Work in Progress – Workforce

January 22, 2020June 29, 2023

Leadership Skills: Inclusion and Empathy

Jenny just walked into your office and confessed her life is falling apart due to an addiction to Vicodin.

Tom just showed up in a dress and used what appears to be the wrong bathroom.

Your reaction to these events says a lot about how ready you are to be a manager in the coming decade. Your company is not likely to be of much help.

I recently finished reading Mike Isaac’s “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.” It’s the story of how Uber rose from humble beginnings to become a Silicon Valley unicorn, then stumbled from the top as its bro-tastic culture caused it to be tone-deaf to the world around it via repeated PR fiascos.

The cultural challenges led to the ouster of founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, who was replaced by former Expedia leader Dara Khosrowshahi (still CEO at Uber).

To illustrate the cultural overhaul underway at Uber, let’s look at some old founder-driven values under Kalanick, then compare those to new values rolled out under Khosrowshahi:

Old Uber Values: Meritocracy, toe-stepping, always be hustlin’.

New Uber Values: We build globally/live locally, we celebrate differences, we do the right thing.

Company values must evolve over time. Uber was late to make the cultural change, which underscores an important reality in most workplaces. Almost every people manager faces change happening faster than organizational infrastructure or company values can accommodate.

Great managers adapt before they are forced to and usually before the company sponsors cultural change.

Change is everywhere in society and comes at us fast. You’re reading about the drug use facing corporate America in this issue of Workforce. Opioid addiction, legalization trends and more are upon us. Company policy regarding hot button issues naturally trails the change we see outside the workplace. The fact that cultural change happens faster than companies can pivot is why one of the most important manager competencies in today’s world is rapid inclusion and empathy.

Consider the following realities:

You’re a leader.
You’re full of personal thoughts, a specific background and some bias.
When change comes and you’re asked to consider the rights of yet another special class of people or individuals, you may react as if it’s a burden or worse. You can say it’s all gone too far. Some will agree with you.
But you’ll ultimately acknowledge the rights and needs of the segment of people in front of you, or you won’t be allowed to lead anymore.
History shows this cycle of events to be true. Look at all societal change and trailing legislation from yesterday’s Title VII to today’s LBGTQ+ conversations and emerging laws. Once societal change reaches critical mass, mandates come to the workplace. It’s just a matter of time.

Most of us don’t work for a company like Uber in crisis and as a result, cultural expectations related to inclusion and empathy are less clear. That means you’re on your own as policy at your company trails societal change. What if you weren’t late the game? What if you as a leader made it a priority to make all feel welcome and equal in your company and on your team?

Great managers adapt before they are forced to and before the company sponsors cultural change.

If that was your approach, you’d find the people in question — the special class of people currently causing others discomfort — incredibly willing to work for you and, just as importantly, freed to do their best work. You’d be maximizing your ability to get great work from the employees you have.

Many of you are HR pros and leaders working for companies stuck in the middle. Your company is slow to pivot on societal change for many reasons.

Also in Work in Progress: How to Hire Your First HR Leader

But that glacial corporate reaction to change is an opportunity. While you likely can’t change corporate policy in an agile fashion, you can still lead and train others on the business opportunity that happens when you treat people the right way.

When you’re early on inclusion and show empathy, a funny thing happens. Performance and the ability for someone to do their best work goes up. Word spreads about your empathy and the candidate pool expands. Managers start to have their own gravity from a cultural perspective

Also in Work in Progress: Are Your Leaders Credible? Are You Sure?

None of us are perfect when it comes to the change required as society evolves. But the best managers and leaders are moving quicker through the cycle to acceptance, and they’re viewed as a manager of choice as a result.

Uber was not an inclusive or empathetic company until it was forced to change. You don’t have to wait on your company to dictate inclusion. Be early on acceptance.

November 25, 2019June 29, 2023

How to Hire Your First HR Leader

So, business is good, growth is strong and you’re ready to hire your first HR leader. That’s great news. Congrats!

Now comes the hard part.

This column is not meant to help those looking for their first HR hire, which is generally an individual added by small to medium-sized business when transactional items like payroll and compliance overwhelm an office manager or similar administrative employee with another job to do.

That was your first HR hire. You’ve likely made that hire at least a year or so ago. You thought that person was going to shore up your recruiting issues and get to needed projects in performance, training and other areas. You were wrong.

So here we are. You just posted an opening for an HR manager/director — your first HR leader. If you’re going to invest the money, you need the person to innovate and deliver the return in all your areas of need related to talent.

Finding the right hire in this situation is hard, and misses occur often. Here are ideas to assist in your search:

Experience matters, so prepare to dig. If you’re looking for someone to come in and build your next-level HR platform, you’re going to need to make sure they’ve done it before. The biggest lie the devil ever told the world about HR is that titles equate to ability. That’s not only false in the world of HR, it’s dangerous.

There’s a high degree of variability across HR manager/director candidates. To ensure you end up with what you need, pick your top three HR areas of need, then prepare to interview candidates purposefully on how they have built strong programs in those areas.

Ask candidates to bring a portfolio of examples of their work in each domain. Make sure the experience is real, not hypothetical or you’re going to be less than satisfied in under a year.

Company size of current and past employers is important. As a growing company, you’re going to be naturally attracted to HR leaders in small companies. While that’s one path to success, you shouldn’t discount HR pros who want to downshift from a mega-company existence to the SMB life.

There’s a high degree of variability across HR Manager/director candidates. Pick your Top Three areas of need, then interview purposefully.

Big company HR pros have the benefit of growing up with great tools and resources in the areas important to you. The best ones (who are a motivational fit for life in a smaller company) can use that experience to build your HR platform in a meaningful, progressive way.

Consider recruiting backgrounds as an alternative. Most growing businesses seek to add their first HR leader at around the 100-employee mark. You’re likely adding this leadership team member due to growth, which means recruiting is almost always a pain point. For best results, look to add candidates to your hiring process that have been pure recruiters in their past in addition to holding pure HR positions. Interview to understand their success and satisfaction in the former recruiting role. If your first HR leader has past success as a recruiter and enjoyed that life, you’ll be set up for success.

Of course, all of those tips are related to candidate backgrounds and what you’ll see on résumés. To truly win with your first HR leader hire, you’re also going to have to be brutally honest with yourself related to your company environment and the behavioral DNA you need in a candidate that provides the best match.

My new book, “The 9 Faces of HR,” digs deep into the behavioral DNA of HR pros. Here’s the must-haves I’d recommend for anyone seeking to hire their first HR leader:

Quick on the draw. Taking in large amounts of data/feedback and making quick, accurate decisions is key. Things move pretty fast at a high-growth company, and the right candidate for you will need to match the speed.

Fearless. Your new HR leader needs to be naturally inclined to deal with challenges head on. The right candidate for you will have a bias toward action.

Loves chaos. Let’s face it, you have a cool company but it’s a freak show, as all high-growth organizations are. The right candidate is going to view chaos as a ladder, not a barrier.

Successfully hiring your first HR leader is about finding a candidate in the sweet spot — the intersection of hustle, hard work, innovation and the ability to create product and services others will use to move your company forward.

The right one is out there, but only if you go into the search with a clear plan of what you are looking for. Don’t settle!

September 20, 2019June 29, 2023

Balancing the 3 Types of Work-Life Balance

I did a candidate interview for an open position recently — during vacation on the beach.

Go ahead and fire up the comments about how my priorities are out of whack. About how I need to take care of myself.

I provide this nugget as a visual to the following reality. There are three types of work-life balance in the world. Two you can choose, one you must earn. All come with a cost. As an HR/talent leader, you should have a point of view on each because odds are they all exist to some extent in your company, but one probably defines your culture.

Let’s break down the types of work-life balance you must choose from:

You have zero work-life balance and zero flexibility. Not only are you working long hours but you’re also expected to be present in the office on the organization’s terms, not your own. You have zero flexibility about when you can leave and you have your smartphone next to your pillow at night.

This situation is relatively easy to find. Just change jobs a couple of times, don’t have boundaries about what you’ll accept and you’ll find the company and boss combination that can provide this quickly. NOTE TO THE KIDS: Sometimes you have to put in time in this situation to pick up the deep experience that can get you to a better place.

You have maximum work-life balance.Congrats! You have found a company and boss that respects your need for time away and even has an unwritten policy that they won’t reach out to you in the evening or on weekends. You come in at 8 a.m. and leave at 5 p.m. It feels good not to have to worry about the chaos after hours. Your time is your time. You found someone who respects that, so if it’s important to you hold on with all your might.

There’s just one little problem: If you hear a ticking sound, it might be the clock counting down on how comfortable you are. You see, progress on earth has rarely been moved forward by respecting labor’s need for an 8-to-5 schedule with a 90-minute lunch, so the tradeoff is that your manager may be mailing it in and putting you and your team at risk long term. Also, just know that by wanting the perfect 40-hour work-life balance, you’re opting out of the corporate version of “Game of Thrones.”

Of the three types of work-life balance in the world, two can be chosen, and one must be earned.

You get more done than the others, or you don’t get promoted or become unemployed. I know it’s harsh. But the ticking clock is real for many who feel great about their work-life balance. It’s all fun and games until you’re on the market as a candidate whose biggest accomplishment was achieving balance.

You have no flexibility and maximum flexibility all at the same time. Most of us would agree that a feature of great work-life balance is being able to leave work when you need to — a late lunch with a friend or an event at your kid’s school. If you have this ability, you agree this is tremendous, and for many of us, it’s the best part of any work-life balance conversation.

For the most part, it’s earned. You can’t put up walls and say you want a 40-hour week to get this flexibility. You have to earn it. The tradeoff for being able to leave any time you want is being indispensable, which in corporate America means your boss — who is likely a complete Type A — can ping you at 9:30 p.m. and get a quick answer.

It’s that access and iteration pace that alpha leaders want out of their people. If you’re looking for work-life balance, that’s the bad news. But if you’re looking for max flexibility about when and where you work and if you can go to the Thursday afternoon soccer game, it might be the type of work-life balance you seek.

As an HR leader, you’re in a tough spot. Odds are that you have jobs at your company with work-life balance flexibility in all three of these categories. But at the end of the day, you’re a performance coach as an HR leader.

You don’t define work-life balance alone at your company as an HR pro. That’s a team sport. But only you — the gifted HR leader who understands potential and life expectations — can customize career coaching for the individual employee in a way that matches their ambition.

That’s it, gotta go. Have another candidate interview coming up. Going to do it in the sun, by the pool. Then I’ll probably hit the beach.

November 1, 2018June 29, 2023

The 5 Paths of Falling Into HR

Raise your hand if you grew up dreaming of a career in HR. No one? Of course not.

The dirty little secret of HR is that most of us didn’t have a master plan to end up managing people functions and maximizing human capital ROI inside the modern workplace. We grew up with bigger dreams, which is cool because no one grows up dreaming of being a director of account management, financial analyst or marketing manager, either.

Those dreams all stink when you’re 16.

Instead, our teenage selves dreamed of being movie stars, recording artists or professional athletes. The freaks among us were entrepreneurial from the time they were 5 and likely knew they’d own their own business. The rest of us float, usually until the time we pick a major in college, at which time our career paths and ambitions solidify.

But the choice of HR as a career path happens later than most on average. For all the undergraduate programs in HR, the ubiquitous nature of the Society for Human Resource Management and the increasing importance of the human capital function, many HR pros don’t solidify a path into HR until they’re in the workforce doing other things.

Translation: Many HR pros will tell you they “fell” in to HR.

Falling into things can be a blessing and a curse. It’s all relative to the outcome. From my experience talking to the talented high performers who make up the world of HR, here’s some common ways people “fall” into HR without a real plan to enter it.

I started at the bottom, now I’m here. You are a bootstrapper! Right out of college, these people took entry-level roles in our function, usually doing transactions as an HR coordinator, payroll specialist or similar role. They enjoyed the function and in many cases rose to run the whole thing.
I’m a people person. These HR pros were generally present in a company and were identified as someone who was “good with people,” subsequently flipping into HR from another department. When looking at this group, “good with people” is a broad designation that can mean they are extroverted, a good listener or willing to take large amounts of abuse without exploding. It can also mean skill in solving other people’s problems and maximizing their performance inside the organization.
I got dropped into HR on an interim basis and never left. Big companies have rotational programs for high potential employees as part of succession strategies, and HR is generally part of that rotation. From time to time, HIPOs are rotated into HR, love it, are highly effective and never leave or come back to HR after their rotations are complete. In other circumstances, high performers are parachuted into HR on an interim basis to put out a Dumpster fire, find their perfect match and stay for the good times.
I was good at a specialty related to HR and ended up running the whole HR show. Feeder groups for HR include some specialties that are considered a distant or related cousin to the HR function like training or recruiting. This close proximity to the HR function provides a natural exposure and transition point to HR for the professionals in those functions with the chops to handle the chaos that awaits them in the big show.
I failed in another job at our company and they moved me into HR so they didn’t have to fire me. I didn’t want to include this one, but no rundown of all the ways people fall into a HR career would be complete without it. HR has a reputation in some company cultures as a backwater, a way station for average people doing average things. This leads to the perception that good people struggling in other areas can be dumped in HR. This seems to be decreasing in frequency, but it’s a historic reality of our lives together in HR.

You can probably add to the list of ways that people fall into HR. If you’re an HR pro who has an HR degree and has always possessed the clarity that comes with knowing you’d be in HR since you were 12, Godspeed to you. Don’t mess up your dream.

The rest of us woke up one day in HR with the Talking Heads song “Once In A Lifetime” playing in the background. I’m glad I’m here; I bet you are as well.

June 20, 2016July 30, 2018

Who to Hire When Your Culture Sucks

If there’s anything we love as HR/talent pros, it’s talking about culture. We love talking about how the culture at our company is different, what we value and how we reward people according to our cultural norms.

But the dirty little secret is most people are either actively looking or open to moving to a different opportunity. If you believe a recent 2016 CareerBuilder poll, 3 out of 4 employees would leave your company if the right opportunity came around.

But that’s not you, it’s them. Right?

Sure it is, Sparky.

That stat means one of two things: Either your culture sucks or it doesn’t matter as much as you think it does.

The aforementioned CareerBuilder stat leads to turnover in a good economy, resulting in the blame game inside your company. Who does the company want to blame for rising turnover? HR! Who should be blamed? Probably someone else!

But most HR pros don’t have the time or organizational clout to blame others, so we start to try to stop the bleeding by building a case that our culture is different. We do this in an attempt to differentiate our company on the recruiting and retention trail.

The path is pretty standard. Upgrade workspace and make it cooler. Insert pingpong, foosball and a pool table — in that order — and start recruitment marketing activities designed to compete in a hot market for talent.

Of course, your culture isn’t struggling because you don’t have good ideas or a road map on what you want your real culture to be built on. Your culture struggles because you’ve got mediocre managers.

Crappy managers lead to all kinds of bad outcomes. The most obvious one is a lack of leadership across teams of all sizes and specialties in a company. An absence of leadership leads to team dysfunction, infighting and yes — turnover.

That’s why you probably should stop competing in the superficial culture wars and start getting focused on how you select people to join your company. Whether your culture truly sucks or is just bruised a bit doesn’t really matter — selecting the type of talent who can survive the challenges that exist inside your company is key.

You don’t have to hire superheroes to deal with the cultural challenges inside your company, but you do need to have a road map in mind related to the behavioral strengths that a new hire needs to have to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty and a lack of organizational consensus that accompanies weak culture.

Simply put: Hire the right type of person who can deal with the downside of your culture, and they’ll thrive. If they thrive, odds are they’ll stay.

While it’s impossible to give you notes based on the specific cultural challenges you face, there are some common elements to candidates who can survive in crappy cultures.

First up, star employees in mediocre corporate cultures tend to have low sensitivity; inconsistency or even outright hostility doesn’t fluster them. They take each day as it comes, remaining level-headed and calm when others around them are melting.

Low sensitivity doesn’t mean someone doesn’t care. It simply means you don’t have to talk someone off the ledge when things don’t go as planned. Without the norms of a strong corporate culture, inconsistency in outcomes, feedback and internal politics is the rule rather than the exception.

Another common behavioral characteristic is the ability to deal with chaos. Dealing with chaos requires someone with low-rules orientation.

An employee with low-rules orientation wants to help determine the best possible solution for each circumstance. Inconsistent company culture maximizes that circumstance for all employees, so it stands to reason that the person who can create new solutions on the fly is going to be a winner.

Finally, these employees are almost always more aggressive than their peers. Uncertainty leads to a natural advantage for those with high-assertiveness levels. While no one likes an asshole, there are jerks, sharks or whatever name you want to give assertive people who almost always get more done than passive employees. That reality is even truer when cultural norms aren’t there to guide the way for the masses.

Great HR pros are pragmatic to a fault, which leads to our ability to understand we might be working for companies with room to grow related to culture.

While you’re helping build a culture you can be proud of, do yourself a favor: Start recruiting the type of person who can thrive in that freak show you call a company.

Kris Dunn, the chief human resources officer at Kinetix, is a Workforce contributing editor. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.