Once again, the sports world is abuzz over the treatment of an injured player who, at least so far, has been kept on the bench despite being cleared to play. The player in this case is Alex Smith, quarterback of the San Francisco 49’ers. Since being cleared to return to play following a concussion injury, Smith has been kept on the bench by 49’ers coach, Jim Harbaugh, in favor of Colin Kaepernick, a rising star who has performed well in game situations. Nevertheless, tensions are rising.

Over the years, the default position of most coaches has been that injured players ought not lose their position due to injury. When medically cleared to return to play, they are returned to the lineup, and then it is up to their level of play to keep them on the field. If a better player emerges, all bets are off.

Good managers, like good coaches take this view also, because they know that one of the chief reasons their team-members suffer corporate “injuries” (i.e., failed projects, missed deadlines, etc.) is because they have extended themselves a bit too far for the team. They get going a little too fast, take on a bit too much (or both), and hit the proverbial wall.

Good leaders realize that the absolute last thing they want to do is to suggest that those who go all out for the team are taking that risk all on their own. They also know that it’s not just a personal decision, because as with the Alex Smith case, everybody else is watching. If people see a teammate treated in an inconsiderate manner after giving it up for the team or the coach, they will think long and hard before putting themselves in that position. They throttle back because they are afraid of what might happen to them.

Not unlike the job of a parent whose kid falls off their bike, our job as leaders is to help our teammates get up, keep them from getting run over, dust them off, and get them back in the game. Hut, hut.

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A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the Contented Cows leadership book series, and Rebooting Leadership. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

For some time I’ve resisted the urge to excoriate a term that has been taking more prominent space in the lexicon of HR professionals. I’ve done so largely on the basis that there didn’t seem to be much harm in the emergence of new-agey alternative vocabulary among knowing professionals. I’ve resisted until now, that is. The term – “talent acquisition.”

Oh, I understand perfectly why some might prefer putting some distance between what they do for a living and the functional title that has long been associated with it… recruiting. Recruiting, after all is about as sexy as dirt, or maybe something that is done with dirt, like farming, or agribusiness as it’s now known. Have you ever noticed that the replacement titles never get shorter?

Like farming and selling, recruiting is hard work, because whereas you can exercise some control over the process, the outcome is much less controllable. In this respect, it matters not whether you are operating from a grimy, dog-eared Rolodex or an iPad. As with farming and selling, recruiting is vital work, and still today is a profession where you do a lot of groundwork, unearth a few leads, experience regular headwinds (e.g., withdrawn reqs, failed drug screens), and at the end of the day are glad if you can hit a bunch of singles, a few doubles, an occasional home run, and bat 300 over the long haul. Yet, one can make a compelling argument that the decision whether or not to put someone on an organization’s payroll is one of the most important decisions that can be made. So, if we want to sex up the title a bit to give ourselves some psychic income (or perhaps a higher pay grade), I’m down with that, but let’s use a little caution.

In fairness, cautious branding doesn’t sound like something that would be advocated by someone who for fourteen years has serially referred to workers, in writing no less, as “contented cows.” Thankfully for us, the cow metaphor is simple and very tight; so much so that on July 3, John Wiley & Sons will release our third book in the Contented Cows leadership series (more on that later). But that doesn’t mean that we haven’t taken some serious guff over it. I will never forget an afternoon spent on Clark Howard’s WSB Radio Show when an otherwise wonderful experience was chilled by a caller who got pretty irate over my “comparing people to animals.”

My concern with the expression, talent acquisition is this: Both words miss the mark. Although talent is important, it is secondary to finding people who, by virtue of pace, preference, temperament, and values happen to fit your particular organization. In the vast majority of cases, there are more available people with the talent to perform a given job than those who “fit” the organization. Marriott International, one of our newly minted Contented Cows, learned long ago that mixing grumpy, self-absorbed employees (no matter how talented) with travel-weary guests is not a combination that yields good business outcomes. In similar fashion, talented or not, most people (repeat, most people) would not be happy, productive, or successful working at your place. So, if we myopically get too hung up on the talent side of the equation, we run a very real risk of overlooking some extremely important factors.

Second, I’m more than a little bothered by the term, “acquisition” when it comes to the employment process. You might be able to borrow talent for a while, but you certainly don’t acquire it. Indeed, acquisition is entirely the wrong term if our aim is to do more than merely complete a transaction. I don’t know about you, but when I ran the organization that was responsible for much of the initial high growth staffing of FedEx, starting a relationship with people who would be today’s couriers and tomorrow’s managers was a hell of a lot more than merely putting butts in seats. No, we were trying to capture hearts, minds, and yes, talents, in large numbers, but still one at a time, because eagles don’t flock. Our aim then, and now is to productively engage with people who want to join our team and do important work.

Our hope is that however you choose to brand your organization’s people functions, you will do so thoughtfully.

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A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the Contented Cows leadership book series, the next edition of which will be released in July 2012 by John Wiley & Sons. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

Anyone who has taken a knowing breath and been within reach of a portal to the outside world this week has heard the howls of outrage over the TSA’s stepped up body scans and searches. Purportedly in an effort to discover weapons and explosives secreted on the human body, the agency has recently deployed advanced imaging equipment together with more aggressive groping, ‘er pat down procedures.

When it comes to security measures, the flying public ‘gets it.’ We really do. What agency management fails to grasp is that we’re not stupid, and we still retain quite a bit of choice as to how cooperative we’ll be when “security measures” are visited upon us. Ironically, it’s not appreciably different from the way our employees react when new procedures are implemented in the workspace.

Rather than beating the TSA like a rented mule, let’s revisit a few practices that lend themselves to more successful outcomes, be it in the airport or our more pedestrian businesses:

1. Selling trumps telling.  Rather than announcing new procedures at the “tip of the spear” e.g., when passengers are nearing a new screening device for the very first time, find ways to communicate ahead of time, what changes are being made, and why they are beneficial to the traveler, ‘er employee, ‘er customer. If you want me to buy into the change, tell me reliably and convincingly how the change is going to make my life better. Better yet, show me.  Telling someone to “Do it because I say so, or because I have the badge and you don’t” didn’t work a hundred years ago, and it sure doesn’t work today.
2. Be authentic. Stop the canned responses and lame rationale for asking people to do obviously stupid things. Be quick to admit and remedy your mistakes. People really don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to be honest.
3. Lighten up a little. In case you haven’t noticed, most of us are self-absorbed, nervous, and wrapped a bit too tightly these days. We don’t respond very well to having overly officious security officers, supervisors, senior vp’s  or spouses barking orders. Smiles help. So does “please and thank you.”

If you think about it, what’s going on in airports today is akin to behavior that I’m told exists in strip clubs, but for the fact that no one is making money or having any fun at it. Perhaps DHS Secretary, Janet Napolitano should consider hiring some younger, better looking screeners and giving them a daily stack of $1 bills to tip passengers for putting some skin in the game… or dancing while we’re in the AIT machine:-)

Your views as always are welcome.

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A thought leader in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

Today’s managers go thru life feeling as if their lips are wrapped around an information fire hose, a condition we refer to as “Data Waterboarding.”  Indeed, various sources have suggested that email volume alone has now reached a level of 100 billion messages per day worldwide, a majority of which is, guess what… spam.

Having more information than you could ever possibly use, right at your fingertips, is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that, as we approach the decade of the 1’s, there simply aren’t many secrets any more. If you really want to find something out, you can do so, quickly and relatively inexpensively. The downsides? The very second you toggle the data switch into the open position or venture near an open web portal, you experience the digital equivalent of what radio host, Erich “Mancow” Muller felt when he volunteered to be waterboarded in his unsuccessful effort to prove that it didn’t constitute torture.

Even more so than the rest of us, managers experience this at some level every day, dealing with scores (hundreds?) of data impulses that come to them in digital, paper, telephonic, and human form, and many days it indeed feels like torture. “When will I have time to do MY work?” And just like what occurs everywhere else, a lot of this is spam, too. If you’re a part of a larger organization, the “switch” gets toggled for you, as others both inside and outside the organization have virtually limitless ability to dump things into your in-box, ‘er snorkle, and dump they do. Clearly, it’s not all stuff that you need or want.

To show how far we’ve come (notice I didn’t say progressed), my parents’ generation considered it very bad form not to examine and then respond personally to each and every incoming phone call or piece of written correspondence. In fact, my dad still gets annoyed whenever he hears that I’ve “rail dumped” an entire batch of email forwards from certain of his friends. Clearly, for the better part of three decades, we’ve been moving at a velocity and with volumes of input which make that totally unthinkable. So don’t try. Here’s what you CAN do though…

Get ruthless. Realize that, not unlike the function performed by a medical triage manager, you MUST sort thru this stuff, and become proficient at separating the vital (the ones that have stopped breathing) from the merely urgent (slow bleeders) and the folks who are just seeking attention or bloviating (hypochondriacs). Fail to do this, or do it poorly and you will drown. And, consistent with good triage, be clear that a lot of your inbound, a majority perhaps, doesn’t need to be opened or read EVER!

Triage derives from the French term, triagere, meaning to “sort”. The concept was first practiced by Napoleon’s battlefield surgeon, Baron Dominique Jean Larrey, who deduced that having some process by which to best allocate the needs of casualties to limited medical resources would yield much better outcomes. Triaging seems highly applicable to the process of optimizing data flow to the modern manager, as it depends on rapid assessment of need (relevance and quality of data in our case) and rationing of care (time and attention in our case). Managers must constantly bear in mind that, while data is useful to doing their job, it is not the job itself. Moreover, in most cases, having too much data is as debilitating as not having enough. No, it’s worse.

Gen. Colin Powell, one of the truly exemplary leaders of our time has long subscribed to a decision making theory that the optimum practical point to make a decision is when you have about 60% of the available information, AND you’ve expended no more than 60% of the available time. That’s the point at which you’ve likely got sufficient data to make a reasoned decision, and can still take advantage of being an early mover. General Powell’s advice is helpful for another reason as well. It reinforces the value of having not just the right amount of information, but getting it at the right time. Stale data is about as useful as stale bread.

To be continued in our upcoming book, Rebooting Leadership…

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A thought leader in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

Professional speaker and trainer, Beth Terry wrote a wonderful piece about freedom, responsibility, and the USA. The message is powerful, and with Beth’s permission, I’ve reposted it here for your benefit.

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“I’m concerned for us.
I watched the amazing Macy’s 4th of July in NYC last night, and once again, got tears as they played the old favorites over the booming and exploding fireworks. I turned to a friend and said, “This exuberant display of unabashed love for the USA is one of the things I would miss if we didn’t make it as a country.” He scoffed and said I was crazy. That would never happen.

I don’t know anymore if that is true. Some citizen said that about the Roman empire thousands of years ago. Germans said Hitler could never happen in their beloved homeland. Someone in the USSR declared at some point that it would never fall. Yet, here we are. “The sun never sets on the British Empire” was a familiar slogan during their imperialist years. It sets now.

I’m not being morbid – just practical. As in any relationship, ignoring the situation does not make it go away. Once we take our situation, our country, our beloved for granted, the relationship is in peril. We can’t be resilient unless we pay attention and work at  being resilient.

With wars becoming a daily staple, we have let our warriors become second page news to celebrity deaths. Yes, on Memorial Day and 4th of July –we parade out the songs, and photos, and memories. Yet those warriors are not the only ones responsible for keeping us free. Our first responders and our warriors certainly have that as their chosen duty and we bless them for their dedication. But we can’t just leave it to them. Yes, by all means, thank every soldier you see. Buy them a drink on the airplane, a cup of coffee or lunch when you see them at the mall. Send them a note, do whatever works for you.

More than that, BE THE PERSON who deserves the freedom our warriors have fought for that we take so often for granted. Pay attention to our Politicians and their shenanigans. I don’t care what side of the aisle you are on – they are CAREER politicians, and none of them walk on water. Their clay feet may walk us into an irrevocable disaster if we don’t pay attention. Hold them to their word. Question every bill they permit to make it to the floor. Read the Congressional Record once in awhile. Go read Factcheck.org and Snopes.com.  Do more than read the headlines. Do more than listen to commentators – all of whom have their own agenda; all of whom have advertisers to appease and special interests that support them.

Have an informed opinion – even if you disagree with your friends and family. Read and make up your own mind. That’s the beauty of the 1st amendment. You have a right in the United States to have your OWN mind and speak it.

I am concerned. In the past two decades I have watched us deteriorate into extreme partisan camps. Normal and civil conversations are rare. If one says they think we really need to make sure that single mothers who have been abandoned by their husbands need healthcare, that person is potentially treated to a barrage of expletives, name calling, and derision. Likewise if someone says the 2nd Amendment is there to protect us from tyrannical governments. THEY are then subjected to name calling, derision, and expletives.

If we can’t have civil conversations, we can’t learn the reasoning and rationale behind the other’s thoughts. We won’t, as I said in my last blog post, “Entertain the possibility that we may be mistaken.” It’s a dangerous road when the bulk of our information comes only from sources that are in 100% agreement with ours. No one is infallible. All our societal woes are complex. There are too many moving parts to assume one solution will fit all, or that any of us has the answer. To verbally abuse someone with the opposite point of view shuts out those possibilities for fair and balanced solutions that will move our country forward. It’s through intelligent discourse that we uncover creative solutions.

This isn’t just a nice notion. It’s our patriotic duty. Questioning our leaders is our birthright ~ one that is not given freely in most other countries. When we focus our derision and scorn on those who disagree, we are using our energy in the wrong direction. Listen to the other side. Pay attention to the Politicians. READ. Ask why someone else may have that fear or concern about this particular bill or this particular representative.

We are the proverbial “frog in the boiling water.” We sit complacently, counting our cars, our money, our debt, our little personal problems, while the heat is slowly turned up. If you love your life; if you love this country; if you love what this country can represent: BE THAT PERSON WHO DESERVES IT.

I’d like to celebrate decades more watching those proud Flags wave on the 4th of July and every day.

God Bless America, Indeed.
And God Bless you,
Beth”

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A thought leader in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows