LOOKING BACK HOME: RE-RECRUITING TALENT

"And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you,
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles its a very, very
Mad world"

Tears for Fears - Mad World

  I was thinking how mad the world turns when we are heading nowhere. Come on... I know it sounds lame but I'll get to a point, I promise :)

  As I was saying, everybody needs a direction to head on and this is something sometimes difficult to manage when you are leading a team. Some of the main responsibilities of a leader towards his teammates is to handle this individual development. But this is easy to say, now, how we can deal with this? First amendment of employee development: Everybody likes to feel special.

1. Assessment: Schedule a calendar in which you need to talk to your reports individually at least once in a month. Managing means having your ear ready to anything that could lead you to a better guidance with your teammates. To get the most productivity on your team you need to approach every member one to one first, make sure they are on the best possible role to help the group.

HR has to provide with specifically designed (together with managers) development plans towards a particular and measurable model of competencies. Define the necessary competencies by task, not only by role (this is a common error, in order to get the most from a team you need to go to specifics). Only then you will be able to identify the bias and develop the tools to face this better.

2. Open Cross-team Re-Recruitment Processes: Why not democratise the progress of your best talent? Make the measurements collective and accessible to all members of a group. Bring back the 360º's. Make a culture on sharing best practices collectively.

I'm not saying anything new if I mention the sense of belonging is probably one of the most important engines of motivation any human being can have. Make all your team a participant of a process, specially when this internal promotion stays inside a particular working team. This will transgress the expected vertical secrecy through your company and will help building community feeling.

3. Founding Trust: As you can read in one of my previous posts, one of the most common causes of leaving the work is for trust between employee and company. When this divorce occurs, oh boy... Friedrick Nietzche said once “I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you”. 

If you re-recruit, if you promote your people instead of finding the resource outside, you will grow instant trust among everybody. But be careful, even though it is not your fav one, you need to base your recruitment process on pure meritocracy. Make objectivity and logic flourish in your company. Promote only the bests, but promote them, look what's inside before looking outside. This will help create a culture of competition and self-improvement.

4. Grow Culture of Talent: Top Performers need excitement. They need to feel they are doing the best they can in the best place possible. Use your own talent development to convince others to embrace the culture of performance. 

5. Be the first to offer: You might not bear in mind that your best employees are being contacted by other companies several times a week. If you offer first the odds are high talent will stay in your company because of inertia.

6. Get out the rut: An employee excitement cycle is short. It's even shorter if this one is a top performer. Your talent behaves like the overexcited infant, once the sugar rush ends the kid crashes anyplace. Take control of this variable, promote the activity. 

  Some parts of this post were inspired by Dr. John Sullivan's (The Michael Jordan of Recruitment) article in TLNT.

Written listening to "Tears for Fears - The Hurting" album (Rate:8,5/10)

HR PEOPLE, THE EMPTY HEADED PLAGUE

  Here is an article, from some time ago, everyone interested in the HR field must read. Come on. Go ahead, I'll wait.

  Let me choose for you some inspiring soundtrack to ease your read.

  You're done, right? How does it feel to be hated with such conviction? I love this article. Everytime I find someone that works in HR field and should be rewarded with Best Classic Corporate Parasite Of The Year award I deliver this wonderful piece of genuine hate straight to his inbox.

  Check out the following comic strip that proves the same point but with Scott Adam's genius.

  When I started interesting myself on HR field this was the reality to face, lots of accommodated personnel of corporations all around, with no ambition and not a single interest in making themselves useful inside a company in a career wide range of time.

  We have to thank to these HR fathers that built this poor reputation, for letting us new flesh such a virgin playground to start making a real impact and change things for once and for all.

  So once we have stopped whining. How do we start making ourselves, HR Specialists, useful in today's corporations? Well, first of all being experts on getting the most from people.

  I recently read a great report on what CEO's expect from HR heads today. This are some of the ideas I found interesting reading the text and could be used as a guide to start developing ourselves to serve this needs.

1. Get to know how to get more productivity from fewer workforce. Learn group dynamics, how to manage diversity, embrace it and how to get the most from it. Corporations today need to improve their productivity, be creative promoting staff's own creativity to be better and faster.

2. Leaders need to understand how their teams can help organisations to succeed. HR heads can help them with strategies to inspire their teams, coach the leaders on their abilities to lead and inspire better.

3. The Head of HR need to have interpersonal saavy: High emotional intelligence, a superb perceptiveness about people and good communication skills. This is what CEO's expect from the head of HR and this is what the head of HR needs to deliver.

4. Help building a trustworthy and fearless feedback channel throughout the entire organisation, indistinct to the hierarchy. Constructive feedback move things forward. Always. No matter where it comes from.

5. Facilitate, serve as a bridge of clarification for the senior management team and the entire corporation. 

6. Talent Care. "Not only may the head of HR be responsible for recruitment into the team; he or she may also act as troubleshooter or henchman, removing underperforming or recalcitrant individuals, thereby preventing team dysfunction". Touché.

7. Take initiative. Days of the empty headed HR corporate parasites must be left completely over.

Written listening to "Framework - Skeleton" album (Rate:9/10)