The Point of Exhaustion

There are many demands on the employees of modern companies. Businesses want to stay open 24 hours a day to catch every possible customer, people want to be able to buy whatever they want where ever they are, and managers work feverishly to anticipate the evolving needs of these businesses and consumers. The internet has an eternal memory and time is measured in fractions of seconds. If we want more money, more of our time must be subject to the whim of our employers. Failing to sacrifice our time results in financial punishment. The voracious need for things drives us to work crazy hours and spend much of our remaining time surfing, tweeting, gaming, and staring at the TV. The speed we are expected to move often exceeds the ability to provide a thorough product. This results in a beta version, 1.0, 1.2, 1.3.5, 2.0 and the multiple downloadable (is that a word) patches to the system. The most important product we present is ourselves, yet we fail to get enough sleep, talk to our families at dinner(at the dinner table), and remind people why they are important. Does anyone send a paper invitation or a paper thank you anymore? Welcome to our evite world. If you have time to sleep, you have truly achieved "work-life balance". Now I have to go, I'm at the point of exhaustion, so I'll read CNN on my laptop, download an episode of Spartacus and collapse on a coach in a video coma. See you tomorrow,

The Lost Art of Plain Speaking - The Friday Rant

This topic is a gift from my ghost writer. "Calling a Spade a Spade" Doesn't the vast majority of what's wrong with HR and business in general is all this double speak and political correctness? If the old adage, "A problem well-stated is half-solved" still applies in a modern era, wouldn't it seem if we just "called it what was", the problems would be easier to see and solve? I am often curious what causes us to make the problem less interesting or less pressing by calling it something pretty, like an opportunity. Why would we compromise urgency for fluff? The sense of achievement in solving a problem is much higher than taking advantage of an opportunity. Notice opportunities are associated with a sense of advantage. That could be appealing to those that need to dominate or conquer. For the rest of us,we grew up solving problems and getting rewarded with good grades. We are good team players and go along with the new verbiage, then we make fun of it over a beer at business conferences. Secretly, we think that pandering to the whiners that require pretty pictures to keep their rosy world functioning is a waste of time. Now is the time to commit to saying it like it is. Are you with me? No more PC paint to keep everybody positive. Time to gut it out like Knute Rockny and the heroes of old. It looks bad men, but we are not ordinary people and we will prevail. Holding the flag at the top of Fort McHenry lying along the bodies of my comrades that held the flag before me, it is time to validate the claim or our national anthem. Let's get back to the land of the free and the home of the brave. No bullets, just simple words in a complex world.

Back to Our Roots

Every once in a while, we need to get back to our roots. Today, I was introduced to an opportunity that reminded me of my operational past. Something made me decide to give up running restaurants and taking responsibility for a team to learn a profession. When I have had the chance to work with a team again, it is the most rewarding thing I have done. I have convinced myself that I don't want have the responsibility of a complete facility. This is curious because I did it before I could drink legally. What makes us decide to become specialists? The nice schedule doesn't hurt, but we lose out on the excitement of making it all work. Here's to the operators and those of us that decide to be their support team.

The Intern Plan aka Marketing People Stuff

I asked the other day what to do with the interns. The discussion went into the mechanics of day-to-day intern life. Tomorrow, the first four come in to get their offers. I am going to ask them about our company brand. Did they think about the company before they saw the intern posting? Why? What got their attention? Was it positive or negative? What companies were they thinking about joining? Why? What would make our company more interesting to more students? I need more subjects for this study. I need some regular management candidates and some mid-career professionals from other companies. They could really give me a clue on how people see our company as a potential employer. Every company wants to be the place to work. Having the best and brightest line up at their door, but the biggest companies in the world are not the most popular. What makes the popular company appeal to the right people? Okay, now we are back to undergrad Marketing class. I'll see if the interns can give us some insight and I'll let you know the results of the first focus group.

Diversity and Skills Transfer

I responded to a question in a strategic planning chat. The question involved the best ways to increase representation of a particular ethnic group in a business. It seemed they were in a big hurry because they presented the idea that they could throw money at it and create a department staffed with talented people of that ethnicity. Here are my initial thoughts and I welcome your input. Financial resources are finite and job creation is not the answer. If a company wants to better reflect the diversity of their community, they need to expand their recruiting to increase the number of qualified candidates from diverse backgrounds. It takes time to increase diversity, but it avoids several issues. One, it prevents new hires being treated as "token" employees to meet a number, great qualifications can't overcome this stigma. Next, creating jobs represents a poor business decision unless there is a true business need, like supporting a new customer. Finally, creating lasting relationships educational institutions and organizations that can refer high quality candidates from diverse backgrounds will make the biggest difference for the company.
They also asked about meaningful skills transfer. Here are the thoughts I shared and I would like to hear your ideas. Meaningful skills transfer is another matter. If this is regarding scientific or mathematical skills at a higher level, this requires time with the incumbent and sometimes a mentor to walk the learner through the quirks of the teacher. Companies have to plan skills transfer to ensure time for the new learner to gain and practice the skill of the encumbent. If a company lets their highly skilled folks work alone and in compartments that prevent skills from being shared. If one of them jumps ship, it is a significant loss. There are some techniques used by drug makers to get their teams to collaborate and share knowledge. There are a handful of different articles from Harvard Business Review on the topic.
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Interns

If they aren't getting us coffee and typing stuff to protect our fingers from undue stress, what are we supposed to do with them? This year we are going to teach them about business, well, our business. We might give them a review, so they can enjoy the same feedback anxiety we instill in all employees. At the end, we will give them a project and presentation to make them feel like work will be similar to school. It also creates the illusion that they will bump elbows with executives and do cool presentations, if they come work for us after college. We even pay them to sample our workspace and judge it for future use. This is an awesome racquet and I missed it to work as a manager at McDonald's. There are some rewarding parts to sponsoring interns and seeing them learn and grow. Have any of you been an intern or have you put together an intern program? Share your experiences and tips. I could use the help to make an internship program that actually retains the candidates at the end of the program, since they get a full year for other companies to turn their heads.

A Piece of Advice

I had the opportunity to talk to some college students about going into the professional world. One asked, "What piece of advice do you wish that someone had given you when you were making this transition?" First, I told the student that I was already a restaurant manager and married by the time I graduated. My thought was that any advice I needed was far different from what a graduate with a few summer jobs needed. Then, in an effort to provide some guidance, I offered my thoughts on what I think sets school life apart from work. I told the student that business is about results; it is not about effort just about results. The student was taken aback and just said okay. I have listened to more than my share of internship and management candidates talk about dealing with team members that don't perform. In every case, they knew that the work still needed to be done, however, most of them simply redistributed the work or took it on themselves. Why? They had to get a result, as grade. In the process the poor performers get the benefit of the work or the students ratted them out to the teacher. They may be learning about results in some way, but they are not learning effective ways to deal with difficult people. In the work world, difficult people will be their greatest challenge and biggest obstacle to results. Far too many of them will run into savvy blockers that put their jobs in jeopardy and squelch their enthusiasm. We don't need to teach them about all the bad people, but they need to be expected to engage challenging people. It's about the results and when we get them by overburdening ourselves or others to cover for the poor behavior of a team member, there is more loss from the resentment and frustration.