Comments

I agree so much with the sentiment (order!) expressed here.

I was very lucky in my early management career in having an HR partner who, although we had to fill out a form in the end, always always talked to the meaning behind what we were doing.

The use of more self serve tools in HR
should have freed up HR professionals to become true HR business advisors - many companies simply viewed it as a way of cutting costs.

Posted by PaulH at February 25, 2010 9:57 AM

In leading my own self, I like to execute execution through this:

1.- Picture mentally radiantly.
2.- Draw outside the canvas.
3.- Color outside the vectors.
4.- Sketch sinuously.
5.- Far-sight beyond the mind’s intangible exoskeleton.
6.- Abduct indiscernible falsifiable convictions.
7.- Reverse-engineering a gene and a bacterium or, better yet, the genome.
8.- Guillotine the over-weighted status quo.
9.- Learn how to add up—in your own mind— colors, dimensions, aromas, encryptions, enigmas, phenomena, geometrical and amorphous shapes, enigmas, phenomena, methods, techniques, codes, written lines, symbols, contexts, semantic terms, magnitudes, longitudes, hunches, so forth.
10.- Project your wisdom wealth onto communities of timeless-connected wikis.
11.- Cryogenize the infamous illiterate by own choice and reincarnate (multiverse teleporting out of a warped passage) Da Vinci, Bonaparte, and Einstein.
12.- Organize relationships into voluntary associations that are mutually beneficial and accountable for contributing productively to the surrounding community.
13.- Practice the central rule of good strategy, which is to know and remain true to your core business and invest for leadership and R&D+Innovation.
14.- Kaisen it all unthinkably and thoroughly by recombinant, Gendaken&Gestalt-motorized judgment.
15.- Provide a roadmap for drastically compressing the time it will take you to get on the top of the job, nonetheless of your organizational level.
16.- With the required knowledge and relationships embedded in organizations, create support for, and carry out transformation initiatives.
17.- Offer a tested pathway for addressing the linked challenges of personal transition and organizational transformation that confront leaders in the first few months in a new tenure.
18.- Foster momentum by creating virtuous cycles that build credibility and by avoiding getting caught in vicious cycles that harm credibility.
19.- Institute coalitions that translate into swifter organizational adjustments to the inevitable stream of changes in personnel and environment.
20.- Mobilize the overriding energy of many others in your organization.
21.- Step outside the boundaries of the framework system when seeking a problem solution.

Thank you for sharing so much great materials. I guess -- in being an educated guess -- we need to be more interactive and forthcoming, as per my most respectful own POV and that of others.

Posted by Andres Agostini (Andy) at February 25, 2010 11:29 PM

The football analogy is getting old. Especially from a guy who talks so much about the importance of women. Its is also inaccurate. Football is videotaped from every angle - a game happens once a week and lasts for
(work time) exactly one hour. Then they have all week to see what they did wrong. It is easy to evaluate football players (compared to employees in a business) . They have very defined roles. They are never told to 'go out and drum up business' - The players themselves are not asked to innovate on the fly. They do things they have practiced over and over.
Students in a classroom are not employees. They might be customers, but then they might not be - The society outside of the classroom is just as much a customer as each of the students. It gets back to the boring old every day compromise. There should be standardized ways to evaluate employees mixed in with the non-standard.

Posted by zorro anagy at February 25, 2010 11:34 PM

Most employees could not withstand the kind of scrutiny that the NFL places on players. I support Tom to the extent that rigid systems do not 'map' to people with their infinite variety.

Could we argue that standardization might be beneficial if the output celebrates and encourages risk-taking, finds the outliers who excel, and applies no penalty for creativity?

Posted by Wayne at February 26, 2010 1:17 PM

When interviewing new programmers our first pass is to ask them to fill out a survey about what they enjoy about programming. Since we're doing open source development (and aren't really paying anything) we need to know that there's a good match of working styles and also what motivates everyone.

So yeah, I totally agree that different projects will need different recruitment processes and forms.

Posted by Clay Ward at March 1, 2010 12:56 AM

Best darn post ever! You hit it right on the nail, gosh. I can't tell you how flustered I am whenever I see this being implemented.

Where I come from, we practice 360 evaluation, the concept is FANTASTIC, but the execution still boils down to standardized forms. Typical excuses are that there's 10,000 resources and there needs to be a fair and "measurable" way to line up everyone in the pecking order.

Secondly, half of the time, the employees and evaluators themselves do not know how to key in the metrics on the forms. Nullifying the initial intent.

As you've mentioned, each department and personnel plays a different and unique role in the organization, and when that sense of ownership, accountability and reward gets across fairly, there will be stronger sense of commitment compared to a "we vs them" scenarios that can happen come evaluation time.

I dare say, an equitable, exciting and stress free HR evaluation policy still eludes me. What are some of the reader's ideas and experiences, do share.

Posted by Dr. Kervokian at March 1, 2010 4:26 AM

I am probably threatening to hijack this thread... but here goes.

I was recently chastised by two managers on behaving like a manager (thankfully, neither was my manager).

Both said they hoped to be average and wanted their people to be average. They implicitly suggested that I should be average; one called me abnormal.

Posted by Stephen Garner at March 1, 2010 9:26 PM

Stephen - I've met those two managere in my career too :-)

Ignore them and aim higher. Average is ok but aiming higher always wins for me.

Posted by Trevor Gay at March 2, 2010 5:29 AM

Thank you Trevor. And I agree.

It might interest you and other readers that I was being threatened with arrest in this conversation. Dealing with a malfunctioning gas pump, the cashier said that they could not do math. After doing the math myself, she called store security who turns out to be local sheriff deputies in full public regalia but employed by the store.

I complained to the store manager (who falsely identified himself as the sheriff's shift commander) and the actual sheriff's shift commander (who apparently was at the same time a store employee). It was during this "converstaion" that they suggested I start acting like a manager and that I was abnormal. I told them I strived to be above average; didnt they? BOTH said all they wanted was to be average. The Sheriif's shift commander said that I could be arrested for being abnormal under laws for disorderly conduct.

I pointed out that the store's employees actually had created the disturbance, not I. Of course that went over just as well.

Posted by Stephen Garner at March 2, 2010 11:08 AM

I take it that you've never seen the NFL Scouting Combine. They test everyone in the same tests. Everyone runs the 40. Everyone does jumping tests, and shuttle tests, etc. Each position also gets position specific tests. But the idea that there's no standardized testing is completely wrong.

Posted by Gus M at March 10, 2010 4:56 PM

Standardized forms are used to create consistency, repeatability and to prevent people from making individual decisions. I agree in principal with what you mention here, but it requires a few things to be successful:

• Organizations must empower employees to think and make decisions based on the situation.

• Employees must accept the responsibility and extra work associated with custom review of a situation.

Posted by Bob Williams at March 14, 2010 1:13 PM