Table of Contents
Your Friends Are Not A Network 1
Your Friends Are Not A Network 1
Last modified on 2011-09-14 13:40:49 GMT. 14 comments. Top.
Last week, I went to the Dreamforce conference. It’s Salesforce.com’s annual gathering of the clan. It’s a convention of people who sell stuff to sales people and the sales people who buy that stuff.
I went hoping I wouldn’t be beaten to death with motivational posters and welbutrin laced energy drinks.
The place was a madhouse, rich in testosterone and adrenaline. Real booth babes in real booth babe outfits. Three men for every woman. Reptilian vibes. And vendors. Hundreds of vendors. Metallica in the late night street party.
Really, angry hard metal for the contemporary salesguy. And suits. More suits than you usually see in San Francisco.
LinkedIn was there selling business intelligence. Not too many folks from our neck of the woods. I only saw Jason Corsello and Sean Rehder. They were both hunting for innovation that could be applied in our market.
It was intense and the opposite of most HR conferences.
My personal epiphany came as I was browsing the Dreamforce Bookstore.
Along with Logo-ed Salesforce.com goodies. There were about 75 different management best sellers in great big stacks. Books about networks, lots of them. Books about using social media. Even more. Books about measurement and analytics. Tons.
Everything was available in a Dummies edition. Everything.
What I realized is that everyone has begun to sound the same. Our contemporary paradigm is nearly set in concrete. It goes something like:
“Social networks, based on social media, are the path to the future. Everyone you know is only six degrees of separation from everyone else. This is ushering in a new era of flat organizations, greater informality, deep flexibility and customized personal experience. We are at the edge of an astonishing epoch because networks and collaboration are the key to an explosion of creativity and a thunderstorm of patents following the death of the PC and the rise of mobile tools. We will crowd source the economy with location based gamification”
That’s what they all said.
That view of the world has become so conventional that it has to be wrong. It is so pervasive that it has to be about ready to change.
Arthur C. Clarke is credited with the futurists paradox: “Any likely future sounds so unlikely that the forecast will be ridiculed. Any future that sounds right is inevitably far from the truth.”
There, at Dreamforce, I realized that we’re on the verge of a future that is nothing like our view of it. The networked view has run its course.
Keep your eyes on this space. We’re wrapping up our first ever comprehensive analysis of social media in the HR and Recruiting sectors. The report will be available for sale on the 15th of October.
Your Friends Are Not A Network 2
Your Friends Are Not A Network 2
Last modified on 2011-09-14 13:39:55 GMT. 4 comments. Top.
If you’re anything like me, you get all twitchy when people start talking about collaboration. Apparently, our likely future is an orgy of collaborative work in an anti-hierarchical land of bliss. I’ll be the guy with his towel wrapped tightly around his middle and boxers underneath.
From where I sit, collaboration is nearly always championed by people who want to be in charge of stuff. They’re the very people who make collaboration impossible. It always feels like collaboration is some sort of sophisticated code for “do it my way.”
If you can believe it, my views on collaboration are softening.
This year, I took a series of experimental classes with a number of geniuses in educational technology and reform. Their ardent belief in the collaborative god initially gave me the willies. But, I soldiered on.
(In our house, you don’t have to eat everything on your plate. You do, however, have to take a “No Thank You Bite.”It’s okay of you don’t want to eat something. But, the biggest sin in our house is “contempt prior to investigation.” The “No, Thank You Bite” rule applies to young and old. It applies to more than food.)
I was really surprised.
When it works, collaboration is an amazing and explosive experience. Unleashing the synergy of a team of co-learners creates an avalanche of insight and output. The biggest problem with collaboration isn’t bossiness or proselytizing.
It’s overwhelm.
If I hadn’t experienced it, I could never have imagined taking a class where my problem was keeping up with a torrent of insight that came from the rest of the class. As we got good at mining the material and developed some separation of labor, the group exploded the content. Learning multiplied and went exponential.
This collaboration was computer mediated. The class was a small world with students on four continents and 10 time zones. We used video, whiteboards, mind mapping, chat note taking, live Googling, twitter, and a host of social media tools.
The problem was trying to figure out how to synthesize the learning into something usable. It got so intense that it occasionally seemed like each student was off in their own world navigating the explosion of awareness.
That actually doesn’t seem like it would be very useful in most work settings.
My sense is that the proponents of collaboration don’t really have much experience with it. Decisions have to be made before they are perfectly informed. More information and better insight is rarely what’s missing from decision making.
Great information work usually involves getting from plan to delivery. Add some more time to the planning process is a good idea. Making it a sport is a bad one.
Keep your eyes on this space. We’re wrapping up our first ever comprehensive analysis of social media in the HR and Recruiting sectors. The report will be available for sale on the 15th of October.
Peter Clayton
Peter Clayton
Last modified on 2011-09-09 04:46:22 GMT. 1 comment. Top.
Early on in the Top 100 project, Peter Clayton appeared on the list. Here’s the intro
What started as landed.fm became Total Picture Radio. The story, told with some eloquence here, is that Peter Clayton founded landed.fm in 2003 as a way of bringing a full spectrum of media to the career development and management question. Before anyone had ever heard of a “podcast”, Clayton was putting well produced, professional quality audio online for the community of recruiters and careerists.
The seasoned corporate film maker was reading the handwriting on the wall.
After a long career in the development of corporate marketing and sales films, Peter came to understand that the end was at hand. His colleagues in all aspects of the New York Metro journalism, publishing and media scene were starting to lose their jobs. The internet, with all of its transformative power, was a freight train hurdling straight in his direction.
Clayton made motivational movies for Bell Labs, ATT, Deloitte and a fistful of other luminary organizations. They all shared one theme. Their businesses were dependent on the creativity of their employees. Clayton’s existence depended on his knack for communicating the accomplishment of others.
If you’ve ever wondered what the term “silver throat” means, listen to one of Clayton’s podcasts on Total Picture Radio. He has an amazing beautiful voice. When he was getting the company started, he used income from voice overs to help pay the rent. For the past three years, he’s been at the task fully engaged.
Every time I’ve seen Clayton in action, I am amazed by the way he is amazed. His subjects receive his complete attention. You can feel the depths of his curiosity as he navigates his interviews. Clayton is always in the hunt for better questions and better interviewing techniques. He has permanent and powerful curiosity about people and always finds something interesting.
With hundreds of podcast interviews from people all over the Career-HR-Recruiting spectrum, Clayton has assembled a singular resource. With just a little bit of patience, you can stay abreast of the changing face of the industry in your car on the way to work. Clayton calls TPR “Tivo” for radio. He is astonished by the way Radio has migrated out onto the net and into your iPod.
Clayton began to explore the HR-Recruiting-Career marketplace with little more than a hunch. He says that he interviewed his way into understanding. He’s talked to everyone you can think of.
The other day, Peter and I decided to turn the tables again. Since we last spoke, he’s launched “Jobs in Pods” with Chris Russel. The service is “the only audio job board”. Advertisers who use Jobs in Pods get the ability to paint an audio picture of the jobs. The resulting podcasts are like Tivo for Job ads. You can listen to them whenever you want. Since the listener is likely to listen to the entire Podcast, it’s a great platform for Employment Branding. Once the podcast is online, you can use it in a variety of settings.
Clayton has interviewed over 600 leaders in the HR and Recruiting industry. Sorting through the archives at Total Picture Radio will give you a first class education in the industry.
Peter and I spent some time digging into the things he’s learned. Having Peter tell you about the industry is a way of getting rapidly exposed to an enormous number of things in a short time.
Technology
“Everything is going to mobile. iPads and smart phones. Anyone who is in media writing and producing: You have to deliver to every screen. Time shifting is becoming increasingly important. Media has to be in the form and on a device that people are using. Sticking with one format is a kiss of death.”
Staying Fresh
Being on the forefront of technology requires that you devote 10% of your time to the question. Watch how people adapt and see who is getting ahead. These days, really interesting experiments are unfolding in new marketplaces. Pepsico released its new app at SXSW. Apple went from almost out of business to world’s largest company in an incredibly short time. Watching technology is like watching a horse race. Since you are going to change careers 10 times, you have to be adept at renewal.”
Advice to Job Hunters
“Keep your Social Media up to date. Read blogs to find out what’s going on. Search is your biggest asset in the job hunt. Listen to Shally interviews to learn boolean. It’s how recruiters find you. Participate in LinkedIn groups. Find the ones where people speak your language. Recruiters also look into those niche groups. Keep your stuff updated. Good career maintenance means set up agents on the big job sites. Don’t sit on job boards. If you’re in the 100K plus category, job boards don’t really work.”
If you can fit podcasts into your routine, Peter Clayton’s products and services are right in your sweet spot,
Dealing with Toxic Employees by Bob Corlett
Dealing with Toxic Employees
Last modified on 2011-09-09 04:42:48 GMT. 8 comments. Top.
Bob Corlett | Founding Member, HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board
Bob Corlett returns to the HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board. Bob has worked in staffing and consulting for over 25 years. He is the founder and President of Staffing Advisors, a retained search firm near Washington DC. He developed The Results-Based Hiring Process® and is one of Washington’s best known thought leaders on staffing and recruiting. Full Bio…
Dealing with Toxic Employees
by Bob Corlett
Six months ago Lori became the new VP of Human Resources at a successful company with a reputation for strong management. During her interview, the CEO was candid about problems in the HR department – it was sluggish, bureaucratic and distrusted by the executive team. HR was not a real business partner with the operating units. Instead, the departments muddled along on their own while the HR team obsessed over how to properly fill out the forms – but tragically, they did not even do that particularly well.
Lori knew she needed to replace many of her existing employees. Unfortunately, the worst performers had been with the company for decades. So all the institutional knowledge was locked up inside the heads of the poorest performers. Lori was deeply uncomfortable firing the only people who knew how things were supposed to work.
So instead of firing, Lori quickly filled a few vacant positions with strong people from outside the company. Yet, two or three new people cannot turn around a department of twenty employees. Alarmingly, Lori realized that her new hires were starting to befriend some of the toxic legacy employees. She worried that by doing nothing, her hard-charging new hires might slip into the old bureaucratic ways of the current team. Simultaneously, she worried that by moving too quickly to replace the toxic legacy employees, she would destabilize the team and alienate everyone left. What to do?
When faced with toxic employees, most managers hesitate. They instinctively know that the most toxic people are the ones who sue. They know that the least employable people will pull every string to keep their current job (the job they appear to hate, by the way). Time races by as managers daydream about an orchestra of pianos falling on the toxic people’s heads. But toxic people are like cockroaches – they can survive a nuclear blast. They will never leave on their own.
The only thing to do is fire them.
Lori debated calling it a layoff to help soften the blow. But sometimes you need a public hanging to get your point across. Sometimes it’s important to demonstrate there is a new Sheriff in town—that performance matters now. So Lori summoned her nerve and cut the dead wood loose. (She wasn’t stupid about it; she arranged outplacement and a fair severance package in exchange for the employees waiving their right to sue.)
And then a funny thing happened. The sun came up the next day. And good people on the team, who had suffered in silence for years without complaining, came up and to say “thank you” for finally getting rid of the toxic waste. Managers in other departments started to invite HR to meetings again. And Lori’s new hires said “I only befriended the toxic people to get what I needed, but now I can really get up and run, without them in my way.” And with a few strategic terminations, Lori tipped the culture of her department.
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