Now What Do You Need?

Through our friend and fellow author, Sharon Armstrong, we were virtually introduced to a reporter, Bernie Linnartz, in Taos, NM. Bernie writes a business column for the Taos News. Since New Mexico is one of my favorite places on earth, I was excited to make the connection. We send a copy of The Big Book of HR to Bernie and he was hooked. He decided to use the book as the basis for a series of articles on managing human resources for his column. The following is his article that appeared on March 10, 2016 in the paper, entitled Workforce Planning.

Workforce planning is about thinking both short and long term. It is considering your current situation and how you want to create the future of your business and your life. Here are some areas to explore:

Be strategic, proactive and forward looking:  To be strategic you need to know where you are going. Once you know where you are going you can be strategic and proactive. An easy trap to fall into is to be reactive to what is going on inside or outside your business or home. It is critical to know what you want in specific terms. Start by asking the deeper question of “what are your aspirations and dynamic urges?” This question will ensure that you are working beyond a quick, random and superficial level. Be specific with numbers, timeframes and who will be responsible for the desired end results. Avoid problem solving and focus on creating the exact future you want. Strategic thinking is about keeping your intention and attention on specific outcomes.

With whom are you working? Do you know the strengths and weaknesses of each team member? Are you aware of how each person sees their needs, interests and potential? How about meeting with them individually and/or as a team to share your and their insights? From “The Big Book of HR” by Mitchell and Gamlem, “…the best strategic plan will be ineffective without the right people in the right places with the right skills to carry it out – or as Jim Collins put it so well in “Good to Great”, ‘having the right people on the bus.’” And I would add, the right people in the right seats, for sure the driver. Get to know each other as persons and professionals.

Who else might we need to help out? As you gain greater clarity of what you need and want plus create a specific picture, plan and map of where you are going, identify any skills, resources and input that are missing. Create a list of needs regarding what is missing in your current situation. Stay away from “we can’t afford it.” Next week recruiting is our topic and we will identify low or no cost options.

Who will be our team in the future? In every business and family there are additions and subtractions to and from the team membership. This can be a situation of expansion, downsizing or succession. In any case, it is beneficial to be strategic and proactive. Preparing and planning, especially for succession, can create innovative approaches to handling difficult dynamics and create opportunities for maintaining and creating increased consistency and trust with other team members to include customers.

As we continue to explore areas of managing human resources find ways to become increasingly conscious at work and at home that everything that we think, say and do is an opportunity to build relationships rooted in care and support with the intention of building a better life and world for all people.  (For additional HR Insights see “The Big Book of HR”)

What's Your Exerience

Recently, I heard a colleague talking about the customer experience. He had nine customer experience imperatives that he thought every company should practice.  I couldn’t help but draw the comparison between the customer experience and the candidate experience. So many of these imperatives apply to HR, especially in our roles of attracting the best talent to our organizations. Let's take a look at some of these imperatives.

Personalized and tailored experiences. It's no longer a one-size-fits-all world in many respects.  There are a great deal of tools and differing technologies that help us source and attract candidates to our organization. Custom tailor experiences for your candidates as you would for your customers. It’s the platinum rule rather than the golden rule that’s important. We’re not all alike, so treat other people the way they want to be treated not the way you want to be treated. For example, communicate with candidates using the media that they prefer and use and not the media with which you’re most comfortable. This means varying communication methods as well as sourcing methods. Know where to find your ideal candidate.

Provide advice and learning opportunities. Be a curator of information. For example, through blogs and white papers on your website, or through LinkedIn, share information about what your organization or industry is doing. Use storytelling to share facts and antidotes. Give people something to talk about. Get candidates excited about your company so they’ll want to work for you.

Be a part of their journey. Remember the job search is not just one experience at a time but rather it's the path that the candidate takes from the time they start exploring new opportunities to when they come to work for you. Their journey is made up of a countless string of experiences that relate to you: how they first heard about you, what their first visit to your website was like, what they may have learned about you on social media, their first interaction with someone from your company, what the interview was like – from the time they parked their car to when they met their potential future boss.  These are all part of their experience. Make sure their journey is a positive one.

Engaged employees. Consider the individual a candidate will meet when they first set foot into your organization – their future colleagues. If you have an engaged and friendly workforce it’s going to show – no shine – through to the candidate. Consider the story I heard recently from a young man pursuing his teaching certificate. On a visit to a local school to complete an assignment for his studies, he was blown away by the people he met. Students and faculty walking down the hall greeting him in a friendly manner – “Hi, how’s it going? Can I help you? Hey, who are you – welcome to the school.” It’s certainly a place he’d like to work.

Neither HR nor talent management work in a silo in their organizations. All the departments and parts of the organization work together and can learn lessons from each other. A business model that is built around positive experiences is a win for everyone!

Working in Harmony

Workplace bullies. Toxic employees and work environments. These are some topics that I’ve seen out in the blogosphere or tweeted about recently. So what do you do? Coach them? Put them on a performance improvement plan? Remove them from the team and make them an individual contributor? Bottom line: ask yourself, “What’s the problem?” By the way, that’s a chapter title in The Essential Workplace Conflict Handbook, but it’s a question you’ve got to ask so you can determine the best way to address the problem, whatever it is.

For example, the problem could be any of the following:

·       Someone who has a negative attitude that infects the rest of the team – the naysayer – the person who crushes creativity with a phrase such as “That won’t work” or “We’ve always done it this way!”

·   Someone whose jokes and comments get out of hand and there’s a real potential for harassment;

·      Someone who dominates meetings, cutting everyone else off or worse, hijacking the meeting with his or her own agenda – subtle or not so subtle forms of bullying

All of these are examples of poor behavior – not performance – in the workplace. Conduct is about how people are expected to behave at work. When an employee exhibits behavior that is inappropriate in a business environment, there is a conduct problem.

So what’s an organization to do? Clearly crafted policies can be an organization’s best way to address these issues because policies provide guidance (not mandates) for management. You do necessarily need to have a policy that addresses every type of poor behavior. Consider an employee conduct policy that defines categories of conduct that are unacceptable and could lead to management action. At the top of the list – Inability or Unwillingness to Work Harmoniously with Others. Do any of the above examples fit this category? They absolutely do! Your conduct policy also needs guidance on management responses to inappropriate behavior.

Of course, there will be situations where the nature of the conduct warrants a stand-alone policy, such as workplace harassment which has legal implications. Your harassment policy should tie to the conduct policy. What I mean is that if someone’s jokes and comments are leaning toward harassment, you can reference both the conduct policy and harassment policy when you address the behavior. All your policies should work in harmony with each other!

Address the problem – don’t move it somewhere else in the organization. Even an individual contributor has to interact with others.  In addressing toxic workplace behavior, a very clear message needs to be sent:

·       Describe the disruptive behavior that is occurring

·       Describe the impact that the behavior is having on others in the organization

·       Describe what will happen next: support, if any, that the organization can offer (such as a referral to the employee assistance program); further management action if the behavior does not stop or change

Think of your organization as an orchestra. Your policies and process are the musical pieces or compositions and your employees are the players or orchestra members. Is there harmony among all of these parts of your organization? If not, what steps will you as a leader or the conductor take to bring the harmony back?

Listening Really Matters

 Winston Churchill said, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

We’ve all heard that most Americans fear public speaking more than they fear death but, until I read the Churchill quote, I’d never thought that it takes courage to listen. I think he’s definitely right.  Most of us would rather talk than listen—even when we have nothing really important to say. Maybe it’s a little dramatic to say it takes courage to listen but it certainly is an extremely important communication skill and one that is vital to success in business or in life.

In a business setting, having good listening skills are critical to success and developing those skills takes effort and, dare I say it—courage.  So many leaders don’t stop to listen to the people around them. They are too busy believing they know all the answers to think they might learn something if they sit down and listen.

Good listening is an active process—it’s not just being quiet until the other person stops talking so you can say what you think.  Good listeners interact with the speaker to ask questions.  Good listeners watch for verbal cues while processing the words they’re hearing.  Good listeners listen for what’s not being said—some call this “listening for the music and not just the words.”

Good listeners must exercise a good deal of restraint and not jump to conclusions based on a few early words from the speaker.  If you haven’t listened carefully to what the speaker is saying, your initial judgment can be the cause of you dismissing the rest of what’s being said and that can be fatal!

Ralph Nichols of The University of Minnesota says as reported in Michael Roberto’s book Know What you what you don’t Know—How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before they Happen-- that he encourages his students to listen more effectively by having a statement at the top of each white board that says, “Withhold evaluation until comprehension is complete—hear the speaker out. It is important that we understand the speaker’s point of view before we accept or reject it.”

There are many things to be aware of that get in the way as we listen or even try to listen:

·       Setting

·       Distractions

·       Timing

·       Beliefs

·       Perceptions

·       Emotions

·       Cultural differences

·       Relationships

·       Word usage

·       Assumptions

In our most recent book, The Essential Workplace Conflict Handbook, we devoted an entire chapter to the importance of good listening skills in managing workplace conflict. We talk about how to use active listening, gestures, eye contact, and reflective listening skills to improve the listening experience. 

So, be courageous and work to be a better listener and see how this improves your working and personal relationships!

Liberal Arts Degrees—Are they Still Relevant?

There has been a lot of press recently on the demise of the liberal arts degree and that has made me very sad.  Full disclosure—I have a liberal arts degree with a double major in history and political science and a minor in Spanish so I will admit, I am a bit biased on this subject.

Twenty five years ago, the economist David W. Breneman, published a controversial report about how we were shifting away from liberal arts toward practical courses “like engineering and business.”  In an August 2015 interview with The New York Times (August 2, 2015) about where we stand today. He said that “The economic recession had a severe influence on (liberal arts education). We look at education as an investment, like buying a machine.” 

We discussed this topic recently in my business book club.  Some people felt that employees weren’t prepared for work when they come out of college and that the colleges and universities were failing them and the business community.  Certainly, employees need to be prepared for the work they want to do but isn’t it also important for people to learn how to think?  Shouldn’t we expose our youth in college to the arts? 

Dr. Breneman says, “the original ethos of education was that it prepared people for citizenship, for enlightened leadership, enhanced their creativity.  There was a tradition going back to Jefferson, who founded the University of ‘Virginia, that a liberal arts education was the core of our democracy.  If we lose an educated populace, were open for demagogy. We need broadly educated people.”

We’re now seeing a trend where even in elementary and secondary schools, there is less emphasis on the arts and more on STEM classes. While I don’t disagree we need scientists and engineers, we also need our students to learn to appreciate literature, music, theatre, and other less practical but more esoteric subjects!

If I had my way, everyone would get a liberal arts degree and then go on to specialize in their chosen field.   However, I am pretty sure that’s not going to happen but I sincerely hope we don’t lose sight of why we educate people—it is not just so they can make money. It is also so that they can be good citizens and creative members of a civilized society.