A female friend of mine was having a conversation with her female colleague the other day and they were discussing the etiquette and courtesy associated with men holding doors for women.  The colleague saw clear and distinct geographical differences in the answer to this question, with Southern men trained as automatic door holders while Northern (particularly Northeastern) men seemed less inclined to notice or care.  Both agreed that this was a polite gesture, particularly if one’s hands were full, and were irritated with those men who did not have the slightest inclination to help.

Cut to a conversation with a male colleague who went to a university heralded for it’s human resources program.  The professor of one HR course went so far as to convey that it is sexist and inappropriate for a man to hold a door for a woman, and that in the workplace, one needs to be overtly aware of how such actions can cause offense.  The conclusion?  Avoid door-holding at all costs.

In her book The Etiquette Edge, Beverly Langford posed the following question to test your courtesy quotient.  Which answers would you choose?

When you reach the doorway at the same time as a person of the opposite sex, the following rules apply: (pg. 13)

(a) Whoever arrives first should open it and hold it for those who are following.
(b) Men should still open doors for women.
(c) Women should open doors for men to prove they are no longer oppressed.
(d) Always open and hold the door for someone of either sex if that person has his or her hands full.

According to Landford, the answer is both (a) and (d), and I tend to agree.  

That’s right - I say with pride that I am an unabashed door holder.  As for geography, I was mostly raised in the Midwest, went to school in the South, lived in the West and now live in the East.  I have never had anyone of either sex scoff at the idea of me holding the door.  (If anything, I tend to get a little pissy with people who don’t say thank you, but that’s for another post.)  For me, holding doors is just polite, regardless of ones sex.  And sometimes, in today’s busy and impersonal world, one simple gesture can go a long way.  Let’s keep the conversation (and door holding) going.

It all began when I was a young boy growing up in the suburbs of Milwaukee. My older brother and I would turn on the sprinklers at dusk, sipping on Kool-Aid as we waited for the sun to drop and the grass to fully saturate. Grabbing our flashlights, we’d slosh onto the soggy lawn to stalk the objects of our desire - Nightcrawlers. These are the big, fat, juicy earthworms that are the lifeblood of a Midwestern fisherman. Squirming and diving, the faceless creatures would be collected en masse, dropped by the dozen onto a dirt bed within cheap styrofoam containers.  We had an enterprise, and signs all over town pointed to our house, where “M & M Worms” (Mike and Mark…very creative, I know) was headquartered.

In the very early morning, the alarm would ring, the garage was opened and the fishermen would come.  We sold a lot of worms and had a very good client base.  But even at the age of eight, I had a sense that the worm business may not the right long-term strategy for me.  I had learned a lot about marketing, product management, packaging and operations, so I took those lessons, found a new and growing trade (recycling cans & bottles), and pushed my career forward.  Almost thirty years later - and with the benefit of hindsight - I can easily count over twenty such instances where I shapeshifted my career into something new.  

Business humorist Tom Stern writes about this is his Fast Company article, “The Skills Portability Factor“.  Stern speaks to the fact that employees are consciously taking jobs to add specific skills which allow them to be more marketable somewhere else.  They tend to drop in, learn something on your watch, and then jump.  Stern chalks this up (with a smirk) to today’s job reality:

“We all want to make sure we are ready for every eventuality the shrinking job market might throw at us. It’s all about survival. Corporations once owned us and kept us dancing to their tune. Now a new crop of skill-set hustlers, who strut into the metaphorical pool hall of their workforce and clean up on a sucker bet, are challenging them. Today’s job market is doing double time as the University of Turnover. And you know us Americans. Between our denial and our tenacity, eventually we will begin to feel that we really can fill any position that might come our way.”

I think that when push comes to shove, most employees are opportunistic, searching for those elusive characteristics that can fill the happiness-gap in their careers and lives.  And once they land that next job, the cycle repeats until it’s time to move onto greener pastures.  A lot of the people I know in this situation either bore easily, want the challenge of something new, or can only tolerate the inevitable frustrations they encounter for a fixed period of time.  

Regardless of the reason, employers will be challenged by the shapeshifters.  They will take any form you’d like, learn on the job, and then leave you scratching your head wondering what ever happened to them.  As a former worm salesman, I know it can be done.  Let’s keep the conversation going. 

In watching coverage of the games last evening, my wife and I were discussing the overwhelming complexity involved in managing and deploying the Olympics.  With so many nations each carrying such unique agendas and goals, what overarching principles are applied to such a multifaceted assembly?  What procedures are in place to ensure proper philosophical governance of an event with such global implications?  

After a simple search, I came upon the site of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), a place teeming with information and history.  What caught my eye was not the obvious data on site selection, symbolism or management, but instead the Olympic Charter.  The Charter is 104 pages in length and contains every conceivable rule and regulation associated with the Olympics.  

What stopped me in my tracks were The Fundamental Principles of Olympism (pg. 11).  I read these through and immediate wished that employers could convey such a simple set of ideals to their employees.  In replacing the word “sport” with “work”, I think you’ll see my point:

Most employees walk around every day with a ready supply of hand grenades.  Some are thrown at coworkers during times of duress.  Others get rolled into the boss’ office when credit is taken for something you worked weekends to complete.  But the most explosive, destructive and damaging we save for ourselves.  This is the overarching point of Gen Xer Jason Seiden’s sarcastic book, “How to Self-Destruct: Making the Least of What’s Left of Your Career“.

How to Self-Destruct provides a useful thought-exercise when considering the frustrations of your own career trajectory.  So many of us are concerned about what we should be doing to succeed in the workplace.  Seiden takes the opposite approach – what should you do if you were trying to ruin your career?   Shockingly, the behaviors that could ruin your career are identical to the “play it safe” strategy most of us use to advance and protect our careers – being defensive, not taking risks and making sure that blame falls on someone else.  

Recognizing behaviors to avoid can be equally, if not more, useful to career advancement than focusing on behaviors to adopt.  It will take several pages to get used to the reverse language in the book.  And sadly, I’m convinced there are some readers who won’t get the point and may actually employ Seiden’s advice literally.  Flame on brother, flame on….

If you want an entertaining snapshot, take a look at Seiden’s “explosive trailer” below.  Let’s keep those grenades at the ready and the conversation going.

Since Monday’s post entitled, “Outsourcers - Let’s Get Ready to Rumble“, much has occurred in the great debate surrounding those who list and rank the best in the industry.  One particular development has caused me tremendous concern.  

As many of you are aware, Phil Fersht of AMR Research had posted a simple survey asking buyers, providers and influencers to “rate the raters”.  This morning, Phil announced that the findings of the survey were tainted by false respondents claiming to be Fortune 500 organizations.  Per Phil’s Horses for Sources blog:

“Unfortunately, I received a very large number of suspicious survey responses from a host of “FORTUNE 500 buyers”, whose IP addresses - for some reason - all seemed to emanate from the couple of locations. I received a very large number of these survey submissions clustered within a short time-frame, and they had no names or email addresses attached. They also all had selected one particular list-maker as “highly credible”, while simultaneously describing the same 2 others as having “poor credibility”.”

As someone who has been in this industry for some time now, I am terribly saddened and disappointed to see such a simple attempt at an open information capture to be fraudulently tainted.  Unfortunately, this type of behavior simply perpetuates an area of the industry wrought with increasing distrust.  It seems to me that once again things will have to get worse before they get better.  

Let’s keep the conversation going and our integrity intact.  

Michael Buffer is well known for this catch phrase, a statement that precedes a typically bloody exchange between the world’s most renowned boxers.  Well strap on your mouth-guards and prepare for the body blows, uppercuts and jabs being thrown on Phil Fersht’s Horses for Sources.  Fersht, Research Director for Sourcing at AMR Research, has a regular brawl on his hands over the extremely controversial issue of industry lists and rankings.  

Although concern surrounding certain list-makers’ methodologies has been brewing for some time, a frenzy erupted when BusinessWeek’s Steve Hamm wrote a very compelling article questioning the practices of Black Book of Outsourcing creators Brown & Wilson.  Per Hamm’s article:

“Claes G. Fornell, a professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business who specializes in customer satisfaction surveying, says Brown & Wilson’s methods aren’t sound. First, he says, the firm can’t be sure all the people who respond are qualified. Second, the results could be tilted in favor of companies that urge their customers to participate. ‘You’d be better off not doing anything than doing a survey like this,’ says Fornell.”

Picking up on these concerns, Deborah Kops (CMO for WNS Global Services) repurposed her May 2006 article (”The Book of Lists”) for Fersht’s audience.  Among many insightful statements, Kops questions the value of lists and what they don’t tell us:

“A key component of editorial calendars and other sponsorships in the outsourcing industry, rankings and lists can provide a service to communities by identifying players and trends. But let’s not delude ourselves; they are also a business imperative for publishers, associations and pundits to build membership and/or circulation and sell adverts, publications and reprints, playing on the sell side’s need for recognition. They generally make someone money! This is not necessarily a negative, but is rather the way the world goes around. What’s critical is that that which is editorial and that which is financial should be kept completely independent at all costs. Pay for play in any form must not be the modus operandi.”

I believe Deborah was very gracious by not explicitly referring to those entities whose lists, rankings and awards have tainted the perceived or real value of the industry’s providers.  Those of us who have been in the market for sometime now can easily identify the organizations who have handsomely profited from such point in time, pay-to-play assignments of value.

The Catch-22 of our current industry state is this: In lieu of an attractive alternative, provider marketing organizations will continue to pour precious funding into the pre-existing ranking and rating processes. Thus, the cycle perpetuates itself.  We don’t like the lists yet many are afraid to not be on them.  However, until there is a collective halting of such spend, we can’t expect the system to self-correct. In the interim, we can hold out hope that a better mechanism will emerge that is truly transparent, unbiased and effective. Let’s keep the conversation going.

_________________________________________________

It you want to voice your thoughts on these issues, place your votes by judging the judges.  

You won’t be shocked by the joint findings of EquaTerra and HR Executive stating that public sector HR needs to be more strategic.  This shouldn’t be a surprise given the traditional notion of the public sector lagging the private sector in progressive practices.  Because, let’s face it, HR in the public sector is hard.  

Some of the challenges EquaTerra cites are common to most HR departments, both public and private, including:

• Inadequate resources and lack of executive management attention and support that hamper process improvement efforts; 
• An inability to adequately focus on more strategic activities because of competing demands and insufficient resources;
• Ongoing attrition of skilled/affordable employees needed to address these challenges and an overall aging workforce. (pg. 4)

But others are truly public sector centric, such as:

• Competition from the private sector for employees; 
• Diminishing appeal of the public sector “brand” as a means to attract and retain skilled employees;
• More responsibilities than their counterparts of yesteryear as a result of mandates from the Federal Government and public calls for additional services, including homeland security.  (pg. 4)

If you’re still reading and haven’t fully given up hope just yet, you’re probably interested in hearing what the answer is - the big punch-line, the silver bullet shot forth from the blogosphere that offers that dreamy “ah-ha!” moment of infinite clarity and obvious action.  This blog may not have the ultimate answer, but here is some food for thought.  Perhaps the answer lies in the persistence of public sector HR to not take no for an answer.

We asked Glenn Davidson, Managing Director of EquaTerra Public Sector, to comment on how public entities can stretch tight dollars for key initiatives and transformation:

“Be creative; work smarter.  For instance, a marketing/branding strategy for recruitment, retention and driving behavior doesn’t have to be costly.  Look for alternative ways to get access to technology and services, thereby freeing up resources to do other work.”

Neil Reichenberg, Executive Director of IPMA-HR concluded that:

“This study demonstrates the challenges that public sector HR faces in becoming more strategic, especially in a time of diminishing resources. While the study results indicate that progress is being made, the journey is far from over. The HR department needs to develop innovative strategies and tools that will enable them to become leaders in total talent management within their organizations.” (pg. 19)

The underlying implication is that this is not happening.  But in fact, it is…. slowly.  Those who have a vested and external interest in public sector HR are going to continue to saber rattle and cry from the highest rooftops.  Why?  Because there are billions of dollars in services, licensing, consulting, competitive sourcing and the like to be gained if the internal HR functions could simply “get out of their own way”.  

The problem is that this type of change cannot truly exist without those who feel the pain each and every day electing to stop, take stock of their situation and say enough!  This is hard, and scary, and risky, and sometimes career limiting.  But if you don’t try, you frankly have nothing to complain about.  So take action now and let’s keep the conversation going. 

I’ve received a lot of questions as of late regarding current economic conditions and employee risk.  Both business leaders and employees are struggling with the realities of a down market crashing against a personal need for sustainability and financial security.  Employees are inclined to hide, stay out of sight, not rock the boat and somehow survive.  Employers are peppered with quick hit strategies, the need to act swiftly, massively shifting priorities and the temptation to cut, cut, cut.  

In April of 2005, a very unlikely source authored an interesting publication addressing some of these issues.  It was entitled, “Growing Old Together: Firm Survival and Employee Turnover“.  And the authors?  Two researchers from the Federal Reserve Board’s Divisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary Affairs. This is a very scientific paper, but the abstract does a good job summarizing their thesis:

“Labor market outcomes such as turnover and earnings are correlated with employer characteristics, even after controlling for observable differences in worker characteristics.  We argue that this systematic relationship constitutes strong evidence in favor of models where workers choose how much to invest in future productivity. Because employer characteristics are correlated with firm survival, returns to these investments vary across firm types.  We describe a dynamic general equilibrium model where workers employed in firms more likely to survive choose to devote more time to productivity-enhancing activities, and therefore have a steeper earnings-tenure profile.  Our model also predicts that quit rates should be lower in firms more likely to survive, and should tend to fall during slow times, while job destruction rates should rise.  These predictions, we argue, are borne out by the existing empirical evidence.”  

Ok, so some of this seems pretty obvious.  If your organization is going to make it, you’re going to work a bit harder to ensure that this is, in fact, the outcome.  Is that correct?

“Quite intuitively, workers employed in firms highly likely to survive choose to invest more in future productivity than their counterparts in low survival firms. These investment patterns have several implications for the features of turnover and earnings across firm types in steady state and the evolution of turnover rates following business cycle shocks that are consistent with the relevant empirical evidence.”

And what about quit rates and job destruction?

“We qualitatively evaluate the dynamic properties of our model by computing the transition path between steady states following shocks to total factor productivity (TFP) and gross firm failure rates. Two outcomes of these experiments are particularly notable. First, as in the data, we find that quit rates are procyclical, because workers use slow times to retool (see DeJong and Ingram, 2001). Second, we find that job destruction rates are countercyclical provided gross failure rates for firms rise during recessions, even if the increase is very small as suggested by the existing evidence on corporate failure rates.”

It’s an interesting study.  In effect, they offer evidence that allows you to logically (and dispassionately) understand cyclicality in employment.  To simplify one of their flows, they spoke to the fact that training usually precedes an expectation for higher wages.  During times of training, our productivity would obviously slow, and history has shown that training increases during recessions (DeJong and Ingram, 2001).  If you’re training more, producing less and quitting less often, this can lead to layoffs, something too many Americans are painfully familiar with.

So what should you do?  For employees, the obvious answer may be to do everything in your power to help ensure the survival of your organization.  This is often easier said than done and should not involve stepping over the bodies of your coworkers and peers.  The market will eventually recover and those flaming bridges will come back to haunt you.  Instead, raise your hand and encourage those around you to do the same.  A trench mentality may do nothing more than lead to the fate that you fear the most.  So stay aware of what’s happening around you and let’s keep the conversation going.

The unexpected passing of a loved one can be a shock to your system.  Your last conversation with the dearly departed plays like a broken record.  You ponder their past and reflect on your future.  Your mind marks the calendar as “one week since”, “one month since”, “first 4th of July since”, and so on.  And throughout it all, you and the other surviving family members sort through documents, folders, notebooks and computer files seeking often disparate pieces of information that will allow you to press forward in their absence.

Similar feelings, albeit to a lesser degree, can be found in organizations dealing with the unexpected departure of a key contributor.  If we were to treat succession a bit more like estate planning, we may be able to avoid much of the stress, anxiety and confusion that remains in their wake.

To that end, I’d call your attention to Purdue University’s Six Basic Steps for Getting Ready for Estate Planning. Purdue has done a good job of itemizing each of major considerations, all of which can be repurposed for your succession strategy:

1. Initiate the Discussion: This is often the most difficult step, for like estate planning, this is something that many organizations do not care to discuss.  Begin by identifying those at-risk high performers that are likely to either seek greener pastures and/or retire.  
2. Take Stock of the Present: What is their span of control and/or influence?  What critical information do they have in their possession and how do you extract it?  What relationships do they singly control and manage?  Imagine that they left tomorrow and you had to make heads or tails of their world.
3. Develop Objectives: What exactly do you want to accomplish?  Business continuity is often the most immediate objective, but beyond that, how would you reinvent their role?  What characteristics are optimal and do you have a pool or readily available candidates to fill the void? 
4. Choose Advisors: Seek outside advice and guidance.  Whether through executive recruiters, consultants, industry connections or other third-parties, do not feel the need to solve for this complex equation through internal means alone.
5. Consider Alternatives: Should this previously occupied position cease to exist?  Could or should it be split into multiple roles?  Can you proactively communicate a desire to form mentor/protege relationships of this person’s choosing to openly and actively address the issue?
6. Review and Modify: Succession plans have an expiration date, and do not let your more important ones sour or stagnate.  Expect to revisit the plan quarterly to assess net-new factors or considerations that modify your prior assumptions and expectations.  Stay fluid yet focused. 

No matter how much time you think you have to deal with these issues, there is no better time than the present.  Like the grieving survivor, we often wish we could turn back the clock and have done things differently.  So let’s keep the conversation going (and the regrets to a minimum).

The animals at Kris Dunn’s HR Capitalist have broken free of their blogging cages as the 39th edition of the HR Carnival opens for business!  Strapping on their overalls and straw hats, human resources departments from all over the world are anxious to take a peek under the tent of the newest Big Top show.  Here’s a sampling of what they will see:

 ”Remember you are the expert (and act like it) - Ann Bares of Compensation Force shows us how in the area of compensation, related to when a request for a grade adjustment is real, and when it’s not.

-Tweak rewards and incentives based on the goal - Wouldn’t it be nice to be the expert on the impact of different types of rewards on individual vs. team behavior? Paul Herbert of Incentive Intelligence runs it down for you here.

-Use technology to deliver a customized experience for employees - Wally Bock reminds us that technology exists to customize our programs in many areas, including employee development.

-Become the expert on getting innovation through collaboration - Jon Ingham trots out some thoughts on the value of collaboration.  Maybe you should rethink locking down the social media sites via your web filter.”

…and there is much more, with 36 ”performances” across a litany of death-defying human capital stunts.  Enjoy the show and let’s keep the conversation going.