. My favorite is Wally Bock's analysis of Warren Bennis' leadership vs. management distinction. He doesn't like it and I can see why.

So trip on over to Dan's site and spend sometime learning more about leadership.

Life Lessons From Mom You Can Use At Work

Wally Bock at Three Star Leadership has a great post today on Mom's Supervision Lessons. I thought it was a great post with super lessons stated in a way everyone can understand them. He talks about behavior, feedback, and consequences in terms of "Mom." Give it a read. I am sure you will enjoy it, learn from it, and learn to apply the lessons taught in it.

Boomers, Brain Drain and a Quote

I was quoted in an article entitled Older Workers: Once Trashed, Now Treasured, written by Bill Hendrick for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The article deals with the subject of older workers, primarily baby boomers, and the realization by many organizations that they are facing a brain drain as the boomers retire.

There are alot of human resources issues involved in the impending retirement of large amounts of baby boomers. (BTW, "baby boomers" is a US term for children born during the period following WWII through 1964. Other countries had baby booms at different times.) Some of these issues include: healthcare, retirement income, delivery of services, succession planning, and one of the biggest, loss of knowledge.

Many organizations are struggling with this impending loss and how to retain this "knowledge" within the organization. By the way, this knowledge is not just "how to do the job", that is actually the easier knowledge to retain. The difficult knowledge to retain is the relationships these boomer workers have established with customers, suppliers and co-workers that enhance the selling, buying and problem-solving process on a daily basis.

There are a couple ways to do this that might work. One is a mentoring program. Teaming younger workers with older works. Problems may arise however because not all parties are good mentors or mentees. Younger workers may get impatient and cause discrimination problems. Older workers may feel threatened and feel like the company is trying to push them out too soon. So this process has to be set up correctly and ALOT of training needs to be done.

An approach to transfering "relationship knowledge" that I like is done by Harvey Mackay, author, speaker and company CEO. He uses something called the Mackay 66 , in which he provides a mechanism for tracking a great deal of information on customers. Things such as family information, likes and dislikes, favorite foods and sports, where they went to school, things you should and should not discuss and much more. This information is collected and logged over a period of time and retained by the company. This way if the person who was calling on this customer leaves all of that knowledge does not walk out the door with them. The next person can read that information and get a head start on retaining the relationship.

There are a number of approaches that can be used, you have to pick what fits best with the culture of your organization. But if you have not started working on this today you will soon find yourself between a rock and a hard place. Look at your organization and take stock of who may be retiring in the next 10 years. What and who do they know? Figure out a way you can get them to invest some of themselves in the future of the organization. Wally Bock, at Three Star Leadership, also blogged about this issue and had some suggestions, so check him out as well.