Your Mission (Should Be): To Change the World

Originally uploaded by /maple

I've been on a "mission" kick lately, which is a bit unlike me, since I tend to be pretty pragmatic and facts/data-oriented when it comes to how I approach HR.

At the same time, the world is in flux – millions are losing their jobs and companies are struggling to stay afloat. People and organizations are being forced to re-invent themselves in order to make it through this recession and come out healthy.

Amid such dramatic changes, it's natural for us to reach for an anchor to guide our thinking and future planning.

Unfortunately, most organizations' mission/vision statements don't serve as helpful anchors or guideposts. They are we-centered and inward-looking. They focus on generic goals like maximizing customer and shareholder value or being the best at providing some sort of solution/product/service that, in an economic environment such as this, loses its relevance.

In Good to Great Jim Collins emphasizes the need to orient an enterprise around a vision that faces outward. A vision/mission that aspires to change the world, even if only in some small way.

Collins doesn't propose this for its feel-good value (though such a mission can play a significant role in employee engagement/motivation). Rather, such mission statements allow ultimate flexibility in adapting your organization and business model to economic and market realities that are always changing, without losing sight of your ultimate objective. They allow you to constantly re-invent yourself without modifying your highest aspirations and values.

By way of example, here are a few that I found online (with some slight editing for readability).

Not Very Helpful:

• "To exceed customer expectations and fulfill customer needs with the highest quality products at the lowest available cost." 
  
• "To delight our communities of users, advertisers, and publishers – all of us united in creating indispensable experiences."
  
• "To be the preferred destination for our customers by delivering outstanding value, continuous innovation and an exceptional customer experience."

Getting Better:

• "Simply, to make it easy for you to express your personal style throughout your life."
  
• "To Give everyone the freedom to create their own social network for anything."
  
• "To Save people money so they can live better."

Really Good:

• "To make the world's information universally accessible and useful."
  
• "To connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty."
  
• "To unite Artists and Fans in an independent movement that aims to level the playing field in the global music industry."    

If you're in a position amid this recession to re-invent yourself, think about how you want to change the world for the better. What problem do you want to help solve?  If you could make some small change in how the universe operates, what would that be? 

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How Do You Keep Employees Up When Everything is Looking Down?

I'm in the middle of Daniel Ariely's Predictably Irrational and having great fun with it. 

Ariely is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT, so he is a bit of a misfit among economists. He doesn't believe that humans behave in a strictly rational (and easily mathematically "modelable") fashion. Rather, we're quirky. Our behavior is often guided by strange emotional responses and is embedded in a social/cultural context that defines right/wrong and appropriate/inappropriate in ways that sometimes defy pure reason.

In the middle of the book, Ariely gets into market vs. social norms and how we respond to them, and he draws some very stark conclusions with regard to how we treat people in today's organizations. 

In turns out, according to Ariely's research, that we tend to respond very generously to requests for help when the rewards stay within the realm of "the social." For example, we tend to readily volunteer our time and work hard for others when offered a gift in exchange for our efforts or even no compensation at all. 

On the other hand, market signals, such as an offer of money payment or even just mention of money, seem to flip a switch in our minds telling us this is a formal exchange.  We will put in as much effort as we believe the payment merits. 

There is nothing particulary new or shocking in this. But the current economic environment and the limitations that it imposes on our ability to retain and motivate employees with monetary rewards makes his message especially poignant. Market-based comp schemes are expensive. Compensation wrapped in social norms?  Not so much.

Not only that, but the messaging usually associated with downsizing and restructuring tends to emphasize the employee-employer relationship as a market exchange. "It's just business," after all. Those signals are great motivation- and loyalty-killers,according to Ariely's research.

So it seems that it's time to go "back to basics" when it comes to keeping employees engaged and boosting productivity in this down economy. As a profession, we need to be thinking about how we can get back to the business of increasing the intrinsic rewards of people's work, and we need to get creative in rebuilding the human and social aspects of our organizations. 

In short, instill meaning in people's work and use rewards that mimic social exchange and build community (and are cheap!). Do those things, Ariely suggests, and you'll weather this downturn just fine.

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The Death of the Resume: RIP

Originally uploaded by cstein96

Try this exercise:

1. Write down your job title.
2. Write down your job responsibilities and the skills required to do your job. And BE HONEST!  
3. Go to Monster.com and perform a search for your job using your current title.
4. See how many jobs come up and, for those that appear, compare the job responsibilities and qualifications required with what you wrote down in steps 1 and 2.

What did you find?  If you're like most people, you found what you already knew either intuitively or explicitly – that the era of consistency across job titles has long passed. A HR Manager is not an HR Manager is not an HR Manager.

The implications of this, as it relates to job-seeking and recruiting, are significant and well-known to recruiters because they make life hell. Tracking down a qualified candidate based on resume data is incredibly difficult. 

Madeline Laurano at Bersin put out a post a couple of weeks back titled, "Resume Thinking: Is it Becoming Obsolete?"  Madeline makes the point that in the current economic environment:

Recruiters and hiring managers are inundated with more resumes for less positions and no common language to decipher the necessary skills for each job opening.  Enough said…the system is broken. 

The emphasis here is my own.  The bold text is THE reason, in my mind, why the traditional resume needs to go away. I keep referring to this as a problem of structured vs. unstructured data (resume data being unstructured), even though this is an incredibly ineffective way to help people understand the challenge.  

So much to my excitement, I came across a SlideShare presentation on Hidden Talent Pools tweeted by BooleanBlackBlt. The presentation does a great job using specific examples to outline just how difficult it is to identify ideal job candidates based on resume searches.  

So what's the solution? There's no silver bullet, but Madeline does provide links to some interesting possibilities. From my standpoint, this is absolutely another reason to seriously pursue competency-based job profiles as part of your recruiting process. 

1. Competencies lock people into a common, structured language for outlining job requirements as well as what candidates bring to the table
2. Competency-based job profiles eliminate the heavy reliance on job titles and other relatively meaningless criteria for searching for qualified job-seekers.

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Job Postings and Your Nuptials

A good friend of mine – let's call him Lee – was recently promoted to Director of Marketing for a large non-profit. Congrats, Lee!

Lee was favored for the position from the start. He's been with the organization a few years, is viewed very highly and is incredibly well-liked. In fact, this specific position was even created based largely on his recommendation for the future direction of the department. 

Yet, as is quite common, Lee's organization had to post the opening externally and go through the process of interviewing outside candidates before they could offer him the job.

The rationale for taking this extra step is well-known. Oddly, it actually parallels the procurement process for most companies very nicely. (I'll await my thrashing for comparing procurement to recruiting and HR.)

 

But with people, not products, isn't this just a bit counter-intuitive?  Why shouldn't you be able to simply reward someone for the fact that they've adapted effectively to the demands of the organization, their job, and their co-workers, and proven themselves worthy of the next level?

Take this outside the workplace for a moment. What if you treated your fiancee the same way?  

What if, after falling in love and spending many moons with someone, you didn't simply propose but instead laid out an eight step plan in which you would evaluate other potential candidates to eliminate bias and make sure she's the right one? 

Yeah, try that.  Let me know how it goes.

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Don’t Fall Victim to Your P-Ness

My Myers-Briggs tells me I'm not the most organized and planful person.  And I'm not.  This is one of the not-so-pretty things I've come to accept about myself and my personality as I've gotten a bit older.

I'm a serious P – meaning, in part, that I kind of like distractions and I don't like being forced into rigid routines or making plans too far in advance.

This isn't a particularly adaptive characteristic as it relates to work and organizational life. So, I was glad to be reminded by a colleague of mine – also co-author of this book on generational issues in the workplace - that I shouldn't allow myself to be victim to my "P-ness."  

It's true. She said that. Jokingly, of course, and in the context of the story where she accidently made this remark in the middle of an MBTI workshop.  

And she's right. Despite my natural tendency to be a lame-ass when it comes to planning and project management, I can do better. 

So can you. Carl Jung, according to my colleague, described personality types like the Myers Briggs types as rooms in a house.  "Your type" is simply the room in which you feel most comfortable. "Maturity," then, according to Jung, was the process of becoming more comfortable in all of the various rooms of the house. Sage advice.   

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What’s Twitter Worth?

No, this isn't about the company's valuation, a topic that has made news recently.  This is about what Twitter is worth to an average user, like me.

To illustrate, a story.

During a recent trip to Saudi Arabia, a colleague from Sweden shared his copy of the Economist, the British weekly, with me.  

Reading through it, I found an article on managing the Facebook generation with a short feature on a new company called Rypple. As can be gleaned from the website, the entire purpose of Rypple is to provide a means to help people quickly and easily gather feedback from colleagues and peers. "Fanstastic!," I thought, and so I tried to register. Much to my chagrin, the free version of the web-based application is still in private beta. I was wait-listed.

Here's where the story gets interesting.  Despite my small setback, I decided to post a link to Rypple on Twitter. In a matter of hours, I had a reply from the product manager of the application, asking for my feedback (talk about customer intimacy!).  I sent him a direct message in response, letting him know I loved the concept and had signed up for the private beta, but was still waiting to get in.  Within minutes, he had tracked down my registration and lifted the velvet rope to let me in. While the full review of Rypple is to come, I am already enjoying its benefits.

So what's the moral of the story?  Namely, that Twitter is much more than just a great tool for sharing information and updates with colleagues and friends. It's not just another way to tell people your "status," one of the most common misconceptions of Twitter. 

Rather, it's the equivalent of a 21st century wrecking ball. It demolishes barriers between you and virtually anyone else out there in the twittersphere. I've never known a tool more powerful and effective at democratizing access to other people and their intellectual and social capital. If you don't believe me, just try it.

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Paving the way for praise

Originally uploaded by cattycamehome

My wife received an email this morning from the florist we worked with for our wedding a little over a year and a half ago. As the story goes, one dissatisfied customer has begun to post highly negative reviews on the florist at local review sites like yellowpages.com, insiderpages.com, maps.google.com, local.yahoo.com, etc., etc.

In response, this florist has asked that any former clients who were satisfied with her work (she was outstanding, in our opinion) go online and tell their stories, as well.

This little shop in Minneapolis, Flora Bella, is taking a crash course in the importance of carefully stewarding one's online presence. While the owner may have formerly relied primarily on word-of-mouth and wedding magazine articles, etc. to build her reputation, she's also savvy enough to know the following:

When a bride-to-be gets engaged, one of the first things she'll do is begin scouring Google for local vendors. She'll do searches like, "wedding flowers minneapolis," and get a google maps or yellowpages listing of all of the local vendors, including Flora Bella. Right next to Flora Bella, she'll see reviewer ratings and comments that will form her first impression. If the only review listed has one star and a soliloquy of complaints, our florist knows that she's in trouble.

The whole incident, however small, reminded me of a great Heath Brothers article in Fast Company a couple of months ago about the need to make it easy for customers to give praise, and then to make sure that praise gets passed on to the right people. It's something that is not only critical for branding purposes but for employee motivation and engagement, as well. How many customers out there love your products and appreciate the contribution you've made, but from whom you've never heard boo? Wouldn't it be nice to know?

Link to article

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If you only read one article all week…

…Let it be this one! 

Link to article

Ellen McGirt is an outstanding staff writer for Fast Company, and she has done a wonderful job in this article of making the business rationale for enterprise 2.0 come to life.

Two things that stood out to me in reading this article - 

1. The very explicit recognition that getting companies to successfully use web 2.0 in an enterprise setting requires a great deal of consulting support.  The cultural/organizational and business process changes needed are enormous, and Cisco is not shy about that fact that they are positioning themselves to capitalize on that need by using their own company as a testing ground. Watch out IBM and Accenture! 
2. Similarly, it's difficult to make the business case for web 2.0 right now (and will be increasingly difficult as the recession deepens) because we collectively lack a compelling success story. People hardly know what web 2.0 technologies are capable of, let alone how to derive value from them. Cisco can no doubt speak to the gains they've made over the last seven years and the journey that has brought them this far. Telling that story publicly could be critical to broadening adoption of web 2.0 in the future (in much the same way GE's six sigma story gave birth to a trend).

There is a lot of great stuff in here that ties in to HR more traditionally, as well, but I'll let you discover that for yourself.

As a closing comment, I'll just say that, from the standpoint of talent management more narrowly, I see this Cisco example as a great counter to the more traditional approach to managing talent that most HR technologies today are built to support.  The distinction is one of helping management identify talent versus enabling people to find one another so that knowledge/capability can be leveraged as needed.  While the first may always be necessary and more comfortable for some organizations, the latter will be a requisite step in truly harnessing the potential of the knowledge worker.

Fun stuff!  Enjoy the article.

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When career paths at your company include your competitors…

My brother-in-law works for a Fortune 500 company (who shall remain nameless). He's relatively new to the organization, and to the world of work in general, but has been very well-received and appears to be seen as an up-and-comer.  

Despite the fact that he's at a large, well-known company that offers myriad job opportunities and has well-defined career paths, and despite the fact that he's been told over and over that he's an important asset, he still sees the company as a very short stopover in his career.

Really, it's been fascinating to hear his commentary on "what talented people do" at his company.  Sticking around and working your way up the ladder doesn't seem to be one of the oft-chosen options. Apparently, it's much more likely for the best and brightest to go on to work for vendors or, worse, competitors. So those left to be promoted are often chosen from the middle of the pack – a move that serves to further push out both current and future talented employees.

Sounds like a great path to mediocrity, doesn't it?  What do you think the VP of HR and CEO would say if they knew about this "informal" career pathing?

Talented people at this company leave for a wide variety of reasons, it seems, but what is clear is the fact that the career ladders are so rigidly defined that you know from day one where you're going if you stick around. Veering from that path is legendarily difficult.  You're essentially locked into a lifetime of repetitive work on similar problems with essentially the same group of people. 

This scares the hell out of ADD Gen Yers like my brother-in-law.  He doesn't want to be told where he's going if he stays with a company. He wants to chart his own course, figuring it out along the way.  He wants to know what opportunities are out there and how to access them, but not be told which he can or cannot pursue. 

Ultimately, his career most certainly won't involve a lifetime with Company X.  He'd be apt to stick around longer, however, if he could envision a future there that would accommodate his short attention span.

So… is it time to obliterate traditional career paths?

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More on RIFs

After my last post, I found a couple of additional perspectives on layoffs from Human Strategies and TalentedApps.  They add some wonderful, personal color to the experience that Guy’s post doesn’t really bring.

TalentedApps: The Silver Lining: A RIF Story

Human Strategies: You’re Right-Sized?!

Enjoy!

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