Ask Liz: How to Describe an HR Background?

Dear Liz,

Here is my resume Summary. Any suggestions for me? Thanks! Penny

Over 25 years of experience in a wide range of industries and in
virtually EVERY aspect of HR, including but not limited to Employee
Relations, policy and procedure development, complaint investigation,
salary surveys and structures, writing job descriptions for all types
of jobs, (compensation in general) benefits administration, workers
compensation, legal compliance, training, performance management
program design and implementation, full life-cycle recruiting of
numerous positions within numerous different industries, and HR
Audits.

Industries have included storage, health care, scientific, research,
software, manufacturing, IT, consturction, and telecom.
While I prefer something regular, full-time I will consider long-term
contracting positions as well.
I have a Bachelor's degree in Psychology, a Master's degree in
Applied Communications, and a certificate in Alternative Dispute Resolutions
(ADR) that includes Facilitation, Mediation, and Arbitration.
The rate of pay will depend on the position to fill.

Dear Penny,

It is a big plus if we HR folks can talk about not what we've done functionally (comp, benefits, etc.) but how what we've done has helped our employers make
money or save it in a significant way. If we can say "I led the
integration effort when Acme acquired Blackburn, without losing
customers or missing product release dates" we'll kill two birds with
one stone: a) we'll allay the widespread fear that HR folks are too
focused on the tools (comp systems, policies, e.g.) and not focused
enough on the business; and b) we'll create a more specific and
memorable picture in a reader's mind than a list of "dunnits" can do.

It's the same way in lots of other functions; "led the launch of the
flavored hair gel line TastyCurls, generating $100M in sales in the
first year" runs rings around "experienced in branding, PR, and new
product development." The more concrete and situational, the better --

Cheers -- Liz

You Go, Lilly

Dear friends,

I was still a corporate HR person when the Lilly Ledbetter case made the news in 1998. Lilly sued her employer for sex-based pay discrimination that had gone on for 20 years. Too bad for Lilly, she lost at the Supreme Court level because the law said that a claimant had to file a claim within 180 days of the discriminatory event. Meaning the date that the first unequal paycheck was cut. Too bad that companies don't tell you when they're illegally discriminating against you by paying men more than women (or women more than men, etc.).

Not that I was a babe-in-the-woods naif in 1998, but I was shocked by that, well, idiotic decision. I guess the Supremes had no choice; the law essentially said that if an employer can hide its discriminatory pay practices for six months, the illegal pay structure can survive forever.

Congress passed a bill today, 11 years later, making it possible for employees to sue for pay discrimination even when they didn't know the discrimination was occurring at the time that it occurred. Duh. Hurrah for Congress and for Lilly. Here's the story.

If you're interested in stuff like this, check out the Ask Liz Ryan HR Ning group

Respond to Every LinkedIn Query?

Dear Liz,

What's the protocol associated with responding to LinkedIn requests?
I respond to most of them, but some of them are off the wall. If I
get a piece of LinkedIn mail from a non-connection that seems like
dreck, I deep-six it. Should I be responding to everything I get on
LinkedIn?

Yours,

Kaylie

Dear Kaylie,

Great question! Most of the mail on LinkedIn moves between first-
degree connections - it's those connected people communicating with
one another, or more distant connections being introduced by their
intermediate contacts. I think you need to respond to all of those.
If you have a first-degree connection who really shouldn't be your
connection, you can snip the cord without too much trouble.

As for InMail from un-connected LinkedIn users, I think it depends.
If it's pure spam, delete it. I have one in my inbox I'm sitting on
right now. It's not spam but it pushes the bounds of my tolerance for
the kind of presumption that borders on bad manners. I don't really
feel like responding but I don't want to be rude, either.

A guy has asked me to come and speak at a conference in Dubai in
June, and says "I know it's a long way to come and present, although
if you have travel plans in the area at the time it may be feasible"
-- and then, presuming that I won't be able to make it, asks me for
helping finding speakers. Who want to get to Dubai under their own
steam to speak at this conference. In June, when the temperature in
Dubai averages between 104 and 107. Yeah, I'm deleting that message.

Your "delete" finger has a voice of its own. I say let it ring!

Cheers,

Liz

It's the Culture, Stupid

Story: It's the Culture, Stupid (from the Boulder Daily Camera)

When my family arrived in Boulder some years ago, our big kids were little and our little one wasn't born. We wanted to meet people and keep the kids busy, so we signed up for every kid activity under the sun.

Skating lessons at the downtown ice rink: delightful! Swimming with Curt Colby: tremendous! Avid4Adventure, Bits, Bytes and Bots and Renaissance Adventures: magnificent! The kids had a blast. I enjoyed meeting the parents. Everyone was happy.

There was only one dark spot on our family activity schedule that year: my daughter's ballet class. The ballet school was unfriendly and poorly run. It felt like a stereotype, a striver's dream, built for parents hell-bent on seeing their kids dance in the Joffrey.

The school had a music program in addition to dance classes. We tried that one, too. Ick! Through the heavy wooden door I could hear the teacher screeching at my third-grader. No thanks! The school was broken, and the malevolent culture was palpable to me as a parent. That's the thing about organizational culture: it's loud.

Years later, I heard the back story. The original, grassroots, warm and inviting music school had undergone a disruptive and unpopular change in control some years before. When we hit town, the effects of that unfortunate series of events were evident. When a culture is broken, clients can tell.

There's an old New Yorker cartoon that shows a CEO barking to an underling, "Get me a corporate culture by Monday morning!" The joke is that, of course, every organization already has a culture. We may love it or hate it or be oblivious to it, but it's there. Whether the culture supports our goals is another question.

I got a call from a CEO this week who said, "I must be crazy calling you now, when conditions are so tough in the marketplace. But I think we could be working together more effectively in my company.

"Our employees aren't rallying around the mission just because we're under competitive pressure. I guess I don't blame them. We need to figure out how to manage in this new environment. I can't afford to have my best people quit on me now, and I need every person's best efforts."

I give the CEO credit, because it would be easy to say "I'm not expending one iota of mental energy on soft-and-squishy people issues now, when our company is under siege." The CEO understood that turnover and motivation and culture are all related. If employees don't care about the game plan, a Dave and Buster's gift certificate will not do much to change their views.

As a newcomer to the broken music-and-dance academy (now out of business, no surprise) my gut told me that the culture was awry. The CEO's gut told him the same thing about his organization.

He decided to act rather than wait for the malaise to magically disappear on its own. He told me "My instinct says that I'd better dig into this topic now, before it badly disrupts my business."

Instinct, gut -- if you can't pay attention to those trusty scouts, who can you listen to?

Ten Ways for HR People To Gain Altitude in 2009

HR people say, "I want my seat at The Table." Others say, "I've got my seat - now what do I do with it?" They're two sides of the same coin. Which HR approaches have the greatest leverage? HR people want to be heard - so how do they do that? And once people are listening, what do they say?

Here are ten thoughts for HR types looking to gain altitude - as in the difference between the two-inches-from-the-ground, here's-the-form-you-need-to-fill-out view and the fifty-thousand-foot, let's chart a course for the company's talent management for the next five years view:

Ten Ways for HR People to Gain Altitude in 2009:

Read the right stuff.

There may be a line manager or two in your organization who's interested in the latest findings about performance management or the nifty team-building ice breaker you discovered on an HR blog. Mostly, your managers couldn't care less. To be credible as an HR person, you've got to know more about business -- your business, your industry and your competitors - than you know about HR. That means reading industry pubs and blogs, not just HR-specific media.

Learn by Interviewing.

You've got a building full of business experts at your disposal, and multiple brains stuffed full of useful information. Sharing your HR expertise isn't nearly as important as learning from the brilliant folks around you, and a great way to do that is by interviewing. If you're not interviewing at least a leader per week in your organization, you're behind the curve. How do you interview your leaders? Easy - ask each one to coffee or just schedule a meeting, notepad in hand, and start asking question. What's the biggest challenge each top leader sees on the horizon for '09? What are the acquisition-and-retention-of-talent issues on his or her mind? What organizational changes does s/he foresee for '09, and why? Don't site in your cave - get out and get into the brains of the people who run your organization.

Be a Community HR Leader.

The best HR advice I ever got came from my CEO back in 1988. He said "I want you to start an HR Council for our industry association." That group was the American Electronics Association. I said "Okay," and that was that. Soon I was organizing meetings, getting to know my peers in the industry and speaking in front of groups (horrors!). You can do it too, and you should. There will never be enough time in the day to finish all your tasks and paperwork - that's a terrible goal, anyway. Get outside your office and share ideas with your counterparts.

Ask your Clients What They Need from You.

We hate to ask our internal clients how we can do a better job, because we're afraid we may be overwhelmed with their wish-list items. That's a small problem. If we can dig into one area of common need and deliver, our credibility and our utility will soar. Create a free Zoomerang or SurveyMonkey survey for your 50 most-visited internal clients and ask them what they want from HR, and from you, in '09. Whatever action plan you put together, Item Number One is a recap of the survey results to the participants, letting them know "I heard you." That seat at the table is hiding in those data!

Build on the Business Strategy.

If you haven't read your organization's 2009 Strategic Plan yet, now is a good time to do it. If there isn't one, an HR person like you can be the catalyst for getting one written. It doesn't have to be ponderous and dense - one pithy page is perfect. Somebody in the enterprise knows the 2009 plan - you can pry it out of his or her brain and put it on paper so the rest of the squad can get on board. Your HR plan springs directly from the company strategy. An HR plan built in a vaccum is an irrelevant HR plan.

Your focus group awaits.

Imagine that it's mid-December and your shiny six-point 2009 HR plan is committed to a dazzling Powerpoint presentation. Take it to the lunchroom or the breakroom and pop a squat. Chat with the first ten people who wander in, and ask them whether HR is doing what it needs to do to keep smart people in the organization for another year. But wait, you say - my obligation is to the management team, not the rank and file! Bull dooky - who keeps the organization running, after all? If your team members aren't getting what they need from you (think of timely and correct paychecks, performance review processes that work, information on pay grades etc.) their bosses won't give you the credibility time of day.

Be Specific.

"Create a winning culture for long-term competitive success via strategic use of Talent Management approaches in a multidimensional intervention matrix" is not a strategy, a tactic, a plan or even a mission, vision or coherent English sentence. It's HR gobbledygook, and it sinks our credibility like no other. In your HR planning, be specific. You're going to reduce turnover? Great - by how much? How are you going to do it? You're going to listen more closely to the needs of middle managers? Ditto - how, and to what milestone? Sales and manufacturing departments don't get to submit airy-fairy annual goals, and credible HR people don't, either.

Know Your Stuff.

I used to say to my CEO boss, "Hey! My job is harder than yours. You just have to know a bunch of business stuff. I have to know that stuff, plus all this HR junk." I was kidding. But it's true. You'd better to be up to speed on HR trivia, including changes in employment laws, how smart employers are changing their approaches to recruiting (broken) performance management (cracked) and other often-tweaked-but-seldom-improved HR processes. If you want to gain altitude in '09, you've got to come across for your organization with smart and nimble HR systems that work - not retreads of barely passable programs that you've read about in year-old HR magazines.

Be Available.

Line executives' biggest complaints re: HR people are their lack of business knowledge, their fanatical devotion to policy-making and their unavailability when they're needed. Make yourself available to people who have questions for you - the daytime hours are for people, after all. I hate to work overtime as much as anyone, but if I'm not available to business leaders during the day, I'm sunk. No one values you for your diligence in completing EEO reports; that stuff doesn't move your business forward. Get it done another way, and keep your door open for those business-slash-people problems that high-altitude HR people are experts at.

Spin It Up.

As you build your HR plan and your high-altitude 2009 persona, start a conversation about what you're up to with other HR folks. Join a discussion group like Ask Liz Ryan HR (just for HR people) or Ask Liz Ryan (25,000 businesspeople from all functions) and/or a Ning group like this one to keep your learning going throughout '09. Leave a comment below and tell us how you're planning to grow your altitude next year. Share what you've learned through a blog or via Twitter. You're not alone, thank goodness. Altitude-seeking HR people are all over, and they'd love to know you.

Follow me on Twitter: asklizryan

The Mom Advantage: Making the Workplace Hospitable to Working Moms

No life event seems to get a corporation's collective undies in a
bundle so much as the birth or adoption of a baby. Perhaps it's the
unpredictability of the event. One day Sally
is working quietly at her desk, and the next day she drops the B-bomb
on her boss like it's nothing.

Unlike vacations, promotions, work schedules and travel requirements,
a baby's arrival is in the employee's court all the way.

Lots of people prefer predictability to unpredictability, and so the
disappearance of an employee on maternity leave feels like a terrible
inconvenience and an affront.

I like to remind employers that a garden-variety skiing accident
could easily land an employee of either gender in a six-week medical
leave of absence, but that doesn't seem to quiet their fears.

After all, they tell me, an employee with a torn tendon comes back to
work post-leave unencumbered. S/he hasn't taken on a major life
obligation in the process! This is true. New motherhood (or repeat
motherhood) is its own animal.

Yet, babies are not about to stop appearing, and employers need to
handle their working moms' arrivals and departures without panic.
Having made an investment in an employee already, wouldn't you rather
keep her on board than lose her to a more family-friendly environment?

Accommodating Moms

But you'll need more than a family-friendly policy. You'll need to do
lots of listening and lots of communicating, to consider each
returning mom's situation on its own merits, and to guard against a
backlash from non-moms who may wonder why having a baby entitles an
employee to special hours and other privileges.

The most common accommodations for returning moms are flexibility in
their work schedules and flexibility of place (e.g. telecommuting). A
baby's early months require doctor visits during the day and
childcare can create scheduling demands.

Less common accommodations for new moms are on-site child care, the
ability to bring Baby to work, and company-paid babysitting when Mom
travels for business.

Overcoming Barriers

Employers typically have three big fears in the accommodating-new-
moms department. Be prepared to deal with these cultural obstacles.

If we offer special programs to new moms…

Other employees will complain.
The last thing we want to do is to send a signal that moms are golden
and all other employees are chopped liver.

Accommodations need to be based on a realistic assessment of job
requirements,
the returning mom's tenure and performance, and how the accommodation
could be applied to others.

If you can't extend the same kind of flexibility to other employees,
consider putting a timeframe on the agreement. Meet and discuss the
arrangements every quarter to see whether it makes sense to stay the
course.

When I was a corporate HR person, I'd hear from non-parents fairly
often about our company's few family-friendly offerings. I'd say to
them:

"We need to develop all the employee groups that we have here at XYZ
Corp, and spot any gaps between the performance or tenure of any
group of employees and the team overall. If new moms are quitting at
an alarming rate, that's a business problem. If Latvian red-headed
Capricorn employees were dropping like flies, that would be a
business problem, too."

If we can help employees see our outreach and accommodation measures
as the solution to a legitimate business problem, we have a chance to
get them over the 'why not me?' hump.

To read the full story, please jump here.

Hire and Step Back

HIRE AND STEP BACK
by Liz Ryan

I was on a tour of a local employer’s facility with its human resources leader when we heard raised voices. We turned a corner and saw a middle-aged man venting his spleen on a young colleague.

"Our CEO," the HR chief whispered to me.

"A yeller?" I asked, and she replied under her breath, "Not normally."

We ran into the CEO again in the cafeteria, where he came over to introduce himself. "You witnessed me losing my temper," he said. "That's not really like me, but I must say I was very angry at something that happened this morning."

Naturally, I wanted to hear the story.

Turns out that the young associate had asked the CEO for permission to handle a high-stakes customer issue, and the CEO had agreed. The young man had dropped the ball, badly. The CEO had been expressing his displeasure with the incident when we ran into him. He'd only learned about the ball-drop when the customer called him to complain.

"We try to hire people who don't need a lot of direction," the CEO told me. "Ninety-eight percent of the time, it works. Two percent of the time, we give some heavy guidance or we make a change. I can't imagine running this place any other way. If our managers had to watch people like hawks, we'd be done — it's too expensive."

The CEO got no disagreement from me, because he's right on the money. It is expensive to spend supervisory time watching people work, double-checking their output and second-guessing their decisions.

Granted, there are regulatory requirements (Sarbanes Oxley being just one) that require us to conduct audits and set up groups to watchdog one another's processes. But in the vast majority of business actions where that sort of oversight isn't required, why would we impose it?

It takes more time and more careful interviewing (notice I didn't say more steps in the selection process) to hire people who view their jobs the way Harry Truman ("the buck stops here") did, but the savings in leadership time are enormous. Why would we hire anyone else?

I spoke to a group of HR leaders at a workshop last week, and we talked about the silly ways that employers too often approach the hiring process. We pilloried the time-honored job-ad phrase, "Must be able to hit the ground running."

That company is saying it would rather hire someone who knows every aspect of the job and can be productive right away, than a person with twice the talent and vision who doesn't have the specific skills the job requires. What a bad trade!

If we hire a person expecting him or her to stick around for a year or three, why would we trade off long-term potential for the ability to navigate some software developer's latest release - especially if the fine points of that newly released application could be mastered in two days?
Short-term thinking is the culprit.

We can't wait; we need you to hit the ground running! That’s poor leadership on display.

But we get to choose.

We can hire people capable of learning what they need to know on the job, quickly; folks whose intellect and character will move our companies forward dramatically.

We can hire people who don’t need constant watching via internet snooping programs that count their minutes on Facebook or Ebay.

We can hire people who can be trusted to get their jobs done without a manager’s eagle-eyed supervision.

If we have the confidence to hire Harry Trumans and set them free, we'll have the advantages the CEO in this story has. He raises his voice two or three times a year at an employee who is confused about what the word 'commitment' means.

The rest of the time, he deals with the issues on a CEO's plate and lets the employees, capable adults that they are, manage themselves.

Read this story on CoBizMag