by CHRC | Sep 16, 2020 | Covid-19, Leadership, Performance Management, Strategy, Work From Home
It’s mid-September, when people should be getting:
- Back from vacations
- Back to school
- Back to work
Except
- Vacations? Very few people took those, certainly not the ones they had anticipated
- The whole school thing—depends
- Back to work … or back to Zoom?
Yet, there is a sense that people feel like they should be getting back into a routine, like there should be some sense of normal to return to … that normal most of us left in mid-March.
We have been collecting articles and prophecies on the post-Covid world, especially the post-Covid workplace since April. Yet we are nowhere near that. Standing in line for an elevator the other day, I was speculating that perhaps printers of large, durable floor stickers are the winners in this Covid-economy.
So how do those at the helm of businesses, be they large or small, attempt to strategize for this new world? You need to have a monocle on one eye and a telescope on the other. Even to survive in the medium term will require innovation, and that requires your best people.
Right now, all your folks are stretched and stressed, so assume your best folks are as well. Your best folks might be the most stressed and stretched because they are probably conscientious at everything they do. So, value those capable of driving the innovation, and be aware of what will make them productive right now. You might never know about the immuno-suppressed partner or parent that prevents that healthy looking employee from coming to work each day. Your employee may have successfully hidden an auto-immune issue for years and does not want to disclose it now. Innovate your management style and develop new management skills in order to retain your key talent.
Really think through who must return to your physical office despite the September instinct we all have. Would you rather Zoom with a trusted, vital resource, or have to start recruiting for their replacement? Read More Here
by CHRC | 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.
