• Steve Browne
• Rebecca Slosberg
• Victorio Milian
• Ben Eubanks
• Charlie Judy
• Steve Boese
• Paul Smith
• Trish McFarlane
• Matthew Stollak
• John Jorgensen
• Jason Lauritsen
• Lisa Rosendahl

That’s a list of a lot of great people but what did I get from doing it? A couple of things:

1. HR Stars Come From Many Backgrounds – Different geographies and paths led them to HR. Some come from different economic, social, and cultural areas. Others come from different career backgrounds. Some started in HR right away, some didn’t. In any case, no matter where you are in your HR career (or if you haven’t started yet), you can still make a real impact on the industry.
2. HR Stars Give Their Time – There isn’t a single person on this list that doesn’t put in a lot of time on something that’s not part of their day job. Some of them may earns some coin for it but for most, it is a labor of love. If you want to be an HR star, you have to be willing to give a significant fraction of your free time away. Especially initially. The reward comes later.
3. HR Stars Are One Piece of The Pie – A very important piece of the pie I might add but a piece none the less. These people execute HR and organize people at the very core of HR’s mission statement. Personally, I don’t think any of what these people do will go out of style but it might be called something different in the future.

I also made the conscious decision to touch HR stars nominated who are still practicing HR or very, very close to practicing HR. I also didn’t nominate anyone myself. In that way, I missed a whole slew of great people:

• People like Laurie Ruettimann, Kris Dunn, Frank Roche and Sharlyn Lauby. Without their HR inspired writing, I don’t know if I would have continued doing my thing here.
• Smart people who write for publications and run conferences like Bill Kutik or my colleagues at ERE Media Todd Raphael, John Hollon, Amybeth Hale and David Manaster.
• Personal friends like Chris Ferdinandi who I should have put on the list anyway.
• Former SHRM folks like Sue Meisinger and China Gorman who remind me the society had vision and can have it again.
• Marketers like William Tincup and the people who run some of the great HR vendors (including Rypple, the series sponsor)
• The hundreds of people (literally) I’ve met the past two years in HR who show up, do the work and aren’t ever satisfied with the status quo.

These are all people and organizations that deserve highlighting but weren’t included. And I know I left out buckets and buckets of people too.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, it shows that this list is just as flawed as any list on the internet these days. There’s subjectivity and bias in them all and factors left out.

What is most important to me though is that the people highlighted can hold their own in discussions about people who make a real impact on HR. There are lists of other people but I really enjoyed being able to highlight this group of individuals.

1. Don’t do anything
2. Repeat

If you never want to get married, have kids, start a business, change careers, or take even the simplest of risks in life, perfection may be for you.

If perfection is your pursuit though, do not under any circumstances start a blog.

Blogging is for the imperfect

I’ve never worked this hard (for this little money) to be as imperfect as I am on this blog every single day. Not only that but my imperfections here are displayed for everyone to see and dissect. A whole database of searchable imperfections for all of the world.

When a wave of spelling and grammar police hit my blog, I know it. My spelling and grammar skills aren’t perfect.

When I make a factual mistake in a post, I know it too. People are there to call me out on it.

When I have dumb ideas or I don’t think all the way through on one, I know it as well. People love shooting down dumb ideas.

I wish I could sit down and thank every one of these people. Thank them for reminding me how absolutely imperfect I am as a human being. How incredible it is that I could be so fantastically imperfect in every way. And that, in spite of all of my ridiculous imperfections, I am able to make a go at it and be successful anyway.

Turning imperfections into strengths

When someone swoops in to remind me that I messed up the spelling of a word or that I made a grammatical goof, it is a reminder about how much content I pump out. I’ve written approximately 250,000 words for this blog over the course of almost four years. To put that in perspective, I’ve written and self-edited about three to four novels worth of information. If I would have waited until perfection, I would have written zero words. Even the most careful single blogger couldn’t expect that. I choose to leave those mistakes in place because it is a reminder that perfection is the enemy of quick to market, interesting content.

When I make a factual mistake, it is a reminder about how much information I consume on a daily basis. I read so many pieces of information during the day that I sometimes get my wires crossed. For most of the posts I’ve written, I’ve probably read at least ten times the amount of words I end up writing about the subject. If I was scared about throwing out a bad fact, I would have posted zero times. I don’t get facts mixed up that often but when I do, I make sure to leave the original and add the correction to show that recovery from imperfection isn’t fatal.

When I throw out an idea that everyone hates, it is a reminder about how my ideas ebb and flow between very good and pretty bad. I always have a hunch but I rarely know for sure how new ideas are going to fly on this blog. Some ideas that many people have liked have taken me by surprise. Others that people hated (sometimes quite a bit) really take me by surprise. In any case, the fear of being wrong would have prevented not only some of the dumb ideas but also some of the really great ideas. I’ve never gone back to delete or rework my writing from the past because imperfect ideas are what drives you to generate better ideas.

Life is for the imperfect

David Rendall makes the point of emphasizing side effects instead of weaknesses in your business life. Using his model, most of my readers don’t mind if I have a typo or grammar error as long as I continue producing great content. My wife doesn’t mind if I don’t vacuum as long as I split cooking with her and fold laundry. Your employer may not mind if you work from home as long as you get the job done.

Perfection isn’t an end goal. I don’t think that has ever been the intent. Being the very best and brightest depends highly on your tolerance for imperfection. It is balancing the need for perfection with speed and innovation. And if there is any balance at all, your product (no matter what it is) will be decidedly imperfect.

Change Your Company Culture

Why? In many companies, the stigma of calling in sick (or worse, calling in with kids sick) is incredibly strong. Strong enough to compel even the most disgustingly sick to try to “stick it out” and “give it a go.” When their manager sees them, they say something along the lines of “Thanks for at least trying to come in. You can go home now.” Thanks for trying? Like it is a good thing to try to soldier through illness and expose your workforce to potential harm?

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Is your company paying lip service to this little guy?

If your company is actually serious about stopping the threat of H1N1 (or any easily communicable disease), they would do the following:

1. Provide a generous sick time allowance so people don’t have to choose between working sick or not paying the bills.
2. Allow work from home whenever possible and get systems set up to accommodate it now.
3. Don’t allow anyone to work sick, discourage it from the top down and lead by example at every. single. turn.
4. Punitive measures for parents of sick children? Now your crappy policies impact daycare providers and other caretakers.
5. Advise managers on identifying warning signs and teach them how to balance workloads.
6. Understand the impact that forcing a sick person into work can have (hint: this person can get your healthy employees sick)

Not doing all of these? Then you’re paying lip service and are part of the problem.

And really, this goes for any communicable illness like the annual seasonal flu. Poor policy making on the part of companies or poorly conceived company cultures have caused millions of hours of lost productivity in the workplace. All because we couldn’t stand to lose 16-40 hours of productivity from a single employee.

And why do we do things this way? So we can prevent a few abusers of the system? Employees that do that are, at least in my experience, already poor performers who should be managed up or out. Here’s the real question: why are you still employing these losers? Drop them.

Now even as an individual employee, you can follow the CDC’s advice to the letter and still get in trouble because the company’s culture hasn’t shifted.  You can either see your career prospects plummet as a sickly or needy employee or you can actually get the same disease from your co-workers who are trying to stick it out. That’s why it is a company wide thing. That’s why it is a culture thing. Are you ready to get on board?

HRevolution Was A Resounding Success

You can correct me if I am wrong but I don’t believe Trish McFarlane, Ben Eubanks, Crystal Peterson or Steve Boese had any experience running an event like this before. Honestly, you couldn’t tell because everything ran incredibly smooth and surprisingly close to time. This is amazing simply because I know that this group of people can be some of the worst traditional conference attendees. Maybe that’s why the format worked but let’s hand it to these four who put in a ton of effort to pull this off.

Everyone has different goals coming into an event like this so you can take this as just one person’s opinion. I hope that future events like this will be more about equipping progressive people in the talent industry with the knowledge, tools and passion necessary to push our industry forward. We can talk about the future of HR, strategic vs. tactical HR, and those huge topics all day. There is a fear in my mind that we get caught up in circular arguments, questions about terminology or nitpicking advancements and failures on the part of the traditional talent models.

Let me back up here.

What Is Revolution?

July 4th, 1776 is a fairly significant date in US history. It is the day that our Declaration of Independence was signed and the birth of our nation. The document itself isn’t the reason that the day is significant though. After all, the document itself is a Dear John letter saying goodbye to British colonial rule with some fairly outdated language conventions. Without the context of everything else, the document is imperfect and written by one of the least diverse groups in history.

What did these guys know about starting a revolution?

What makes the day and the document so significant is that it spurred us into heavy action. Those resulting actions, followed by many, many more, gave us what we have today in the US.

What would have happened if they just kept talking about the document instead of acting on it? What would have happened if they got together in 1779 and talked about how there are some imperfections or how some had some significant issues with the document itself? What would have happened if the Declaration were still on the table getting discussed in 1789? 1799?

We might have missed an opportunity to do anything. Rebellion could have been easily squashed, new power structures could have been installed and people could have lost the will to continue discussion with no inaction. The founders knew that the window of opportunity was swiftly closing and that 100% agreement was less important than capturing an inspiring statement and using it to thrust a cobbled collection of colonies into war.

Revolution Is Action

I may be burned out a bit from all of the future talk but at the end of HRevolution, I felt like there wasn’t a call to take real action that will push us forward.

I know. It is all so uncertain. We don’t have a crystal ball. That’s why there is hesitation to lead.

We can continue to wait for the right time, the right answer, the right set of circumstances and the right people. We can revise the mission statement a thousand times. Until we execute, until we move forward personally, and until we accept the fact that we will never have all of the answers about tomorrow today and that it might result in failure (spectacularly hopefully), things will simply change without our input.

The odds are always against purpose driven, proactive change. Simply reacting to a set of circumstances is too easy, too in line with human nature to impact those odds that much. That’s why I am not interested in convincing others (at least with words) to get on board with the future of business and people. It is actually more effective (counter intuitively at times I might add) to simply do something amazing without thinking a ton about it. The rules are written as we act.

I’d love to have a forum where we can talk about tactical ideas that align with this new paradigm and how we can implement them both within ourselves and our organizations. Then we could talk how those ideas actually worked and what we could change about them. Then we would change and implement again. Repeat forever. Sound easy?

It Won’t Be Easy

It seems like a simple thing but it isn’t. It is easier to talk about big ideas and never bring them back to action. It is also easier to think the former argument is more important than the latter because that feels more strategic and inspiring. To me though, the most strategic and inspiring stories come from people who have succeeded through imperfect action. A couple of takeaways that I have been using to ignite action in my life:

1. Constantly question with the purpose of acting – I mentioned this on HR Happy Hour but I will do it again: I ask questions to help me take my next step forward. Just because I ask if HR is dying doesn’t mean I believe it is or whatever else was being implied. It means there is critical examination taking place so that I can continue to evolve and push for change.
2. Constantly act, especially when you feel uncertain – I am in a place in my career where I don’t know what I am doing all of the time (some would say all of the time). Being paralyzed because of that would be easy but acting has helped define much of the constantly evolving strategy of our business. I would never know what actually is going to work without doing it.
3. Constantly give, especially when you won’t get anything in return – I am prone to think about actions in the context of this “What’s in it for me?” mentality. When I drop this mentality and just do it for the sake of helping other people, I have found that this prompts me to act more than I normally would. And acting more means learning more means defining the best path forward.

How do we push for revolution? We find every opportunity to act. Are you ready?

Did We Figure Out The Future of HR?

No. Figured I might as well get this shortcut out of the way. If that’s what you’re here looking for, you’re not going to be happy with the rest of this post. What we talked about are possibilities for the function.

The Idea of Freedom Versus Restriction

One of the things we talked about is the idea of freedom and tearing down barriers that make people work in less than ideal ways. Here’s the scenario:

You’ve got a workplace issue that you need to fix. Let’s say two departments aren’t speaking to each other as often as they should. What’s the first thought that goes through your head about how to fix it? You could create something that makes sure these departments get together on a weekly basis. That’s what I think initially.

What happens if you thought about the things that keep these people from naturally meeting and communicating? If, for example, the teams are in different buildings and they need to communicate more frequently, why not move them closer? Or if one team is being directly impacted by a business initiative that kills their available time, why not do more to reduce that responsibility or change expectations?

Freedom is a powerful mindset change and it is one that is often misunderstood as always being contrary to constraint. Sometimes constraint can be an extremely powerful tool of freedom. That’s a post in and of itself though.

The Talent Dynamic Shifting

For so long, that talent function in most organizations has assumed that being strategic meant making sure your plans fit with corporate needs. As an example, if the organization wanted to shift some functions to a different part of the country, the talent function is best served by a person who could tell you how to get it done right and efficiently.

The problem with that is that isn’t strategic at all. We’re coming into the conversation too late. If HR came into the conversation saying “We have key competencies elsewhere in our company that we can use to expand and one of our locations is close to a college that is one of the top ranked in this area as well.” that changes the dynamic completely. Speaking of which…

Building Your Business Around Talent

Let’s say you want to start a business. Where do you start it? How do you find the best people to run it?  I think that second question is going to start driving the first one. Rather than make the consideration solely based on where the entrepreneur is at or where the market is at, they are going to be building the business where their talent is at. With product delivery easier than ever, the major differentiation strategy will be pulling together those pieces from wherever they may be and making it happen.

As our economy and workforce continues to evolve, I think it will be more important than ever to think about this. Think about the business executives that will be retiring in five years. What happens if you could engage with them from their house in Florida on an ad hoc basis? It isn’t even a hypothetical anymore but it will become more of a business consideration as we work into the future.

Going Forward

These are just a couple of ideas that transpired through our conversations (I have pages and pages of notes and conversations in my head that I am still digesting). The cool thing of course is that these are only possibilities right now. There is a lot of work to be done to make these reality too.

As the conversation continues to evolve, I encourage people to get involved and opine on some of the ideas that get presented out.

All good things had to come to the end and we parted ways (I quit without notice because they wouldn’t let me work with my ear piercing in, my first experience with dress code policies). Things have changed a bit in 11 years. What was once a beloved but tacky regional restaurant chain has become the fast food iteration of the “Eat Local” movement.

Burgerville (based in my hometown of Vancouver, WA) has become a powerhouse of the Northwest casual cuisine scene. From hipsters and hippies to cube dwellers and suburbanites, I’ve found few that really dislike the joint and even less that have never experienced it. Not to mention that they are an interesting case in business transparency.

Burgerville started off by naming suppliers of their products and opening both themselves and their partners to scrutiny. Guess what though? It wasn’t the end of the world. People felt better about what they were eating.

Now they’ve attracted attention for another bit of transparency: nutrition labeling based on what you order. Cabel’s Blog posted a copy of his receipt and it was picked up by A Hamburger Today (one of my favorite food blogs for obvious reasons).

So you can see that he not only ordered a halibut sandwich but that he removed tarter. And those sweet potato fries? Better in the fiber category but bad everywhere else in comparison to regular french fries.

While other companies put their nutrition information on weird parts of a website or in little pamphlets with tiny printing, Burgerville puts it right where it counts: in your face, before you eat it.

And yes, people who know me know that I am against mandatory laws about these sorts of things. But using labeling and transparency as a key differentiator in your marketing strategy? I really love it. Especially when none of your competitors can roll out anything close to this in a timely manner.

Put information into your customer’s hands, respect their intelligence and let their informed wants guide you to better products. How hard can it be if a regional burger chain is leading the way?

I always chalked it up to politics being an uncomfortable situation in general. It is one we often find easier to commiserate with like-minded folks. Then again, it seems like every other department I’ve worked with inside an organization wants to talk politics. My theory: if you want to be a big shot in HR, you’re going to have to have a political voice.

So HR is different but why? Here are the three primary reasons:

Poor Education

Some people aren’t going to like this reason and that’s too bad because it is one of the major reasons. I don’t know too many politically educated people who sit on the sidelines in other fields so it has to be a reason in at least some of the cases.

Political issues that impact the workplace are complicated certainly but it’s not like there isn’t a myriad of ways to get educated. So what could be the problem?

Could it be that SHRM’s emphasis on being an advocating and lobbying organization rather than an educational organization on legislative matters be demotivating to those that may disagree with SHRM on critical workplace issues?

Maybe the thing that has rubbed me the wrong way about SHRM’s issue advocacy on the part of all SHRM members is that they spend so few (comparative) resources on being proactive in workplace issues. Wouldn’t working within corporations to promote communication and openness serve as a better long term solution to the threat of easier unionization than advocacy? Shouldn’t we as a group of HR professionals be talking about more thoughtful approaches than just battling legislation?

Faux Neutrality

As the famous Burr/Hamilton duel suggests, we could just shoot people when we had political disagreements in the past. Now we have to take a slightly different approach.

One of the major reasons I hear smart and intelligent HR people say they don’t want to enter the political arena is that they want to maintain a sense of neutrality. I know this because I used to be that person as well. And there is a decent argument for it somewhere but it has nothing to do with being a leader. It has everything to do with marginalizing yourself out of important conversations going on in your organization.

While you may feel like you are being noble and fair, you are also missing an opportunity to show your skills as a contributor. Anybody can report how the laws changed. How do you bring it up within your organization? What’s your position on it? What is your plan for adapting and thriving?

When you take on your faux neutrality pose, it hinders your ability to have reasonable, adult level disagreements with people you respect and have to be around. That’s a political skill that translates over so well in business. You become a better person because you aren’t just commiserating with like-minded people anymore.  You learn to disagree respectfully while still being firm in your beliefs.

Intimidation by Other Corporate Leaders

The last, and maybe most difficult, reason is corporate leader bullying. Now if you know me, you know that generally isn’t a problem. I am a big believer in free enterprise and that goes over well with other corporate leaders.

That being said, there are also some areas where there are some serious disagreements. That’s when some people who haven’t learned how to disagree like adults start the bullying and harassing.

Of course, the HR side of us wants to say, “Hey, some states prohibit that” which is admittedly funny in its own right. But the problem is much bigger than that. The assumption that most leaders are like-minded in political matters has to be one of the major threats to American business. If you think I am joking or being glib, my philosophy is that like-mindedness is bad for innovation and if there is anything American business needs right now, it is innovation.

So Now What?

So now what, what? Get politically active. Get educated, drop the silent treatment and stand up for yourself. Let’s talk about health care reform or unionization or affirmative action. Let’s talk about regulations that impact our core businesses. If you work in aviation, know about the major changes to flight safety going on now. If you work in ecommerce, read up on the developments around taxation for goods purchased.

None of this is rocket science but it is a change. Are you ready and willing? Have you been doing this for a while? Are you not ready to take the plunge? Let me know in the comments.

This would have required “big box” retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target and Home Depot to pay $10/hr plus $3/hr in benefits to employees whenever operating within city limits. While I find this particular proposal (and similar proposals) interesting, this is mainly to spearhead the topic of my post: Do high minimum wages drive employers (and jobs) away?

My feeling has always been that it depends. In a retail environment where prices are already competitive and price shopping is common, I would say that it would have an effect.  In a tech sector where you can afford a bit of price buffer (a high minimum wage will likely not effect any workers) and with high differentiation and specialization, it probably has little effect.  For industries that are necessary that carry low skill workers, the costs will be passed to consumers but there will be few attributable job losses. So overall, I think the type of wage increases we have seen over the last couple of decades have not been as harmful to our businesses.  That’s not to say that it couldn’t be harmful.

Overall, like many things in business, moderation wins out overall. Moderate wage increases followed by a cooling period have shown the best results over all industries. And that’s where I feel Chicago really missed out on their wage proposal.  Their increase to big box employers was 100% above baseline costs for other retail outlets in Chicago.