Job Descriptions are Money in the Bank for Your Business

I know:  talking about job descriptions is like watching paint dry; and reading job descriptions may well be the cure for insomnia.

However, it's when your business or nonprofit organization lacks job descriptions that the excitement can begin.  And I'm not talking fun excitement.  I'm talking about a body blow to your bottom line.

Submitted for your disgust:  the audit conducted by the New York State Comptroller of the Charlton Fire District, located here in the SmAlbany, NY area, entitled Internal Controls Over Treasurer's Activities:  Mismanagement Allows Theft, which describes in detail the multi-year financial field day (a.k.a. theft) the Fire District's Treasurer (who is married to the Fire Chief, by the way) had with the District's finances, spending and paying herself to the tune of $500,000.

Aside from the complete lack of leadership oversight and commonly accepted financial controls, what caught my eye was how the Treasurer paid herself an additional hourly rate in addition to her Board-approved salary for "work in addition to regular duties."  As the Comptroller's Office noted, this is an unusual arrangement for someone who is already paid a regular salary.

What really set the stage for the theft of wages by the Treasurer to occur was the absence of a written job description prepared by the Fire District Board, as well as the lack of a written list of "work in addition to regular duties" approved by the same Board.  Nothing was documented by the Board.

That wage theft amounted to nearly $325,000.  I don't know any business or nonprofit organization that can justify or absorb a bottom-line hit like that.

So if the cautionary job description tale of the Charlton Fire District isn't enough to scare you straight about the financial importance of having current and compliant job descriptions on file for your business or nonprofit organization, here are a few additional financial parting gifts to seal the job description deal for you:

• Audit by the Department of Labor:  if DOL pays you an unannounced visit and you don't have current / compliant job descriptions, how will you prove which of your jobs are exempt from overtime and which are nonexempt?  In these tight government budget times, DOL's fines to businesses and other organizations are a key funding stream, not to mention the multi-year back-wage repayment requirements if DOL discovers Wage & Hour violations at your workplace.

• Worker's Compensation Injury / Liability:  If your employee sustains an injury at work and there is no job description, how will you prove to your Worker's Comp carrier that you've done your diligence in informing your employees about what safe conduct is in your workplace? Can any business or nonprofit organization afford a big increase in your Worker's Comp insurance coverage?

• Unemployment Insurance and Discrimination Claims:  If you don't have job descriptions, you have no ability to provide acceptable documentary proof of employee performance issues, because you never set the minimum standards of performance via current and compliant job descriptions.  Can your business or nonprofit organization afford an unplanned hike in Unemployment Insurance premiums, or worse:  an unplanned discrimination lawsuit settlement totaling thousands of dollars?

Job descriptions on the surface may be great sleep aids, but in this HR geek's reckoning, compliant and current job descriptions are money in the bank.  And that should help any business leader sleep well at night.

The Floods of Irene Bring Out the Best in This Team (Tribe) of Employees

I saw my friend and Entrepreneur Mentor at church today.  He had called me the Tuesday night after the 500-year flood of the Mohawk River retreated back to its banks from its historic trek to Erie Boulevard in downtown Schenectady and the building where his company of 20+ years is located.  He was facing possible relocation to drier temporary quarters (and potential suspension of business operations), as he did not yet know how extensive the damage was to the building where his company leased space.  He was concerned about his employees, and he called me for a reality check.

Dear Mentor had good news to report today as well as best-practice tidings of how his Employee Team rallied to support him and the business that supported all of their families. 

When it became clear that Hurricane / Tropical Storm Irene was going to cause epic flooding in downtown Schenectady, Dear Mentor called all of his employees after the storm subsided to ask their assistance in moving company-critical assets to safer ground before the Mohawk River reached and exceeded its flood stage.  It was Sunday, and it had not been a great day off at home for anyone, thanks to the effects of Irene.

Every member of Dear Mentor's Employee Team showed up that Sunday to help move the business assets, and they brought reinforcements:  some of them brought their adult children and friends to help as well.  They all worked until midnight that Sunday.  At midnight, his team wished him luck.  At that juncture, no one knew if Dear Mentor's business would be there after the flood.

After the State of Emergency was lifted in downtown Schenectady, Dear Mentor and his team were allowed back into their building to assess the damage.   The good news was that they didn't have to move the business out of the building; the challenging news was that the business space was full of mud and without power.

The next day, the Employee Team again demonstrated their resiliency and engagement under the adversity presented by mud and a lack of electricity:  they voluntarily brought their personal generators and power washers from their respective homes, and they got to work.  Dear Mentor was not only grateful for their generosity, but inspired by the joyful collaboration.  "It's not very often I get to witness these men enjoy the opportunity to let their inner boys come out and play as they used the power washers to get the mud out of the building," Dear Mentor remarked, his eyes sparkling through noticeable fatigue. 

As Dear Mentor shared his story, I knew it was his leadership and commitment that created the space for his Employee Team to rally and give of themselves to preserve their shared livelihood:  this in turn allowed the entire Employee Team to demonstrate the leadership stuff they are truly made of when faced with extreme adversity.

You can't get nuggets like this from an employee engagement survey.

More importantly (and thankfully), it was not a familial vibe:  Dear Mentor is not their dad, but their Chief.  Dear Mentor and his Employee Team are an interdependent tribe of business warriors, and they demonstrated their commitment, prowess, flexibility, personal investment and generosity in one of the worst situations a CEO (or a tribal leader) can face.

Now that's a tribe where I'd be honored to be counted as one of their warriors.

Can't Fill That Job? What is "The Help" Saying About You?

In the 1960's setting of the best-selling book and movie The Help, the reputation management channels were limited, but effective:

• In-person social networks that existed within the two distinct groups in the story:  the white (mostly) segregationist employers and the African-American domestic employees;
• Hard-copy newsletters;
• The telephone;
• And of course, the book, the-story-within-the-story, The Help.

Now as this movie trailer intimates (without giving too much away), the white segregationist Hilly clearly was not an employer-of-choice in Jackson, Mississippi:

As of September 2011, there are exponentially many more available reputation management channels available to talented candidates:  LinkedIn, Twitter and Google are merely the tip of the reputation management channel iceberg. 

And just as you as the CEO / Hiring Authority are using LinkedIn and other reputation management channels to perform research checks on just how talented / savvy your candidates are (or are not), they are performing the same reputation checks on:

• You as the CEO; 
• Your leadership team; 
• How you treat your customers; 
• How you conduct yourselves from a values standpoint;
• What the press says about you, good and bad;
• What your organization's long-range value proposition is;
• And most importantly, how you treat your employees.

Savvy candidates, among other methods, can do a simple search on LinkedIn to find your current employees in their own networks, virtual or in-person.  And they're performing reference checks on you. How do you and your organization hold up?  Do you know?

A sure sign to me as a recruiter that an organization is in trouble in any of the above areas is how many applications I receive from the current employees of an organization.  I can also confirm my concern by the rate of churn -- employee departures and new hires within a short period of time -- at a particular organization, also thanks to LinkedIn.  Is that the reputation you want to convey?

Hiring is beginning to pick up in certain markets, and SmAlbany is one of them.  The competition for talented candidates is beginning to splinter the good fishing of the candidate barrel that this last recession had created.

Having a hard time finding talented candidates to fill your positions?  Are you listening to the chatter about you and your organization currently buzzing along the multiple reputation management channels?  Are you coming across as Hilly, or as Skeeter?

Have U Prufed Yr LinkedIn Profile to Suport Yr Sucess??

Gentle readers:

I know, it's annoying.  The English Major is at it again.  I'm reading a lot of your LinkedIn profiles and finding typos / errors.

Frankly, this is much worse than finding these typos / errors in your job applications:  please read my advice to you on this front in my earlier post, Thank You Fer Teh Job Oppertunity.  As a recruiter and a hiring authority, the audience for your errors as a job applicant is just me, theoretically.  The advice, however, is universal to all of your reputation management, online or not.

On your LinkedIn profile:  well, it's the entire online community worldwide, viewing your handiwork (or lack thereof) real-time on their Droids, iPads, and related hardware.  It's like a picture posted of you with clumps of spinach in your teeth, in full view of your potential customers / employers.  Hopefully you already know that your LinkedIn profile, unless you've changed your LinkedIn settings, shows up in Google among other search engine results when a hiring authority / potential customer conducts a simple Google check on you. 

So potential decision-makers in Melbourne (and everywhere else) are chuckling ruefully at your lack of precision and attention to detail, and clicking on the next LinkedIn profile in their search results for a vendor, a consultant, a Ruby-On-Rails Developer, an Online Reputation Manager, or a Controller.

And sadly, not calling you for potential career and business opportunities.

Now, intentional misspellings have been used since advertising has existed.  One of my favorite local examples is the beloved ice cream joint, Kurver Kreme.

The LinkedIn examples I've seen recently are clearly not intentional; and in fact, are actually in (ouch) current LinkedIn profile headlines (censored to protect the careless):

• Business Developement Manager at xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx  (a U.S. profile, FYI)

• Marketing anager at xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx

• Human Resoruce Manager at xxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx

• Here's a doozy - not just one but multiple misspellings at the top of this person's LinkedIn profile:

            HR Manger at xxxx xxxxxxxx

Xxxxxx xxxxxx  | Human Resources

328 connections

Current:

HR Manger at xxxx xxxxxxx

Past:

HR Buisness partner at xxxx xxxxxx

Manger at  xxxxxxx

                  Recruitment Manger at xxxx xxxxx

Now I know that after experiencing both an earthquake and a hurricane within the same week, we all need a little Christmas, right this very minute, with the serene visualization of a manger scene.  But please:  not in your LinkedIn profile, unintentionally!

By the way:  by entering misspelled words into the powerful LinkedIn search engine, I was able to generate a list of nearly one million LinkedIn users with potential misspellings in their LinkedIn profiles.  Yikes!

So, gentle readers:  get thee to Merriam-Webster Online and a trusted editing buddy and fix your LinkedIn profile typos, fast, to best support your online reputation as well your ongoing success.

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.

When the Workplace Student is Ready, The Teacher May Be An A**hole

"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."


"When the workplace student is ready, the teacher who appears may be an asshole."

                                                                               
Guess which quote is from Queens, NY, like me?

The other source is Buddha, of course.

I'd like to thank Bob Sutton (author of the great workplace tome, The No-Asshole Rule) for helping me to express myself more authentically as a professional.  As Sutton asserts in his book and elsewhere, the word "jerk" doesn't quite capture the visceral experience of working with an asshole.

But what the hell do I mean?

That the assholes you encounter in the workplace are, more often than not, the teachers / gurus in your path to career excellence and success.

That the asshole who tries to demean you publicly in front of a large meeting can be a test of your belief in your talent, developing your resilency, diplomacy and leadership:  if you Keep Calm and Carry On, there's very little an asshole can latch on to, and they more often then not will, eventually, move on.  If they don't move on, you may need to move on:  only you know the limits of your stress tolerance and the standards for the quality of the work life you envision.

That the asshole who once tried to demean you may become your subordinate, and you can coach them towards compassion:  and if that fails to work, you can make them available to industry.  Sometimes time and consequences heal assholes, sometimes not.

That the asshole who tries to keep you out of the loop as punishment or power play, can be a test of how you can stay centered, continually discover your empathy for them and keep them completely in the loop in return.

That the asshole who gossips about and bad-mouths you in an attempt to destroy your reputation is actually extremely hurt and wounded themselves, and that their venom usually backfires into their own public substandard  performance review.  And that the compassion (and even love) you discover and display for the asshole can heal the world, one asshole at a time.

That the asshole who tries to bait you into a conflict to embarrass you publicly teaches you to more carefully choose your battles (e.g., how important is it) and to stand up factually, professional and functionally when it is a conflict worthy of your time, attention and talent.

That when the asshole has nothing left in their arsenal to hurt you, then they may be ready for a conversation where you are the teacher and they are the student (if they're ready and willing to listen).  Time can sometimes be the universal asshole-healer.

For as I learned as a diversity trainer and as a mediator:  meet ignorance with compassion; be prepared to be the teacher of inclusion; and keep your courage up to discover the real needs under the yelling of the asshole. 

Oh, and the most important learning of all:  don't let the assholes get you down at work; and don't become an asshole yourself to survive.

In that way, you are not only the eternal student of career success, but also the advocate of peace at work:  one asshole learning-opportunity at a time.

Work Friends Are Risky Rungs on the Career Ladder

"There are no such things as friends at work," my friend Barry declared to me one day a number of years ago, coaching me on a (now) minor work dilemma.  A mutual colleague at work, who I assumed was a friend of several years based on our warm sharings together about our child-rearing experiences, had just pulled a maneuver on me worthy of a cannibal cousin of the Borgia clan.  Frankly, and annoyingly, my feelings were hurt.

I uncharacteristically did not respond immediately, processing the paradox of his statement and a bit taken aback.  As we were both Logistics professionals, I responded logically.  "So we're not friends," I replied, a bit puzzled.   "No,"  Barry reiterated.

I started chuckling:  it worked, I snapped out of my moping.  "We eat lunch together at least twice a week; we travel together at least twice a month, and we hang out together voluntarily on non-work-related time.  So we're not friends?"  Barry shook his head, grinning.  "It's business, not personal," he said.

I rolled my eyes.  Here we go, about to take another trip to the Gender Gap.  Barry, however, would not let me off the hook.  "Here's the deal," he continued. "The bottom line is that results count.  We're here to produce, not to play.  You know that as well,  if not better, than I do."  I nodded, and Barry continued.  "That guy's always been an asshole when it comes to getting his work done.  He just needed to get work done, and it happened to be in your area, so it was your turn.  Plain and simple."

I thought for another minute about Barry's assessment.  "But you and I get our work done:  we knock heads occasionally, but the net is that we pull our results, have fun and we're not assholes to each other," I asserted.

"True," Barry agreed.  "It makes our work together more productive and pleasant.  But when the opposite happens, I accept it and move on.  I get the majority of support from my family and friends outside of work.  Now, I may have met some of my great friends at work:  however, it always better when I don't work with them."  Seeing me uncharacteristically quiet and pensive, Barry drove his point home. "As another example, I accept the fact that, while you and I are friends at work, I also know that you, as the HR Director, may someday be in a position to lay me off if our business starts tanking."  He grinned at me again.  "It's part of your job:  it's business, not personal.  The work comes first."

"So you do understand that, especially in my line of work, friendships are always a risk," I responded.  "I appreciate your feedback."  I grinned back at him.  "I'm still willing to take the risk."

Barry rose from his desk chair and put on his coat.  "Great, I'm done.  All this talking has made me hungry.  Let's go grab some lunch."