Authoritarian managers? Sure, they get things done. They get results.

But as they grind away for results from a position of power, there's a dirty little secret. At some point, the talent that works for them is going to walk away. For a better, or even lateral, job. For hope that there's something better out there.

The managers who get the best results over time aren't authoritarian. They look and feel like career agents for the people who work for them. They approach everything related to performance from the lens of the employee's career.  Like this:

"I'm not here to just grind on you to get results. I'm here to make you better, so you're going to have fun, make more $$ over time and accomplish your career goals while we get results for the company."

"I'm willing to do that even if it means you promote yourself by taking a better job with another company because we made you better."

Think about that last statement for a second. Powerful. Only a handful of managers out of 100 make their employees feel that way.  And they're the ones employees are most loyal to - no coincidence, my friends.

It's called the manager as a career agent.  Do you buy it? 

If you want to buy the concept but really don't know how to guide your managers to become career agents for their employees, send them to the webinar I'm doing with Halogen software entitled “Get My Agent On The Phone: How Smart Managers Position Themselves as Career Agents Via Performance Management” (click to register).  Join us next Tuesday, May 21st at 1pm EST, and we’ll hit you with the following ways you can help your managers become career agents for employees:

• By making sure the goals they set represent the Five Most Important Things (5MIT) for the employee in question. Smart managers skip discussing the busy work and get to what’s going to change the game – for the company and the employee. We’ll give you the 411 on how to do that as an agent for your employees.
• Offering up ways each of the Five Most Important Things might be measured in the months that follow. You want measurements – we get it. We’ll show you how to set the expectation your direct reports are going to be measured on, without actually taking performance or development off the table. PS – They’ll love you for this if you deliver it in the right way.  Think “employee portfolio”…
• Having Thoughts on what “Good” and “Great” performance looks like in each area. That’s right – we’re going through a goal setting process not because HR told us we had to, but because it can set us up to be a great performance coach for the rest of the year, and help us get the employee where they want to go with their career.
• Including a section that details “What’s In It for Me?” for each area of focus. Being an agent is about talking about how chasing great performance in the area in question could be great for the employee’s career. We’ll show you how to frame this as the agent/coach. It’s the most important thing you can do.
• Putting it all in an easy to follow, informal format. If you go beyond one page, you’re making goal setting too complex. List everything we’ve described to this point in one page, and make the headers conversational in nature, and you win. We’ve even got some formats we'll share with you.
• Having a plan that screams "career agent" when you coach on a daily basis and maybe even start having 1-on-1s on a regular basis that you don't dominate, you authoritarian #$#$!

You can be viewed as a career agent for your employees rather than a run of the mill corporate bureaucrat. Join us for “Get My Agent on the Phone“ and we’ll show how the secret sauce to goal setting and follow-up conversations can dramatically change the positioning of what you do in performance management.

See you next Tuesday!

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!

Hi KD - 

What's a best practice related to how long a hiring manager should have to give you feedback post-submittal or post-interview on a candidate you've provided to them?

Signed - Ignored in Texas

--------------------------------

Ah yes - hurry up recruiters! Give us candidates! Feed us!! 

Then once we have them, we'll be sure to....um....<crickets>

Hiring manager feedback is tough to get.  Should it be that tough?  No.  Will it remain tough to get? Yes.

Feedback - especially from a hiring manager who has openly claimed they need and expect help - should come within three days of you submitting a resume/submittal and two days of a live interview.  If it's more than that, it's way too long.  It should actually be two and one respectively, but let's walk before we run.

Best ways to get compliance with that - get everyone to agree that the clock is always ticking for top talent (pitch that candidates start to think something is wrong and scatter regardless of the reality), then get agreement that you're going to start reporting that as a metric, just like you would Time to Fill and Cost Per Hire.

Then embarrass the outliers. 

Have fun with that.  Remember - you're doing it for the kids.

KD

Check out the chart below as Exhibit A:

Change and taking risks is difficult. Of course, if you don't have the right number of people in your organization who are comfortable asking "what's next", it's going to catch up with you.

Raise your hand if you thought in 2001 that AOL's sub base would decline by 90%.  Anyone?

They didn't think so either.  They undoubtedly had opportunities in hundreds of areas, including broadband and video. They stuck with dial-up. Ugh.

More from Dan Frommer at Splat F:

At the end of March, almost 2.7 million people still subscribed to AOL service, the company reported this morning. That’s about where Netflix stood at the end of 2004.

Since then, Netflix’s subscriber base has grown — 29 million at the end of March — and AOL’s has declined at a remarkably parallel rate. But that makes perfect sense: Nothing says “dialup” more than AOL, and few services have benefited more from the growth of broadband than Netflix. (The paths cross in early 2008, just as Netflix’s streaming video service was starting to take off

• Worth noting: Netflix now has more subscribers than AOL ever had. (The distinction changed hands late last year.) This makes sense, given the rise of mobile devices, cheaper computers, connected videogame consoles/TVs, and just the increasing popularity of the Internet, thanks to broadband.
• Worth pondering: What will eventually cause Netflix’s decline? Missing the next era of Internet technology? (Something mobile-first or mobile-only?) Internal crumbling? Or are Netflix’s best years just getting started?

Andy Gove once said, "Only the paranoid survive.".  I like that.

Fire a change-blocker today.  Include the AOL chart with the documentation you do on the term.

Hey Age-Related Protected Class People...

Yeah - you.  Especially those of you that are hiring lots of young professionals and manage people.

Do you know how to use a hashtag on social properties like Twitter and Instagram?  In case you didn't realize, Instagram is the new Facebook for the young guns.  And hashtags, introduced originally by Twitter, play in heavy rotation on most social properties.

Figure out what a hashtag is here.

It might be your chance to connect and act like you know what you're doing.  Or it might make you look so old that even Kevorkian wouldn't take the case.

Here's an appropriate use of hashtags by Kliff Kingsberrry, head coach at Texas Tech.  Observe and learn:

Hashtags can be used even in formal communications these days, as shown above.  Of course, to properly use hashtags in formal communication, you probably need to be active on social and properly mixing your work and personal activities in broadcast mode on the platforms.  Get started, Marge.  Take a flier, Henry.

#getwiththeprogram

#donttellmetogetoffyourlawn

#lookyoungerthanyoufeel

#supriseme

A lot of you know who Seth Godin is - blogger, author, marketing thought leader, blah/blah/blah.

He's known for quippy, quick posts.  Like anyone else who writes daily, sometimes they're gold, sometimes they're good, sometimes they're "meh".

He nailed it today talking about companies and organizations either being "battleships" or "Blueberry pancakes."  See the whole post here.

The comparison makes for a good question for HR leaders - are you building a battleship or a blueberry pancake?  Here's some of the difference per Godin:

"The typical industrial-era organization is like a battleship. Hundreds or thousands of people onboard, and most of them are essential--but most of them aren't actually directly responsible for the work that we hired the battleship to do. Without the fuel people, the navigation team, the folks in the med corps and on and on, it doesn't work.

One more thing about the people on the battleship: just about everyone has a punchlist, an itemized inventory of what they need to get done. And many of them are rewarded for doing that set of tasks more efficiently, more elegantly and with better quality than expected. Great people means the system works even better, but it's designed to survive with people who are merely good at what they do.

The typical professional services company, on the other hand, is a lot like a blueberry pancake. While there's an essential support team, the firm is all about blueberries working in parallel. Each blueberry can work independently, and sometimes they even work on projects that might have conflicting outcomes or views of the world. I don't care how many people report to you. I care about how connected and how brave you are.

As the firm gets bigger, it doesn't get thicker. You don't make a better pancake by making a thicker one. You make a better pancake by hiring ever better blueberries."

And, as you might expect, Godin provides more fodder for why most companies (and I'm saying HR practices) don't center they're strategy around the latter - blueberries:

"And, as you've guessed, most of the blueberries don't know exactly what they'll be doing in six weeks, and most don't work from a manual about the industry's best practices on how to do what they do. It's hard to measure blueberries, but a talented and motivated one can also change the world."

Which brings to mind this important point for HR leaders - even if you have to build a battleship to get things done, you ought to always have and protect talent that is like the blueberry Godin references.

Blueberries don't want to serve on a battleship. But if you protect them and give them the right environment, they'll be part of your team anyway.  

On the interviewing track in a big way at Kinetix, and one thing keeps emerging...

We don't interview enough for adaptability on the fly.  Winging it with intelligence and confidence.

Faking it until you make it....

Now I know what you're saying.  Kris, faking it is bad.  People need to know what they're doing.  They need to be trained. We owe that to our people.  We can't ask them to fake competency that they don't have.

Here's the problem with that stance. Your talent - my talent - is faced with at least 5 conversations a day if not more) they don't have experience in.  Training for all the things that require adaptability on the fly is not possible.  

That's why the best hires are the ones that aren't afraid to jump on a call or in a meeting where they have limited subject matter expertise and wing it. 

Winging it - and faking it until you make it - is street code for facilitation.  

People who can facilitate and participate in conversations where they have limited subject matter expertise - and become more knowledgeable by the minute while that conversation is going on - are the ones worth their weight in gold.

Hire someone with the ability to fake it until they make it.  It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to think about some improv activities as part of what you do to develop people with that in mind.

Let's start with a picture.  See below and then come back after the jump...

That's a picture of 2 employees of the Houston Rockets - Chandler Parsons and James Harden.  They're pro basketball players and they got the memo - you shouldn't be showing up to a post game press conference in normal clothes.  Thus, Parsons with the Russian mafia apprentice club wear, and Harden with the scarf in late April Houston.

But it brings to mind an important question. What's it mean when an employee in your organization suddenly becomes fashion-aware and starts taking chances with his/her wardrobe?  

I'm not talking about stretch pants in the call center or Nirvana-gear.  I'm talking about an otherwise historically standard employee suddenly looking like their trying to win the cover of Esquire or Vogue.

Here's my experience with what the change in dress (up the fashion curve, not down) could mean:

1. High performer is looking to make a move, and to get mentally prepared, they've decided that changing up their wardrobe is the best way to get their game face on;

2. Low performer who can't get love from anyone in the organization, but they consider themselves a player outside of work, so they're bringing their outside game to the office park in a desperate cry for attention; or

3. (Dudes only) Otherwise normal guy who's never really had many girlfriends now has significant other, and she's working at Express, Banana Republic, etc.  She's taken over his life and since there's not a long history of having a significant other, he allows it.

Your task is how to deal with the Peacock.  It's pretty simple, and somewhat Darwinian:

1. High performer - you put up with it, but maybe make sure they're comped right, feeling the love, etc, to limit flight risk.

2. Low performer - goes on performance plan.  It was overdue anyway. The super skinny jeans and the Russian club button up just serves as a strong reminder.

3. Guy who just landed rare or highly dominant girlfriend - you make fun of him without mercy, and see if grows a backbone.  If not, you call him "Boris Nitkin" and explain that's his Leningrad club name.  Find your Russian name here.

You thought Dress Code issues were all about short skirts, the fact your policy still has a panty hose rider in it in 2013, etc.  You were wrong.