Over the holidays we went back to my husband’s childhood home, where we tackled the project of cleaning out a few remaining items in his closet. Amid scrapbooks, photo albums, and well-loved toys was a box of trophies. He pulled out two that were special and moved the rest to the trash pile. Our 8-year-old daughter was visibly dismayed. How …
Recruiting: Your Little Brother Is All Grown-Up
Work in big corporations long enough and you start to recognize the caste system inherent in the professional community. R&D is indispensable, Manufacturing has to actually make the ideas come to life, and then somebody has to sell it, so Sales becomes critical as well. The “big 3” pillars in a company—discover it, make it, sell it. That leaves a lot of the “rest of …
Show Me The Shekels
My buddy KD just wrote a piece about the importance of the Employee Development Plan when targeting the performance “middle-class.” It makes a lot of sense; you have 20% of your people who don’t want development, 20% who manage their own development, and a huge population in the middle who are waiting to be captured by one camp or the other. …
With Friends Like Me…
“Always drink upstream from the herd.” – Will Rogers One of the lesser-known pitfalls for an HR professional working as a Business Partner is one not normally mentioned when the topic of “HR Competencies” is discussed. At least in a corporate HRBP role, you can actually run into the complication of being too damn friendly. Truthfully, it can be a …
Oh, one more thing….“Be prepared to leave the company.”
“Be prepared to leave the company.” That’s the professional opinion I gave the Mrs., sometime last year when she was feeling jerked around by her employer and had reached the point of making a formal complaint to Human Resources. It’s a sad commentary on our profession, but I knew the potential end-game she faced once that bridge was crossed – …