Author: Kris Dunn

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Be Like Mary Barra: How HR Leaders Can Become CEOs

Mary Barra, seen here in January 2012, will become the next CEO of General Motors in January 2014. Photo by John F. Martin for General Motors.

By now, most of you are aware that a former human resources leader has transcended the HR space to become CEO of a Fortune 100 company. And for the uninitiated (click here for some descriptive text on Mary Barra), the former vice president of HR at General Motors Co. will become the automaker’s new CEO. 

With that promotion in mind, many in the HR space trumpeted the ascension of a former HR leader to a Fortune 100 CEO spot as proof positive that HR pros can be anything they want to be. And while the promotion of Barra as the leader of General Motors is great news for HR, caution on what it means is probably warranted. Just because you’re in HR doesn’t mean you can be CEO. In fact, you still probably need to get out of HR to become a CEO.

Need proof?  Let’s look at part of Barra’s background/profile as captured by Bloomberg Businessweek:

Before becoming CEO, Barra served “as executive vice president of global product development and global purchasing and supply chain at General Motors Co. Ms. Barra served as senior vice president of global product development at General Motors Co. since Feb. 1, 2011, and served as its chief of product development. … She began her career with General Motors in 1980 as a General Motors Institute (Kettering University) co-op student at the Pontiac Motor Division. She has been director of general Dynamics Corp. since March 15, 2011. Ms. Barra serves on the Kettering University Board of Trustees and Inforum Center for Leadership Board of Directors. … Ms. Barra received a GM fellowship to the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from General Motors Institute (Kettering University). She holds an MBA in Business Administration from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1990.”

What’s all that mean? If you're an HR leader with a dream, here are five things the Barra profile tells us you need to do to become CEO:

1. Get the hell out of HR soon. Let’s be clear: One look at the Barra profile tells you her HR experience was part of a power rotation to learn the business, not a defining tag on her résumé. That should tell you what has always been the reality: You need to rotate elsewhere to be enough of a player to become the CEO of a company of any size and scale.

2. Deep subject matter expertise in an area core to the business is desired. Barra is an engineer at heart, an area that’s obviously core to GM’s business. Your company also has a similar heartbeat. If you have an undergrad that matches that heartbeat, you could do HR, take a rotation elsewhere and become a player in the race to become the boss. If your educational background doesn’t fit, you have no chance. But you could find a company that provides a better match and values your non-HR undergrad.

3.  Depending on the company’s focus, you need to decide which rotational path is best. Most companies these days have cultures that are defined by product or by sales. If your company is product-focused and your educational background is a match, you take a non-HR rotation in that area. If your company is sales-focused, follow that path. A sales focus at your company also allows you to worry less about a lack of match in your educational background with the company’s core product or service as long as you’re willing to risk it all with a career in sales management.

4.  Top tier MBAs still rule. Barra is a Stanford MBA grad. The mail-order MBA isn’t going to cut it if you want to be a CEO of a big company. You need to go get the elite MBA.

5. Get the hell out of HR. I had to say it twice, because it’s that important. I know you love it, but if your goal is to be the CEO, you’re not going to get there from here.

Get to the rotational program and get out of HR if you want to be CEO. As much as we want to believe the Barra story says we can become CEOs, it’s only true if we’re brave enough to leave.

Kris Dunn, the chief human resources officer at Kinetix, is a Workforce contributor. He is also the founder of “The HR Capitalist” and “Fistful of Talent” blogs. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Dunn on Twitter at @kris_dunn.

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How to Hire 50,000 People in One Day

McDonald’s is looking to hire 50,000 people across America on April 19.


Before you get snarky and start brainstorming the ad campaign they need, you have to ask the obvious question: Why set a goal as an employer to hire 50,000 people in a single day?


The answer is equal parts need, call to action, PR and production line. Follow along as I use McDonald’s to break down when it makes sense for a company to draw a line in the sand and hire 50 (or 50,000) people in a single day. I use 50 as an alternative to 50,000 because most of us will never have a goal of 50,000 hires. But 50 in a day can be as intimidating as 50,000.


Simply put, hiring 50 (or 50,000) in a single day makes sense when:


1. You need to make a bunch of hires but your time-to-fill has died out in recent months. You’ve got open positions, but the sense of urgency across your recruiting organization resembles the look you get when you ask a Kmart worker for help. That line in the sand looks like a good way to get your recruiting team’s attention.


2. You have multiple openings for the same position to set your focus. Lots of openings across the same position means you use the same hiring funnel to make multiple hires. That’s called economy of scale by folks who understand production.


3. Your hiring managers have de-prioritized recruiting and you need a call to action (the risk of public humiliation) to get them motivated. Time to fill/hire is the metric for which you are held accountable, and managers tend to use it to point the finger at you. There’s no better way to create accountability among line managers for hiring than with a BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal) that’s supported by your C-suite.


4. By focusing on a single day for hiring, you can create a sense of urgency with candidates and maximize your PR/advertising spend. If you have to hire a bunch of people by a specific day, it makes sense that you can maximize your awareness among candidates by putting a perishable date on your process. Raise awareness regarding the date by advertising and working traditional PR channels for media coverage.


5. You’ve got the discipline, recruiting skills and infrastructure to execute on the plan once established. Ah yes. It’s easy to create a date, but you can only use the “big day” approach if you’ve got the recruiting infrastructure and ability to deal with the volume hiring 50 (or 50,000) people in one day can create.


Not sure what infrastructure is needed to pull off that many hires in a single day? Here’s your cheat sheet of what you’ll need as a talent/HR/recruiting function to make it happen:


1. A big fishing net across all digital sources of hire. You need applicant volume to hit your goal—and lots of it. Have a detailed plan for your use of big and small job boards, job board aggregators and search engine optimization to ensure you have the top-level volume (candidates) to work through the hiring funnel and get to your goal (hires).


2. An analog promotion and sourcing plan. If you’re planning on hiring 50 or 50,000 people at once, simply spraying all digital sources with postings isn’t going to give you all the flow you need. You’ll need feet on the street to hit job fairs, community sources and to also source candidates via the phone who don’t directly apply to your company. You cast the net through the job board and aggregators; this is the part where you go find the candidates. Track your success and have an idea related to what percentage of your prospect flow will come from the analog side/hunting.


3. A PR/advertising presence to help you get the word out. You’ve created an event, so it makes sense that you’ll also try to develop candidate flow by having a PR person or firm work the local media on your behalf, and don’t forget that a hiring day like the one you’re pondering is one of the actual times that the old model of traditional media advertising actually can work.


4. Technology to help you handle all the flow that’s going to spill into your organization. Don’t try to hire 50 or 50,000 people in one day without an advanced applicant tracking system, and don’t attempt it without a comprehensive review of how candidates come in, are categorized and handled during the process. Optimize the system for what you’re about to experience.


5. Pipeline management that looks more like Salesforce.com than anything you’ve seen out of your current HR/recruiting setup. Your sales organization handles forecasting through an activity known as “pipeline management,” which places all incoming leads at the top of a funnel and then starts eliminating leads deemed as nonviable through a five- or six-stage process. Your volume in this type of recruiting process is going to be so high that, unless you think like a director of sales, you’ll fail. You need to know how many applicants/prospects it takes to get one phone screen, one live interview and one actual hire. Only by knowing your pipeline like you know your pets or kids will you hit the number you’ve promised on the day in question. Be ruthless in your projections.


6. Early stage assessment tools to weed out candidates who will waste your time. You’re dealing with enough volume that it makes sense to use assessment tools designed to help eliminate candidates who don’t fit. Find the right tool and put it in play. The tool is cheaper than an hour of the hiring manager’s time.


7. Reporting that forecasts whether you’re going to make your goal. Got a month until the big day? Use the pipeline described in No. 5 to let everyone know where the company stands versus the goal. Use the reporting to embarrass those who won’t commit to the process. Your applicant tracking system described in No. 4 should be optimized to do that reporting for you.


8. Recruiters with the ability to confront and negotiate quick outcomes. There’s going to be a lot of volume flowing through the system with this type of hiring initiative. It’s no place for a passive, farming recruiter. Your recruiting team is going to have to drive the post-interview conversations with the hiring manager to close—getting to a yes/no, go/no-go decision on every candidate. Your volume is going to be so high you don’t have a choice; force the organization to make the hiring decisions quickly and on the fly.


Still want to hire 50 (or 50,000) people in a single day or within a one-month window? Start thinking more like a director of sales; monitor the volume in your sales funnel and close candidates quickly—and you’ve got a chance.


Workforce Management Online, April 2011 — Register Now!

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Four Things to Consider Once Your Company Opens Up Social Media Access

When it comes to social media and your organization, you probably fall into one of two camps: You’re either sick of hearing all the hype related to what social media can do for your firm, or you’re frustrated that your company doesn’t trust you enough to allow you to check your personal e-mail or Facebook account at work.


Because I can’t help myself, I’m offering up the following morality play performed millions of times daily within the bowels of corporate America:


Your employee: Opens up browser to post something witty on Twitter or Facebook.


Your network: Blocks the employee from accessing the social network in question, perhaps with the digital equivalent of a little finger wagging at the employee (bonus malice points if the message the employee sees refers to the social network in question as “the” Facebook/Twitter).


Your employee: Promptly swivels in chair to access the social network in question through the browser on his or her smart phone. Your company isn’t blocking cell towers in your buildings, right?


The verdict: Employee continues to think they are smarter than you. Based on this morality play, they have a decent case.


But I digress. With all the workplaces blocking social media, it’s evident that the irony of the social media workaround outlined above hasn’t hit home yet. But it will. It just takes time.


As the percentage of companies allowing access to social networks grows, you need to realize there are strategic things related to social media you’ll need to figure out as a progressive human resources pro. No one else in your organization is thinking about the issues necessary to have a meaningful approach to social media related to human capital strategy.


What issues, you ask? Consider the following gems that will kill you if you don’t figure them out:


1. Purpose. When you grant access to social media across your company, are you doing it because you’re benevolent, or do you think there’s actually a business opportunity in that decision? If you’re simply doing it because it feels good, stop reading now. If you think there’s a business opportunity in granting access, read on. You need to figure some things out quickly.


2. Portability. If you thought portability only referred to moving your cell number across wireless providers, you were wrong. Portability in social media refers to who owns what related to social media, and whether the intellectual capital related to social media moves with employees when they leave your company or stay with the firm. As you might expect, portability is reflected in the following details of ownership:

• Do accounts used in any way for company purposes belong to the employee or the company? The most effective use of social media seamlessly blends company brand and individual personality. While that works from a branding perspective, it’s hell when attempting to lay claim to social media accounts initialized by employees or the resulting networks built over time.

• Who owns the networks established by an employee on company time? When team members capture new members of a social network or a utility like LinkedIn, who owns the network? Do they own it or does the company? You need to figure out what you’re comfortable with now before a recruiter leaves with 60 percent of your recruiting network on his or her LinkedIn account, then disables the ability for you to view the connections. Ouch.

The earlier you figure out portability, the better off you are. Once you figure out the importance of portability, you’ll want to pay attention to the next item on our list—naming.


3. Naming. As you open up access to social media across your company, you’ll find that there are three types of activity, including the following:

• Totally personal. I just had a Pop-Tart for lunch. Who cares? You are correct—no one. Move on, because there’s nothing strategic to do with this segment. You opened it up, so they use it, like the toilets in the bathroom.

• Totally corporate. You couldn’t wait to activate the ACME twitter account. Congrats, it’s active and has the personality of Ben Stein on downers. Play on, because there’s no sizzle to this steak—no one will ever try to steal it from you. It’s yours.

• A mix of personal and professional social media activity. Danger! Here’s the type of social media activity where a naming strategy really comes into play. Looking to engage recruiters or marketing pros to start using social media in a way that develops them professionally and builds the company’s brand? Naming is the main issue you need to figure out before they start. If you’re going to underwrite the investment of time and focus related to social media, get in front of portability issues with a naming convention that makes sense.

Here’s an example of naming issues in the corporate social media realm. Let’s say you engage one of your recruiters to become active on Twitter in hopes of augmenting your recruiting efforts. Her name is Jen Smalls and your company’s name is ACME. Do you require her to do all Twitter work under the twitter handle @ACMEjen or @ACMErecruiter, or do you allow her to do the work under the decidedly personal @jensmalls?


Each name means something different related to portability and Jen’s ability to develop an interesting and compelling presence related to your company’s brand and her personal credibility. Allow the presence to be built via the @jensmalls handle and you have no shot at claiming the brand equity on behalf of your company.


4. Personality. Once you’ve analyzed your purpose for opening up social media access, sorted out portability issues and the naming decisions for social media accounts that follow, you’re free to develop some personality related to your company’s social media presence.


Remember one thing: Unless you plan on doing all company business through a fully corporately branded social media presence, there’s always some probability the social media equity that’s built belongs more to the employee than to you.


If you decide that’s the best path to getting business results for your company through social media (and many companies have been successful with that strategy), play on.


Just make sure you ask the questions before you get started.


Workforce Management Online, February 2011 — Register Now!

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Six Ways to Guarantee Finance Doesn’t Respect You as an HR Pro

You’re an HR leader, and you demand respect. You deserve to be in the same league as marketing, engineering and operations.


There’s just one little catch: You won’t be viewed as an equal to anyone until you’re respected by the group that controls the budget, the money, the analysis and, thus, your career.


That’s right; I’m talking about finance. Respect the number jockeys and seek to influence them weekly, if not daily. If you’ve ever struggled to be taken seriously by your peers on the leadership team, odds are the finance group held the keys to your turnaround.


Of course, influencing the finance group takes focus, and it’s something HR classes and organizations don’t teach you in textbooks. The result is a trail of tears, and here’s the top six ways many in our profession guarantee the finance teams around them don’t respect human resources pros:


1. Not having your game together when it comes to loaded full-time employee cost. Your friends in finance like to think of the business world as a collection of units, and they understand better than anyone the cost, value, demand and timing of every unit in the company, which means they understand the business. Guess which department controls the units that account for 60 to 80 percent of the units that matter from an expense perspective? You guessed it, it’s you: HR. Nothing irritates a finance pro more than line leaders who don’t understand the cost of what they control. When they ask you for the loaded full-time-equivalent cost of each employee in the company, they’re asking for a ballpark figure related to the cost of benefits, payroll taxes—all the costs beyond salary required to house an employee. They think you’re weak if you can’t cite that on command and break it down for them in detail conversationally.


2. Not being the expert of record when it comes to compensation at the local market level. Compensation budgets are made up of all the positions your company expects to employ in a budget year. Your friends in finance will periodically get requests to add positions to the budget, at which time you’ll get the following request from the bean counters for budget purposes: “What’s the salary you expect to offer for a call center rep in Rochester?” It’s not a range; it’s the actual offer you would expect to make on a consistent basis for that position in Rochester. They’re plugging in a market number to drive the cost model. If your answer is “I don’t know” or “Let me get that for you from my comp analyst,” assume the finance folks think you’re a lightweight. Their thinking is as follows: Call center spots make up 29 percent of company headcount, so shouldn’t you know the market rate for reps where your company has call centers so you can help make business decisions about where to expand and contract? They’re right.


3. Not having a dashboard of metrics you call your own in HR to help drive your decisions. Finance folks love dashboards, and when they’re talking shop with you about stuff that affects them, they love to hear that you’re in control of your own numbers. Your dashboard doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Items like turnover, cost per hire, time to fill, etc., are fine, but you have to be able to talk about each metric and show competence that you know which levers you can pull to affect any item on your dashboard. Also, make sure you update the dashboard you use monthly and send it out to those who need to know (including all in finance). Nothing affects finance’s view of your HR practice like the feeling you run your business by the numbers, even if it’s simply one of many inputs you consider.


4. Not being able to distinguish what human capital assets are expendable in other people’s departments. The exercise is called the fire drill, and it’s the periodic cost reduction exercise that calls for the business to consider what budgeted items they can live without and, in horrible times, what current assets can be shed without totally cannibalizing the business. Not all fire drills are public. Since people costs constitute 60 to 85 percent of a company’s total expense load, finance wants to be able to come to you for opinions about which human capital assets (people and the items in place to support them) are expendable. If you don’t know enough about the talent in your company to have an opinion, you’re useless in this drill.


5. Being unable to talk about any of the above metrics, numbers or information on demand without doing research. Real finance pros have a pretty good directional feel for the numbers they track. Ask them a question and they’ll give you an answer they feel pretty good about, even if they want to double-check the data after providing you with a guesstimate. Once they check, they’re usually right.


Of course, they expect the same from you. They want you so in tune with the numbers related to your function that you can sling accurate guesstimates with the best of them. The reliability of your guesstimates in spot conversations with finance is built over time, so there’s no way to fake this. You simply have to be in command of the number detail that emulates from your HR practice.


6. Not doing cool stuff that benefits the finance and accounting departments. It’s Influence 401, people. When you’ve got pilot projects and freebies that offer great exposure and benefits to the departments that receive them, don’t leave out the number jockeys. They’ll remember you didn’t forget them and make sure you’re taken care of as a result.


Bottom line: You can’t be viewed as an equal without having a productive, positive relationship with the finance group. It won’t happen by simply being nice to them. If you want finance to think you’re a player as an HR pro, you’re going to have to understand the numbers that drive the HR function from their viewpoint.


But simply understanding the numbers isn’t enough. You’ve got to know it well enough that you can discuss it on the fly without supporting documentation. Like Jeff Spicoli from the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High once said, “Learn it, know it, live it.”


Words to live by if you want respect from finance.


Workforce Management Online, January 2011 — Register Now!

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The Five New Rules of Using Social Media to Evaluate Candidates

As an HR pro, you’ve had it drilled into your head that, above and beyond all else, you need to be concerned with liability.


After all, there’s liability everywhere, isn’t there? Hiring, firing, promotions, credit checks, performance plans … tell me when to stop.


You know you like it. That’s your job. You’re the HR pro.


All the talk about liability can make HR pros a risk-averse group, so much so that a running joke somewhere in your company goes something like this:


Question: I hate this initiative. How do we guarantee our company will never take action on it?


Answer: Include a member of the HR group on the due diligence team and have them report on the potential discrimination risks. Make sure there’s a formal report that’s distributed to everyone.


That’ll kill it—and kill it good.


Liability is so top of mind that there’s a whole industry dedicated to telling HR pros what can get their companies sued and how to avoid it. Much of that advice is well-intentioned and valuable, but occasionally it feels more like fear mongering.


Translation: There’s one thing the HR police/risk management industry will never evaluate for you: the liability associated with not using your common sense as an HR pro.


Case in point: The current trend of pondering the liability related to viewing the social media accounts of candidates in your recruiting process.


Go to any HR conference these days and you’ll hear speakers waxing poetic about the risks of viewing the social media accounts of candidates in the selection process. It’s the obvious stance when you think about it. You viewed a social media account, saw something you didn’t like and made a hiring decision that had nothing to do with someone’s ability to do the job.


Shame on you if you judge candidates based on what they share via social media, they say.
I say shame on you if you don’t judge candidates based on their profiles.


There’s a new set of rules related to using social media to evaluate whether candidates are the right fit for the job and your company. You can’t afford to be scared; you’ve got a job to do.


Need the CliffsNotes? Here are the five new rules of evaluating candidates using social media:


1. You can’t afford not to Google a candidate and see where the digital trail takes you. Ask your CEO the following question: “Do you expect me to do everything legally at my disposal to ensure the hires we make can do the job and are great fits for our company?” It’s a hypothetical question, because the answer is always yes. Your CEO expects you to deploy all legal measures you can reasonably afford to make sure you’re making great hires. He or she doesn’t want to get sued, but doesn’t want you to be a wallflower. Rule No. 1—maybe the only one you really need to understand—you’re expected to be in the game. You’re an agent of the company, first, last and always.


2. Hiring managers and HR pros are becoming much more tolerant about what they see in a candidate’s social media footprint. The transparency of social media created a bit of a blowback effect in the early days. We never had access to pictures of candidates drinking before, so there was some shortsighted judging going on as a result. Now? We’ve seen enough to remember that people drink socially. As a result, we’re much more tolerant when we find out that a candidate’s not spending weeknights at church. Our threshold for what constitutes a red flag is much higher and more related to whether someone can do the job. That’s a good thing.


3. You don’t give many candidates the real reason they were rejected, and that doesn’t change simply because social media is at play. Unless the candidate in question has a skills gap, most organizations don’t share the real reason for rejection. As a candidate, you had a personality issue and seemed a little angry at the world during the interview process. Did the company provide you with candid feedback? Of course they didn’t. We’re already trained on what not to say that might present liability in the feedback process. Why should questionable pictures or content mined through social media be held to a higher standard?


Stop me when you’ve heard this risk reducer: “We’ve elected to make an offer to a candidate who was a better fit for the role in question.” The statement is true when you don’t think someone can get along with the hiring manager and it’s true when they’ve blasted opinions via social media that most at your company would find objectionable.


4. Privacy settings have eliminated much of the liability related to social media. By far, the biggest risk to your company is digging into a social media account that is intended for nothing but personal use by a candidate. Facebook is the choice of most candidates when it comes to communicating events in their personal lives, and privacy settings now allow a candidate to wall off what they don’t want the world at large to see. As a result, liability has been greatly reduced during the past two years.


5. Evolution means some species don’t advance. You pay your employees to exercise good judgment related to what, with whom and how they communicate. This requirement is on display daily in your company, and when someone shows they can’t do it, you separate them from the mother ship (that’s called termination, folks).


Even though we’ve grown up dramatically related to our reaction to personal details shared via social media, occasionally someone will share something so egregious you know there’s a judgment issue at play in their DNA. That means they don’t get to play in your company at which time you share the talking points detailed in item No. 3.


Your CEO wants you to use all tools available to make the best talent matches possible. The HR risk management industry wants you to be scared.


What should you do? Don’t be scared. Manage the risk and engage.


Workforce Management Online, January 2011 — Register Now!

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Email Dumpster Diving and LinkedIn Reviews Can Reveal Who’s Leaving the Company

There has been a lot written in the past two decades about human capital related to acquisitions. After all, companies buy competitors not only for intellectual property and market share but also for economies of scale, which is code for “via this acquisition, we can slash $100 million in duplicated payroll costs and make a dollar.”

Of course, the term “duplicated payroll costs” leads to fear and backstabbing, with men ending up in the organizational lifeboat instead of women and children.

There are winners and losers in every acquisition. Most of what has been written focuses on the resulting purge and layoffs that address duplication and cashing in on the aforementioned economies of scale.

But somewhere in the deep underbelly of the company, there are folks trying to make a call whether life is better or worse and if the new organization fits their values and world view. That’s especially problematic when the folks trying to make the call hold the keys to your competitive advantage.

If you sent them a card at the time you closed the acquisition, it would start out as follows: “Dear talented mobile employee who can walk out the door with all the IP we think we just bought in your head. We love you. Please don’t leave.”

The issue is in play at the former Palm Inc., as some key people decided to get the hell out of Hewlett-Packard Co. after their acquisition was announced in April. A key employee compared working for a big company to a wedding and a small company as a first date. As the employee wrote in this article last month for TechCrunch, “I am not looking to dance down the aisle just yet, no matter how pretty the bride is.”

As such, he and another former Palm employee are starting their own company. They aren’t sharing much beyond the fact that they’re interested in developing technologies they don’t think HP would support or embrace.

So let’s break this down. Two former Palm employees who chose to jump from HP are high-profile folks, but there are hundreds if not thousands of this morality play taking place within HP/Palm, and for that matter in any acquisition of significant size.

How do you figure which employees are likely to bolt once an acquisition goes down, and who do you need to invest in to have the best shot at making them stay? I’d do the following three things:

Step 1. Get data points down and across the organization on who you can’t lose in the just-acquired company. Get multiple data points—not just from their manager, because let’s face it, that’s often tainted. Too often that’s all organizations do—get a list from the manager or the department head. That’s weak.

    Step 2. Ask your human resources folks to analyze every one of those individuals using their LinkedIn profiles. The main question: Does the background and career arc for each person indicate they are a flight risk? Do they have a history of jumping when things get more corporate? Do they have a history of jumping for other reasons that would indicate they won’t put up with the acquiring entity for long?

Is that subjective? Yes, but I could do this in two full days across 1,000 employees if you give me the list; most of them have LinkedIn profiles/résumés on file.

A couple notes about this process: If your HR team tells you they don’t have the capability to do this, they’re not good enough or they’re embedded close enough to the street at your company where stuff happens.

If they tell you they don’t have time, ask them how much time they can spend on the project. When they answer, tell them your expectation is that they triple the amount of time on the project. It’s that important and core to what you do.

Step 3. I’d call a social network analysis expert and ask them to use your e-mail servers and other tools to assess who the most connected, influential and active people are on that list with the outside professional world. There is some custom social network analysis involved in this step, but I’d want to know who’s most connected and active with the outside professional world in their industry, because if I know that, I likely know who could leave tomorrow and have a lateral gig at another company by the end of the week.

This step is the equivalent of the digital dumpster dive. Don’t feel guilty. You own that e-mail data, and you’re not planning on posting the results on the intranet. It’s privileged information for your eyes only.

So you’ve got a list, but what do you do now? Let’s take a look at what we’ve built and what you should do as a result:

• Step 1 builds the list of who I need to worry about.

• Steps 2 (LinkedIn analysis) and 3 (social network analysis) give me data to tell me who’s at risk.

• Score high in steps 2 and 3 and you get maximum retention attention as a flight risk via more ego-stroking and stay bonuses.

• Score high in Step 3 alone and you’re next on the chart. You’re building your network to give you options even though your past doesn’t suggest you’re going to jump.

• Score high in 2 but not 3, you get some attention, but you’re at the end of the line behind the first two profiles listed because your ability to flee is not as high as the others.

• Score low in both 2 and 3, and thanks for being a loyal corporate citizen. When it comes to retention bonuses, however, there’s no soup for you.

That’s right, I’m using your e-mail and maybe even phone and Web traffic to determine if I need to be concerned at a high level about retaining you. In an ironic twist, if I can do the analysis without you knowing, I have no intention of paying the people most likely to be loyal and go nowhere.

It’s a crazy world, but if I’m advising the CEO for the acquirer, that’s how I would roll, assuming I could deal with the inconsistencies in the organization (those most loyal and least likely to jump getting nothing—a bit of a PR problem for any young Vader of HR).

Don’t hate me because I’ve got a plan. Hate me because I’m treating human capital like any other marketplace and making measured bets based on the best facts I can find—not on emotion.

Workforce Management Online, November 2010 — Register Now!

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Four Ways to Make Your Existing Performance Review Process Better

As the year winds down, many human resources people are getting ready to lead a companywide performance review process based on an annualized calendar.


Rather than get all high and mighty regarding the effectiveness of an annual feedback loop or waste energy talking about whether performance reviews even work, let’s do something different.


There are ways to help make the effectiveness of the process better. Rather than say, ‘You’re doing it wrong,’ here are some thoughts that can maximize what you have in place.


Let’s start with a list of what most companies do well related to the performance review process. This is going to seem a little mundane, but these things are universal across most companies.


• You have a form. It contains goals and objectives that you hope the team member has reviewed. Hopefully, the team member has actually had a conversation about the goals with his or her manager.


• Your managers know they have to complete the form in question. This is the first part of what many HR pros affectionately term as the “cattle call.” Attention managers: Please complete the form, offering strategic insights while not causing your team members to become openly hostile upon delivery.


• You’ve got a meeting schedule. Managers must have the forms completed and hold meetings to deliver the news to their team members within a particular time frame. This is where you police those who don’t deliver by the date in question, using equal parts begging, intimidation and public humiliation to drive compliance. If none of that works, you do what any reasonable person would do. You tell their director.


• Your managers plow through the meetings. They hope the sessions go well and they don’t get trapped in awkward conversations. How do they do it? They don’t stop talking and limit the session to 30 minutes.


That’s a quick rundown of the common process most companies use related to performance management. It’s how 80 percent of companies in America still approach performance management. Of the remaining 20 percent, 10 percent does nothing—nothing!—related to performance management, and the other 10 percent are experimenting like crazy.


Most of you are in the 80 percent category. The rundown captures most of what you do, which begs the question: What can you do to make this traditional process better without putting your company through waves of change?


Simply, there are four ways you can make the traditional performance review process dramatically better. There’s no dramatic process engineering. And, there are no new forms.


1. Ask managers to provide examples to back up the rating and ensure those examples aren’t what I call “glittering generalities.” You rated Johnny a 3 (on a scale of 1 to5) on his second objective. Now give a couple of examples to back up that rating and make sure they’re specific so they can lead to deeper conversation.


Bad: “Johnny does a good job in this area. Nice work, Johnny.”


Worse: No written examples to back up the rating, which is the equivalent of a caveman grunt.


Better: “Johnny does a good job getting the reporting deck in on time. I especially like the improvements he made in the churn report, which helped us more accurately monitor the segments in which we were losing customers. Nice work, Johnny.”


2. Once managers have provided specific examples, have them weave in language that clearly ties the examples to a specific rating. Now that you have an active example of someone’s work in the area in question, you have a shot to tie it to the rating. Believe it or not, this actually helps set expectations with the team member and sets your manager up to ask for more in the future.


Example: “Johnny does a good job getting the reporting deck in on time. I especially like the improvements he made in the churn report, which helped us more accurately monitor the segments in which we were losing customers. Getting the reports in on time and occasionally looking for improvements is consistent with what I expect out of Johnny to meet my expectations in this area. Nice work, Johnny.”


3. Once managers have specific examples and have linked those examples to the actual rating, they should coach the team member by asking for more performance. Your managers want to deliver the review and get out of the room. You need them to be more—to be a coach. Have the manager list at least one example of what the team member could do to raise his or her rating. By doing this, they have a visual reminder of the need to coach for improved performance:


Example: “Johnny does a good job getting the reporting deck in on time. I especially like the improvements he made in the churn report, which helped us more accurately monitor the area in which we were losing customers. Getting the reports in on time and occasionally looking for improvements is consistent with what I expect out of Johnny to meet my expectations in this area. Moving forward, Johnny can get to the next level in this area by reviewing each report in the deck on a quarterly basis to determine if improvements can be made and executing on the changes he recommends. Our company would benefit greatly from that type of continuous improvement. Nice work, Johnny. Look forward to seeing more!”


4. Give managers the skills to deliver in-person coaching from the written comments they’ve generated. Work hard as an HR pro and you can implement the changes above and improve your existing performance review process in a dramatic fashion.


But your work’s not complete. To this point, the improvements you’ve made have been accomplished by enhancing the written product.


To truly capitalize on the potential of the enhanced written performance review, your managers need to be able to deliver the performance review verbally as well as in writing.


That means they need to be comfortable having a free-flowing conversation with the team member, using the rating, the supporting examples listed and the areas the team member can grow in as talking points. They need to let the team member share their feelings. It takes time, and the best place to start is through controlled practice in a training environment where they can get feedback.


You’ve got forms. You’ve got deadlines. Don’t have time to revamp the process in its entirety? Focus on these four things and you’re on the road to maximizing the benefits of the performance review process.


Workforce Management Online, October 2010 — Register Now!

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Six Reasons Why You Are More of a PR Manager Than an HR Manager

You’ve said it before as you’ve contemplated a tough move on the people front within your company: “What will this look like to our employees and customers if we take this action?” Or, you may ask, “What will this look like to the same groups if we don’t take action?”


Like the Spike Lee film, you always want to do the right thing as a human respurces pro. However, it’s a tough world, and you have to think about how any people move (or lack of a move depending on the situation) is going to be perceived.


Face the facts: Part of the job of good HR is good PR. Want proof from the big leagues?


When Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Mark Hurd resigned, one of the outcomes that came out in the after-the-fact discovery was that Washington-based public relations firm APCO Worldwide Inc. worked with the HP board every step of the way as they moved toward the decision to separate Hurd from the company.


According to Fortune magazine, it was the PR strategists at APCO who helped the HP board decide how to handle harassment charges against Hurd. One of the tools was PR influence at its best: APCO presented a mock newspaper article illustrating the potential damage to HP’s reputation if the board failed to take action swiftly and decisively.


In short, PR people played a vital role in making an HR decision. Shocked? You shouldn’t be.


APCO has worked with high-profile clients like UPS Inc. and Pfizer Inc. The same APCO specialists who advised HP on people issues advised Merck & Co. on its Vioxx lawsuits, WorldCom on its bankruptcy restructuring, and Ford Motor Co. when Explorer SUVs with Firestone tires were blamed for crashes.


Consultants from PR shops such as APCO tell clients to “think like journalists” while presenting mock stories or dummy TV reports to show how the press might treat their crisis.


Some of you will reject that notion on first sight. “We don’t manage by approval polls,” you say. I get it. But you do. At times, you’re a PR person who does HR and talent management as a hobby.


Need more proof? Here are six ways you’ve been a PR expert in the last week:


• You’ve assessed the risk of terming an underperformer without taking a single step in your progressive discipline process. What would the PR person ask? The same thing you’re asking. “What’s it going to look like down the road? Are we likely to get sued? Are our team members going to be influenced by the fact the underperforming team member never got a formal warning?” It’s up to you not only to figure out what to do in balancing the needs of the business vs. the liability, but also to figure out how it’s going to play on the street.


• You’ve thought about internal candidates who will be interested in a new open position but aren’t ready. You’re thinking about what to tell them. You’re wondering if it’s better from a PR perspective to put them through an interview process in which they have no chance of succeeding or if it’s better to not post the position at all, plug in the favorite and take the backlash. If your final decision differs from that of the hiring manager, you’re crafting your talking points related to why your approach is the best.


• You’ve received feedback on the way your CEO is perceived in one of your remote locations. You’re assessing the credibility of the views and wondering if you should present the data to the CEO while wondering if the messenger figuratively will be killed. You know your message has to be right to avoid that. You’re also evaluating whether you’ll hurt innocent team members in that location by sharing the information with the CEO, since your lead person is likely to be down on anyone from that location for a long time.


• You just got the application for “Best Places to Work.” You know your company offers much to employees, but you also know it’s not a perfect place. You’re wondering about the positive and negative impacts of chasing the “Best Places” designation. Is it better to have the award regardless of the perception by some internally that you chased the award for PR benefit?


• You looked at your LinkedIn profile and think it could use some spice to enhance your recruiting effectiveness. You’re thinking about what you will write to make candidates want to talk to you and position your company as an employer of choice.


• You’re changing your medical insurance options, premiums and coverage levels again. Change happens, but this is the fourth time you’ve gone back to the well to reduce coverage, ask for more of an employee’s paycheck and say, “It’s not us; it’s the cost structure of the medical industry.” How do you share the story in a fresh and unique way?


It’s also your task to deliver negative news yet attempt to focus the perspective that team members have it better with you than they could get at the firm across the street.


So you think you’re not a PR person? Some would say you’re more PR than HR.


I say roll with it. If you’ve been in the game for a while now, chances are you’re a pretty good PR pro. And, spin-master skills are valuable elsewhere if the career in HR doesn’t work out.


Workforce Management Online, October 2010 — Register Now!

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MBA Oath How About an HR Oath

Where there’s a need you’ll find a provider. That’s how the free market works, and that’s how this reality holds true for ethics as well as widgets.


Case in point: More than 2,000 MBA graduates have taken an MBA oath of ethics. Modeled after the Hippocratic Oath, MBAoath.org calls for MBAs to do the right thing first rather than automatically deferring to the thing that benefits them most. As you might expect, the MBA oath is a predictable response to the Wall Street meltdown of the last couple of years.


Here are a couple of points from the oath that caught my eye:


• “I will manage my enterprise with loyalty and care, and will not advance my personal interests at the expense of my enterprise or society.”


• “I will invest in developing myself and others, helping the management profession continue to advance and create sustainable and inclusive prosperity.”


Did you say, “Wow!” after you read the entire oath? This kind of stuff always brings out the cynic in me—the one that says you could save some trees by simply saying, “I promise not to screw others, or at the very least, have reasonable assurance that they plan on screwing me before I attempt to screw them.”


Now, that’s an effective MBA oath, don’t you think?


It reminds me that what the HR profession really needs isn’t respect, more business savvy or better metrics. We need an oath.


With that in mind, I present the following HR oath for your consideration. The HR oath is designed to be taken when someone passes the PHR or SPHR, and by anyone else in our industry who believes in the content of the oath, but thinks the current HRCI certification system is bunk.


The HR oath
(My comments are in brackets following each pledge.)


I, (state your name), member of the HR community, promise to:


• Never say the phrase “seat at the table” again, unless I openly mock it and say it in the voice of the Church Lady or Samuel L. Jackson.
(I’m talking about the raised, agitated Samuel L. Jackson voice from “Pulp Fiction” or “Snakes on a Plane,” in part because he’s ultra-cool and always uses that voice in a way that makes you unsure whether he’s serious or not. It’s perfect for mocking this tired, overused phrase.)


• Avoid dumping 15 to 50 candidates I secured via the “post and pray” model on the hiring manager, then encourage her to “take a look and see what she likes.”
(It’s true. If your HR function is still dumping candidates to the hiring manager to get initial feedback, it’s time to put on your big-boy pants and take some risks by acting like your opinions and business knowledge might be as important as the hiring manager’s. Cut it down, pronto. Present three to five candidates you’ve already talked to, like a real recruiter.)


• Carve out two hours per week to do nothing but figure out a way for me to add value to the business.
(It’s nothing but you and a blank sheet of paper or a single blinking cursor on your laptop. What can you do that’s not currently being done that would help generate business results? The key phrase here is business results, not HR department results. There’s usually a difference, at least initially.)


• Refrain from spending my entire personal development budget on the always-challenging “Employment Law Seminar 20XX” for the sixth straight year. 
(Human nature suggests we migrate to what we are most comfortable with. Use your professional development spend to start chasing skills that make you feel totally incompetent when the training begins. That’s a sure sign you’re doing something of value that will pay off in the long run.)


• Speak up at the possible risk of my job when I see my boss or a peer doing something that blatantly runs counter to the people mission of our company.
(Not much else to say here, other than you have more leverage than you give yourself credit for.)


• Never own or wear a sensible pair of shoes that make me look like a fool.
(I’m being a bit elitist with this one, because everyone who knows me clearly understands I’m not wearing Armani to the office. I’m not asking you to look like a supermodel or Tom Brady, just that you to dress and care a little bit about your sense of style, at least to the level of whatever the mean is within your workplace.)


• Ship product regularly.
(If you don’t know what this means for an HR pro, the short take is creating and delivering something of value on a regular basis rather than just making sure the company HR trains run on time.)


• Give a crap every day.
(Or get out of the business, because you’re depressing the rest of us with your lack of effort, originality and game when you mail it in every single day.)


That’s it. If you’re in, simply signify your commitment to the HR oath by leaving a comment. If that’s too public for you, take the lighter approach and click the “recommend” arrow at the top of this article.


For those of you who take the HR oath, maybe we’ll get together at SHRM 2011 in Vegas and party. Either way, we’ve got a leg up on the MBAs. Our oath is more realistic—and more fun.


Workforce Management Online, September 2010 — Register Now!

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The Only Question You Need to Figure Out Who Owns Your Culture

In management, we often make things harder than they need to be. Things like culture, engagement and the Gallup 12 are good examples.


We’ve heard so much about employee engagement that the mere term has become a bit of a buzzword to many in the talent game. The mention of engagement alone can cause a cynical, jaded reaction among HR leaders (when no one is watching and the cameras are off, mind you).


After all, how do you measure engagement? How do you find time to chase engagement initiatives in addition to everything else you have on your plate? What’s the ROI of engagement work?


It’s easy to talk about engagement, but it’s harder to measure. It’s even harder to do well and feel like you have your arms around the concept as an HR leader.


There’s a simpler way.


No doubt you want to build the best culture possible at your company, which requires employee engagement (or whatever you choose to call it). Regardless of how you define your culture, you can find out what your employees really think and what they value culturally by asking the following simple question: If you could pick any manager (other than the one you currently report to) in the company to work for (regardless of functional area), who would it be and why?


It’s a no-BS question you should add to your next employee survey that cuts straight to the heart of what people want out of your company. Culture isn’t defined by a cool workspace, by free lunches and soda, or by the stuff you put in the onboarding packet. Those things help to attract talent and are nice to have, but they quickly become entitlements.


You are not the car you drive or the perks you pump up your recruiting collateral with. Your company is, however, only as good as your managers allow you to be.


You lose control of your culture once your managers take delivery of talent in the new-hire process. At that point, an employee’s experience with your culture is heavily influenced by their day-to-day interactions with their manager.


My bet is if you ask the “Who else would you like to work for?” question and review the results in a group of manageable size, you’ll find some common names popping up all over the place.


Employees talk. They know who’s good with people, who’s fair and who has a nice balance between business results and development of team members.


The equation is pretty simple: Fairness plus people skills plus balance between business results and employee development equals the culture your employees truly value.


When I talk to my peers about the impact of frontline manager effectiveness and the potential of this question from an engagement and cultural perspective, objections consistently differ between large and small companies. The big companies claim that the “Who else would you like to work for?” question isn’t scalable to their enterprise level needs. The small companies claim that they already know the answer.


Both responses are wrong.

For big companies, there’s no question that employee reactions to the question can’t be effectively reviewed in raw form. However, it’s easy to imagine a progressive HR team taking a page from the marketing playbook and developing a form of “buyer personas” from the trends identified.


Buyer personas help marketers understand buyer needs and thus market more effectively to them. Why wouldn’t a big company ask the “Who else would you like to work for?” question, then develop a form of “manager personas” detailing the trended traits and skills of the managers the polled employees identified?


Imagine a world where you developed those personas, evaluated your existing managers to see which profile each had the best chance of emulating, and then developed a customized development plan to help those managers match up with that persona? It could be scary good.


Small companies are simpler in their objections to using the “Who else would you like to work for?” question, claiming they already know the answer. Of course, that’s not true.


Those in charge at small companies know who they would like to work for, not who their employees would like to work for. Don’t believe me? If you’re in a company with more than 20 managers, ask the question and I’ll guarantee you that you’ll be surprised by at least one trend in the results.


Ask the question, and then look at the names of the managers that come up repeatedly. Look at their style and philosophy, then figure out how to push, prod and train your other managers to embody some of the traits identified.


The question doesn’t lie, and it’s brutally honest because how it’s written (anyone other than who you report to) releases the employee responding from saying, “I’d take my manager,” because we all know that’s the politically correct answer.


Ask the question. Learn who is really driving your culture.


I bet you’ll be surprised.


Workforce Management Online, July 2010 — Register Now!