Five signs the organization will do just fine without you

There are plenty of mistakes we make managing and navigating our careers. Some are kind of obvious, and easily avoided with just a smidge of common sense (like don't park in the bosses' reserved parking space). Others are a little more complex, more subtle, and usually involve sorting out more nebulous concepts like who the office's hidden influencers are or what projects offer just the right balance of exposure, likelihood of success, and work you actually know how to do.

But possibly the most significant mistake we make in personal career management is that we overestimate our relative value and importance to the organization, or said differently, we take on a "there is no way they can get rid of me" kind of mentality. 

Of course they can get rid of you. In fact, it is usually shocking just how easy it is for the organization to move on after you are gone. But in case you are still deluding yourself as to your essentialness, here are a few tips that you can use to check yourself. How can you be sure the organization will do just fine without you? 

1. You've been there fewer than 2 years - It took you 3 months to figure out where to park your car, to find the cafeteria, and to sort out the office dress code. Then it took 6 months to learn all of the corporate acronyms. Then you (sort of) got down to learning just exactly what it is you were supposed to be doing. So maybe that took another 3 months. Face it, you have been only marginally productive since this March. If you were gone tomorrow, it would not grind the wheels of progress down to a halt. No one hardly knows you are even there.

2. Your job has a Roman Numeral in the title - Maybe you are a Financial Analyst II or a Senior Marketing Planner III. Either way, the mere presence of a Roman Numeral in your title suggests that there are plenty of folks ready to step up a Roman Numeral into your job. In fact, even the most famous Roman Numeral job, Pope, is not immune to this reality. A week after Pope Innocent IV calls it a career, there is a Pope Dominic III ready to step in.

3. You never get called or texted by work after 5:30PM during the week and NEVER on the weekend - In this age of constant connectivity and decreased demarcation between work and not work, if you are never being called upon or contacted after hours or on the weekend or even when you are on vacation that is probably a sign that you are not as important as you might reckon. 

4. Your 'war stories' no longer have any practical value, (but they might still be funny) - If your 'back in the day' tales start to lose any connection to both the reality of current market conditions or the sensibilities of your (probably younger) colleagues, then it could be time for some self-examination. After a while, these stories start to move from 'the wisdom of experience' to 'the insane ramblings of a crazy person.' When does that line get crossed? Hard to say, but once on the other side, it is pretty much a done deal that you are not coming back. 

5. You can explain what you do to a stranger in less than 60 seconds - The depth, breadth, and complexity of what you do should not be able to be summarized in the time it takes to microwave some Top Ramen. If what you do can be distilled into such a compact package then it stands to reason it would not be hard or expensive to train up the next guy to step in for you once you are gone. 

The truth is we all are replaceable. All of us. Bill Gates doesn't run Microsoft any longer. Steve Jobs passed away, and Apple still prints money. Steve Perry of Journey was replaced by some guy that the band found on YouTube.

The organization will be just fine without you. That doesn't mean you didn't do a great job and were respected and valued.

It just means that the time comes for everyone.

WEBINAR: 5 Ways To Build a Recruiting Function Your CEO Will Love

Summer is a great time to kick back, take it a little bit easier around the office, and spend at least half your time plotting how you are going to (plausibly), skip out of work on the next 12 Friday afternoons in order to get a head start on some sweet beach action.

Or, it is a great time to take advantage of the slower pace to really dig deep into some important or problematic part of your business and take the time to study, design, and implement some improvements so that when the C-suite gets back engaged around Labor Day the one thing they will notice will be how you 'fixed' things over the summer.

So maybe your dilemma is in Recruiting. Maybe you are having a hard time finding and attacting the right candidates, and even when you do, the team isn't strong enough on the close to cement the deal.

Well, never fear, the gang at Fistful of Talent is here to help you get a reset via our roadmap for building a high performing Talent Acquisition/Recruiting function. Join FOT's Kris Dunn and RJ Morris for our FREE June webinar (sponsored by the recruiting experts at CareerBuilder) on June 24th at 2pm Eastern (1pm Central) entitled, Moving Past Smile and Dial: 5 Ways to Build a Recruiting Function Your CEO Will Love, and they will hit you with the following roadmap to help you build the perfect recruiting machine.

1. The Front End: There's never been more competition for the attention of candidates, so you've got to look GOOD.  We'll help you understand the value of front-end items like a robust Careers Site, Talent Networks, Job Descriptions that don't put people to sleep, and ATS messaging designed to make people smile---not cringe.  We'll also give you a roadmap for how to use Social Media in a way that makes candidates feel like your company gets it.

2. The Back End: The worst enemy of any recruiting function is disorganization, so we'll cover critical elements of your back office like ATS functionality, the mission critical nature of having your own searchable candidate database as a strategic advantage, automated job distribution/postings and more.  Your recruiting function is only as good as your back end, so we'll help you understand how to build it out.

3. Building Your Recruiting Strategy: How many recruiters do you need?  How do you calculate your investment in recruiting?  What should that investment be?  How do you measure the effectiveness of your Recruitment Marketing Spend?   Good questions. We've got the answers in this strategy section.

4. Creating a Coaching Culture in Recruiting and Measuring Your Success: You can do all of the things listed above well, but if you don't actively coach your recruiters, it probably won't matter.  We'll give you some benchmarks for recruiter performance goals and walk you through how successful recruiting managers treat recruiters like salespeople – ultimately wanting filled positions but coaching up and down the recruiting funnel/

Whether you're a Recruiting/HR Leader looking to remodel your recruiting function or an up and coming recruiter looking to understand the strategic side of the recruiting business, join FOT for Moving Past Smile and Dial: 5 Ways to Build a Recruiting Function Your CEO Will Love on June 24th at 2pm Eastern (1pm Central) to get ramped up.  As a bonus, we'll also provide a FOT Checklist – 10 Things To Do Today to Maximize Your Ability to Attract Great Talent – to all who register.  This checklist is a great tool to cross off what you've already done well, then use it as an avenue to show what you're missing when asking for more budget for your recruiting function.

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DINOSAUR ALERT: When the new leader doesn't 'Get' social media

You know what says 'I am pretty much out of step with most of the major developments and trends of the last decade or so?"

A quote like this:

I don't like social media. I don’t like it at all. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t do it, I don’t use it, I really don’t want anybody to know where I’m at all the time or what I’m eating.

That might be a perfectly reasonable and harmless opinion if it was coming from say, your Grandma, or if it was uttered by someone 5 or 7 years ago when it still was not totally clear that Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram and Twitter would scale to the levels that back then would have seemed impossible to comprehend.

And in business and marketing that might be an acceptable position on social media from someone buried in the innards of the organization, with no external-facing role or responsibility, and limited ability to influence others on social networks. I would still probably argue that most professionals can extract value and work on personal/professional development goals using social media as a tool, but in a big picture sense if the assistant accounting manager doesn't believe in Twitter or LinkedIn, that really is not that big a deal for the organization.

But the above block quote wasn't taken from a recent conversation with Grandma, or from an article in Time Magazine in 2006, or even from some late night TV show random 'person on the street' skit. No, this quote was from the new Head Coach National Football League club the San Francisco 49ers, a Mr. Jim Tomsula. The new head coach doesn't 'get' social media, doesn't participate, and quite frankly can't understand why any of the rest of us do either.

And this might not be a big deal, at least taken at face value, in the context of a football coach. After all, NFL head coaches are notorious lunatics workaholics, often spending 80 - 100 hours a week on the job, watching film, preparing game plans, and running practices. When you work crazy hours under crazy pressure like that, who has time to worry about Twitter and Instagram and the like? Cerainly not Jim Tomsula.

But I think it is kind of a big deal, when a new, high-profile leader in the organization like Tomsula expresses those kinds of dinosaur-like opinions about social media. Sure, he, or any other prominent organizational leader doesn't really have to be some kind of Twitter personality, but in 2015, they need to at least acknowledge and hopefully understand something about the business importance of social media. And as a leader of people, many are very active on social media, (the 49er players, mainly), Tomsula has to be able to take his head out of the sand and at least attempt to relate to these players and understand their use of social media from their perspective. 

And lastly, when a leader like this expresses these kinds of backwards opinions it begs the question of whether or not they will be open to any kinds of newer, innovative approaches to business, leadership, and their specifc industry. A huge shift in professional sports management over the last 20 years has been the dramatic rise in importance of advanced statistics and analytics for measuring both player performance and in the creationof game plans and strategies.

Will this modern and new approach be embraced by a leader like Tomsula? Or will he not 'get' that either, and wonder why anyone would waste their time running regression analysis on last week's play selections instead of monitoring the players push around the blocking sled for the 897th time.

A leader not 'getting' social media is fine. Maybe. But what it might say about the leader's ability to 'get', anything not exactly in line with their view of the world is more troubling still.

Have a great week!

CHART OF THE DAY: More open jobs today than since... well, since ever

Not much to say about this data as I think it is more or less is self-explanatory.

Courtesy of our friends at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and powered by the St. Louis Fed's awesome 'Fred' data service, take a look at the last 15 years or so of data on Total Job Openings in the US.

A quick glance at the data tells us what we need to know: Job opening as of the end of April 2015 were about 5.4 million, and are at the greatest level in the history of this data set, surpassing the previous high mark in January 2001.

There's lots and lots of opportunity out there. And I will bet lots of said opportunities are not the ones that like to hassle their opportunity holders about unfiled time sheets, and sick leave accruals, and bereavement leave, and having to 'check in' when they are out on vacation. 

The labor market continues to get tighter. People have more options. And the organizations that are slow to realize this will probably, eventually regret their ignorance or arrogance.

Have a great weekend!

PODCAST - #HRHappyHour 215 - Operation Rob Lowe

HR Happy Hour 215 - Operation Rob Lowe

Recorded Wednesday June 10, 2015 at the Globoforce WorkHuman Conference

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

LISTEN HERE

This week on the show Steve and Trish recorded the HR Happy Hour Show live at the first ever Globoforce WorkHuman Conference in Orlando, Florida. The event was definitely fun, definitely interesting, and definitely different, as it was much less about any specific technology but rather about work, workplaces and people's relationships with work and their colleagues.

From Improv sessions, to TED-style talks, to what was a (surprisingly to me anyway), really engaging and energetic keynote from actor Rob Lowe - this event left Steve and Trish with plenty to discuss. 

So tune in to the show to hear Steve accuse IBM of stealing his 'Culture-Strategy-Talent Triangle' concept, Trish then agree with Steve and then reverse the heat and disagree with him at the end, and what Rob Lowe had to say about the secret to building great work teams. Hint: It was more about 'Talent' than culture or strategy.

You can listen to the show on the show page HERE, or using the widget player below:

Check Out Business Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Steve Boese Trish McFarlane on BlogTalkRadio

 

And of course you can listen to and subscribe to the HR Happy Hour Show on iTunes, or via your favorite podcast app. Just search for 'HR Happy Hour' to download and subscribe to the show and you will never miss a new episode.

This was a fun show and a fun event. Many thanks to the folks at Globoforce for having us at the event and definitely check out something from the Rob Lowe filmography this weekend.