Let me first start by saying I love being an HR professional. I love the insight that the profession gives you into a company and its employees. But as HR people know, this insight can often be a double-edged sword. Instead of being coaches, we often become referees, and instead of ambassadors of our organization, we become law enforcement to …
The Key To Getting Internal Promotions–The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need.
Brown-noser. Suck-up. Kiss-A**. These are the terms you’ll hear. Pay them no mind, white-collar worker. You’re here to win. Those are the stones thrown by the masses who don’t have what it takes to win–#jealous #bastards. What’s the game we’re trying to win? The game of getting internal promotions. I once had a friend from my MBA class email me …
UPS Driver: From Sweet Job to Suck Job
Gather ’round the campfire, kids, because I’m here with a story from a galaxy far away, a time when things seemed simpler, when good was easier to distinguish from evil, and when we weren’t so divided. It was also a time when “UPS Driver” was a premium job. Don’t laugh out loud–that’s disrespectful. UPS Drivers were once knights among us …
Throwing out the Bad Apples
Everyone’s heard the phrase “a bad apple spoils the bunch,” but in my work experience, this hasn’t been true. In my experience, it isn’t the bad apple that spoils the bunch; it’s the semi-bad apple. That apple that you think is just as good as the rest (or pretty close), until you realize it’s not just as good, and that …
Just Leave Us Alone
I read a quote last week that I would surely butcher if I tried to recall word-for-word, but the overall theme of the quote was this: People are not required to be constantly available to you, or you to them. And yet, there I sat at 8 AM on a Thursday morning with 57 notifications on my phone. By 7 …
What Are You Telling Employees When You Send Them Late Night Emails?
I learned long ago that you should always be ready to take good advice — no matter where it comes from. This month, it came from a guy named Michael Dermer who touts himself in his blog and newsletter as The Lonely Entrepreneur. His words of wisdom were short, sweet, and spot-on. He said: “Turn off at a respectable time, …
Is High Performance a Zero-Sum Game?
I read a lot of HR stuff about high performers. We all want an entire population of these employees at our companies. Adding more high performers means better overall results, which means better everything, right? Maybe not. Depending on your culture, you could be making it hard for the best performers to stay. As Long As It Helps Me A …
What’s Your Story?
Everybody has a story, maybe more than one, impacting your work life. A few years back while attending the SHRM National Conference in Orlando, Heather Abbott, a Boston Marathon bombing victim, gave a rousing 10-minute introduction to the conference. An HR executive whose life was dramatically altered after losing a leg in the tragic event. She has recovered, moved on, …
That Company Has 3 Types of Workers.
People are wired to work and make things happen. You may or may not like your job, but you are there to achieve things for your company. That is why you should hire more people who actually love their work. There are three types of workers. The “job” worker. This is the person who hates Mondays, lives for the weekends, …
Your Next Expert in Performance Management? Hire an Economist!
From the world of unicorn employers (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.), our next great HR experiment has almost gone undetected. What is it!? The use of Economists to run employee performance management! A recent article talked about a new trend of tech companies (Amazon, Google, etc.) hiring hundreds of PhD Economists for all kinds of roles: For example, Amazon runs a program …