The Agony and the Ecstasy

Just when you think HR has learned that some assessments aren’t right for hiring, you open today’s Wall Street Journal and there’s an ad for a COO position being recruiting by a major search company that asks for a resume and “complete Myers-Briggs personality type test results.”  Then they refer to a free online knockoff of the original, which the publishers of clearly state is not appropriate for hiring.

Enough agony. Now for the ecstasy.

For those of us who are highly motivated by mastery, there is nothing better than the triumph of person over technology.  And for those of us who are highly motivated by affiliation, there is nothing better than doing it as a team.  Today our team finished our first videos on Role-Based Assessment and teaming characteristics!  And this was our first ‘review’:

Speaking as a performer who pays attention to production values kudos on the quality of the clips!   It captures very visually  the Gabriel Institute competitive differentiation.

Overall, that shifts the balance clearly in favor of ecstasy for today!

PS: If you are on Facebook, you can see them here:
A New Way to Know
People as Teams

First, Fire the Leaders

Another week, another crop of downsizings, and with few notable exceptions, HR people are telling me how they’re choosing the leaders over the non-leaders as the keepers.  And I’m groaning inside.

Has anyone figured out how companies run when everyone’s a leader?

For one thing, no one’s willing to make the coffee.

For another, the self-promotion rises and the effective internal communication falls.

There are loads of strategic plans (if they ever get out of the planning stage, that is) but there’s no one who actually prefers to DO something.

And no one fixes the little annoying things that threaten to jam the progress and no one loves tracking the instructions that tell you what to do to unjam them.

But it’s like someone made it a rule that being a leader is the only worthwhile position.  I’m going to riff on John Coltrane now and declare, unequivocally:

Damn the Rules, it’s the Team that Counts. You need all the Roles in your song, anyway.

Just give me some improvisation, baby.

What Will Happen to HR?

I gave the keynote at Philadelphia SHRM’s meeting this week and since I’ve been getting a lot of calls and LinkedIn requests from senior HR people lately, I figured I’d offer my help to anyone who’s looking.  I never expected there would be that many.  More to the point, I never expected to be that many senior level, highly experienced, knowledgeable people with no prospects in sight.

One person lamented that companies just don’t care about people any more.  I’m not convinced that they ever did, at least in the sense that HR professional thought they should.

Seems to me that when we think that way, we pit HR, the protector of the worker, against the company’s stakeholders – often a whole lot of people who have a little bit of that company’s stock in their (dwindling) 401k.

What if we had a way of thinking about all the people involved in an organization – those who fund it, those who it serves, those who manage it – as if their interests were compatible?  If we did, I wouldn’t have to ask myself, what will happen to HR?

On Appreciating Yourself

It’s so amazing to me how some wonderfully spectacular people have absolutely no appreciation of how special they are. Seems to me that all we do with long lists of “required competencies” – most of which have little or nothing to do with how you actually need to interact with others to accomplish the goal – is make people feel inadequate. So I hope you will understand how proud I was of Kevin, our fabulous VP of Sales, the other day.

Seems he sent an HR leader her own hiring report. Now usually we don’t do this, since who wants to read things that might be negative – things you don’t even want to change about yourself, even if, magically, you could. Apparently the HR leader read it and was not happy. (No one ever is, really, and mea cupla - it is we dumb “experts” who have caused it with our overemphasis on impossible generic “perfection”.)

But Kevin rose to the occasion and went through it with her, bit by bit, making sure she understood that for what she was expected to do there could not be a better fit – even though there are lots of jobs for which she would be a much less than perfect fit. Not that she would actually want to do any of them…

I know he must have done a great job. He shared this comment she sent him:

“I read this report again and was surprised to find that it really wasn’t that “bad.” I think I can live with this assessment! I intend to share it with my boss and see how useful he thinks it is considering what he knows about me from having worked with me for several years and/or whether he thinks it would be useful in making a hiring decision.”

What I love about this is how she moved from fear to appreciating how truly excellent she is for what she does, just by having some real feedback from a real person.

I hope you are appreciating yourself today!

Politics, Namecalling & the Hiring Process

Too much namecalling happening in politics. It reminds me of a story I heard about two guys who found out they were being considered for the CEO position at a major company. They managed to get word to different factions on the decision making team and, in short, thoroughly trashed each other. Since both seemed honest, both were believed. And, as you might guess, someone else was hired.

What really gets to me is how political namecalling would never pass the HR sniff test.

Take the brouhaha over Barack Obama’s middle name. What HR person would tolerate using someone’s name as if it was a slur? Plenty of people have names traditionally associated with a nationality that they aren’t. Look at the baby books. And while you’re there, look up Barack. I don’t know what his parents’ intention was when they named him, but Barack is a Biblical name. Check out Judges for the story of Deborah – he’s her general. And the other Barack I was thinking of was the character in Leon Uris’s Exodus, the leader of the kibbutz who changed his name to Barack, citing the reference to Deborah’s general. So does that make Senator Obama Jewish? As much as Muslim, I’d say…

Politics would be kinder and gentler if it took a lesson from HR.

The Other Side of the Desk

Had a lovely exchange with the HR manager of a new customer. While she was out on maternity leave the boss tested Role-Based Assessment, saw the value immediately and integrated it into their hiring process. The boss shared some reports with the HR manager (including the boss’s own report!!) and the HR manager was amazed at the accuracy of details of behaviors and interactions. She wanted to understand more about the technology, so we had a brief conversation, during which she told me this story.

She and a hiring manager were supposed to interview a candidate together and the hiring manager had to leave so she decided to interview the candidate alone and bring him back to meet with the hiring manager later. She sat at her desk and expected the candidate to sit on the other side, the normal interview arrangement in this company. She thought he would be rather professional from the very formal way he was on the telephone when the interview was being set up, but he quickly became very condescending to her and then moved in closer. And closer. Till his chair was all the way around her desk. Not a sexual come-on thing, she quickly said (I hate to think what would have happened if he’d tried anything. She’s a mom – she knows you have to cut bad behavior off fast.) It was just not the kind of behavior she expected from someone with such a good resume. (Do you believe in resumes? I still believe in Tinker Bell but I don’t believe in resumes…)

When she came back from her leave, she realized the hiring manager still had an appointment to interview the guy. She went to her boss who double checked and said, no, he was not recommended and she breathed a big sigh of relief. This guy was not going to fit – not with her, not with their customers.

The good news is she is now on board, along with her boss, with the idea of screening before interviewing. The bad news is this guy is still out there and hasn’t learned the basics of respect. He’d better stay away from my daughter…