Author: John Hollon

Say what you will about Sam Zell, winner of the 2009 Workforce Management Stupidus Maximus Award, but one thing is clear: He has infused a sense of consistency and predictability in his management minions at the Tribune Co., who then are relentlessly efficient in carrying out the shortsighted, regressive, ham-fisted management policies that he inflicts upon his workforce.

Here’s the latest “Can you really believe this?” action from Zell’s Phi Beta Kappa management team: Three editorial staffers at Tribune’s Baltimore Sun were laid off last week as they were in the middle of covering a Baltimore Orioles baseball game from the press box at Camden Yards.

One of the staffers–sportswriter David Steele–blogged about how it feels to get canned by phone in a very public way while you’re doing your very public job.

“Yes, it felt just as bad as you imagine it would,” Steele wrote, “but it’s a little different when you’re 44, when you’ve been in the business more than half your life … and when it’s your specific job, not your entire newspaper, which has just become defunct. And when the people responsible for giving you the news were a few dozen blocks away, calling you on your cell phone in the middle of a baseball game you thought you were going to write a column about for the next day’s paper.”

Although this isn’t the absolute worst firing I’ve ever heard about (the nurse who was called out of surgery last month and told she was getting laid off definitely tops this one), it’s certainly par for the course for how Sam Zell and his management “brain trust” do business.

Steele says that the first thing he did after getting the news of his layoff was to let all his friends and family know what had happened. “The overriding theme” from all of them, he wrote, was the same thing: “They [Baltimore Sun management] couldn’t tell you to your face?’’

“They had their reasons,” he noted. “Step back far enough and squint really hard and you can see them. As long as you ignore the fact that they made arrangements to get a replacement column into the paper long before they ever dialed my number. And the fact that if you go up high in the stands behind home plate, you probably can see the Sun building from Camden Yards. It’s not a plane flight away. It’s literally walking distance; Sun people with tickets had been making that walk since the ballpark opened.”

I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again here in the Year of the Endless Cutback: Firing someone is a one-on-one activity that should be done in person, face to face, supervisor to worker. There’s a reason for this, and it is simple: It should be handled that way because management should be forced to personally confront the consequences of its actions. And that’s why doing it by e-mail or phone is a cop-out. It dehumanizes a process that is pretty inhuman to begin with.

Why did the management of the Baltimore Sun opt to terminate staffers by phone from the ballpark when they could have easily done it in person?

David Steele has an answer: It’s because “the people ultimately responsible, for the gutting of the paper and the callous treatment of its employees, whether they were in the office at the time or not, are a plane flight away. Clearly, to them ‘Baltimore Sun’ is just a line on a balance sheet. Or a bankruptcy claim, in this case. Practically speaking, none of us should even have had low expectations for how this would be handled. ‘No expectations’ was probably shooting too high.”

Like Steele, my expectations for Zell and his management team are so low that they are on the floor. Nothing Zell does should surprise me, and that’s why he’s so deserving of this year’s Stupidus Maximus honor.

Simply put, it’s because he’s a guy who not only is adept at demoralizing his workforce, but also highly skilled at making himself look crazy at the same time. And as I noted before, in a world with so many bad managers, that’s a really tough combination to beat.

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Despite how much I like to write about bad management practices (as I did here last time with my annual Stupidus Maximus Award), most people gravitate to the good stuff. They want to know about the really wonderful business initiatives that make great companies stand out.

I can’t say I blame them. Learning about what makes successful organizations tick helps anyone who is serious about business figure out what it takes to take their own organization to the next level.

There are lots of awards, books and case studies that focus on top-notch business performance, from “best places to work” lists to such books as Good to Great and Built to Last. But none of those focuses on the people management practices that drive an organization’s bottom-line business results. And, that’s where Workforce Management’s annual Optimas Awards come in.

Now in their 19th year, the Optimas Awards honor organizations that exemplify the skill and ingenuity it takes to succeed in the 21st century. The organizations we honor each year have reinvented the workplace, streamlined government HR processes, created innovative partnerships, confronted talent shortages, saved a corporate reputation, nurtured a learning environment in a fast-paced business setting, and sidestepped the pitfalls of an acquisition, to name but a few of the Optimas winners’ accomplishments.

More important, Optimas Award winners prove that astute workforce management can be practiced anywhere: in family businesses and the public sector, in the Fortune 500 and in small organizations, in big cities and on the farm—in industries of every sort, in other words.

The Optimas Awards process is fairly simple. Organizations can nominate themselves, or, they can be nominated by someone else (a consultant, for example), in one of 10 different categories. All of the information is on our Web site, at www. workforce.com/optimas, but the real key to a winning entry is the ability to demonstrate how a workforce initiative achieved measurable bottom-line business success in response to the organization’s business needs, issues or challenges.

Previous Optimas General Excellence winners range from mega-companies including Levi Strauss, Hewlett-Packard, McDonald’s and Google to lesser-known organizations such as the Bank of Montreal, the city of Hampton, Virginia, and last year’s winner, Crouse Hospital in Syracuse, New York. In fact, this is one competition where size truly does not matter; it’s the quality of the workforce management initiative—and the impact on the organization’s bottom line—that matters most.

Optimas Award winners are “among the best” (which is what optimas means in Latin) and must reflect the leadership, vision and energy that define workforce management. In that vein, I’m highlighting the call for 2009 Optimas nominees now because the deadline for this year’s competition is April 24 and coming up fast.I frequently get asked just what Workforce Management judges look for in choosing Optimas winners. When that happens, I like to point to a quote from Wells Fargo CEO Dick Kovacevich. The bank was a 2005 Optimas General Excellence winner. Kovacevich described how his company pulled off a massive merger and yet managed to both minimize layoffs AND increase profits by 13 percent.

“Everything we do at Wells Fargo starts with our people,” Kovacevich said. “Why? Because when people are properly incented, rewarded, encouraged and importantly recognized, they provide better service, generate more sales and produce even better business results. This generates more revenue, which results in greater profits.”This is the essence of the Workforce Management Optimas Awards: smart business practices that focus on better leveraging an organization’s greatest asset—its workforce—to better drive the bottom line.

I hope you agree that people practices are paramount, and better yet, I hope you’ll enter this year’s contest and tell us what your organization is doing that is worthy and impressive—and delivers superior bottom-line business results. I would love to honor your organization with one of our 2009 Optimas Awards.

Workforce Management, April 20, 2009, p. 34 — Subscribe Now!

Are we finally seeing the foundation of Freelance Nation?

    I ask the question because one of the distinguishing characteristics of this current economic downturn/recession/depression is that it is pushing a lot of workers out of regular jobs and into the ranks of the self-employed, whether they like it or not.

    A recent story in The Miami Herald explored this trend and indicated that it was a “real option” for many workers, although as the story also notes, this is less of a voluntary choice and more of the reality that many workers are finding thrust upon them when they suddenly find themselves out of a job and all else fails.

    “As times get tougher,” the Herald story says, “many are turning to freelancing and contract work, transforming a trend that was once a lifestyle choice into a matter of economic survival. Frustrated trying to find full-time work, more people are piecing together a living doing projects, consultancies and part-time gigs from home for an outside employer.”

    In other words, a lot of workers are being forced into the self-employed entrepreneurial lifestyle out of necessity and/or desperation.

    Not everyone is cut out for the freelance life. Freelancing has long been an option for those who wanted to work on their own schedules, doing what suited them. But beyond that, freelancing has always been a refuge for people who, for one reason or another, found they just didn’t fit neatly into a regular work environment.

    I’ve known people who were difficult and impossible to manage in a traditional work setting who suddenly became mellow, professional and productive after they went the freelance route. There is one guy who freelances a little forWorkforce Management who used to work with me as a staffer at a daily newspaper. In that environment, he was unfocused and unproductive. And while I don’t know how he works at home, when he writes for me now, he hits his deadline most of the time and is a pleasure to work with. That’s not something I could have said when we worked together in a traditional workplace structure.

    Freelancing is a great option for some, but hard to swallow if you’re forced into it because you find yourself out of work with no other good option for making a living. And those who take up freelancing by necessity know all too well that without an employer, no one is there to pay for health benefits, sick days, coffee or any number of things we all take for granted when we have a regular job.

    There’s also the question of how you distinguish yourself as a freelancer when there are suddenly so many other freelancers to compete with. I’ve been bombarded this year by queries from people I have never, ever heard from before who are now trolling for any kind of temporary gig or freelance assignment that might be available. Just the sheer volume of freelancers out on the market makes it really difficult for anyone to stand out.

    More important, this flood of people into the freelance world feels to me like a fundamental change, a shift for both workers and businesses into a very different kind of employer-employee relationship. “The big question,” the Herald story asked, “is whether this trend is long term or whether freelancing will fade as the economy strengthens and full-time jobs become available.”

    I don’t think there’s a good answer for that, but I do think that many businesses will find that the flexibility of a freelance workforce— primarily, the ability to assign work as the need arises on a project basis—will have a lot of appeal even after the current economic downturn has run its course.

    There’s another factor that makes the prospect of Freelance Nation so appealing for so many: If people can be successful working for themselves without the BS they get in a traditional job, they’ll be more than happy to kiss employee life goodbye.

Workforce Management, March 16, 2009, p. 34 — Subscribe Now!

I’ll admit it: I’m fascinated with the story of US Airways Flight 1549, the jet that was heading from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to Charlotte, North Carolina, but ended up landing in the Hudson River instead.

    Part of my interest is that I fly a great deal, so I can identify with what happened to the passengers and crew. But my greater fascination with Flight 1549 is that there are larger-than-life management lessons that can be taken from this January 15 incident—lessons that are worth examining and remembering no matter what field of endeavor you’re in.

    Lesson No. 1: Don’t ever discount the value of experience. Experience can bring smart, time-tested thinking to difficult business problems—the kind of thinking that can help organizations perform better during difficult times. US Airways Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III safely landed a jetliner in the Hudson River under the most difficult of circumstances. His ability to rapidly size up the situation, weigh the various options and safely execute a seldom-tried emergency plan is testament to his many years of flight experience. “In many ways, as it turned out, my entire life up to that moment has been a preparation to handle that particular moment,” Sullenberger told Katie Couric on CBS’ 60 Minutes.

    Sullenberger’s experience made the difference in this situation, and this speaks to a larger issue: Experience matters in every organization. There’s great value in people who have solid and relevant experience; they can represent the difference between success and failure. I’m sure the passengers on Flight 1549 appreciate the experience Sullenberger brought to bear when he landed in the Hudson. Would all have ended so well if he had been downsized in a corporate cost-cutting move and replaced with a much cheaper, less-experienced pilot? Who knows, but who wants to take that chance?

    Lesson No. 2: Training is important in good times and bad. Training is a line item that’s easy to whack when budgets get tight, because it’s not always easy to see its immediate payoff. That misses the point, however. Training is about getting people ready to execute and put their training to the test when the organization needs it most.

    The New York Times made this point when it noted an exchange between Michael A.L. Balboni, New York state’s deputy secretary for public safety, and Sullenberger. Balboni said that he shook the pilot’s hand, looked him in the eye and thanked him for a job done brilliantly. Balboni said Sullenberger “said to me, in the most unaffected, humble way, ‘That’s what we’re trained to do.’ No boasting, no emotion, no nothing.”

    Has there ever been a better example of the value of a training program than that? He could have pointed to any number of factors that helped him, but the fact that he pointed to his training (and experience) shows just how critically important it can be. This makes a great case for why organizations should really resist the urge to slash training budgets when times get tough.

    Lesson No. 3: It’s all about the team. If you watched the 60 Minutes segment February 8 with Sullenberger, you noticed that he had his entire flight crew on camera with him. That’s because he has gone out of his way to emphasize that it wasn’t just him, but his entire flight team that was responsible for safely landing Flight 1549. He said that there has been too much about him in the aftermath of the landing, and “not enough about the team.”

    Sullenberger clearly knows that the best success is shared success. He has gone out of his way to make sure that his team is recognized, because organizational success is rarely about an individual. It’s a principle that too few managers understand, but one that we need a lot more of as we all struggle to keep our organizations afloat in these tough times.

    The lessons of Flight 1549 are well worth remembering. In the end, it was solid, well-executed people management practices that made the difference between “miracle” and what could easily have been a disaster.

Workforce Management, February 16, 2009, p. 50 — Subscribe Now!

Let me be honest and upfront about this: I like Barack Obama. After eight years of George W. Bush and “conservative” policies that Ronald Reagan wouldn’t recognize, Obama is like a cool breeze on a hot summer day. Everything he says seems to be encouraging and hopeful, and that’s what America really needs right now.

    But I’m also pragmatic and realistic about the liberal agenda that our new president has embraced during his brief time in public service. Although Obama’s early actions seem to be following the Bill Clinton centrist leadership playbook, the business community is bracing for something else: a mandate-driven, legislative-heavy, pro-labor agenda.

    Our cover story in this issue (“More Labor for HR”) lays out the burdens this kind of agenda is likely to place on management and human resources professionals, but there is one plank of the Obama platform that troubles me above all others—the deceptively named Employee Free Choice Act.

    This legislation isn’t about the free choice of employees at all. What it is about is making it much easier for unions to organize a workplace by introducing “a card-check procedure that allows a union to gain recognition without an election by secret ballot,” according to University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, writing in The Wall Street Journal.

    There are other problematic provisions to the act, but the big issue for me is the frighteningly wrongheaded notion that the secret ballot, a pillar of our democracy, is somehow good for electing presidents but flawed when it comes to union organizing. It’s a bad idea that is going to make for even more divisive labor-management relations, in my view.

    Under the current system, the union can lobby workers to sign a union card, but “an employer can insist upon a secret ballot after 30 percent of workers indicate by card checks their interest in a union,” Epstein notes in his Wall Street Journal piece. He adds that “the campaign that follows lets the employer air his views about the downsides of unionization before the vote takes place.”

    Unions don’t like the notion of a “campaign” in the workplace in which both sides get to make their case to workers about the merits of a union or nonunion environment. That’s why the Employee Free Choice Act is such a miserably misleading and flawed piece of legislation: It cavalierly dismisses the democratic principles of fair play, open debate and the secret ballot for a system that instead would be heavily stacked in favor of a union gaining admission to a workplace simply by gathering signatures.

    Organized labor had assumed that the Employee Free Choice Act would be one of the first pieces of legislation pushed through Congress by the Obama administration. After all, the new president sponsored the act in the U.S. Senate, and unions have assumed that Obama would want to reward them for their help in getting him elected.

    But there may be something else going on. According to a story by Workforce Management’s Mark Schoeff Jr., congressional Democrats have decided to push the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, “which would make it easier for employees to sue for pay discrimination, and the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would lift compensatory and punitive damage caps on pay suits,” instead of starting with the Employee Free Choice Act.

    Part of that may be because the act is fiercely opposed by the business lobby and promises to start a “legislative Armageddon,” as Schoeff puts it, but perhaps it’s also because our new president has had some second thoughts about the act as he follows Bill Clinton’s more centrist approach.

    Pushing the contentious Employee Free Choice Act right out of the gate would seriously dent the encouraging and hopeful tone that Obama has been working to foster. Would tackling the act right now and setting off a legislative war be the best way to begin his new administration?

    Here’s my hope: that the decision to delay, for now, any serious push on the Employee Free Choice Act gives everyone the opportunity to re-evaluate whether such a flawed and undemocratic piece of workforce legislation should even be part of America’s business agenda. Perhaps our new president will continue his encouraging and hopeful tone. Maybe he’ll decide that despite organized labor’s support for him, for now a legislative Armageddon over the Employee Free Choice Act will have to wait.

Workforce Management, January 19, 2009, p. 42 — Subscribe Now!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Desperate times call for desperate measures. Although everyone seems to tiptoe around what to call the economy we’re in (Downturn? Recession? Wanna-be depression?),  it’s clear that businesses and organizations everywhere are swallowing hard and making some tough decisions to get through this difficult time.

Although I have been writing about things like the rise in forced workforce furloughs as a cost saving measure, the full impact of what so many organizations are doing didn’t really hit me until I read this Associated Press story in the Chicago Tribune this week: “More employers are freezing pay –even the White House–as recession deepens.”

The message here is pointed: Pay freezes, furloughs and pay cuts are preferable to cutting more jobs, and workers everywhere are reluctantly agreeing to go along with the program.

“It’s a real tectonic shift,” said Terry Connelly, dean of Golden Gate University’s Ageno School of Business, who talked to the Associated Press.

“The extraordinary pace of layoffs has shifted people’s internal calculations to the point where they are not only willing to take a pay cut to save their own job, but also take a freeze to save their co-worker’s,” he said.

I don’t know anyone, anywhere, who likes taking a pay cut, or enjoys being forced into an unpaid furlough, but most workers have bought into the premise that these measures are a “shared sacrifice” that they are willing to make to help their organizations get through this tough period.

It’s a reminder that our country was built on this notion of shared sacrifice, and that most Americans are selfless enough to rise to the occasion and do it again when needed.

So furloughs and pay freezes are a sign of the times, of our shared sacrifice, and something we can all be proud of. Unless, of course, you work for the United Auto Workers.

“The United Auto Workers union will sacrifice to help General Motors and Chrysler get their federal loans, but doesn’t expect to take lower wages,” UAW president Ron Gettelfinger said this week at the Automotive News World Congress. (Automotive News is a sister publication of Workforce Management.)

The story went on to say that “Gettelfinger also said automaker executives have indicated publicly that wage concessions would not be required of the union as part of federal bailout provisions being demanded of GM and Chrysler. “We’re not expecting lower wages,” he said, despite the fact that “the federal government made union concessions a major condition of a $17.4 billion loan package to GM and Chrysler.”

I don’t know about you, but I find this attitude by the UAW amazing, given that the federal government is going to spend many billions of dollars to bail out the three American automakers. Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a strongly liberal friend of organized labor if there ever was one, said she expected all the major players in the American auto industry–including dealers, suppliers and investors–to take “a haircut” as part of the federal bailout.

This is the problem I have with organized labor: It doesn’t buy into the notion of shared sacrifice, even though the America auto industry is much worse off than so many other business sectors where wage freezes, unpaid furloughs and salary cuts are the order of the day.

Rather than focusing on heavy-handed legislation like the Employee Free Choice Act and its frighteningly wrongheaded notion that the secret ballot shouldn’t apply to unions, maybe Ron Gettelfinger and his union brethren should look at the tough choices other businesses and organizations are making all around them and see that pay adjustments are something that many, many workers are having to swallow.

Desperate times do indeed call for desperate measures.

Do American autoworkers and their union masters understand that they aren’t immune? That they also have to submit to hard choices and shared sacrifices needed to get through these times?  The survival of a proud and influential American industry hangs in large part on the UAW’s ability to come up with the right answer.

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You know that a lot of workforce trends start in California and the West Coast in general, but the Golden State is also a place where a lot of workforce law gets focused and refined.  Here is the latest one, and it pretty much drives a stake through a legal issue that drives a lot of people crazy–noncompete agreements.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reports on Thursday, August 7, “California employers can’t limit their employees’ right to work for a competitor or solicit former clients after they leave the company, the state Supreme Court ruled today. In a unanimous decision, the justices said state law since 1872 has forbidden so-called noncompete clauses that restrict management employees’ options in their next job or business.”

The reason this is important, as the Chronicle points out, is because “Courts in some states have upheld [noncompete] restrictions, and the federal appeals court in San Francisco has interpreted California’s law to allow a company to limit its employees’ future job choices as long as it doesn’t prohibit the employee from working in the same field. But the state’s high court said any such restriction conflicts with California’s ‘legislative policy in favor of open competition and employee mobility.’ ”

In other words, California’s highest court says that allowing workers the mobility to seek new jobs and openly compete on the free market trumps, in most all cases, the ability of an employer to restrict a worker from going to work for a competitor.

The Chronicle quoted Justice Ming Chin, who said, “An employer cannot by contract restrain a former employee from engaging in his or her profession, trade or business.” According to the justice, “the law recognizes only a few limited exceptions, for noncompete agreements that are part of the breakup of a corporation or partnership.”

If you’re wondering why this is important, the Chronicle explains:  “Businesses and employment lawyers have been following the case closely, anticipating that it would resolve the disagreement between state and federal courts on the meaning of the California law. Federal courts are likely to fall in line now that California’s highest court has interpreted the law.” And if the federal courts follow California’s lead, this ruling will quickly spread across the country and be applicable to every workplace in every state.

“Both California employers and employees are winners in this case,” said attorneys James Pooley and David Murphy, partners in the trade secrets and unfair competition litigation practice at Morrison & Foerster.  “The court’s decision was correct both as a matter of law and public policy. California will continue to have a high-velocity labor market, with the type of high employee mobility that many economists and social scientists believe has fueled its high level of technological innovation.”

To put that in non-attorney English, the court’s decision is good for both workers and the businesses that employ them because it removes a barrier limiting the ability of workers to freely move in the labor market–a restriction that might limit future innovation and job growth in California’s large and ever-changing economy.

Here’s my take: I’ve always thought that noncompete agreements were the province of paranoid, small-minded executives. I worked for at least one who has to be frothing at the mouth over this. He loved to bully workers and threaten them about taking his “trade secrets” to someone else.

His problem, however, was that he had nothing worth taking. There was no secret sauce, no combination of 11 herbs and spices for workers to take across the street. He had nothing to lose then, and with this California Supreme Court ruling, one fewer thing to bully his workers about now.

I never cease to be amazed at the sheer number of business and management books that get published every year. There’s no management topic too obscure, no strategy too minor to merit its own hardcover. Every week, three or four are sent to me for review or possible use in Workforce Management (the stack of them just from 2008 is approaching the ceiling in my office), and I know that is just the tip of the business-publishing iceberg.

    The reason so many get published is pretty simple: People are hungry for good management. Everyone is looking for the magic formula that will help make them that great manager who can drive workers (and the organization) to the next level.

    But the more I wade into the river of management books flowing through my mailbox, the more I’m convinced that all too many of these titles really miss the point—that good management is really pretty simple.

    I’ve been writing about it the last few years here in The Last Word and in my blog, The Business of Management (www.workforce.com/wpmu/ bizmgmt). As I look back over what I’ve written, I see that I come back to the same issues and themes. These are, for the most part, drawn from my own experience and education, but I’ve never really tried to quantify them into a list of “best practices” until now.

    So that you don’t have to dig through one of those many business books that keeping getting published, here—free of charge—are my top management tips:

    You must be able to manage expectations. There’s a fine art to this, and it generally takes time and practice to figure out how to do it right. But remember that your credibility—and sometimes your job—is at stake if you can’t deliver on what you say you can do. The trick is to under-promise and over-deliver, to set expectations where you can reasonably meet and exceed them.

    Never forget the “no-surprise rule.” This is one of the first rules of management I ever learned, and it’s simple: Don’t let the boss be caught flat-footed by something you should have let her know about. If you have to choose, over-communicate rather than under-communicate, and tell the boss everything until you figure out what he wants to know.

    Know what you don’t know. Be realistic about what you’re good at, and what you aren’t. Great managers like Warren Buffett become great because they know in their hearts that they don’t know everything. They put great people who know what they are doing in charge and get out of the way. If someone as successful as Warren Buffett can take this approach, you can too.

    You always need a Plan B. No matter how smoothly things seem to be running, managers should always be thinking “What if?” You need to develop contingency plans that will keep things going when the much-feared worst-case scenario really does come to pass.

    Learn the art of the apology. Attorney Steve Paskoff notes that apologies can be a powerful tool for conflict resolution, but only if they’re part of a cultural change. “You need your corporate leaders to say, ‘If we make mistakes, we fix them.’ If someone says there is a problem, you need to listen to what they have to say. And if you have a problem, you need to bring it up, because we’ll listen.”

    Treat people right. This sounds deceptively simple, but I am amazed at how few businesses and managers actually practice it. I reflected on it a few weeks ago when Herb Kelleher finally stepped down as chairman of Southwest Airlines. “You have to treat your employees like customers,” Kelleher would always say. “When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us. … Our people know that if they are sick, we will take care of them. If there are occasions of grief or joy, we will be there with them. They know that we value them as people, not just cogs in a machine.”

    If you focus on these simple rules, I guarantee that you will be a better manager—and you won’t need to wade through the latest management book to get there. Take what you would have spent and buy lunch for an under­appreciated team member.

Workforce Management, June 9, 2008, p. 42 — Subscribe Now!

You’ll be happy to know that there’s more to top executives than lavish perks and getting grossly overpaid. Now we’re finding out that they don’t know when to just shut up and listen.

A survey of 2,500 North American HR executives released this week by Boston-based consulting firm Novations Group found that at many companies, top executives spend too much time talking to employees and not enough time listening to them.

“Of survey respondents who have an opinion on the issue, 44 percent said management speaks too much,” Novations reported, while a majority (53 percent) said it gets the right balance between speaking and listening. But here’s the kicker: Only 3 percent–yes, that’s a miserly 3 percent–feel senior management spends too much time listening to employees.

“HR executives have a unique perspective on what’s going on within an organization, what employees really think and how the leadership team is perceived,” Novations director of consulting Jan Thibodeau said in a press release. “So here’s an insight into whether top management communicates effectively or not. The findings tell us management gets it wrong at two out of five companies.”

And this is why top executives should make nearly 350 times what the average employee does? Maybe the Center on Executive Compensation and others that argue that CEO pay levels are perfectly appropriate should take a look at this survey.

According to Thibodeau, management often assumes that listening is a natural skill. “In large, complex organizations listening is neither a simple task, nor does it come naturally,” she said in the release. “Leaders have to learn to listen with purpose, with sensitivity to certain words and language, and with attention to underlying meaning. But in too many cases what should be a genuine dialogue becomes just a monologue.”

At a time when employee engagement is so crucial, management needs to foster a culture that values open dialogue, Thibodeau said. “This is particularly key with Gen Y employees who placed a high value on an interactive work environment.”

These are all good points, and more reasons why executive pay should be handled more along the lines of what Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has called for. And it is even more proof that Ernest Hemingway had it right when he said, “I have learned a great deal from listening. Most people never listen.”

Pardon me if I seem sick and tired of all the overheated talk about the worker shortage that is supposed to be threatening American business.

I catch a lot of flak when I say this, but I just don’t buy that this is a real issue. Yes, there are shortages of workers in specific areas (health care workers and engineers, for example), but in general we don’t have a problem—something that is confirmed just about every day when I read about the latest company buying out or laying off workers.

But, you might ask, what about the impending retirement of the baby boomers? Who is going to take the place of the 76 million Americans born after World War II who are beginning to leave the workforce? I think this purported trend has been overblown too, and I have written about the talent-shortage myth on numerous occasions in my Business of Management blog at Workforce.com.

First, I think the boomers are going to take their time leaving the workforce. Second, there is a huge group of new workers now gearing up to take their place: the Millennials (also known as Generation Y), who were born after 1980.

They are here and ready to start working—but what if we aren’t ready to let them?

Last month, I was surprised to read in The Dallas Morning News about an advertising executive who had decided to stop hiring newly graduated Millennials unless they have an advanced degree or have done a work-related internship. The executive said that it wasn’t because Millennials lack creativity or technical know-how, but rather because they lack the ability to deal with responsibility, accountability and setbacks.

“They wipe out on life as often as they wipe out on work itself,” advertising executive Owen Hannay said. “They get an apartment and a kitty, and they can’t cope. Work becomes an ancillary casualty.”

The problem, according to a generational expert who talked to the newspaper, is that Millennials have been “overparented, overindulged and overprotected. They haven’t experienced that much failure, frustration, pain. We were so obsessed with protecting and promoting their self-esteem that they crumble like cookies when they discover the world doesn’t revolve around them. They get into the real world and they’re shocked.”

Well, maybe some are, but how can you broad-brush a group of 80 million people? Hasn’t every generation entering the workforce had its own share of strengths and challenges?

I have a close-up view of the Millennial generation: Not only do I have three in my own household, but I teach writing to a class full of them at a local university. And, although Millennials have their own unique generational issues, the ones I deal with reflect what you would find in society as a whole—some are good, some average, some clueless. How different is that from any other group?

“Some of them are the greatest generation,” said Marian Salzman, an ad agency executive at J. Walter Thompson who talked to 60 Minutes in November and invoked the term used for the pre-boomers who fought World War II and held down the home front. “They’re more hardworking. They have these tools to get things done. They are enormously clever and resourceful. [But] some of the others are absolutely incorrigible. It’s their way or the highway.”

The rap on the Millennials is that they have been spoiled and coddled, but they also tend to be much more realistic and pragmatic about the modern workplace. “I remember my dad getting laid off and all these things growing up,” one Millennial told 60 Minutes. “And that’s ’cause they sacrificed for the company. Well, the first knee-jerk reaction from me is, I sure don’t want to do that. I’m going to be in it for me and I’m going to make it work.”

From my perspective, this is a much healthier way to view work. It’s the result of more than 20 years of Corporate America treating workers like disposable parts, and now, the next generation of workers is saying, “We are aren’t going to do it the way our parents did.”

Maybe that’s the one thing the Millennials can teach the rest of us: that work is the means to an end, a way to help reach our goals but not the end goal itself. They are going to do it differently, and like it or not, we’d better be ready. Once this generation fully takes over, our workplaces will never be the same.

Workforce Management, March 3, 2008, p. 42 — Subscribe Now!