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Archives For October 2011

Life without HR: Recruitment/Staffing

Tim Vanderpyl —  October 30, 2011

Can you afford to entrust the recruiting role to an overworked manager who does not have time or desire to spend with prospective candidates? Can you afford not to have a strong recruiting department? Imagine your organization without the recruiting part of your Human Resources (HR) department. Imagine if you had to do all of the work your recruiting department does. Sounds easy right?

Do you want to answer inquiries like “I just graduated high school, and I want a management position. What do you have for me?” or talk to someone’s mom about career opportunities for her 26-year-old? Do you want to attend career fairs at obscure places and talk to thousands of people about why they should work for you? Do you actually want to process and filter applications, many of which aren’t qualified for the jobs they applied for?

Last time I checked, employment law is stacked almost completely against the employer, and it is cumbersome to unravel the constantly growing case law that adds more and more restrictions onto employers. HR Professionals understand this, and can be the voice of reason that prevents lawsuits stemming from discriminatory recruiting practices. One lawsuit can easily cost more than the recruiting budget at most companies.

You can’t build a world-class team with the wrong people on the team in the first place. And you can’t recruit top talent through laissez-faire recruitment efforts by managers who do not have the time to take it seriously. Organizations must dance with the talent they want, and that dance is time-consuming. HR can be that frontline sales team that finds that talent pool, accesses it, and constantly adds talent to areas that need it.

Most coffee addicts (like me) don’t know a single executive at Starbucks, but we do know our local baristas. How they treat us is a reflection of the whole company, every time we get our coffee. Likewise, recruiters are that frontline face of the organization’s talent pipeline. If trained and integrated well, they can be the crux of people deciding whether they want to work for you or not.

Applying for a job is a deeply personal and vulnerable task. People will remember this process for the rest of their career. Were they treated like cattle in a feedlot, ignored like they did not exist, and mostly forgotten about? Or were they treated with the utmost of customer service, and either hired or declined in a fair and professional manner? Imagine your declined candidate pool being ambassadors for your company and promoting their amazing experiences to their friends and family. Is that possible? Yes, it is. But only if your organization takes its recruiting efforts seriously, and if you have dedicated people passionate about recruiting and staffing your company. HR is important, and does contribute to your organization’s success.

Tim Vanderpyl is a Certified Human Resource Professional (CHRP) with Canada’s largest catholic healthcare organization. He holds a Master of Arts in Leadership from Trinity Western University and is working toward a Doctorate in Strategic Leadership at Regent University.

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The Essence of Strategy

John Bell —  October 26, 2011

I’ve always loved strategy. Maybe it’s because I grew up playing chess; maybe it’s because I can be stubborn. Luckily, good strategists are also stubborn. They have to be, because in today’s “light-speed” business world, most of their business colleagues are anything but strategic. They either believe that strategy is a deterrent to opportunity or they’ve never experienced the strategic disciplines of a prudent mentor. I suspect these folks have never enjoyed the sales and profit rewards that result from rejecting non-strategic opportunities in the name of maintaining the integrity of a guiding business strategy.

The irony is this: the best strategies are actually those that require sacrifice. These strategies tell you what not to do. Once strategists carve out their course of action, the best ones stick to it like glue. They don’t want to hear about the innumerable opportunities on Mount Elsewhere. They want to know how to better trek Mount Here, the vista everyone on the team agreed to climb in the first place. Consider these basic strategic questions:

What business are we in?
What will we sell?
To whom will we sell?
I’ve posed these questions to hundreds of senior executives. You’d think I’d get similar answers from the executives who work in the same company. Think again. Answer the questions with a view to focus, clarity and differentiation and you will be on your way to a compelling business strategy. More on “the questions” in next week’s post.

People worry that strategy slows a company down and limits growth opportunities. The opposite is true. Look at the success of Apple. Big. Fast. Focused. Innovative. Steve Jobs managed to harness the resources of 49,000 employees to introduce and successfully market a slew of breakthroughs. Both Jobs and Tim Cook were adamant in saying “no” to thousands of projects so that they could focus on the few that were truly meaningful to Apple.

Take Starbucks. Howard Schultz grew the company at an outrageous pace. All it took was three decades for Starbucks to catapult from the Pacific Northwest to 17,000 stores in 55 countries, $10 billion in sales and $950 million in profit. Schultz’s vision for Starbucks was a social community with a defined culture that people would aspire to connect with, (over a cup of distinctive, dark-roasted coffee). Seemingly, the personality of the brand impacted every decision about the experience and the ambiance – the furniture, the artwork, the exotic names of the bean origins, even the music.

With so much written about the success of so many great companies led by outstanding strategic visionaries, one has to wonder why there is less and less attention paid to the tenets of good strategy in today’s business.

John Bell is a strategy consultant and former CEO of Jacobs Suchard (Kraft, Nabob). He is a contributor to Fortune magazine and a regular blogger at CEO Afterlife.

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Book Review: The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan

David Burkus —  October 25, 2011

When new leaders are installed, they’re given a brief period of time to establish themselves and get results – sometimes as little as 100 days. (If that leader happens to be President, then every hour of those 100 days is televised). For that reason, I’m always looking for good information that can help leaders get set in their new role, and The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan does just that (Full Disclosure: I was provided an advance review copy from the publicist).

The book claims to be a comprehensive onboarding strategy for leaders at every level, and it is fairly comprehensive. There’s a lot of information for new leaders to digest and to utilize as they make their mark on the new organization. To be fair, though, only some of it appears to tie back to the evidence. My favorite section involves analyzing company culture, of which researchers and consultants alike have proven is vital, yet confounding. The authors present an easy way to assess culture: BRAVE (Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values and Environment). Understanding this acronym and how to use it to understand your new organizations culture would make the purchase worthwhile by itself.

I’m not sold that this is the comprehensive guide to onboarding a new leader. I’d put it with Watkins’ Your First 90 Days and a few others. However, The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan definitely has a place within the canon of onboarding new leaders.

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When to Hire an HR Manager

David Burkus —  October 24, 2011

You’ve incorporated. You’ve used your exceptional leadership skills to build a 500 employee operation. You’re over-worked. At a certain point, managing the needs and development of your people can be overwhelming. That’s where a HR comes in. Often small and medium-sized organizations aren’t sure exactly when their leadership team needs help from HR. This helpful infographic from TribeHR outlines when it’s time to call for a little backup.

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Book Review: You Can’t Not Communicate

David Burkus —  October 20, 2011

As dear readers know, LDRLB is all about the research and theory behind the practice of leadership. This research comes from a lot of fields, organizational behavior, psychology management science, sociology, etc. One often-overlooked field of study in leadership is that of communication theory. This may well be because those doing the research are poor communicators (if you don’t believe me, please join me at the next academic conference on leadership).

This is what attracted me to David Grossman’s You Can’t Not Communicate 2 (I’m fairly certain this is an update of his original text, but I can’t be sure. I was sent the second edition as a review). Grossman primary argument is that, to be a leader, you have to be good at understand how people communicate and how to communicate to them. This isn’t really Grossman’s argument alone to make, countless others are in the same boat. Communication is an integral part of Charismatic and Transformational leadership research.

The books main focus, naturally, is to teach you how to better your communication skills…both in public settings and conversations. There are two strong points to the book. The first is the three myths of communication (Chapter 4). The second runs throughout the book: the design. The book is absolutely beautiful, full of graphical images that support what they text is saying. This is an unexpected treat too, since the paperback format of the book hides it).

If you’re looking to become a better communicator, then you probably won’t be able to do so by reading just one book. However, I would recommend starting with You Can’t Not Communicate.

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