by Kate Evert | Oct 12, 2022 | Human Capital, Leadership, Skilled Labor
Checking twitter for some of our favorite labor economists, the app declared that Jerry Orbach was trending.
Jerry Orbach?
Hasn’t he been gone for several years? But funny enough, I had just been talking about how much I loved his portrayal of Lenny Briscoe on “Law and Order”. I had once seen an old clip and knew he was a triple threat and Broadway star. He could:
Act
Dance
Sing
Poor Angela Lansbury. In mourning her death yesterday, fans started sharing and posting a clip of her recording the soundtrack for “Beauty and the Beast”. The fact that she shared the booth with Jerry Orbach is what has gone viral.
It seems few knew about his hidden talents. Well, hidden on TV that is.
What secret talents do your employees have? Have you pigeon-holed them into a current role, or perhaps a predecessor did? Do you know what sorts of roles they have performed before? What kind of transferable skills they might have?
Don’t wait until a talented member of your ensemble is gone to find out all that they have done or could do. Take them to lunch and find out now. I think Lumiere would have said,
“Be our Guest”
by Kate Evert | Sep 1, 2022 | Human Capital, Jobs, Skilled Labor, Work Place
Labor Day evokes many images. For some of us, it’s a time to savor the last days at the beach, perhaps with a good read?
Most of us hope to find meaning and purpose in our jobs. In this era of The Great Reassessment, maybe this is the Labor Day to reconsider our own toil? Or that of our colleagues?
Here are three suggestions to spark your own contemplation:
This podcast introduced me to Dr. Mike Rose, who was a professor of education at UCLA. He wrote The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker. In an excerpt from the podcast, he reflects on the concept of meaningful work:
So let’s then bust this notion of meaningfulness open, … regardless of the kind of work, to be able to support a family or put food on the table, that’s meaningful. … So for her, then, in the midst of this difficult work and difficult circumstances, there was great meaning in the kind of social dimension of it, right?
Conversely, you and I both know people who are doing work that the culture at large, from a distance, would say is really meaningful — and they’re miserable.
… They’re as unhappy as can be. You know, the miserable lawyer, the unhappy neurosurgeon … So meaningfulness is a more fluid and rich and variable concept, I think, than we tend to imagine.
In Dr. Rose’s book, he references Stud Terkel’s American Classic: Working: People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do. This 600+ page book is something we all should have picked up in quarantine! In the introduction, the author says:
“It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash.”
Some industrious folks found Stud’s original reel-to-reel tapes and distilled the best of them into an hour-long podcast. These snippets from the 1970s are both time capsule and insight into what gets folks out of bed in the morning.
Lastly, a book published about a decade ago by a modern-day philosopher, Alain de Botton. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work questions how some professions can be so admired, yet how we overlook those that accomplish remarkable feats.
As goodreads summarizes it:
We spend most of our waking lives at work–in occupations often chosen by our unthinking younger selves. And yet we rarely ask ourselves how we got there or what our occupations mean to us.
… With a philosophical eye and his signature combination of wit and wisdom, Alain de Botton leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art–in search of what make jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying.
All good fodder to ponder as the summer winds down, and we head back to work, possibly with renewed vigor about our own vocations.
by Kate Evert | Jan 5, 2021 | Creativity at Work, Human Capital, Innovation, Inspiration, Productivity, Skilled Labor, Strategy, Work Place
Over the holidays, I hung out with one of my most inspirational friends from my adolescence. We spent many hours together reliving her many escapades (and the ways in which she inspired me to ride along on her adventures), even though I will never be as brave as she is. We even giggled about her hairdos and fashions. Don’t worry, we were socially distant the whole time—Nancy Drew was safely ensconced in the covers of her mysteries that made up this year’s holiday puzzle.
Unlike last year’s ridiculous puzzle undertaking, this year’s was not frustrating—it was fun. While no one else in my family helped, many other things did help with this puzzle. Intimately knowing the artwork of many of these covers, the ability to discern the difference between fashion across the decades, and then of course, an eye for fonts.
At some point in the endeavor, I was struck by a thought that differed from last year’s insight. It was at the point when you have done enough of the hard work that you notice a piece, recognize the color scheme or font, and remark, “Oh, I know where this belongs.” I started thinking about the types of Aha! moments that only come from long hours and deep thinking—a shortcut won’t get you there. It is only from studying something and understanding its nature, from having the patience to get to that point, that you can make a break-through. My mind immediately went to the scientists who developed the Covid vaccines in record time. They have spent careers doing the equivalent of 20,000 piece jigsaw puzzles. Their knowledge base far exceeded color schemes and fonts, but at the core of the development, patience.
So, I spent the rest of my time with Nancy pondering patience. What in our lives today (pre-Covid) fosters patience? In an age when many kids grow up with knowledge, entertainment, and transportation, amongst other things, at the tip of their fingers, how do we impart the value and lessons of patience to them?
We should all be extremely grateful to all the scientists who developed the Covid-19 vaccines in record time. Their patience and deep thinking was the key to solving the world’s biggest challenge.
by Kate Evert | Aug 26, 2020 | Competencies, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Human Capital, Productivity, Skilled Labor, Work Place
Everyone predicted it back in the spring. We even addressed some of the childcare issues that concerned people back in May on our blog.
But, we’re still here. Summer is ending, some schools have started (even if only virtually), and the picture isn’t any prettier. Are you willing to lose one of your best workers over two hours a day? Have you ever had someone resign when their mother died? Well, get ready…
An executive was stunned by the number of times that female employees resigned when their mother died. He couldn’t figure it out. Fortunately, other females connected the dots for him: their mothers had provided essential childcare; without mom/grandma, they could no longer work. This executive then connected other dots too. Leaving children at home, with no way to get to and from school, or no way to get to after school activities, was worth losing income and childcare.
And all of this was Pre-Covid.
This article from HR Executive provides some ways to start thinking differently, so that you and your company might be able to be as prepared as possible, and put all those agile thinking skills to use when your star performer comes in ready to quit. Read More Here
by Kate Evert | Aug 19, 2020 | Compensation, Corporate Culture, Skilled Labor, Work Place
Back in May when we first warned of the quicksand that awaited employers flirting with basing pay on where people lived, we approached it from a technical compensation perspective. When I came across this article last night, I knew we had to revisit the topic from the right point of view—corporate strategy.
I had never heard of this CEO or company before, but looked up both after reading this article. Ian White has many quote-worthy quips in this article, but up front he reminds ALL employers that:
Companies have a responsibility to pay their employees fairly and on time, but that’s where their control ends. The manager who chooses to move into an expensive high-rise downtown doesn’t deserve to make more money than their peers who choose to buy a modest home in the suburbs or live with their parents to save on rent.
He echoes many of the sentiments we made back in May, but most importantly he reminds all of something that we often stress—don’t copy a practice that another company is doing if it doesn’t fit with your culture. Read More Here
by Kate Evert | Aug 12, 2020 | Competencies, Performance Management, Skilled Labor
Maybe it’s my mom’s fault. When I was only six months old, she discovered that watching the Detroit Tigers on TV captivated me and gave her time to get things done. Then again, maybe it’s my dad’s fault because when he took me to games, he taught me how to keep score, the old-fashioned way, the way that you can go back and check which field a batter hit a pop fly in the third inning. (Foreshadowing my work with performance management tools?)
All blame aside, I love baseball. I still keep score whenever I’m lucky enough to go to a game; mocked until the seventh inning when someone does want to know what that guy did in the previous at-bats. So perhaps it was because I cannot go see a game in person this summer, that over the weekend I picked up Moneyball by Michael Lewis. I loved the movie when it came out and couldn’t imagine enjoying the book even more. But, I did.
It is so amazing to read how recruiters (scouts) with so many statistics at their fingertips, even before the advent of personal computers, still relied on gut and feel instead of cold, hard math. Getting on base and scoring runs wins games. Looking good in the uniform and having “the face” does not. I absolutely love Billy Beane’s line: “Are you selling jeans?”
The biases in business do not differ very much from those exposed in professional baseball. I have been lucky enough to work with the sort of organizational development professionals that design robust competency-based selection tools, yet managers still need to be coached around their empty biases about how a candidate “seems” and “he’s got that look” like he would do well here.
Even though Michael Lewis’s book is now seventeen years old, it really is a great summer read—especially this summer of fan-less baseball. While remote working has eliminated some of baseless management habits that sluggish managers have relied on for decades, if not centuries, if not millennia, there is plenty of work still to do. Perhaps diving into the lessons in this book will remind us to eschew bad old habits, and develop good new ones, grounded in stats, like your coaches used to drill you on every summer.
