My HR Practice

Ralph has been a consistently mediocre performer for your company "forever".  He shows up for work each day on-time, occupies his cubicle with an eye toward anonymity, tackles his responsibilities as if they are chores to be checked off a list, and invests in his relationship with others to the minimum extent possible.  At the table stake level - attendance, behavior, task completion, ethical conduct, basic learning - Ralph meets expectations.  Beyond that, he's a non-performer.  He never exceeds expectations nor goes the extra mile.  He does not serve as a role model.  He isn't respected. As Ralph's manager, you have always viewed the time, effort and cost of terminating him as greater than the value you would bring to your organization from his departure.  His job can be rather tough to fill, he never really does anything wrong, his output isn't particularly measurable, you've become adept at relying on his teammates to make up for where he i

New and not so new labels - Baby Boomer, Generation X, Millennial (aka GenY) - are being bantered around our workplaces today and challenging our thoughts about effective management practice.  Baby Boomer and Generation X leaders like you want to know how to lead the new entrants into your workforce and fear that your differences may introduce managerial challenges for which you are unprepared.   You may know more about managing your future workforce than you think! Let's start with a short review.  Baby Boomers were born between 1945 and 1964, or between the presidencies of FDR and Lyndon Johnson, and make up about 40% of our US workforce. Generation X'ers were born between 1965 and 1981 (Johnson to Ronald Reagan) and make up about 20% of the same workforce.  The remaining 40% is comprised of Millennials (aka GenY), who were born between 1982 and 1993 (Reagan to Bill Clinton). Dan Schawbel works intensively to help leaders understand how to lead Millennials.  Dan'

As I work through my "Re-Connecting, Refreshing, Re-Tooling" career stop, I have spent a great deal of time reading about my chosen profession.   I have grown to realize that HR has, for a generation or more, been searching for relevance .  Here's Dave Ulrich in a 2012 interview with Dan Schawbel from Forbes on the future of Human Resources: " For the last 20 years, we have been enamored with “strategic” HR where the strategy is a mirror that reflects what HR should focus on.  We now believe that HR should look through the strategy to the outside world.  Strategy becomes a window on both the general business conditions and on specific stakeholder expectations so that HR can connect their work to external factors . " With all due respect, it is as if we have deemed to be insufficient our operational excellence charter that asks us to help our managers recruit and hire great people.  To solve for creative and effective ways to compensate them and to inc

So you love to play the saxophone, and were thrilled to go work for Sax4u, Inc.,  a global company that is all about the saxophone.  Steve Jobs talked about doing something that you love, and there are few things in life that you love more than playing this amazing piece of brass.  In fact, you have a shrine dedicated to Clarence Clemons from the E-Street Band in your man-cave. Oh, how you miss him!  But I digress. Following Mr. Jobs' advice has been good for your career.  You have grown and advanced to a point at which you are the head of Human Resources at Sax4u.  Your parents are so proud! In fact, you now report directly to the CEO and are a member of her  most-senior-leadership-team.   Every Monday morning you sit in the executive conference room, with Starbucks skinny latte piping hot and in hand, and commiserate with your fellow most-senior-leadership-team members, including the heads of: design, marketing, finance, sales, manufacturing & supply chain, distribution

When I wrote " The Seven C's of Employee Engagement ," I included  Compensation  among the "C's".   Here's the reference: C ompensation  ... employees must associate recognition and reward with accomplishment.  If genuine accomplishment requires "above and beyond" effort, then it is not hard to see that a company will need to recognize and reward such effort in order to sustain it.  Sustained "above and beyond" effort is employee engagement.   I promised to write more about this later.  It's been a while, admittedly, but here it is. My first and most critical observation: the words "recognition" and "reward" are not  synonyms .  They have, in fact, very different meanings.  In my experience, companies make their most consequential mistake, an act of omission that impacts employee engagement negatively , when they inadvertently treat recognition and reward as the same thing.  Think of it like th

I just put an interesting article in my Blog " I Think, I Like "  in which Lou Adler posits that experience is overrated .  He says, "e xperience and skills are overrated. A continuous track record of exceptional performance in a variety of increasing complex situations isn’t." This article got me thinking about a prevalent practice in corporations - assessing employee potential .  It also made me acknowledge that in defining potential, companies have made this way, way harder then it needs to be.  Look at this definition, from the Harvard Business Review: " High potentials always deliver strong results, master new types of expertise, and recognize that behavior counts. But it’s their intangible X factors that truly distinguish them from the pack.  The Four X Factors of High Potentials : 1. Drive to excel 2. Catalytic learning capability 3. Enterprising spirit 4. Dynamic sensors " Catalytic learning capability???  Dynamic sensors