At the time, it seemed perfectly logical

Last night on the HR Happy Hour show, 'HR Horror Stories II', I shared a tale from one of my college summer jobs, as a landscaper in a large cemetery.  The details of the story are kind of interesting if not all that important, suffice to say that we, (not me personally, mind you, I was kept at a safe distance from this sort of thing), had managed to 'place' a couple of recent arrivals to our facility in the wrong plots, and they needed to be 'swapped'.flickr - casch52

In case you (and I hope this is most of you), have not had a close encounter with the process of digging, positioning, leveling, and backfilling burials, to effect this 'swap' would require several hours of work, varying in intensity from not too hard, (operating the backhoe), to pretty hard, (raising, transporting, and replacing the coffins).  It was not a normal kind of activity for us, in the two summers I worked there this was the one and only occurrence of such a situation.

So in the morning we got the order that essentially read - 'Dig up Person A.  Dig up Person B. Put Person A where Person B was, and vice versa'.  And get this all done by 4:00PM, because no way we are paying overtime to any of you goofballs.'

Ok, I added the 'Goofballs' bit.

You would think that it would be the kind of hard, tedious, and unappealing task that the staff would try to avoid, as most of our days consisted of driving around on riding lawn mowers.  When the supervisor asked the seasonal help for volunteers to assist the 'real' staff, I stepped up, figuring I had six more weeks of riding around on the mower before I went back to college, and a day of exhuming and re-interring bodies seemed sort of appealing by comparison.

I hopped in one of the pickup trucks accompanied by one of the long-time, permanent cemetery workers who immediately shared his excitement and enthusiasm that he was assigned this duty, and he continued on to congratulate me on volunteering for the job, as it would be 'the best deal I had all summer'. I sort of thought the guy was a little weird to begin with, so the comment did not phase me too much, and I figured that at the very least the whole exercise would make for a good story. I suppose I was right as here I am telling it again after more that 20 years.

When we arrived at the plot of 'Person A' rather than call up the heavy equipment, and proceed the (likely nasty) process of exhumation, I was instructed to hop out of the truck, and grab the little plastic sign that served as a temporary marker (the permanent gravestone had not yet been placed), and get back in.  We then drove the short distance (none of the permanent staff walked anywhere when they could drive), where I snatched the temporary plastic marker from the site of 'Person B', and replaced it with the one for 'Person A'.  We completed our version of the exhumation/re-internment by putting the marker for 'B' on the original site of 'A'.

Yep, instead of actually digging up and re-burying, we simply switched the temporary markers that had been placed on the sites.  We saved ourselves several hours of hard work, were able to slack off for the rest of the day, (the staff were incredibly adept at hiding and doing nothing), and for the families/customers of 'A' and 'B', when they next came to the cemetery and saw the recently upturned soil and the temporary marker with the 'right' name, they were happy that the error had been 'corrected'. In a way we made it right, without actually doing the right thing.

As I look back, I am not especially proud of the story, I can rationalize it by saying I was just a 19 year old kid on a summer job and was trying to not make too many waves and get into trouble with the permanent crew. We should have moved Persons A and B like we were instructed. But thinking about it now, did it really matter that we didn't actually move them?

The only people that truly cared, the families, were convinced that we had actually executed the switch. The owners of the cemetery only cared that the customers were happy, which they were. The workers drove off to hide and sleep in their trucks for most of the day.

If Person A and Person B were unhappy, they sure weren't talking.

So if everyone ended up happy, why do I still feel a little guilty?

Shuffling to Buffalo

Today I have the great honor of presenting at the Buffalo-Niagara Human Resource Organization's annual event, HR Strategies on the Road to Recovery.

My session is about collaboration tools and technologies, what they are, how they can be applied in organizations to foster increased innovation, and how HR leaders and professionals might go about assessing and deploying these kinds of technologies.

I also have lots of unrelated images in my slides, and a dorky but neat 'Star Wars' effect on one of them.

I sent out a few tweets in the last couple of weeks about the event, mainly to try and discover if anyone in my extended network would be there today, and I was met with silence.  So either I am not that popular in Buffalo (likely), or the Greater Buffalo community is not all that dialed in to Twitter (probably), or the community there is passively ignoring me, (possibly).

At any rate, I have embedded the presentation below, apologies in advance for the crude nature of the design, pretty soon I am going to just start doing these 'Jimmy The Greek' style.

BNHRA - October 27, 2010 - Steve Boese

View more presentations from steveboese.

If you do see me in Buffalo be sure to say hello.

The NBA, where your team leader hates your chances

Tonight is like Christmas, my birthday, and the last day of school all rolled into one - the start of the 2010-2011 NBA season!

For me, it means 50 or so nights to be disappointed by the New York Knicks, the chance to watch LeBron and his talents with the Miami Heat pretty much every other night, and hopefully more great and pithy leadership lessons from Jeff Van Gundy.

At the start of the year most NBA teams have some sense of excitement, (real or fake), and express optimism (at least publicly) about their chances for a successful upcoming season. You know, the whole 'hope springs eternal' bit.  And why not?  Every team has at least a few star quality players, and even the 9th and 10th guy on the bench is a pretty talented player as well.

So prior to the start of the campaign, confidence is pretty much the order of the day, and standard cliches abound. 'If we stay healthy and stick to our strengths, we can contend', or 'If we all concentrate on our roles and share the ball, we will be right there at the end', are mostly what you hear from the top players and team leaders before opening night.  

Given that, it was pretty surprising to see the quotes attributed to two-time NBA league MVP Steve Nash about his team, the Phoenix Suns, and their prospects for the coming season. Nash has been reported to have said (variously) that the team has "a long ways to go", is really a "work in progress". and finally, "to be honest, if I was outside this picture, and a betting man, I would probably pick us to be outside the playoffs".

So your team's best player, and leader, goes public with his expressions of doubt about the team's chances for a successful season.  Probably not going to do too much to fire up the fan base, or even inspire the rest of the players to (over) achieve.  It is pretty common for sports teams to try and adopt an 'no one believes in us' or 'it is us up against the world' strategy to generate and sustain motivation, but that generally only works when the 'them' are the media, the other teams in the league, or even directed against former players and coaches that have departed.

Usually 'it's us against them' falls down when the 'them' is one of your own, and worse still, your leader.

What's your take - does the team leader need to 'fake it', at least publicly?

Go Knicks!

Email and Easter Eggs

Chances are many of the emails you spend all day cranking out to your colleagues take about 1/10th of the time to actually scan read as they do to for you to compose.  By the time they get to paragraph three,(assuming they made it that far),  most recipients have tuned out, distracted by the three new messages that just popped into their inbox, a phone call, a text message from their kid, or, if they are really on the cutting edge, a stray Tweet or Direct Message.

If there is something in the message that is really, truly, important you can't bury 175 words in. Hardly anyone is paying attention that far down, trust me.  Don't think this applies to you? Test it out sometime.  Draw up another one of your typical 385 word soliloquies on the budget planning process, or next year's performance management initiatives, or whatever is consuming your thoughts today.  But in the third or fourth paragraph, slide in the  equivalent of an 'Easter Egg', a concept taken from video games where game players can unlock secret or extra functionality by discovering a hidden code, message, or other undocumented feature. Unlocking the ‘egg’ grants the player more abilities, or access to normally hidden levels for game play.

Except you shouldn't have to make your 'egg' all the secret, or hard to spot.  Try it. First thing in the morning send out your own ‘Easter Egg’ a little something like this:

Lead with 200 words of drivel importance then slip this in ... 'So as we continue in assessing the most critical functional skills of the organization's talent, let's tie up any loose ends in our thinking by meeting at Noon for a long lunch at (insert name of local pub here), where I will buy lunch and beverages for all in attendance.  At the lunch we will continue to examine the cross-organizational implications and synergies of our holistic approach to leadership and increased employee engagement, blah, blah, blah. Thanks very much, etc.

Then don’t send another message about the lunch invitation, try to avoid any direct conversation about the plan, and don’t respond to any calls or emails for the rest of the morning.  In fact, sneak out of your office at about 11:15 or so, (or whatever time is sufficiently early to avoid being seen as ‘going to lunch’) and head over to the pub.  Grab a table large enough for at least a few of the invitees to join you, and wait.

Assuming you are reasonably well-liked (at least enough to accept a free lunch from), one of three things will result:

One - No one, or maybe a token colleague shows up - time to really re-think your communication style because whatever you are doing, it’s not working.

Two -  A small group (3 or 4) turn up.  Not bad, but not great either.  Here’s where you have to really evaluate the composition of the ones that turned up. If it the three young guys that spend most of their time talking about fantasy football and happy hours, you can be pretty confident the only message that got though was ‘free beer’.

Three - The majority of email recipients do actually show up for lunch.  Either you have a really attentive team, or you maybe have one person that found the ‘egg’ and shared it with the group. Either way though, you can feel good that the message did get across, even if it was buried in the blather.

The thing is most of us probably think we are pretty effective communicators.  We might even ask our peers, friends, and colleagues to give us feedback and help us improve.  But, especially if you are the boss, people lie.  A better way to see how your communication stacks up is to put it to the test once in a while.

So where is lunch again?

PBR, Irony, and Duct Tape

If you are sort of old like me, and not all that cool, you might not know that amongst wide swaths of the young, hipster crowd that Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR) beer has become a popular and trendy beverage of choice.

Part of the reason for PBR's popularity with that scene is it's relative value; I think a 12-pack of PBR can be had for a reasonable $7.00 or $8.00 in most parts of the country.  The other explanation for the brand's recent success with the cool kids is less about value and more about image; by drinking PBR, a brew that is more or less bland, nondescript, and 'old',  the hipsters are making a kind of statement. They are sending a message that they simply don't care about what the beer they choose says about them, and going further, if they do choose to drink cheap, mass-produced beer that they choose to consciously and conspicuously shun the mass-market, mass-advertised, and more obvious choices like Budweiser or Coors for a more 'indie' choice in PBR. 

In a way it is the ironic choice.  To try and rebel against the incessant marketing messages from the major brands, the hipsters choose to go even more down market, all the way down to PBR.  When was the last time you can recall seeing a PBR commercial on the Super Bowl, or for that matter, any kind of PBR advertising at all?  And no, the aging 1960s era posters at the local bowling alley don't count. At the end of the day, the folks that make and sell PBR probably don't completely understand this newfound popularity, but they know that for the moment anyway, and for the first time in maybe 40 years, the PBR brand has some relevance, some cachet even.  

My Dad still lives in New Jersey, in the house I grew up in.  His neighbor and friend that lives across the street is named Phil, and for most of my childhood Phil worked in a brewery helping to make PBR beer. As kids, we never thought Phil was all that hip or cool. To us, he was an old guy, he wore a workshirt with the PBR logo that we, in our ignorant and narrow view of the world, thought was low-class.  He used duct tape to hold the muffler assembly on his aging Buick, an improvised repair that we laughed at, with our childish lack of awareness of the realities and problems that mortgages, insurance, and medical bills put on an unskilled worker in a brewery.

Phil came home from work every day and took his son, Phil Jr., out for a walk.  Phil Jr. was just a year or two younger than me, but I never had a relationship with him. Sadly, he was a victim of Cerebral Palsy. He could not walk, could hardly communicate, and could not see. Phil would take Phil Jr. out, stand behind him and hold him up, and proceed to try and walk him up and down the street, the entire time having what to us seemed like a one-sided conversation with his son. To Phil these were probably the most precious few moments of the day.  Phil took these walks with this son every day for years.

As I think back on it, I wonder if Phil secretly hoped that these walks with his son, where he essentially was carrying him along, would somehow, someway be the catalyst that would enable Phil Jr. to walk on his own one day.  Eventually the combination of Phil Jr. growing too tall and heavy, and Phil getting older and weaker put an end to these daily supported walks.  Phil Jr's condition never really improved, and at some point after I had gone off to college and moved away, he was placed in an assisted living facility.

Around that same time the fortunes of PBR beer were clearly on the decline, and the brewery where Phil had worked for 20-odd years was closed. After that Phil bounced around in a series of jobs - maintenance worker, janitor, maybe even night security guard, until he finally was able to retire a few years ago.  

I saw Phil earlier this year when my Dad was hospitalized, and he came to pay a visit.  He looked tired, seemed a little bit confused, but for someone that has endured a long and often emotionally painful life I suppose was holding up as well as can be expected.  It was good to see him.

I wanted to tell him about the resurgence of the PBR brand, about how in the last few years it has suddenly become hip to drink PBR, but after a few minutes I realized that he would not have really understood or appreciated or even cared. 

And come to think of it, I am glad I didn't try and tell the story to Phil.  When most people see the PBR label today, they think of the Brooklyn hipsters looking and acting so much cooler that the rest of us. Shallow, transitory, and meaningless.

When I see the PBR label, I think of Phil, in his workshirt, carrying his son up and down the street.