HR — Earn that Seat at the Strategic Leadership Table

There are many, too many, organizations out there that view HR as merely an administrative enterprise.  Even as the top HR leader in a billion-dollar company, I’ve had client leaders personally tell me, “Just wait until I need somebody fired, then I’ll call you.”  Clearly there was work to do in order to gain real respect at the leadership level.

This is not easy stuff.  You have to develop a strategic plan and stick with it on a regular basis, and work consistently to try to bring your client groups along in that way of thinking.  Dave Ulrich, strategic HR thinker at the University of Michigan, has portrayed a model that shows 4 quadrants for HR competency:  Administrative Efficiency, Employee Advocacy, Cultural Change, and Strategic Execution.  The challenge for HR is to figure out how to move from beginning to end of that list in order to drive the credibility required to sit with the leaders.

The companies that I’ve worked with who respected HR as a critical thought leader in the organization all used some form of annual review of people or HR.  In fact, in one company I had the opportunity to participate just as the process was introduced, and it was actually rather enjoyable to see senior leadership figure out how to have the strategic-style thinking and discussions with regards to people rather than just numbers or expansion, productivity or earnings per share.  They learned to speak about leadership bench and promotability, flow within the pipeline, training and development, diversity, and talent.  It didn’t take long before these things became part of the fabric of the organization.  The annual review began to merge into an organizational overview that talked both about the strategic operational things as well as the strategic people viewpoint.  This stuff earns credibility.

From a practical standpoint, where shall we start?  If you are in a business situation today that doesn’t fully appreciate what HR is able to do for them, my recommendation would be to begin by holding a ‘contracting discussion’ with several of your chief clients.  No, I do not mean a discussion about contracted employees.  I mean hold a discussion that has these kinds of questions that you can consider:

• What is the most important strategic issue facing your business or department over the next 12 months?
• What are your expectations for your team members (as a group): hourly, mid-level salary, leadership?
• What “people issues” do you expect over the next 12 months?
• How do you want people to see you as a leader?
• What 3 things do you most need from your HR department as you see it today?
• What one thing do you feel that you need most from me?

If you hold this meeting, be prepared for a couple of things:  first, you should expect that the first time you hold this discussion openly may be a bit ugly, as the floodgates are opened for the first time.  But over time they get much, much better, but only if you follow the second item completely: whatever you agree to do in this meeting, you must complete it and you must re-visit with your client so he or she knows that this item or items got done.  Trust me, it’s important, and it’s about them trusting you to deliver.

Also, learn to influence better.  There is some work from the Center for Creative Leadership and others a while back on strategies for influence, and rational persuasion (what most of us use most frequently) is pretty low on the list of gaining commitment from the clients.  Much higher on the list are things like personal appeal, consultation, and inspiration.  Even exchange (“you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”) and ingratiation (“you’re a wonderful…”) rank higher than rational persuasion.  More on this topic as I get enough legitimate information organized to share with you as a future blog, because I find it not only incredibly interesting but also critical to that seat in the boardroom.

Other ways to improve your Human Resources strategic credibility:

• Learn how to say “no” effectively.  “We don’t do that here” doesn’t work.  Explain how and why this comes back to damage the entire organization or this manager’s department in particular if we do what’s being asked.
• Communicate your current priorities back to the organization on a regular basis.  Especially if you have multiple clients, without this they may have no idea what you’re working on for the others.  And if you’re at loggerheads, get them in the same room at the same time and hammer out priorities and necessary resource commitments.
• Limit “surprises” on people issues:  learn to project downstream issues and communicate them effectively and in advance.
• Communicate “wins” — new hires, awards, successful change actions, department productivity.  Goes a long way.
• Get face-to-face on key topics, sensitive issues, and consultation.
• Have enough dialogue with your key clients so that you can deal with emerging issues effectively before it ever reaches your key client’s desk.  Gain enough idea of his or her values and priorities by your regular talks that you can be effective and handle these things right.  When you don’t, and it goes bad, use it as another discussion point to learn how to handle these kinds of situations going forward.

So again, seek to find ways to push from that administratively efficient individual toward the strategic planner.  Continue to be the employee advocate yet seek ways to improve the amount of time and effectiveness you have to deliver on change management and acceleration.  Learn what your chief clients are about, their values, priorities, and issues, so you can operate on their behalf in a way that benefits the entire organization.  Contract with those clients, use higher level influencing strategies — and slowly but surely work your way toward enough credibility to sit with the strategic leaders in the organization.

Change Acceleration: Developing a Need that is Shared

In my mind there is no single factor that makes major organization change easier than when people want to see the change take place.  As we know, this isn’t always the case.  Different individuals see things from a different perspective and that makes alignment toward a common goal sometimes very difficult.  Do you recall Mayor Larry Vaughn in the movie “Jaws“?  The mayor wasn’t evil; he desperately wanted to believe that there wasn’t a big problem and there was still an opportunity to salvage the tourist season for the little town of Amity.  Police Chief Martin Brody‘s concern was to be sure, certain, that the beach was safe before allowing visitors to swim again, but when the first sizable tiger shark was caught the Mayor and many others wanted to believe the beach was safe and opened it again.  As movie watchers, we knew that the film was only about 1/2 over so the really big shark was still out there, but if the great white had moved to other hunting grounds no one would have been the wiser.

Vaughn wasn’t evil or maligned, he didn’t share the vision for what needed to take place.  Brody had this vision, but wasn’t able to communicate it effectively enough to gain alignment and all push in the same direction.  Now imagine this among a business’ leadership team of a dozen or so individuals all representing a different perspective and various functions.

The first step of gaining alignment is a clear understanding of exactly what the problem is.  Given complex business problems, people will quickly jump to conclusions about why this issue is occurring.  One way to do this is to dip into the Lean Manufacturing / Six Sigma toolbox and utilize a “Why-Why” analysis: in short, this is the practice of getting the right people in the room and looking at the current major issue occurring; then ask why this is happening.  Upon getting various results, you ask why each of those is happening, and so on… sometimes this practice is called the “5 Whys” because most groups find that once they’ve drilled down in the process 5 times, things seem to be as basic as they get (“root cause“).  One other interesting thing often happens: themes or perhaps common root causes often result, indicating that there are three or maybe five things that if the organization can influence, this will make a major effect on the end result that you’re seeing.  In the process of this, organization leaders gain alignment and agreement around what specifically are the root causes of the issues at hand.

In the Jaws case, there was no doubt what the problem was; there was a huge fish out there eating tourists for snacks. The questions were, can we agree on a solution and how do we know when the solution has been attained?  Clearly when the first tiger shark was caught, the mayor was convinced it was over.  Brody and marine biologist Matt Hooper are unconvinced and continue their search, and their review of the stomach contents of the captured tiger shark seem to confirm their beliefs.  Only when another great white attack occurs does the entire town commit to solving the problem right. By that time, significant time had passed; if this is your business or organization, significant progress or profits may be wiped out.

This is about mission.  Not the longer-term vision for the organization, but the mission for ‘how do we avoid this particular business obstacle in order to continue on toward our vision‘?  It’s typically short term, and if you’ve done a “Why-Why” analysis or other alignment exercise, you collectively understand what the problem is.  However, there’s one more problem to consider at this point: the organization’s willingness to challenge the status quo.  I once worked for a firm that said they wanted to see change and improvement take place, yet when anyone complained that we were playing in his backyard, it came to be an issue.  In short, the business was not willing to challenge the status quo.  As an HR leader, you need to test for this up front.  If the organization truly isn’t willing to challenge the status quo, perhaps now is not the time to embark upon the change initiative.  Work harder to try to understand how big of a problem this is (get data from internal and external sources) or partner with your business leader to develop the vision (find examples, best practices, model the standards for leadership more clearly).

Yet challenging status quo is essential and by very definition it embraces change, and accelerating change.  There is an early step here — your top leadership needs to be visible and credible about standing up in front of the organization and saying, “Here’s the problem… we need to fix it…. we are all going to join together and see this thing through to its conclusion.”  This combats the status quo, it effectively creates an internal crisis that we are all going to join together to fight, and therefore it develops a shared need.

The best example of this I’ve personally witnessed was in 1991 when General Motors ElectroMotive Division (EMD), which then held about 60% of the US market for sale of locomotives, was mentioned as a candidate for possible sale in some of the industry newspapers.  GE Transportation (GETS), then holding approximately 40% of the US market share, viewed this as a threat and then-CEO Bob Nardelli of GETS collected his management team together and brought with him Roger Penske, who as leader of Detroit Diesel Allison at the time, was a very likely successful bidder for General Motors EMD. Nardelli effectively used this discussion with the team to galvanize the need for change.  Everyone in the room learned that Penske had the capability of making EMD a much more dangerous competitor to GETS, which would translate to lost sales, downsizing, or even closure for GETS.  This drove the mission home, and GE was able to perform a remarkable series of cost-cutting and market development measures that turned the organization around and since that time has managed to win an approximated 70% of market share.  Nardelli effectively saw a risk, identified it as a crisis, and galvanized the organization to overcome the status quo.  This is the kind of thing your organization needs to do.  Warning: don’t “make up” a crisis — it has to be real and credible to be effective.  

One of the most effective tools I’ve used in this regard is the 4-block “Threat and Opportunity” matrix.  It’s structure is rather simple:  Threat and Opportunity are the columns, Short Term and Long Term are the rows.  Have the team identify short term threats and long term threats (“What are the issues to potentially overcome us in the short term or the long term if we fail to be successful making this change?”) as well as short term and long term opportunities (“What benefits or new markets are available to the business if we take advantage of making this change?”).

In short, your organization’s employees and leaders need to be properly aligned in the direction of change.  If your leaders aren’t ready, you need to get them ready, and test to ensure that they are ready before moving forward.  Use good leadership and communications strategies to confirm and demonstrate commitment to the success of this change to all employees.

Preserving Team Unity During Restructuring and Downsizing

Few decisions are as difficult in the business world than those following the realization that the business unit is wrongly positioned to suit the current mission.   Emotions tend to overwhelm good business reason, and sometimes decisions that seem to make sense are bad for many other reasons. This is not a course taught in business school, and managers are often ill-prepared to deal with the difficulty of the decisions needing to be made.

• Mistrust in this type of situation unfortunately runs rampant. Even when it seems silly, it is still there.  I once attended a management holiday party prior to an upcoming major January restructuring; all of the attendees there knew what was pending and there was a somber overtone to the festivities.  Our business leader had gifts for everyone on the team, beautiful candles chosen by his spouse that in any normal environment would be highly valued.  But some of the candles were short and stout, some of them were taller and thinner, and team members started whispering about who got the tall thin ones versus who got the short stout ones, and attributing that to who goes and who stays. It was terrible!  Yet no matter how silly it was, it still remained on people’s minds.
• Remember to always act with concern and compassion for the entire employee population during this time.  Good people face job loss; we should never treat affected employees as if they are lower than others or that they don’t have value.  Frankly, if they didn’t have value, then managers didn’t do their job in managing them out in advance of a downsizing event.
• With the broad employee population, develop a good communications plan with timing and message that precedes the event, to develop an understanding of business conditions and why this is the only alternative, not so far in advance that all of your best employees run for the exits — but also not so far delayed that they all see it coming and by not discussing it your leadership credibility becomes damaged.  Best practices also include individual one-on-one discussions with each ‘survivor’ employee following the event, detailing changes in job responsibility but also take the opportunity to genuinely note his or her specific value to the organization.  Have each manager perform due diligence on these discussions; they become memorable and valuable to the employee.
• Team unity also hinges on the belief among the employee population that the process is built upon the highest level of integrity, that this is a necessary action designed for the best possible future, that selections were made fairly and not just among the “good old boys” network, and that impacted employees will be treated fairly with sufficient severance and outplacement.  Employees also need to believe that another event is not going to happen again in six months or a year; if they believe this, your best employees are going to be headed for the exits anyway.  If you think this restructuring isn’t going to put your business in the best possible cost and strategic position following the job eliminations, then cut deeper to avoid another short term downsizing.
• I’ve seen organizations believe that they are doing exiting employees a favor by announcing job elimination weeks or months in advance and having the employees work until their departure date.  In my opinion, this does not help team unity at all — it creates an awkward situation in the work area and it doesn’t take long before the work that affected employees are doing becomes less and less meaningful.  My recommendation would be that if you want to give them extra time, set up a career center and have them focus their time on finding a new position elsewhere, which is the most important thing for them.
• Leadership team unity is a complex topic unto itself; because of their role in helping to select team members who stay or go they have to be involved in advance.  They are in unfamiliar territory, they may have to choose between personal favorites and hand-chosen team members, and they may feel that they are personally at risk as well.  They need to be given guidance on how to choose (I strongly recommend a decision matrix here), with specific objectives by budget and headcount.
• Leadership team process needs oversight, typically by the business leader and the HR leader.   Keep fairness and equity an objective and decide in advance how to handle potential angles that may cause team distrust after the restructuring event is over.  For example, decide what ‘headcount elimination’ and ‘budget reduction’ mean in practical terms.  Eliminating a job that the manager was “thinking” or “planning” to add next year (therefore avoiding one more current team exit) becomes viewed with distrust.  However, eliminating a job that was just recently vacated and actively posted is different; so also is one that has been recently approved by a job requisition process and there is current activity to fill.  Eliminating a job or headcount by outsourcing the process may be appropriate, but then the cost of the outsourced process needs added back to the budgetary side of the discussion and must not be missed.  It’s best to decide and communicate these things in advance so as not to damage your own credibility later.
• I recommend a single, across-the-board objective for headcount and cost reduction, such as 15% in all areas.  Yes, some teams are stronger and have better players, some teams are more critical to the business mission, some teams have been managed tighter and more cost-effectively than others.  Yet when downsizing is looming, every decision becomes suspect and subject to charge of favoritism; even if not, the residual after-effects following a restructuring may cause team members to look upon each other with mistrust if one team is significantly less impacted than others.  Facing the same difficult objective that is evenly distributed across the board can actually help to bring management teams together.  I’ve seen the establishment of a “strategic team” to make the tough decisions for the business, but a pending downsizing tends create a much less sharing environment and management closes ranks.  Agreement becomes very difficult and this approach tends not to succeed.
• The business must maintain confidentiality.  No messages until according to plan, and don’t ‘leak’ word that announcements will take place at a future time — wait and delay is disastrous to employee productivity and morale.  You cannot tell your best employees that they are ‘safe’ just to try to keep them from leaving during the stressful situation.   By definition, those who you do not tell this are not ‘safe’.  And sharing this prior to completion of your process may run the risk of being wrong.
• Time the restructuring announcements appropriately.     Do not send a terrible message by waiting until Friday of the workweek.   Recommended would be a Tuesday or a Wednesday; don’t arbitrarily cancel all meetings in advance of that day — you’ll be signaling the upcoming event to employees.  Start right away at the beginning of the workday — don’t let managers agonize in wait.  Train managers well in advance, and script employee discussions with role play so all are comfortable that they are ready, preferably without reading from the page.  Prepare Q & A responses in writing and test them on managers in advance.  Experience tells me that this event is as hard on management making decisions and delivering messages as it is on impacted employees at the time.  Move affected employees directly into de-briefing sessions with a trained outplacement specialist and begin their focus on a future process of finding a new job.  Then following the exit discussions, call the remaining ‘survivor’ employees together and discuss new work arrangements and the priorities moving forward.

The strategic objective here is to avoid having your leadership team and employee teams become torn apart by behaviors during a downsizing or restructuring event.  By thinking through several of these objectives in advance and keeping the concept of team unity as an important outcome, you stand a much better chance of being successful through the event.

Getting Started with Change Acceleration Focus

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
– Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943

What is change management or change acceleration?  It’s a response to a business problem.  John Kotter of Kotter International has studied major change processes for over 40 years and it’s his estimation that over 70% of all major business change initiatives fail.  So astute leaders who don’t want change to fail decide to plan and create a program designed to improve our change’s factors for success.

Multiple practitioners around the world have studied change for many years.  The typical practice is this: line up a whole bunch of successful change initiatives on one side, a whole bunch of failed change initiatives on the other side, and compare and contrast.  In the end, most of the models developed have a whole lot of similarity.  General Electric’s model (GE has maintained change leadership as one of their core initiatives since the mid-90’s), for example, resonates with nearly all of the Kotter 8-step process.  In the end, we find that there are some tried-and-true methods or practices that leaders may engage to improve their chances for success.

Keeping with our practical but strategic focus of this blog, we’ll share some of the core principles and also some of the popular tools used with organizations seeking to improve change.  This is likely to take more than one blog due to the size of the topic.

First, a basic premise.  In addition to the major model components, many adhere to a basic concept, which I’ll refer to as “Q x A = E“.  That is, the Effectiveness (E) of a change initiative is directly proportional to the product of the change’s Acceptance by the population, and the Quality of the change initiative.  Few are the initiatives such as the Pet Rock (extremely high Acceptance but didn’t need high Quality) or the Concorde (extremely high Quality technology, but Acceptance challenges with regulations, maintaining technical standards, and just plain profit).  The practical point to this is that so many times we focus on the quality of the product or program when frankly a bit of attention to ensuring that it’s what the population actually wants may be in order.  Or, alternatively, that we’re trying to enthusiastically sell folks on our half-baked concept idea that just needs development.  Looking at both of these core elements might give us the first thing to improve on our program.  Hey, I certainly wouldn’t knock IBM’s Thomas Watson (above) for his belief that Acceptance of the computer was going to be very low, because eventually he got behind it and realized that computers by their very nature have both Quality and Acceptance, therefore hugely successful as a change initiative.  Do you remember life before the Internet?

Successful programs need a vision.  A vision helps to articulate where it is that we’re heading, and by definition a new program will almost always require a new direction.  The vision helps cut through the misconceptions of the population, the personal agendas of those seeking to counteract the program’s direction, and provide the ‘rallying cry’ for those still not clear about how he or she fits into this new program.  The vision needs to be clear and legitimate.  It is best to have it described in behavioral terms, so we know the way we should act when acting in accordance with that vision.  It needs to be communicated to the population, so all understand and also avoid giving rise to personal interpretations of what it means.  This is perhaps what was missing for Watson and the way he saw computer markets in 1943; there was no vision (from him or anyone else), no real understanding of what life could be like in 2015.  Vision came later; it came from the likes of Steve Jobs at Apple and Bill Gates at Microsoft as well as many, many others, and our world is not the same.

One of the most popular and effective tools I’ve seen to help shape the vision into actionable, behavioral terms is called a “backwards imaging exercise”.  If you have the leadership team together, ask them to do the following:

• Imagine a point in the future when this change initiative has been very successful.
• Use words to describe the way what you see, hear, understand in your interactions with your key constituents:  employees, leaders, vendors, customers, etc.  as they work in the new, changed state.
• Test, modify, improve.  The words and concepts you agree upon can help to articulate your vision.

Shaping this vision into an actionable, behavioral statement is important to leading the change initiative.  It helps to support strong, committed, visible leadership that provides a framework for individuals to take personal initiative, and to challenge the status quo.  The better leaders enable each individual in the population, the more likely our change initiative is likely to be.

Part of shaping this vision, and by extension part of leading change initiatives, is the leadership of a cross functional team and excellent facilitation skills to help guide the exercises to success.  This does not have to be HR, but often these kinds of cross-functional leadership wind up with HR support or leadership, hence its inclusion in this blog.  Also, since we’re clearly focused on major change initiatives of the firm, it’s definitely in the strategy camp.

In future blogs we’ll look at several other popular tools utilized for change management and other ways to improve the effectiveness and success of the programs.

Motivation: My favorite indicator for management success

I’ve spent a lot of years interviewing and hiring candidates for management positions at both high and lower levels of the organization.  During that time I’ve tried a lot of different methods and looked over a lot of indicators for what it is that tends to make an individual successful as a manager.

My favorite?  Intrinsic motivation.  I’ve come to believe that the candidates that I see who are intrinsically motivated to do this work because they like the work, or they enjoy the type of people they get to work with, or they appreciate the customers with whom they get to interact — those are my favorite candidates.  Intrinsically motivated individuals rarely get messed up if we haven’t trained them right — they’ll read a book, look up a colleague, or take a class. Intrinsically motivated individuals tend not to get freaked out that the manager hasn’t given them enough feedback — they’ll seek it out from the clients, co-workers, or the manager himself.  An intrinsically motivated person will often not get too upset if he finds out somebody else is getting paid more for similar work — he’ll demonstrate better performance or recognize that what he’s receiving is fair pay for the work, and work that he enjoys.  She’s motivated by the the work, even if she is upset at the boss right now, because of her intrinsic motivation.

Extrinsically motivated individuals, in my experience, need something else keeping them “going” toward the right kind of performance in this job.  Incentive plans, feedback, bigger jobs or more power, all of these are things that in my thoughts help them overcome the fact that to them it’s just a job.  They tend to be motivated only by the WIIFM concept – “what’s in it for me”, and they really believe that everybody else is solely driven by that, too.   Sorry, this kind of lack of commitment to the overall organization’s success (instead of solely my own success) kind of rubs me the wrong way, and I believe it has no business in a managerial or leadership role.

I believe it rubs employees the wrong way, too.  People tend to like following an individual because it’s the right thing to do, or the organization will succeed for doing these things, or they are enjoying being part of a winning strategy.   Employees don’t like following an individual just so he or she can get promoted or get more money at their expense.

How to I look for intrinsic motivators?  Funny, it comes out in so many ways during an interview.   People who volunteer in community organizations because it’s the right thing to do, or “I remember when I was in that situation and I want to help somebody else”.  Or, why did you choose that particular major in college?  Was it to contribute to society (intrinsic) or make more money (extrinsic)?  How does he treat the Administrative Assistant outside the Manager’s office?  Does he treat her nice because it’s the right thing to do (intrinsic) or not so nice because he figures she can’t do anything for him anyway (extrinsic).  (Yeah, ok, sometimes they know we look at that stuff so he’s smart enough to play along.  But you may be amazed at how many treat her like dirt anyway, and I never hire one of them.)  Why did you join the military?  Couldn’t get a job anywhere else (who knows, might be extrinsic, dig deeper) or I wanted to serve and commit to a noble cause (intrinsic)?

Sadly, some organizations really like the extrinsically motivated person, because they’ll often do whatever the boss wants them to do, even if it’s borderline unethical, in hopes of getting that next raise or promotion.  Some bosses like that.  I never have, because in my mind a person who’s unethical about this can be unethical about just about anything.  Especially in HR, if you’ve got no ethics, you’ve got nothing.   

Just like any indicator during an interview, looking for just intrinsic motivation isn’t perfect…. there may be other failure factors.  But it’s my favorite, for me it’s the most telling, and I don’t believe it’s ever steered me wrong.  HR professionals, if you agree with me, make sure you’re looking at this and develop your own body of knowledge around how to get at it.  It won’t steer you wrong, either.

Create your own confidential mini-data warehouse using Excel

I’d like to recommend some ways HR can better manipulate payroll and HRIS data in a confidential manner, and keep it in your control and current.  Sometimes as HR professionals we don’t know how to do this sort of thing and it’s hard to ask for IT support with the subject being confidential data.  So what we do is we figure out a basic system using existing reports, sometimes keying it in to a separate spreadsheet for the current project (like yearly incentive or Merit increase processing); then in six weeks’ time it’s useless data that is already outdated by people changes in the business. Time to learn one process that can be re-used and updated in a flash, with a single set of skills that you can use with an entirely different HRIS system in the future.

I’m going to propose to you a way to change this scenario for the better — we will learn how to develop a mini-data-warehouse that feeds off your current HRIS and updates automatically to current data when you open it.  It’s going to take some learning and a little work.  It’s too much for one blog, so we’re going to talk about it in a series: first, we’ll learn how to export data from an HRIS database in a manner useful for Excel; second, we will learn how to import the data into Excel and set up an automatic data feed that will update every time you open your spreadsheet; third, we will show how to create some simple tables or Pivot Tables that can present your data in a meaningful way; and fourth, we’ll demonstrate how to create multiple reports / analyses from the same set of data so you don’t have to go into your HRIS’ report generator every time, and you can create a quick HR dashboard of meaningful information ready for your viewing.   We’ll look at one more advanced subject following — the idea of knitting together dissimilar data sources into this same dashboard to enhance your reporting (e.g., mix payroll and HR data from different databases into your Excel dashboard).

Sound daunting?  It should, but I believe we can step through the key essential functions to do these things and help you sweep away the unnecessary stuff.  I’m sure there are more technical and better ways to do this, but I’m trying to teach HR folks how to create your own and keep current, confidential data in your control and presented in the manner you or your chief clients want to see it.  

I.  Seek the .csv data output option in your HRIS report generator.   Although many different systems produce a variety of different reporting options, almost all will have some option that allows you to output report data into a .csv (comma separated variable) format.  Go into your HRIS report generator, generate a report with bunches, just bunches of employee data with employee identifiers (whatever you use, SSN, payroll ID, clock number, whatever, so you know who’s who and who additional data like clock punches should belong to), and tell your HRIS reporter to output report data in .csv.  Why csv?  Because nearly everybody’s system has the option, it skips all the report generator stuff about formatting, etc., and it takes up minimal space in the file so Excel can import it quicker than many other file formats — and when you’re dealing with a bunch of data, fast is good.  I like fast.

Practical tip/trick #1:  “comma separated variable” is just the name the industry uses for the file type.  It means that for every field (piece of data) you have within an employee record (think ID, Last Name, First Name, start date, etc. all collected together) that it’s separated from the next field by a comma.  But you can use other field separators and still meet .csv standards, and I recommend that you use a TAB.  First reason for this is that in many payroll systems, annual salary has a comma in it, which means that halfway through “52,334” the system reads that as two fields, which screws up everything after that comma.    Or employee name “Jones, Edwin R.” in your mind is one name, but in .csv it’s two fields.  Tabs, on the other hand, aren’t that normally used in employee data files.  Second reason is that there are options within Excel that make using the Tab really easy, and I like easy.

II.  When in doubt, dump it.  For most HR applications, I don’t recommend exporting the weekly payroll stuff, because you can have hundreds of records per employee (and usefulness of how much a guy paid in local taxes last month is pretty low).  However, payroll header information (like name, address, work location, base rate of pay, YTD overtime and pay, etc.) might be useful, even if you don’t know that you need it for your current report : when creating a data warehouse,  export extra stuff anyway.  Later in this project you will be looking at your data saying, “wow, now that I can get this far with the data I’ve got, if I only had these other data points I could really make a dynamite report” — and it’s not too much for the system or your spreadsheet to take extra stuff at this time.  We will set up your data feed as an external data source in Excel so you won’t even see the extra stuff or know that it’s there.

This is also an attempt to focus your knowledge base toward Excel rather than five or six different HRIS report generators (heavens, I so wish there were a standard for this!!  In one of my recent HRIS systems, we had FIVE different report generators to learn in the same package!!!).

III. Save the export file someplace convenient and confidential.  You’ll need it for the next step.  Give it a standard name that you will remember.  If it’s truly confidential, I tend to store it on my computer’s desktop, because with most employer’s servers the user account backup does not include the desktop.  IT folks will tell you, “but then your file never gets backed up”, but I don’t care because when we set it up to run automatically out of HRIS I’ll get new data anyway.

I’m a big fan for allowing management to make strategic decisions based on real data and current information rather than perception and opinion.  This is the first step in helping us get there.

Later post, we’ll import the .csv information into Excel and set up the automatic data updating routines, and give you a bit of a teaser for what you might be able to do with it.

Jump into the Performance Appraisal dialogue!!

Sometimes I think I’m just too practical to be as strategic as I want to be.   Strategically, I think in a perfect world that managers can provide the kind of feedback that keeps even the most needy Millenial going, to coach and counsel every member of a team to the highest performance standard, to avoid that uncomfortable, awful, diabolical performance appraisal conversation ending each fiscal year that tries to sum up the entire employee year in 10 minutes.  So, I’ve said it, I hate performance appraisals.  But, I admit, the practical part of me doesn’t know a better system that actually works.

In my world, managers are outstanding at providing feedback to employees who are like them, who cozy up to them, who clearly will eventually be on a peer track to them.  Then there’s everyone else.  Those are the people I worry about, because without the performance appraisal the two of them might never have the coaching conversation, or the growth conversation.

There are clearly flaws in the performance appraisal system.  No matter how rare it is that managers and employees set up good objectives for the following year, the world changes throughout that year and some keep those objectives current better than others.  Of course, many employees have no objectives, or they are so broad you can drive a truck through them, and then at year end the flowery ‘year end results’ documents come through with over-edited opinion of how great the year was (of course this is written by the employee!) and the manager doesn’t believe any of it anyway.   He or she has his opinion, and besides, there has to be a forced ranking so as a manager I’m comparing lions and tigers and I have to make up my own criteria based on who I like, anyway.  It’s fraught with problems, and weaknesses, and for all those managers who hate it more than I do, it’s a process to suffer through a few short weeks at the end of the fiscal year.

Like it or not, employees know what ratings other employees receive (or they think they do).  When they feel that the slug of an employee in the next cubicle got the same raise as their high-performing self, and especially if the performance appraisal system drives merit raises as most do, the process actually becomes a retention issue for higher performing employees.  Yet there are a lot of managers that think they should give everyone roughly the same appraisal / raise out of ‘fairness’ and they will actually drive this retention issue.  Then who quits?  The high performer.  Who stays?  The slug next door.  Who wins?  Nobody.  But the manager still is lulled into believing it’s fair.

I wish I had a better system, and I’m interested if anyone out there would like to offer up practical ideas of systems that work.   Most of the enticing ideas I’ve heard so far sound good, but I’m not yet convinced that they will actually work in a real-world environment. People need honest, straight-up feedback, and some will get it, yet some will not.  It’s the worst feeling in the world when an HR exec has to hear that an employee has become a train wreck because things were said and believed about the employee but nobody told him.  Sometimes you come upon the situation and the damage is already way past saving.  Personally, I really don’t believe the PA solves this issue either, but it can at least be a signal to an employee that things aren’t as right as they should be, which should at least enable the employee to come back later and initiate the tough conversation that the manager should have the guts to start (but didn’t).

I don’t plan to write at all today about the promotability discussion, because that one is pretty scary, and in my opinion should have no place driving a discussion about the raise in the paycheck.  (Performance and promotability are summarily two different things.  Period. )  I’ve had little luck over the years getting calibration among management groups about what promotability actually is, and I’ve found even myself bending the definition on a regular basis.   We’ll talk about it, including the fabled 9-blocks, another day.

Talk to me.  Have you experienced or implemented a system that can get rid of the traditional performance appraisal and still provides the feedback and development that employees need?  What do you do about merit increases (scrap those too, a meritorious discussion)?

Look for capabilities more than just job skills

We spend a lot of effort searching for job skills when we hire people, and beyond minimum qualifications part of this is a waste of time.    Why do we do this?   One reason we do this is that hiring managers don’t want to spend their time training someone new to do the job.   Funny part is, they do anyway.  In my experience,  especially for firms that don’t have a strong culture of training and development, we spend a lot of new hires’ time training them in ‘this is the way we do this here’.   Therefore the new hire gets hired for a set of skills based on the way he has learned it in another place, but then we re-train him in our way of doing it anyway.   So why did we focus on mostly job skills in the hiring process?

Then there is the failure factor.  Rarely, very rarely in my experience, do individuals fail on their new assignments due to lack of skills.  Far more often, they fail because they haven’t integrated well to our culture or environment, or they don’t work well with others.  Once again, if we have focused on the skills in the hiring process, we’ve missed the opportunity to study the things that matter more in the assessment: capabilities and personal traits.  In two years’ time, those skills won’t make any difference because he is thoroughly engaged in our firm’s process, and if he’s not a good team contributor you’re stuck with him.   Again, why did we focus most of our time on skills during the hiring process?

We also focus on skills because we’re being lazy.  Skills can be seen right in front of us on the resume, no more work involved.  Looking for interpersonal, cultural, and team abilities require better structure to our questions, stronger assessment practices, and a lot better idea what past failure factors of others have been (or specifically what we are looking for in terms of these abilities).

Yes, have someone in the interview process verify the job skills that they have listed on their resume to ensure that they have some familiarity with the subject and relevant concepts.  Beyond that, spend time to develop behavioral-based questions like, “Tell me about the last situation you encountered with multiple component failures” to assess the problem-solving skills or “Describe how you go about learning a subject area in which you have no formal training or experience, in the context of the last time you had to do this” for personal development and learning.  An excellent practice is to divide up the job competencies (of which job skills is only one) into categories (such as interpersonal, team, leadership, communications, etc.) and have interviewers choose one or two categories of their interview focus.  This avoids everyone asking about the same thing(s).

For many jobs, you can also use a professionally-developed assessment that can determine both knowledge and aptitude, giving you a clear identification of the level of the bona-fide occupational requirements (BFOQ) for the position.  We’ll talk more about these kinds of assessments as the subject of a future post.

What I’m arguing for is a shift in hiring assessment from “what does she know” to a) “does she have fundamental concepts of the skill area”, b) “how capable is she in learning new things”, and c) “how can she adapt to a new work team and new environment, and our firm”. Since you’re going to retrain her anyway, selecting the best candidate as the one who knows the most “stuff” is silly, particularly if you don’t know that your best candidate can work in the environment or might not be very good at learning new things.  Stop wasting time and dig deeper to focus on things that make a bigger difference to the strategy of your business.

Be aware of your bias and challenge it

You have bias, even if you think you don’t.  So do I.   I want to say I accept each and every individual just for who they are, and I really strive to act this way, but I’m also aware that I don’t always trust certain people the way I trust other people.   We are bound by society and by law to be ‘color blind’ in the hiring and selection of candidates for jobs, or the promotion process once they’re inside the firm, but certain people don’t get presented to higher management with the same fervor and vigor that others do, sometimes resulting in what my grandmother used to call “damning with faint praise”.   (“Yeah, Lakisha is pretty good at her work, but Emily, she’ll knock your socks off.”)

The Emily-Greg vs. Lakisha-Jamal study shocked me when I first read it.  You should take the time to read it, too.  Perhaps you think it doesn’t apply to you.  My first reaction was that I’ve long worked in middle-America markets and we just don’t think the way people in Boston and Chicago think, period.  Not just about colorblindness, but about so many other things like politics and education, morals and values.  Therefore I certainly didn’t think we would treat individuals of varied backgrounds any differently than anyone else.

Yet I’ve taken the opportunity to re-read this study and they have done an excellent job erasing as many variables as they can.  The results are astounding:  with resumes identical to one another but only the names changed, 50% more of the callbacks went to white-sounding names.  We’re not talking about a 5% or 10% difference of a relatively small number of candidates, we’re talking about 50% difference over thousands of resumes.  Plus, increasing the skills and qualifications on the resumes had far less impact on their success than just changing the names!  I pause to think about my firms’ hiring practices: a lot of managers don’t want to get too scientific, they want to pick who they like, or they make up their mind really quickly without a whole lot of data collection between who they want to hire vs. who they don’t, etc.  Others in the interviewing process often bow down to the wishes of the hiring manager, and typically HR doesn’t want to be the only one in the room channeling potential bias or nay-saying, job after job.

Additionally, really, what else have you done to improve your pipeline to help counteract these potential biases?  Do you target schools or universities that have a stronger minority population?  Will you build and support an internal program to provide equal advantage to those who are perceived as different?  In one of my assignments, my team worked really hard to create a Maintenance Trainee Program that could build up qualifications of women interested in maintenance.  We worked with a vendor to develop an assessment that would target aptitude rather than skills, knowing that it was the program’s job to build up the skills.  The program was open to anyone, but we specifically encouraged women to apply for entrance into the program.  We had two early successes early on, refuting the conventional wisdom of “women don’t want to do maintenance, look at how few enroll in maintenance schools” or “women aren’t any good at maintenance”.  Now, culturally, we had a different concern later as they integrated into the workforce, but that’s another challenge to overcome, and equally subtle as well.   When challenged with an EEOC audit, the auditors were very impressed with the progress of our program and commented on this several times.  More than that, we surprised ourselves with the outstanding potential of this type of program.

Don’t think that your team doesn’t have biases, no matter how unspoken (or even unaware) they may be.  Search out those biases, and take opportunities no matter how small to support and promote and encourage people of all types and kinds within your organization.  Take a critical look – a real look – at your Affirmative Action Plan, dive down into the numbers and look at the names on the roster checklists, so you are aware of areas where you can do better.   Diversity of life and background is a very good thing, not just because it’s a popular buzzword or program but because it’s the right thing to do and it’s strategically good for your firm on so many levels.   Take it upon yourself to make this kind of a difference.