Do You Have a $5.3 Million Budget for Sexual Harassment Claims?

Thanks to our state's Freedom of Information Law (also known as FOIL), lately the local press has been peeling back the layers of the cost to settle sexual harassment claims made against state workers over a four-year period to the tune of $5.3 million. In no particular order, these settled claims totaling $5.3 million include allegations of:

• Inappropriate touching / groping
• Inappropriate comments and actions
• Requests for dates
• Repeated retaliation against those who filed sexual harassment complaints.

The state worker targets of these settled claims come from all organizational levels and backgrounds, including but not limited to elected officials, legislature staffers, managers and prison guards. No matter how large the organization is, $5.3 million is a hefty chunk of change in unplanned expenditures to pay out. And the salt in the financial wound is not only that the $5.3 million is funded by taxpayers, but is also FOILable, e.g. discoverable to the general public. Not the reputational / financial data that any organization wants blasted in the news.

If you don't have $5.3 million budgeted for sexual harassment claims (as well as the additional funds that would be needed to manage the negative publicity should the claims become public and featured in the press), do you follow the advice of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to employers to best prevent sexual harassment? "Prevention is the best tool to eliminate sexual harassment in the workplace. Employers are encouraged to take steps necessary to prevent sexual harassment from occurring.

• They should clearly communicate to employees that sexual harassment will not be tolerated.
• They can do so by providing sexual harassment training to their employees; and
• By establishing an effective complaint or grievance process, and;
• Taking immediate and appropriate action when an employee complains."

The cost (payroll, subject-matter expertise, etc.) to train your employees, managers and executives as well as to set up the proper expectations, policies, due-process complaint and investigative infrastructure in your organization to prevent sexual harassment can be as little as .0005% of a potential $5.3 million budget for sexual harassment settlement claims. Sounds like a cost-savings home-run to the bottom line to me.

Managing Death at Work

I'm in a bit of a surreal state right now: Brian, the beloved husband of my dear friend Lisa, passed away in his sleep Saturday morning from an unexpected and shocking heart attack at the too-young age of 44, a day after Lisa and Brian's 15th wedding anniversary. My son Noah is buds with their sons Charlie and Timmy. I'm not quite grasping that he's gone. I spent yesterday and today calling Lisa's extended circles of friends and colleagues to share this very sad news, the minimum mitzvah I can offer at the moment, aside from urging you to love the ones you're with, every day, like Brian and Lisa did.

Brian totally rocked. In additional to being a wonderful husband and father (we all attend the same church, which is how we met), he was a Senior / LEED Mechanical Engineer with a great professional reputation, reinforced by his calm, direct and almost Buddha-like presence. Which served him and our church well as a member of our Trust Committee. He also reminded me of my Grandaddy Nat of beloved memory: Brian could do all of his own electrical, plumbing and carpentry work. He knew how to run natural gas lines, which allowed him to completely renovate their kitchen and bathroom. Brian also cooked up biofuel to use in the family diesel cars. He had been spending the summer putting new siding on the family house. He has just taken Charlie and Tim on our church camp-out in Cooperstown, and then journeyed with them to use their season tickets at Six Flags in New Jersey. Lisa had given him a brand new toilet last Christmas, in anticipation of his next project to renovate the second-floor attic space. Our collective handyfolk are discussing how they will complete Brian's projects for him.

One of the few beacons during this tragic weekend was the response from Brian's manager to the news of Brian's unexpected death. The manager, extremely emotional himself, told Lisa on Saturday that Brian was highly respected at their company, and that their customers specifically asked to work with Brian. A heartfelt, authentic and welcome message for Lisa in the midst of her grief, demonstrating how as Brian's manager, that he truly saw him and his gifts, and lifted them up. Well done.

Happy Employees Make Happy Customers at the Blue Ribbon Restaurant

My good friend and colleague Dale and I decided to have our meeting over dinner at the Blue Ribbon Restaurant this past week. It was crowded as usual, and we were happy to score one of the last remaining booths near the counter.

Our server Jenny was Juanita-on-the-spot with menus and ice water, without prompting from us. She kept checking on us, taking our orders quickly and following up to see if we had enjoyed our dinners. She even encouraged me to try one of the Blue Ribbon's great sugar-free desserts. Jenny smiled, bounced and beamed as she multi-tasked taking care of all of the customers in her section, including us.

Intensely committed to providing great service to my customers, whether they have been internal to my organization or external customers, I love when I experience great customer service myself. Jenny's diamond demeanor was infectious, and she energized me even at the end of a long and very busy day of business meetings.

When Dale and I worked together at the same company, we'd have our business cards poised to recruit talent like Jenny to work in our stores; it was a no-brainer.

I had no job for Jenny that night, but I had a question. "Hi, I'm Deb," I said, introducing myself as Jenny brought us both take-out containers and bags to carry them in without a second request (Great service, I told you!). "You do a great job, what's your name?" "Jenny," she replied, beaming even more if that were possible. "Thank you." I asked her another question. "Jenny, you seem really happy. What makes you happy to work here?" Jenny answered without missing a beat. "The family who owns this restaurant treats me so well. They're respectful, they care about me, and they trust me. At past jobs, I've been yelled at and micro-managed. Not here." I loved Jenny's answer. "How long have you worked here?" I asked, my last question. "Two years," Jenny replied. "And I love it here." That was crystal-clear.

As Dale paid the bill at the cash register, I couldn't resist. "Are you one of the owners?" I asked the young man at the register. "I'm the son and nephew of the owners," he replied, smiling slightly. "You might say I'm an owner-in-training." I smiled back. "I just wanted to let you know that our server, Jenny, is great." He smiled wider, glancing at her bustling around the customers in her coverage area, and without missing a beat as he handed Dale his change, replied: "Yes, she is great. We're lucky to have Jenny."

We were all lucky that night, because at the Blue Ribbon Restaurant, they clearly know that happy employees make happy customers.

Termination is a Dish Best Prepared and Served Cold

While it might be borderline entertainment to watch Donald Trump in the reality-t.v. show The Apprentice spontaneously combust fire his victims contestants on the spot:

Real-life terminations of employment, when handled in this fashion, ruin reputations of both the organization as well as the respective executive / leadership team:  to say nothing about the devastating impact on both employee and customer recruitment, retention and engagement.

How you treat people as you exit them from your organization is just as important (if not more important) as how you on-board them as new employees and treat them during the tenure with your organization, impacting the level of your employees' and your customers' engagement.

Engaged employees are productive employees, and productive employees give great customer service, which in turn drives customer recruitment / retention.  Check my girlfriend Google, The Thank-You Economy and other sources, like The Society of Human Resources Management, if you're at all skeptical about those key inter-relationships.

Which makes off-the-cuff and spontaneously combustive real-life terminations, such as the phone termination of former NPR Correspondent Juan Williams or the phone termination of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz frankly puzzling, given the reputation-bruising both organizations received from the resultant negative publicity. 

When Yahoo then put itself on the market for purchase right after Bartz's firing, engagement was clearly not the focus, financial survival was.   Which explains the leadership vacuum on several levels, as exemplified by Bartz's parting email sent to all Yahoo employees:

“To all,” Bartz wrote, “I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.”

This lack of professionalism telegraphs that both terminations were not planned and occurred as a result of an emotional reaction, rather than a factual response.

Which brings the leadership of the organization into question:  if a termination decision is made and handled in this manner, how is the leadership team handling other business / mission-critical decisions?

And that's what I mean when I say that termination is a dish best prepared and served cold.  When an executive or similar decision-maker comes to me as the HR subject-matter expert totally pissed off and ready to fire the target of their ire on the spot, I gently apply the brakes on the situation, with some simple steps and questions designed to minimize / prevent organizational exposure and protect the reputations of all involved.

• What policies / procedures has the target violated?
• Is there any documentation or prior warnings in their file?
• What danger / exposure exists if the target is not fired on the spot? (One of the few on-the-spot terminations I've performed occurred after weapons were discovered and thankfully confiscated in the employee's workstation.)
• If there is a lack of facts / evidence on the first 3 points above, is the decision-maker comfortable with the legal and public relations risks?  That is:  is the decision-maker (and the organization's leadership team) comfortable with reading about how the decision-maker potentially mishandled the target's termination in the local newspaper?
• Is there a plan to minimize company exposure? 
• Is there a plan at all, e.g. how to communicate the target's departure, managing company security, etc.?

If the answer is no to any of the above points, time must be taken to develop and implement the plan factually and rationally.  

The first step of the plan is for the decision-maker to cool off and shelve their emotions so the facts can drive strategic termination planning and implementation.

If not:  the decision-maker may find themselves in the same boat as Trump's hapless contestants; or their former employees.

Hire Smarter Than You to Succeed

The entrepreneurs and business owners in my network by and large already know that they need to hire folks who are smarter than them in key areas in order to build their businesses.  As their businesses grow to a certain point, they know full well that they need to hire the talent and the subject-matter expertise (SME) they don't personally possess as the CEO in order to take their businesses to the next level.

A key success factor for these entrepreneurs is their status as life-long learners.  As Tom Peters tweeted over the weekend:  "Came to agreement with very senior team that one of 2 or 3 most important traits in a senior exec is childlike compulsive curiosity."  In other words, the most successful entrepreneurs love to learn, and they especially love to learn from their SMEs.

These go-getters are clearly secure about their own accomplishments and their roles as business owners and leaders, so feeling threatened by say, an Accounting SME or a Logistics SME they hire (whether they're an employee, a consultant, or a temp-to-perm SME), to bring structure and consistency into their business isn't even on their radar.  Their hunt is to build the team that's going to make their business successful and grow.

Unfortunately, this model is not yet consistently endemic to the employee-leadership paradigm, e.g. non-owner managers and leaders who hire employees.  And they didn't start the fire, frankly.  Most organizational performance / compensation paradigms still reward just individual performance, not the badly needed manager-employee team and/or organizational performance incentives.  In other words, most managers are still held accountable just for their own performance, which creates an inbred culture of finger-pointing at subordinates and ultimately, abstaining from accountability to the performance of the organization as a whole.

I have been lucky enough to have worked with a few non-owner employee managers who chose to put out the fire of that mediocre paradigm and hire SMEs who were smarter to support mutual and organizational success.

It was woven into the fabric of the GE culture.  The manager who hired me into GE saw me eventually becoming the head of GE Public Relations.  "You're a mini-Joyce,"  Chuck would often say to me.  Chuck's prediction did not come true, but I always appreciated his faith in my abilities.

Another GE manager, Bill (who at this writing, is the best manager I've experienced in my career), firmly believed that the success of his employees equaled his success.  And as I mentioned in an earlier blog post lifting up Bill's leadership qualities:  instead of keeping me in position to ensure that his work got done, his goal was to get me promoted:  the merit badge of a manager's / mentor's success.  And he did, pushing me to a promotion at another business unit, even though I wanted to stay in my job, as a member of his team.  But he was right, as usual.

Consequently, I seized the opportunity to pay it forward when I was in a similar leadership role.  When the time came for me to hire a Recruiting Manager, I hired Alison, who is an AIRS-trained recruiting maven and SME.  A great deal of my knowledge base as a Recruiting SME is thanks to what I learned from Alison.  I'm happy to report that Alison subsequently followed her entrepreneurial bliss as the owner of her own successful recruiting firm.

I am a grateful student, indeed.