Bearing Fruit Consulting

Servant Leadership For Real

Not so with you.  Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant...

My dear, dear punker Laurie Ruettimann (who I love) recently had a post and thread on servant leadership over at Punk Rock HR in which she, and many others, portrayed it as a weak, soft and touchy-feely sort leadership that really wasn't wanted or needed in businesses that need to get results, drive revenue or be successful.  She says:

Here’s my message to anyone who calls himself a servant leader.

• You want to demonstrate empathy, bring out the best in people, and facilitate personal growth? Go home and spend some time with your kids.

I don’t need that kind of emotional baggage at work, yo.

The detractors of servant leadership preferred someone who only cared about results and didn't try to "serve" them in any way shape or form.  Too "nanny state"!  Servant leaders nurture bad employees and keep them around too long others said.  Oh, read the comments on that thread and you will see it all.   

The word SERVE and SERVANT are automatically associated with indecisiveness, weakness, subordinate and a bunch of other terms.  When the term SERVANT, and by extension the auto-associated terms, are combined with a power word like LEADER or LEADERSHIP it seems to be a paradox and people's brains malfunction trying to make sense of it.  Instead they just "got to guns" and start hammering away at what some might call the "softer" aspects of servant leadership while ignoring the essence of strength imbedded in the execution of servant leadership.  True servant leaders are, in fact and by definition, strong, decisive and results oriented.  At heart, the individual is a servant first, making the conscious decision to lead in order to better serve others, not to increase their own power.

What If Karl Marx Were The Director of Recruiting?

My partner in crime at Fistful of Talent, Tim Tolan, had an excellent post yesterday entitled Looking For Talent?  Always Look Outside Your Company.  It is part of a point/counter point discussion between Tim and the mighty Kris Dunn for a Workforce Management series.  I have many thoughts on this topic so I decided to share some of them with you here. 

I am going to come right out and say it.  I think organizations with documented process or policy that require them to look at and/or hire internal talent absent a side by side comparison with external talent are practicing a form of talent management/recruiting communism.  Let me explain.

When I was the Director of Talent Acquisition at Quicken Loans we had a saying within the organization that went something like "What got us where we are will not get us where we want to go."  The point is that what you have done and the work you have done up until this point will not necessarily breed success in the future.  Great organizations need to constantly evolve and get better.  Rarely can this type of performance improvement evolution happen without an influx of talent from outside the walls of the organization.  Constant promotion from within is a form of corporate "inbreeding" that is dangerous and often leads to innovation stagnation, acceptance of norms, inefficiency and general acceptance of mediocre performance. 

More after the jump!

Paying Your Employees To Quit - Brilliant!

Sure you say.  Pay our employees to quit.  What could be so brilliant about that?

Bill Taylor (FastCompany, Mavericks at Work) over at Harvard Business Blogs tells the story of Zappos and their practice of paying employees to quit.  The gut reaction from most is say that is nonsense, a gimmick and it flies in the face of all that is holy in the HR space regarding turnover.  That is exactly why it makes sense - it flies in the face of all that is holy in the HR space.  Here is the money from Bill's blog:

So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.

After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It’s hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture—which means, by definition, it’s not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there’s a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick—and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later. (About ten percent of new call-center employees take the money and run.)

I think it is total brilliance on the part of Zappos.  The cost of keeping disengaged and disloyal people who have a very high probability of being poor performers is significantly higher than dropping a quick $1,000 on them and sending them on their way. 

Ideas like this work, they make sense and they get resuts.  They also take daring and courage which is exactly why most companies won't do it. 

Hurry Up And Wait - Hiring Leader Apathy In Hiring

Kris Dunn over at HR Capitalist has one of the best profiles in the HR blog space.  One of the best parts of his profile is that he is teaching his kids the art of the cross over dribble.  Every time I read that I chuckle. 

Recently Kris tackled Hiring Manager Sabotage.  It is a humorous look at a long standing problem in the recruiting community - hiring leaders who tell you the position is critical, we need to hire someone yesterday and then promptly do nothing with the candidates you send along to them.  He lists 6 reasons why hiring leaders do this (most of them quite funny).  Check out the post for yourself because it is strong but the money quote is this:

Here are some thoughts of why the hiring manager doesn't want to interview for another 30 days, after you got rung up in a staff meeting about open positions:

1.  We migrate to what we are good at, and they aren't good/comfortable with interviewing.

Out of these answers, I think #1 is the most probable reason for the delay in most circumstances. They don't interview for a living, and it's easier to de-prioritize it than to deal with it and get it over with.

Hiring leaders are not often equipped properly to interview.  Most companies make the faulty assumption that if the hiring leader is doing or leads the people doing the job then they are going to know what to ask and how to ask it.  Unfortunately this leads to an interview that is all surface and no depth.  Hiring decisions are made based on what candidates have and not what they can do.  There are several other reasons why hiring leaders delay and stall the recruitment process.