simplerich

A majority of human resources professionals (54%) make their final decision to hire a person based on “chemistry,” according to a poll released Tuesday by the Society for Human Resource Management.

from: Poll: A Majority Hire based on ‘Chemistry’ over at WorkExposedBlog.com

I’ve had managers ask me over and over again how to interview as if there is a silver bullet or super secret trick I’ve learned in the years I’ve been doing it and I frequently disappoint and surprise them. We’re in retail. What we do is entry level stuff. Just about anybody with good people skills can do it. Seriously. It’s not that tough to do. To do it really well needs a certain type of person and that is, for me, what the interview is for.

How well will the person fit in with the good/great members of your current crew? How will you feel after talking to them for 10 minutes during a shift change? What will they be like during an employee meeting? Are they positive? Upbeat? Do they smile easily and readily? Are they easy to talk to? They’ve just met you and they’ll deal with customers all day long that they have only just met as well… how relaxed and easy going they are during an interview is helpful to knowing how they’ll do with strangers during a normal work day.

Just talk to them. Are they profoundly qualified but after two minutes of talking to them you want to kick your dog? I wouldn’t hire them. You have to work with this person. I don’t care if they DO have 12 years experience working as a team leader at a competitor twenty miles away and they only left because the place flooded and closed. If you can’t stand to talk to them how will it be to work with them? How will it be on the co-workers and customers?

So is it a good idea to hire based on chemistry? I doubt it. I think that it gets in the way when we hire people who are just like the people we’ve always hired. I think sometimes we wind up losing something when we lose variety.

I once had a manager who staffed her store for over a year entirely with young African-American lesbians. (I swear I’m not making that up either.) Eventually I had to point out, gently, and carefully, that perhaps someone named Susan or Steve wouldn’t be completely out of line. Two weeks later she called me, so proud she’d “hired a Susan” which turned out to be a white lady that I don’t believe was a lesbian, but I never asked. This was a really good manager, she just had gotten in the habit of hiring people she clicked with. (I am in no way implying she was dating her employees. She wasn’t. I knew her family and that wasn’t something that was going on. She just kept doing it over and over again. She said, “that’s all that applies!” Well, we found that wasn’t entirely true and wound up diversifying a bit over time, slowly… and it didn’t kill her!)

So, while I firmly believe that we should hire people who will work well with others and who I can work well with… I also believe that just like I should do something different and unexpected once in a while, I should also hire outside my comfort zone just to make sure I don’t get too comfortable.

I talked interview tips in a previous post but it wasn’t the same type as this one so I’m OK doing it again. This one was from the interviewer’s point of view too, and the previous post was tips for the person being interviewed. Also, if you’re not subscribed to the Work Exposed Blog yet I recommend it really highly. It has one of my highest click through rates on my feed reader.

The Daily Five Minutes (D5M) as talked about, shared, given away for free on the Internet, by Rosa Say is the single most important management tool I’ve run into. I found it on her blog, bought her book, and have built a relationship (online only – no jealous husbands coming after me please!) with her almost entirely because I fell in love with this practice of hers.

I don’t do it often enough. I intend to, but I get busy and I forget. I do it more than I used to. I need to do it more. Here’s the thing. Doing it mostly is better than doing it never. Doing it all the time… I can’t imagine how powerful that will be. She’s starting a program, this is an alpha run of the program in conjunction with Ruzuku.com (A site I’ve never heard of until now).

The shortest one-liner version of The Daily Five Minutes is to listen to your employees with active listening and find out what’s important to them. (Go read more about it here, even if you’ve done this before, bear with me. I’ve got a point to make here.) This is huge. It’s me shutting up and letting them talk. It’s me getting out of their way and letting them have the talking conch for a while. That’s hugely important at work right? It helps build relationships. It helps us their bosses find out what they’ve got going on in their lives and what they’re struggling with and gives them a chance to feel safe and ask for help without feeling like they’re whining. It allows them to bounce ideas off us.

If it’s that great for work think of how great it would be with your friends and family! Seriously. Pay attention on the next phone call to a friend or family member. How often are you planning your next thing to say or looking at the Bush’s baked beans wondering which ones to get while Aunt Mable tells the story about how her Beagle Indiana Jones (We named the DOG Indiana!) got into the garbage for the fourth time this week? How often are you talking about your day and not asking and listening to theirs? Seriously? At dinner how much time you do you spend listening, really listening, and engaging the person talking? If it’s a great idea for us and our employees it’s an amazingly super-fantastic idea for family and friends.

So, join us November 2nd, whether your manager or not, in the Alpha test of Rosa Say’s The D5M Challenge: 15 Days to Build your Daily 5 Minutes Habit online coachy thing. Rosa Say is an author, coach and speaker who has been making her living doing this stuff for a while now. She knows what she’s talking about and if you do it… I mean really do it and find at the end of the fifteen days  that you didn’t get anything out of it. I will personally return every dime of the cost of the program to you myself out of my pocketsess…

PS: If any of you say “Why Richard, this is simply Dale Carnegie with leis and words I can’t pronounce!” I’ll say it again slowly… go read the link I gave you and come back. My abbreviated version doesn’t do it justice. I’m abbreviating. There’s more to it than my thumbnail OK? OK. Mahalo, punk! (That was in my Clint Eastwood voice. I even squinted some when I said it.)

Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must first set yourself on fire.
Fred Shero

I once told my Mom that I couldn’t figure out how to motivate somebody and she pointed out to me that I couldn’t motivate anybody. I could inspire, but the motivation would come from within. When had anybody motivated ME to do something I hadn’t wanted to do? I’d been inspired by other people to do something, but I can’t say anybody had ever gotten me off my butt to actually do it. That was me getting off my butt.

So, I’m a manager who wants his employees to be motivated and I don’t believe I can actually motivate anybody. It sounds a lot like I’m in the wrong line of work doesn’t it? Not to me. I don’t mind that I can’t motivate them. I also can’t get to Des Moines from my house in under two hours by myself. But I have a car that helps me do that quite handily. So, I don’t need to motivate the employee as much as I need to try and inspire the employee. If I can get them to want to do something then my job is done.

The thing with managers who make employees do things is that at some point the manager is going to leave the room/building. If the employee is only doing something because the manager wants it done it will be done the way the manager wants it done while the manager is there watching. As soon as the manager leaves or isn’t watching it’s being done in a way that the employee wants it done, which is typically faster and not always as well as the manager wants it done. I don’t say that because I think employees are lazy. I say it because the manager didn’t inspire the employee. The manager left the employee doing what he was doing “because I said so!” That’s no way to manage! (OK. It is a way, and I admit to having used it, but it’s not a good all-the-time strategy.)

Tom Sawyer didn’t make his friends paint his fence for him. He made his friends WANT to paint his fence for him. If I can do half a good of a job inspiring my employees to want to paint my fences I’ll quit getting yellow guard-rail paint all over my jeans! I can’t wait.

So, live it. Work hard, work with your employees, help them be better at what they’re doing and try and help them understand why what they’re doing is important. If it’s not important, and they’re doing it out of habit let them know they can stop if they want to. Sometimes procedures hang around years after their importance has faded. We’ve got pages of paperwork that we used to use, and I still find managers using it but all the information is now in the computer and used from the computer. Some managers still do it though, still like doing it, and find comfort in it. If it helps them sleep at night I let them. But I let them know that if they’re tired of it they can stop doing it.

There are plenty of things out there for employees to do. There’s more work than there is time, and there are fewer people doing it. The workplace stress is at an all time high according to recent statistics and workplace suicides increased faster this year than they’ve ever increased before and this is in spite of a smaller workforce than previous years due to the recession. So, help inspire your employees. Help them burn with passion for the job. Help them to find the spark of joy that keeps them coming in and help them develop the parts of the job they like and focus on those. I heard a Pepsi man say once that he got paid in the summer for the work he did in the winter (delivering soda in ice and snow is NOT fun) and that’s how most jobs are. There are parts we love, focus on those and get through the parts we don’t love. Those are the parts we get paid to do.

Watch your employees though. Watch to see if they’re burning out. The biggest thing I have to beat into my new managers’ heads is how important their time off is. They want to be on call 24-7 and they are, don’t think they’re not, but they need to dial it back. There are times they need to say “This is my time and while they may call me if it’s not important I’ll tell them I’ll call them later.” They have GOT to prioritize their private life and make sure to make time to smell the roses. If they don’t recharge at a hockey game or while running or playing video games they’ll burn themselves out.

If I find a manager who brags about their 60 hour weeks I’ve got a problem. They’re not developing their employees. They’re not allowing their assistant manager to grow into their position. They’re not letting their employees do their job. They’re getting in their employees way. And they’re running themselves so close to their capacity that if it does hit the fan and I DO need them to pull a double unexpectedly they’re too far gone to do it. Nobody should run on empty on purpose.

Managers need to be managers, but they need to be people too, and people need time away from their job, even if it’s only a long weekend at Worlds of Fun on Halloween weekend. They’ll be better managers for it. They’ll be better able to inspire their employees if they’re rested and energetic.

This is the last of my posts that have a fire theme. October is National Fire Safety Month, and I hope none of you have any cause to ever need your fire extinguishers or smoke detectors, but if you do. I hope they’re charged and ready to go… just like you after you’ve taken some time off from work.

I see signs in stores and on buildings that end with “Thanks, Management” or even worse, and more impersonal, “Thanks, Mgmt” and I cringe. I am a manager and have been for a lot of years and I’ve never signed a sign with my title. Now that I have managers who work for me I discourage them from it as well. “Management” isn’t a person. It may be an all consuming time-sink at times but managers are people and people have names, and while the people reading the sign may not know who you are… they don’t know who Mgmt is either.

It’s been my belief for a long time that people will mess with unnamed entities. If they feel like they’re “Sticking it to the man!” it is easier for them to commit shenanigans if “the man” they’re sticking to hasn’t got any name but is just a faceless entity. If they might well be looking across the store at the person who wrote the sign it might, in some few cases make a difference. That’s one reason, but it’s not the primary reason I sign my name and not my title to things.

The primary reason I sign my name is I want the people reading the sign to know who I am. Obviously I’m someone. I just put a sign in a place of business and the employees seem OK with that. Heck, this especially applies to employees! They know who “management” is so for me to have to remind them on a sign is almost me undermining myself. If they don’t know that “Rich is the manager and it would be a good idea if I was aware of and listened to this sign” then I’ve got a huge problem as a manager. If I think signing “Manager” to something carries more weight with my employees than signing my name… ouch. That would mean I was pretty insecure about my relationship with my employees. I see “Thanks, Management” signs as a sign of a weak manager or a posturing manager when they’re aimed at the employees. But, I digress. I was talking about my signs being bridge and relationship builders with my customers.

When the sign carries my name, some times they will ask “Who is Rich?” and that’s an opportunity for me to introduce myself and for us to start building a relationship. It’s not that I would say “The manager… and the manager is me.” That’s crazy talk. They don’t care if I’m the manager yet. They care who “Rich” is and why he put up a sign. That’s the question and the hidden question. So, I answer both, and take it as a chance to make a conversation where, at the end of it, they fell like they’re on a first name basis with a local business manager. They’ve got an “in.” They’re now able to call up the store, ask for the manager by name, and see what I can do to help them with something.

If I sign my signs “Management” they won’t know who I am or feel like they know me, or feel that connection that is so important for a sales people to make with customers, especially in small town retail. (I say small town because the store I “grew up in” has a population of around 25,000. It’s not exactly a village, but it’s no city either, there’s a definite small town feel to it, and part of that feel is when customers know their store’s managers by name.

Thanks,
A blogger

*Photo by Mike Smail on Flickr.

The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher was sent to me recently to review and I asked people on twitter how they felt about my reviewing books sent me for free. The consensus was as long as I fessed up to it then there was no harm done. This is me copping to getting a freebie and enjoying it.

I’m reading The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up and listening to Brain Rules from audible at the same time and they’re surprisingly related. I’ll cover Brain Rules later. For now The Levity Effect is being reviewed. It was good. I enjoyed it. It’s a book that will be enjoyed, I believe, by people who already believe what it’s saying. I don’t know that the people who don’t believe it will be persuaded by the book. It’s not that there isn’t enough evidence suggested in the book. It’s just that it’s not terribly persuasive. As such I think it will mostly preach to the converted. I can’t, for example, see my boss reading it and embracing it. That’s now how he does things stylistically. That’s not fair. He does try.

One of the things the book does work hard to point out is the difference between fun and funny and it’s a good distinction. It can be fun at work without someone having to be funny. Fun is not the same as funny. It’s been said at my work that if one enjoys their work then their work will be fun, not fun like volleyball fun, but fun as in “I enjoy what I do and feel fulfilled doing it” fun. I totally see that and agree with it, but that doesn’t mean a little silliness doesn’t have its place at work. According to a lot of the research presented in The Levity Effect the bottom line is always better if people are enjoying themselves at work. Morale is up, people are more productive, and turn-over goes down… how is this not persuasive? I don’t know.

My favorite part of the book is where they discuss how important fun is as a measure of the strength of a relationship. Trust, Communication, and Creativity are all increased by the precepts put forward by The Levity Effect. That part was a surprise to me, but the truth of it came to me as I read it. The people I was most comfortable with and most trusted were the people I was most able to joke around with. I’d never put that together before. I use humor to establish relationships and maintain them.

The list of things to do that help introduce levity also look as if they would be good for team building and morale building. They don’t expressly say that, but people who have fun together I think will perform better together. If you’re a person who believes that work is something that we do an awful lot of and so it should be fun because we’re doing it a lot you should read this book. If your boss tries it then leave this book laying around where the boss will see it. Maybe he’ll give it a read. If your boss is a reader let them read it. It’s a good book. I don’t know how persuasive it is, again, it persuaded be because I already bought into it.

If you’re a manager and you want to be a more effective manager this book will help. Please though, don’t forget you have an HR department. Read the back portion of the book. Remember that mean isn’t funny, and the authors are spot on when they warn that if you’ve got to start a joke with “I hope nobody’s offended but…” or end with “just kidding” then you probably shouldn’t say it. Those things are typically not a good idea. This book is a good idea, after the recession we’ve been in lately and the grim news about it and the cost cuts and lay-offs many companies have been through I’d say it’s a book whose time has come.