Momma's Always Right

Ghost Writer tips her hat to Momma while Marti checks out the billboards.

 

    Much like the author of "Everything I need to know I learned in Kindegarten", I am forever impressed with how many things my mother taught me that apply to the world of business and leading a good life. 

    On organization:  "Put it back where you got it, and you'd know where to find it."

    On time:  "Set your alarm.  Don't be late."

    On courtesy:  "Say please and thank you."

    On self-care:  "Get to bed on time.  You have an early day tomorrow."

    On attendance:  "If you're not throwing up or have a fever, get your butt to school."

    On work ethic:  "They're paying you.  Now get to work!"

    There are probably several more -- I'm forever quoting Momma at work.  Here's to my Momma and all the mothers that provide us sage HR Leader advice without knowing it.  Happy Mother's Day! 

Feed and Firearms

Welcome to the musings of a car bound road warrior. In my travels up Interstate 69 through a great mix of livestock and grain farms it was hard to believe I was only 60 miles from the north suburbs of a major metropolitan complex. In between cell phone calls about any number of crises, concerns and dilemmas, the time is passed reading billboards. One struck me as indicative of rural America, the way most of our country's real estate is used and most of her people live their lives. It was for a Feed store, but at first it seemed like a restaurant. Sort of like "Eat at Joes" for cattle. They had feed, pet supplies, sundries and, of course, firearms (with the assumption they have items to feed the firearms). If you are from a place where even some of the girls take off a week of school at the start of deer season, this is extremely logical. Let me walk the rest of you all through it real quick. The stores is generally 50 or miles from the farm, farm critters eat a lot more than your Rotweiler. When you have to get supplies, you want to be efficient. When you have 200 acres, you also need to help control the populations of certain wild life including some tasty, edible ones. There you go, feed and firearms. If you don't get this and don't like guns, good, stay in the city where the police carry them for you. However, keep your opinions out of our farms.

Selling

Remember the quote, "All the world's a stage and we are all merely players"? I think this is attributed to Shakespeare. Good actors sell their characters and bring the audience into their world. All of us sell in our work. We are looking for others to buy in, whether it is getting the boss to give us a good review to get more money or getting others to go along with our ideas. Human Resources involves many sales functions that are obvious, benefits enrollment, recruiting, on-boarding, and promoting. The less obvious ones are called Employee Relations and Change Management. Managing upset employees to get them to understand and move forward past the issue, can be problematic and requires many "sales calls" to resolve some concerns. Now we are the keepers of change management. Helping overworked managers and resistant employees to come along with the latest plan. The difference for us is that the outlying folks get dragged along for the ride providing a consistent dissenting voice to the effort. These daily interactions and processes hardly seem like selling. I have personally said that I would stink at sales, but I do it everyday without thinking about it. The worst part is that you must continue to sell to all levels of the business all of the time. There is not really a process where they want you to give honest feedback. Multiple recent attempts have only met with negative reactions and angering results. Sitting across from a coworker Friday I finally figured it out. My job is to make a pile of crap look like a pile of leaves so everyone wants to jump in. And I mean EVERYONE!

What Speaks to You?

I'm sitting in a hotel at 4:30am, my left knee hurts enough that I can't sleep. There is a Chris Rock movie on TV. As I knit a baby sweater for a co worker, I start wondering what I'm doing. Work is thankless because it is believed that the pay is the reward. The better the "reward" the more they want us to give up. The most driven of us are easily consumed, looking for more of a reward than money. It isn't really part of the package. The employee engagement survey isn't about how the employee feels for the sake of the employee; it is for the benefit of the business. Wow, early morning thinking can be a little dismal. This leads me to thinking about who I admire or quote the most. It turns out I'm inspired by humor. I quote Dennis Miller, Ron White, Bobby Collins, Gabriel Iglesias and the rest of those talented folks that make me laugh out loud. Now, how do I leverage this to do something rewarding? Have you sorted out what you really enjoy and admire and how are you using it?
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Namecalling

In spite of my habit of chatting about politics and other non-PC stuff, hence the name of the blog, this is about Assessing and Characterizing. As a HR Manager, we are expected to charaterize and assess employees. Their capabilities, their behaviors, their personalities, and any other characteristics important to the team and the business. We discuss stress tolerance and emotional intelligience like they are components of a large machine. In our usual circles, these conversations function like an engineering meeting, reviewing torque and specs to decide if the process is robust. However, in other parts of the business characterization takes on a whole new meaning. I remember sitting in an office with an African American Manager and a Middle Eastern Associate, the associate was being stalked by a customer that left poorly written notes. I asked if the customer used English as a second language. The associate was tremendously offended and became very defensive. The manager understood the question and tried to explain to the associate that I was trying to figure out how the person perceived their behavior. To me it was clinical, to the associate it was personal. The conversation went from assessing and characterizing to name calling based on perspective. It turns out that the customer was a native English speaker with limited grammar skills. Instructions were provided to the associate and managers on what to do, if and when that customer came back to visit, based on this characterization. The intervention was successful, but the associate held it against me for a long time. The leap from assessing and characterizing to namecalling comes from individual insecurities. If my language skills are poor and I'm sensitive about it, a simple assessment is more like a playground taunt. When do we teach others to separate assessment from ego? How capable of emotional intelligience are we, really? Humans are incapable of refraining from compartmentalizing (characterizing) to process information. Anamalia, chordata, mammalia, primata, homindae, homo sapiens, just like Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species - we need these boxes as much as we hate them. I am a brown haired, blue eyed, caucasian, female, human resources manager, wife, daughter, pet owner, petulant child and blogger. In the right context, any one of these is a compliment or a condemnation. Maybe this blog should be titled understanding, to truly connect we must seek to understand. What we infer, is not necessarily what is meant, so just ask!

Expectations

A ghostly thought or two on this Sunday morning on expectations versus objectives. 

Over the years, I have heard many quotes about expectations, but one particular quote has changed my life.  "There's no relationship that can't be improved by lowering your expectations."  [M. W., a personal friend]
    This quote gave me great pause when I heard it.  I thought it sounded horrible.  What?  No expectations of anyone?  Isn't that like saying everyone's incapable? What is a world with low or no expectations like?  How is this possible? 
    So much like any paradigm shifting comment in life, it took time to digest.  The mental kick-it-around on this statement has literally taken years.  To truly understand that statement, one has to consider expectations destructive instead of positive.
    Here's some definitions for our discussion.
    An objective is something that one's efforts or actions are intended to attain or accomplish; purpose; goal.  An objective is a goal.  My HR Manager mentors will be happy to know that I remember a really good objective is SMART - Specific, Measurable, Ambitious yet achievable, has a defined Result, and a Time for delivery.  The best objectives, my HR Manager friends tell me, are those that are shared broadly in a work group (or a family, a pair of life partners, some friends) to inspire teamwork and support for delivery of the objective. 
    This is very different from an expectation which focuses on "the act or state of looking forward or anticipating".  An expectation is a "I think it should be this way" and usually unshared, unspoken, unstructured, and rarely matches any sort of reality.  It's what one hopes will happen rather than any sort of defined outcome.  Psychology would lean toward calling expectations a projection of the expector's needs onto someone else.
    Letting go of expectations in relationships, at work or at home, isn't getting rid of the objectives or the shared teamwork, it's getting rid of the hidden agendas and often destructive anticipations.  It's choosing to accept how the deliverable presents itself rather than saying, "This doesn't meet my expectations".  Ask yourself, "Does this meet the objective?"  And if it doesn't meet the objective, as an HR Leader (or wife or husband or parent), consider these next questions, "What was the objective?  How could it have been set more clearly to have met my intended outcome and make the do-er feel more successful?"
    This isn't to say that people commit to things and don't deliver.  Sadly, that does happen.  However, this may be because the person isn't realistic about setting objectives for him or herself.  Rather than feeling disappointed when a person exhibits the over-commit-under-deliver pattern, coach him or her.  Ask a lot of questions when this person sets an objective.  "Really?  That's possible this week?  With this and that going on?"  In most cases, people want to do a great job.  They want to do what's asked well.  Not everyone is good at understanding that Time part of SMART.
    The next time disappointment with an outcome sets in, be it with someone else or yourself, ask the question, "Was there an objective or an expectation?"  If it was an expectation, do a better job moving it to an objective the next time and/or forgive the person, even if it is yourself, for not meeting this expectation.   If there was an objective, figure out what went wrong and do better the next time -- be it helping those involved better define the objective or helping align your expectations to that objective.
    We all expect our colleagues to behave like adults and our life partners to do what they say they will, but at the end of the day, they are human.  What will keep us from wrecking a relationship out of disappointment and frustration is how we choose to manage expectations.  As Marti says, "If it's important to you, do something about it.  Don't just set there disappointed."

Flexibility and The Love-Fear Hypothesis

Ghost Writer stalks after Marti answering her latest question on flexibility with her own hypothesis of two emotions.

    For those close to this Ghost, I have long hypothesized there are merely two emotions in the human condition -- love and fear.  Every other emotion is just a shade of gray between these two.  Hope, a murky one, is often been the challenge emotion tossed into the conversation when I bring up this hypothesis.  My response, "Hope for?  Hope against?  One is love. One is fear."  So feel free to toss that one out at a cocktail party, and let me know how it comes out in your field tests. 

    In the mean time, how does this apply to Marti's blog on flexibility?

    Inflexibility is a fear emotion.  Usually it's a fear of the consequence of the proposed solution.  I can picture Marti pretty dug in against an idea, and that reaction comes most clearly when she's confronted with an opportunity to be flexible in a way that makes her fear the consequences more than embrace the proposal on the table.  In her line of work, I'm sure these opportunities are often.  As an HR Manager, I doubt she often sees an opportunity to be flexible that doesn't sound in her mind like, "Great, and when am I going to have to hire/fire/remediate the mess this is going to make?"

    The good news is, for Marti and even regular HR Leader folk like me, we generally neither do brain surgery nor rocket science for a living.  We work in regular work environments where the worst that can happen is someone has to be hired, fired, or corrected in some massive way when a flexibility opportunity runs astray.

    So, Marti, awesome friend you are, when you have a moment to be flexible, take these steps.

    1.  Ask yourself, "What's the WORST that can happen?"  If no one could die and you won't be left considering how many bodies would fit in the company car trunk, it might be worth considering.  This acknowledges your fearfulness in the situation and gives you space to understand it.

    2.  Ask yourself, "What's the BEST that can happen?"  See caveat on #1. 

    3.  Ask the proposer, the prior two questions.  Make him/her sell it to you a little and consider the consequences for him or her self.  While you're quite often the smartest person in the room, coaching the person through your thought process might rub off on him/her in a way that imparts some wisdom.

    4.  Depending on his/her answers, you may want to give them this question.  "May I have [some appropriate timeframe] to think about this?"  Really, most decisions outside of the brain surgery/rocket science realm really can wait a few minutes for a thoughtful position made on a decent night's sleep or after one's first cup of coffee, at least.

    Well, and for everyone, this may help you be a better HR Leader, wife, husband, life partner, or parent, because as I found out this weekend, sometimes I'm not the most loveble person when I'm inflexible.  May you all find a space to love others enough to go through a process rather than being so concerned with the consequences and potential fear that you're inflexible.