I don't want to work with companies, I want to work with people

The hard thing about blogging sometimes is that for various and practical reasons you often can't write about stuff that actually happens in your actual life, personal or professional. Sometimes you have to change names, change details of a story, obscure some elements that might not be terribly important to the overall point, but at least give you some plausible deniability, (and protection as well, for the most part, most bloggers are not independently wealthy, i.e. we still need to make a living).

That disclaimer serves two purposes really; one, as an acknowledgement and reminder that there have been plenty of really interesting and potentially really very good posts that I and lots of other HR/workplace type bloggers have to quash in the interests of personal protection/employability. And two, as a preface to what I wanted to really write about, (getting to that next, I promise), which is based on some actual events with real people, but with the specific names left out and some details slightly changed. Ok, here we go...

One of the interesting aspects of the transforming nature of work and workers from corporate lifers into more entrepreneurial, flexible, contingent, and more or less free agents (who may affiliate with a company for a time for mutual benefit), is that customer/partner loyalty is now much more often tied to people and not organizations. Said a little differently, buyers and potential business partners are more and more drawn to the actual people involved in the project or transaction, and not so much, (if at all), their current, (and likely temporary) corporate affiliation.

The specific circumstances that caused me to think about happened last week, in two separate discussions I had with some HR industry folks. Both of these were concerning projects and initiatives where I had been working with, or at least working on collaborating with specific individuals that was interested in working with again. And in both cases, as these potential initiatives became socialized inside the corporate meeting rooms of the organizations where these folks are aligned, the geometry of the deals began to alter.

Suddenly, more (or different) folks needed to be involved. Now more higher-ups from these organizations had to have their opinion heard, (even when I had not talked with any of them previously). There was at least some reluctance in one of the cases by management to 'allow' their person to work with me on the project, as they wanted to have their other, preferred person, (who I did not ask for), leading the effort.

As more professionals see themselves as free agents, who affiliate with companies in more fluid, shorter, and transitory arrangements while simultaneously building their personal networks, professional portfolios, and reputations independent of any corporate overseer, these kinds of tensions will only increase. In the examples I cited above, I was led to and wanted to collaborate with specific individuals based on past experiences (prior to them arriving at their current roles), and personal conviction in these individual's ability and competence. Quite frankly, their current corporate affiliation does not really matter. At least to me.

But it does matter, naturally, to the folks that are the executives at these places, whose job it is to build, protect, strengthen, and make more valuable their company brands. But this will be increasingly more challenging, in many relationship-driven kinds of businesses anyway, when the company brand is really only comprised of a loose affiliation of individual brands, who are going to move in and out of the company umbrella more or less on-demand, and who have many more outside connections and relationships than in the past.

This 'free agent nation', this new world that is sometimes referred to as the 'Uber-ification' of work where most workers are essentially carving out their own personal careers, less dependent on organizational support (and protection) than before is one that puts not only these workers under more pressure than before, as they shoulder more personal risk than ever, but it also will stress their company brand owners as well. I don't think my perspective as a potential partner/customer is all that unique; I am interested in collaborating with the best people I can, and often, (and maybe soon always), I am not that interested in their 'official' titles or what their current company leadership believes how I should interact and engage with them. As sometimes I like to say, that is a 'you' problem, not a 'me' problem.

I guess I will leave with this - the free agent nation has delivered exceeding benefits to company brands - less fixed costs, less regulations, more flexibility, and even more profits. But there are some risks too. Some of your free agents don't really need the company brand as much as the brand needs them. And some of your best customers and partners want to work with people, not with companies. And as the ties between people and companies continue to loosen, (almost always at the behest of companies by the way), the company's hold on talent and opportunity and profit will loosen as well.

Have a great week!

The Canary Trap, or, how to plug an information leak

This is possibly, actually almost certainly, my favorite story of 2014. It involves basketball, information security, organizational intrigue, and espionage tactics. And it just might be a helpful example for you if you are faced with a 'leaker', i.e., someone on the team who can't seem to keep private and proprietary information private.

So here is the story, recounted in this piece from Business Insider: The NBA Used an Espionage Trick Known as 'Canary Trap' to Catch Teams Leaking to the Media

The National Basketball Association fined Detroit Pistons President of Basketball Operations Joe Dumars $500,000 in 2010 for leaking information to Yahoo! Sports reporter Adrian Wojnarowski, according to Kevin Draper of The New Republic.

In order to catch the person responsible for the leak, the NBA set up a months long sting operation based on a common espionage method made popular in the Tom Clancy novel "Patriot Games." In that book, the protagonist Jack Ryan uses what he calls a "canary trap."

According to Draper, when the NBA sent memos to teams, each team would get a slightly different version in which a few words or numbers would be changed. So when the memo, or information from the memo, was leaked to the media, the NBA would look for the small changes it had made to determine which team the leaks came from.

Dumars was one of two executives caught "red-handed," according to Draper.

Fantastic story. And probably useful as well, (at least for the more devious among us).

But seriously, who has not run into this kind of a situation at least once or twice? You are working on a new and 'secret' project and somehow, some way news and information about the project manages to reach someone who you did not want to have such information. Or maybe it is a set of financials or headcount data projections that somehow end up in the hands of a manager from another group - before you were ready to release them.

It may not seem like a big deal, especially in the modern era of transparency, aka 'oversharing', but I think sometimes it is a big deal.

If you can't trust the people and the team to keep confidential information, well, confidential, then you can't really trust them with anything. And sometimes as a leader you have to root out the source of the leak, and The Canary Trap, while sounding straight out of a Bond movie, just might help you to do that.

Try it sometime, even as an experiment. Give person 'A' one set of details, and a slightly different set to person 'B' and see which version, (if any), somehow gets leaked. Trust me, it will be fun.

Ok, that is it for the week I am out - Have a great weekend!

LEAKED: Two observations from the Sony Pictures hack

I am sure you have heard or read about the widespread hack and subsequent leaks of massive amounts of corporate information like email archives and other sensitive organizational (and HR) data at Sony Pictures.

If you would like to be familiar, or at least caught up, a useful timeline of the hack and the leaks, (which appear to be ongoing), is here.

Embarrassing email exchanges, written potshots being taken at various industry players, and even a dump (in the form of an Excel spreadsheet), of salary and other HR data for the organization's executives.

A mess. And seemingly not going anywhere, not for a while anyway.

So here are my two, thought about this for 10 minutes, observations for HR/Talent professionals from this brouhaha.

1. It's time to stop thinking of Email as private, secured communication. I think since the rapid rise, and subsequent realization of the lack of privacy of public social networks like Twitter and Facebook, we somehow look at email, in comparison, and think it is private and secure. And while it should be, the Sony hack is just another example that reminds us that any communication in written, digital form is not ever 100% secure. We use Email so much, and in the large company environment it is so essential and ubiquitous, we have become beguiled to accept it as (mostly) private by default. And that is, in a word, insane. Forget about getting hacked by a malicious 3rd party - all it takes for your private, sensitive, possibly career-threatening email to get out into the world is one tiny error in the CC box, or one slip-up when forwarding something to John Jones and having it go to John Johnson instead. Lesson: Stop emailing so much (general). And talk to your leaders, managers, and employees about maybe picking up the phone once in a while.

2. Employee and HR data in Excel spreadsheets is likely your single largest HR data-related risk area. Every single company has HR or Comp people with salary, bonuses, and other HR/Compensation data sitting in Excel spreadsheets on individual PCs and company servers. For smaller companies, this is usually out of necessity: Excel is the only tool available to them to do comp calculations and analyses. But even in larger companies that have powerful and sophisticated Compensation Planning tools, often these tools are used to simply dump Employee and Comp data into Excel for additional manipulation and even file sharing. The Comp planning systems are powerful and secure. Excel spreadsheets are powerful and highly insecure (ask Sony). Where should you insist your Comp data remain?

We have spent literally years reminding our kids and each other that nothing that gets posted on Facebook or Instagram is really private.

It is also time to remind ourselves and our employees that nothing posted anywhere is really private either.

Have a great week!

What's so great about top talent?

Pretty much every article or analysis of the drivers or pre-requisites for consistent high performance in an organization eventually mentions the concept of 'top talent.'

An organization needs the best or 'top' talent in order to continuously generate great new ideas, to execute their strategies, to improve productivity and efficiency, and so on. Some estimates of the comparative advantage provided by 'top talent' compared to average (and much easier to find) talent rate that advantage as high as a factor of 10. Whatever the actual factor is, and it probably varies pretty widely depending on the industry and type of work, there is pretty much universal agreement that while not always available (and affordable), acquiring 'top' talent should be most organizations goal.

But why, exactly?

What specifically do these 'top' talents bring to the organization? What do they actually do that is demonstrably superior to average talent and how would the answer to that question help organization's improve their recruiting and development strategies?

Well, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research study titled Why Stars Matter, has attempted to identify just what are these 'top talent' effects. It turns out that just being better at their jobs only accounts for a part of the advantage these high performers provide and that possibly the more important benefit is how the presence of top talent impacts the other folks around them, (and the ones you are trying to recruit).

Here is a summary of the findings of the 'top talent' effects from HBR:

The paper points to three different ways that superstars can improve an organization, and measures the magnitude of each in the context of academic evolutionary biology departments. The first, and most obvious, is the direct increase in output that a superstar can have. Hire someone who can get a lot of great work done quickly and your organization will by definition be producing more great work. But, perhaps surprisingly, this represents only a small fraction of the change that superstars have on output.

The researchers found that the superstar’s impact on recruiting was far and away the more significant driver of improved organizational productivity. Starting just one year after the superstar joins the department, the average quality of those who join the department at all levels increases significantly. As for the impact of a superstar on existing colleagues, the findings are more mixed. Incumbents who work on topics related to those the superstar focused on saw their output increase, but incumbents whose work was unrelated became slightly less productive.

So 'top talent' (mostly) gets to be called 'top talent' because they are simply better, more productive employees. But a significant benefit of these talented individuals is that they help you recruit more people like them, who in turn also are more productive than average, continuing to raise the overall performance level of the organization.

But this only works in the real world if indeed the top talent actually can help you (and actively help you) recruit more people like them.

The findings of the NBER study suggest that beyond their own performance, and the potential of them to elevate the performance of the rest of your team, the real benefit to organizations from 'top talent' is really tied up in whom they help you recruit next.

It might be something to consider adding to your interviewing and assessment process a question something along the lines of "If you were to come on board, who would you recommend we hire next?"

Have a great week!

This weekend's company culture test

I am of (pretty) firm belief you can tell just about everything you need to know about company culture from tracking and analyzing email usage patterns, traffic levels, and response expectations.

Sure, not all organizations, and certainly not all roles in organizations, are overly reliant on email as their primary communications, collaboration, and general project management tool, but for those that are, and I suspect that would include just about everyone reading this post, your email Inbox is largely a proxy for your 'work' in general.

Very few initiatives actually get started without first sending an email to someone.

Progress is communicated and monitored on those tasks in ongoing series of emails.

Organizational structure and power dynamics are reflected in who you are 'allowed' to email, and who will or will not respond.

You overall stress level and relative satisfaction with your job can be extrapolated from the point in time condition of your Inbox.

Finally, you probably leave the office with a warped sense of accomplishment if, at the end of the week, you have successfully triaged all of your incoming messages, sent the necessary replies, and achieved that most elusive of states, so-called 'Inbox Zero'. You pack up shop for the week and head home, (or to Happy Hour).

And that is when my favorite test of company culture begins, what happened to your Inbox from say, 6:00PM on a Friday up until 6:00AM on Monday. (this is what we used to call the "weekend".)

As you enjoy whatever it is you enjoy this weekend, think about these few questions:

Who in your company is (still) sending emails on a Friday night? On Saturday morning? Or on Sunday evening when you are clinging like grim death to your last few precious hours of downtime?

Who is responding to weekend emails? And no, I am not talking about genuine business or customer emergencies, just 'normal' kinds of things. You know, the kinds of things you worry about on Tuesday.

Are your management or senior leaders making a habit of tapping away message after message (always "Sent from my iPad") all weekend long while they are ostensibly watching Jr's soccer game?

Are you checking or at least thinking about checking your work email on Saturday afternoon when, I don't know, you're supposed to have something better to do?

Finally, when you get one of those weekend emails do you respond? Are you expected to? And if you do are you now "at work?"

It's odd for the one piece of workplace technology that we all probably use more than any other, that we think about and really try to understand it's usage so little.

Email is just always there. It is always on. We engage with it constantly.

But we don't ever think about what it might tell us about the organization, the power dynamics, and most importantly, what it can tell us about the culture of an organization.

So, are you on email this weekend or are you off?

Have a great one no matter what you choose!