What I am learning about Staffing

I have been working for a staffing firm for the last several months in a sales and business development role.  For a career finance ops guy like me, this has been a tremendous learning opportunity.  In my past work I was assailed by collection agency sales people (sometimes 20 calls a day).  This colored my opinion of sales people.  I had no shortage of adjectives to describe some of these people.  In what is a supreme irony to me, I am now the person I loathed in my former job.

What I have learned so far:

1. There is a lot of sales strategy information to choose from and some of it is practically helpful.  The most important lesson I have learned so far is to be myself.  
2. It is true that there are a lot of sales people who are narcissistic, selfish and manipulative, but there are equally as many of these type of people in other professions and job positions.  It is not the job that makes a person. 
3. I am most successful and happy in a role like this when I remember why I am doing it.  If it is only for the money then I look like the  narcissistic person I loathe.
4. Shut up and listen!  It has been easier for me to remember this from  my own experience as a target client than I thought it would be.  
5. Be patient.  Relationships are fundamental and essential to the sales process.

Death Lessons

Over the last 14 months our family has endured the death of three family members; a parent and two siblings. Despite the temptation to assume such experiences should best be left out of work related discussions there are some very important lessons we learned that are quite appropriate for any work situation.

A death is in essence a crisis. It is a sudden event that despite our best attempts to prepare for it comes upon us when we are not expecting or ready for it. In the case of my father’s death, we knew that it would come, but we had no idea it would come so fast, that more deaths would follow and that there would be so many practical details to attend to. What we accomplished as a family was amazing in retrospect and can be attributed to a couple of key skills.

Communication:

From the outset, we knew there would be a lot of emotion involved in the numerous decisions we would have to make and we did not have the luxury of time to discuss and come to consensus on everything. Each of us had to take pieces of this complex process research and make a decision on what was best. We were successful because we agreed from the outset that we would not second guess each other, and that in the event someone did the decision maker had a metaphorical FU! Button they could push if it happened. Crass? Maybe, but it helped introduce some levity into a very stressful situation. (More about this later)

Teamwork:

We recognized immediately that there was no way any one person could do everything, so we would have to work together to get this done. In families this can be very complicated as the old grudges and recriminations can make cooperation difficult. We were not immune to this risk, but the team work was successful because of the next two critical skills.

Clearly Understood Goals:

We were only able to accomplish everything because in this case we knew we had a lot of practical details to accomplish very little time to do it in and we all decided that our family relationship was not worth sacrificing for the process. Yes, there were seemingly insurmountable tasks that had to be completed but no one forgot why we were doing it and never hesitated to ask for help.

Attitude:

This is quite frankly the most essential to success on any project. As strange as it might seem, a sense of humor was one of the most important skills necessary for us to be successful. In a situation like this it is so easy to let the stress and gravity of the situation narrow a person’s vision. We had to develop tools as a family to keep the individuals from going into unproductive places; we did that with humor but also by individually making the conscious decision to remember that this was not some sort of contest to see who could be the biggest hero or the most thoughtful or caring. We also gave each other the benefit of the doubt when it came to motivations and actions. I will not say that every aspect of this experience went smoothly, but when we did encounter an issue, attitude was the only thing that made it possible to solve it.

Anyone who has gone through an experience like this will tell you that it changes everyone involved. In the end each individual determines how it will change them by deciding how they are going to participates in the process. That individual decision has an enormous affect on the outcome.

Action-Intention-Trust

I saw a recent post about a company who's boss is demanding the ability to access and read all employee e-mail. It sparked a lively discussion about privacy, control, trust and morale.

The reality is that all correspondence on the company's e-mail system is admissible in court. This means that all the mail can be used in the discovery process in a court case. I have personally had to fend off questions from plaintiff's attorneys while on the witness stand and it can be embarrassing and expensive for the company if employees are not careful in their email correspondence. A good rule to live by: Don't write anything in e-mail you would not want your Mom to see in the paper the next day.

In this particular case the boss (being the owner) sees it as his right to have access to this. Although he does in fact have that "right" he must be careful not to completely ruin any spirit of trust, cooperation or creativity that will likely be crushed when employees find out he has been clandestinely reading this mail.

As the boss, if you are going to do this you need to tell people you are doing it and why you feel it is necessary. If your concerns is company liability there are much more effective ways to manage this. Begin with developing a policy that makes clear why it is important to be careful while writing e-mail. If you are trying to keep a pulse on the employees it will not be effective when they find out you are reading their e-mail. If it is a control issue the victory will be pyrrhic. You may have won the battle for the illusion of control but you will have lost all the support and trust of the employees.

My youngest son just completed the project requirement to earn his Eagle Scout rank. I mention it not because I am very proud of him ( although I am) but precisely because the project requirement is one of the most important life skills a person can learn. For those unfamiliar with the requirement, the scout is required to conceive, plan, finance and direct (not do)the work on a project. The project must be writen up, proposed and approved by the beneficiary as well as Boy Scout district representatives. All three of my sons have done this, all of their projects were different and all had different specific challenges. However, I think the lessons they learned are universal and essential for anyone no matter what career they plan to have.

1. Planning (although sometimes tedious) is the foundation and most important aspect of any project.
2. Flexibility is critical in the implementation phase because no matter how detailed the plan, there will be unanticipated events that will require plan revision.
3. Clear communication is difficult but essential as a project leader leading others. Although it is tempting (in the name of efficiency) to do the work yourself, the scope and time constraints of a project often make it impossible and if you give in to the temptation to do the work yourself, you will anger or alienate the team and likely not end up with the result you envisioned in the time frame allotted.

When you ask an Eagle Scout what they would do differently on their project it inevitably ends up being something associated with the above list. If you conducted a similar survey with project managers, I suspect their process improvement suggestions would fall into the same categories.

All the tools in the world will not make a project successful if these elementary aspects are not understood and properly executed.

Entrepeneurial thought for the day

If you think your idea is too small to be lucrative remember this: Merv Griffin wrote the theme for Jeopardy. It was initially 14 seconds long, so he made it 30 second long by changing the key and playing it again; just enough time for contestants to finalize their answers.

It is estimated that the royalties for his efforts exceed 70 million dollars.

Reference: May-June Edition of Mental Floss

Wishful Thinking-Perfect Storm

Earl Klugh put out a recording in the 80s called Wishful Thinking. If you are a fan of light Jazz it is really worth a listen. The title track of that recording has been in my head all morning. I just read an article in Compliance Week about the current state of internal fraud and what is surprising is that despite survey numbers that indicate a steady increase in employee fraud (embezzlement etc.) companies have no plans to increase their efforts to monitor or fight fraud. It invites another less pleasant image. The scene in the Movie "The Perfect Storm" where a wave (bigger than anything ever encountered in reality) washes over the boat in the storm.

It is unfortunate, because as a fraud examiner the best way I know to erode my own credibility is to try and scare people into doing audits. Worse, that it should come as a surprise to anyone that fraud would rise in a down economy.

I hope you have a survival suit.

Chosing

When I was working for a large company, we all tried our best to abide by the laws regulating hiring decisions. This is of course, the right thing to do. When we were in the exciting activities of a start up I learned some valuable lessons about how tricky it really was to find the right people for the jobs I was trying to fill. On Saturday, as I was leaving the field of the first soccer game of the season in the over 30 league I have played in for (perhaps too long), it became very clear why it is so hard to be objective in the hiring process.

We were beaten very soundly by the apposing team. It was not surprising because it was quite clear what the result would be. We were playing a team with very good skill, but more importantly, a team that was quite well acquainted and comfortable playing together. Although the individual skills displayed by many of the new players on our team were impressive, most of us had not played together as a team, so the game for us was more an exercise in learning to communicate and play as a team.

The way a business operates is really no different. In order for it to compete successfully, the people and working relationships have to be solid and in fact are of primary importance. This is not to say that skills are irrelevant but they are clearly not primary. In the case of my soccer team we are of an age that training will be subject to the law of dimishing returns, but the reality is that in a business a person can always be trained. The point is that no amount of training will make a business successful if the team does not share a common goal, mutual respect and an ability to trust one another and effectively communicate.

Some would argue that being preferential in the hiring process is unfair (and it can be illegal in some instances) but if we are all honest about it, we know why it is done. If we want to be successful as a team in anything, we have to chose people we know well and can trust in order to be as competitive, effective and efficient as possible as quickly as possible.

If a business is committed to the fair hiring practices that have been established, then it has to acknowledge that with that commitment comes some risk of not being as competitive, efficient in the short term (and in some instances failure). Therefore, it cannot skimp on the activities that ensure a new or growing team has a clearly defined objective, is communicating clearly and is building trust. Without these foundational elements the result will likely be much like my team's outcome Saturday. I find it interesting that this principle is obvious to everyone, but many will acknowledge that it does not happen in their work world.

The season is young for us. It will be interesting to see if we decide to build the foundation necessary for success. What kind of team are you on?