The Google background check: How long can you hold this against someone?

Check this interesting piece on Deadspin last week from the world of High School sports titled 'Disgruntled Goalie Scores On His Own Net, Flips Off Coaches, Skates Off The Ice Forever. On the surface it seems like a kind of amusing, if a little sad, tale about a senior high school ice hockey goalie, feeling like he had been slighted and had unfairly lost playing time to a sophomore goalie. The senior then used the occasion of the team's last game to vent his frustration with his coaches and the situation in a classic flame-out fashion.  

I won't embed the video here, or mention the goalie's name - both can be found at the Deadspin piece, but in case you don't have time to check the footage (you do, it's literally about 12 seconds), here is the gist of what went down:

With three minutes remaining, and Farmington up by one, (he) corralled the puck behind the goal. The video picks up there as he skates it in front and casually slips it into his own net. He sends a middle finger to his bench, fires off a salute, and skates back to the locker room. The game was tied, and Farmington—with a third-string goalie in net, the sophomore was out with an injury—would concede another goal a minute later to lose.

You can certainly chalk up the senior's demonstration/protest/tantrum to a youthful indiscretion and an immature way to express his anger.  Sure, he was wrong to put the puck in his own net, he was wrong to flip off the coaches, and he was wrong to put himself above the team in that way. Whether or not he was a better goalie than the sophomore really isn't important here, but for anyone that has been in that kind of situation, you can at least feel for the kid's point of view. 

Again, in the end, it's really just a kid acting out inappropriately, like most kids will do at least once in a while, and that most of us probably did ourselves when we were that age. No big deal really, it was only a silly hockey game, and the kid will learn his lesson, (or maybe he won't), and everyone will move on and forget.

But I wanted to call it out on the blog this week, after having a quick scan through the 75-odd comments on the Deadspin piece, and noticing at least a half dozen comments similar to this one from someone named 'Loose Cannon':

/Googles '(the kid's full name)'

//discards resume, moves on

- Hiring Managers

Again, I'm leaving out the kid's real name, as I think as evidenced by the comments from 'Loose Cannon' and several others he is never really going to be able to erase this incident from the interwebs. No matter what he goes on to in his life, a Google search for his name, like many, many Recruiters and hiring managers will execute, will bring up these words and images that show immaturity, selfishness, and lack of respect for authority.

But I kind of feel bad for the kid. Not because of what 'Loose Cannon' thinks, (I have a feeling he isn't hiring anyone anytime soon), but rather for the fact that this episode is going to trail him for a long, long time - maybe forever.

I know I did some stupid things back in the day, things I would not want my potential next boss to read about it in detail.

Our young goalie friend here doesn't have that option now. 

Let's hope the HR person or recruiter that does the first Google search on him in a few years can empathize.

It will help if he or she was also brought up in the YouTube age I think. 

EBOOK: The 8 Man Rotation: The 2012 Season

It's like Christmas in February for the HR pro/sports fan.

What am I talking about? Well, here goes.

I'm sure even if you are not a sports fan you are familiar with the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. Many years back, the big shots at SI concocted a scheme to try and goose sales of their weekly sports magazine in one of the most dead spots of the year in the sports calendar - February.

Their solution to try to boost sales in the period after football season had ended and before baseball season had started?

Pack the 'sports' magazine with images of bikini-clad models cavorting on exotic beaches. And it worked - the 'swimsuit' issue remains a top seller. Certainly, SI came up with a solid strategy that has served the magazine well for a long time.

Well, your pals from The 8 Man Rotation, Lance Haun, Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn, Steve Boese, and Matt Stollak are coming at you with our own contribution to help you navigate through the last few weeks of Winter - yes, it's the release of The 8 Man Rotation: A Look at Sports and HR - The 2012 Season!

The 8 Man Rotation 2012 Season Ebook is the third edition in what has become a February sports tradition on par with the legendary SI Swimsuit issue.

But the 8 Man Rotation offers something different, (not better I suppose, but certainly different), than models on the beach, it brings over 140 pages from the 8 Man Rotation gang, all about the intersection of HR, Talent Management, Recruiting, Leadership and sports.

Sports is the perfect metaphor for much of what we care about in HR and Talent - recruiting the right talent, coaching and performance management, coaxing the best results out of everyone on the team, dealing with 'superstar' talent and finding ways to balance talent, ego, ambition with team goals in order to achieve greatness. 

It's what sports are all about, and more or less, it's what HR and Talent pros also try to deliver for their organizations.

The fearless Matt 'akaBruno' Stollak has once again pored through a year's worth of posts from LanceHaun.com, The Tim Sackett Project, HR Capitalist, Steve's HR Tech, and his own True Faith HR to collect a fantastic compilation of posts on recruiting, development, strategy, and more - and all with the sports angle that fans of the prior editions of The 8 Man Rotation have come to expect. 

So head on over to The 8 Man Rotation site to check out and download your FREE Ebook - The 8 Man Rotation: A Look at Sports and HR, The 2012 Season.

And one more thing - you can catch The 8 Man Rotation gang LIVE on the HR Happy Hour Show this Thursday, Feb. 21 at 8:00PM ET, talking about all things 'Sports and HR'.

VIDEO - Disdain the Mundane and other lessons from Clyde

When I saw that the ESPN 30 for 30 video short series latest creation was a feature on New York Knicks legend Walt 'Clyde' Frazier there was no way that I was not going to post about it on the blog.

Some background - ESPN a couple years ago, in conjunction with the network's 30th Anniversary year, commissioned a series of original documentaries called simply 30 for 30, which covered a wide range of sports-themed stories, from the perspective of 30 different, and many well-known directors. If you care about sports at all, you should really spend some time catching the original 30 for 30 run, (my favorite, which I blogged about here, is 'Once Brothers', a moving look back at the Yugoslavian national basketball team of the 80s).

More recently, the 30 for 30 series has expanded into shorter pieces, like the above mentioned piece on Clyde Frazier titled 'Disdain the Mundane', (embedded below, RSS and email subscribers please click through). Check the video below, and then I'll hit you with 5 life and career lessons from Clyde taken straight from 'Disdain the Mundane'

1. 0:56 - On finding a work/life balance

Clyde speaks: 'As a rookie, I wasn't playing up to expectations, so in order to pacify myself, I went shopping. I might not be playing good, but I look good'.

Lesson: Work matters, but it can't be the only thing in your life. Stepping away, finding some solace, especially when in a tough patch at work is the way to keep your sanity.

2. 1:14 - On standing-out

'I see this borsalino hat, brown velour, but it had a wide brim. And those days, like now, they were wearing the narrow brim. I never like the narrow brim. The first time I wore the hat, everyone laughed at me - my teammates, the opposition. But I said, 'Hey man, I look good in this hat, so I'm keeping it on.' Two weeks later the movie Bonnie and Clyde comes out, and everyone says 'Look, there goes Clyde'

Lesson: Go along with everyone else, wear the narrow brim hat, and you are just another guy with the same hat everyone else has. Go a different way, stand out a little - and now you are not just some dude, you are 'Clyde'.

3. 1:48 - On learning your trade 

'When I was Clyde, I was still learning. I used to go on 5th Ave. and just walk. In the 70s, 5th Ave. was the most fashionable street in the world. I used to see different colors people had on, and I'd go to my tailor and I'd make them up, because I actually saw them right there.'

Lesson: Understand you don't know everything, and the only way to really get smarter is to find people that know what you want to know, or at least can help you better articulate where you want to go. And the best way to do that is right on the street as it were, live and in-person.

4. 3:10 - On working with innovative people

'They (the tailors) know I'm looking for something different. I don't want just your basic, generic thing. Usually when I go to a new guy I tell him - 'Hey man, show me something you think nobody would wear.'

Lesson: You want to continue to do great work? It helps to find like-minded people that are up to that challenge, who can think differently, and who won't get in caught up in devising reasons to say 'No.'

5. 4:07  - On lateral thinking

'(when he embarked on his post-NBA broadcasting career) 'I said, 'Man, I've got to improve my vocabulary.' So I used to get the Sunday Times, the Arts & Leisure section, when they critique the plays - riveting, mesmerizing, provocative, profound - all this stuff, dazzling. So I have books and books of words and phrases, and once I learned the words I could start relating them to the players.'

Lesson: You don't get better at something JUST by studying that one thing. Clyde realized that basketball was 'performance', not unlike movies, books, plays, etc.  So by studying the language that the New York Times critics and reviewers used, Clyfe was able to bring a fresh, distinctive element to his basketball broadcasts, further cementing his status as an innovator.

Awesome.

Clyde is a legend. Cool, canny, cunning, creating.

Rockin' Steady.

Disdain the Mundane.

Go Knicks.

Have a Great Weekend!

What's your culture really like? Ask the new guy from out of town

Company Culture, Employer Brand, Employer Value Proposition - there's been much written and spoken about these ideas and concepts in the last few years and for the most part a general acceptance has emerged that organizational leaders need to be very aware of internal culture, and its effects on morale, engagement, productivity and performance.

While most HR and Talent pros 'get' that culture is important, and some even taking more proactive steps to promote their unique culture (mostly it seems through enhanced 'cultural fit' recruiting practices), there also seems to be quite a bit less written about revealing or unraveling the existing company culture.Where are the donuts?

If you work in any type of organization today you certainly have your own opinion of 'What's it like to work here?', but I'd imagine most of us don't go around the office asking our colleagues for their opinion of 'What's it like to work here?'

Aside from the annual employee survey where these kinds of questions are raised and the answers to them aggregated and placed in colorful bar graphs and pie charts, (Is there anything better than a pie chart?. I think not.), we can pretty easily get tricked into remaining comfortable that our personal view of 'What's it like to work here' is kind of the universal view of the place.

But a more revealing (and hopefully honest) assessment of a culture or an environment might come from a different source than the aggregated and homogenized survey data, or from the long-held and personal views of organization veterans. It could be that the most refreshing look at the culture of a place comes from its newest members, and in particular, ones that by virtue of their past upbringing and history, would not have many deeply-held biases that might influence their opinion.

Case in point - the impressions on American culture from a new visitor, the NBA's Alexey Shved from Russia, in his rookie season playing for the Minnesota Timberwolves, and enjoying his first extended period living and working in the USA.  

Hey Alexey, what's it like in America?

"Well, everybody loves donuts here, and I eat them too. People mostly drink beer and not stronger drinks, exactly like in The Simpsons.”

Nice. American culture through the lens of a recent entrant, with his primary frame of reference being the Simpsons cartoon. 

It's kind of amusing but also serves as a bit of a reminder that culture and the perception of a culture is a highly personal thing. And it also reinforces the point that no matter how much or how hard we try to shape the culture, (or at least the perceptions of a culture), people are going to have their own take on your place, your people, your vibe - you get the idea.

Our pal Alexey's take about donuts and beer, while pretty funny, should also be a kind of wake-up call to those of us charged or interested in shaping, communicating, and propagating something as amorphous as 'culture'.

No matter how hard you try, how slick your marketing campaigns are, and how much 'fit' drives your hiring, firing, and rewards processes - there is probably a new guy from out of town who looks around and sees donuts and beer.

VIDEO - For when you're certain you could do the other guy's job better

It can get pretty tempting to see someone struggling a little bit in a job, or maybe doing fine in a job that you just don't see as very difficult or challenging and think to yourself -

'Look at Jim Bob over there in Marketing or PR or Comms, (doesn't really matter what), anyone could do that job. Heck, they should let ME do that job for a while, I'd show them it's not that hard and I'd get some things done.'

Yep, it's pretty easy to critique from the sidelines, and it's really common, (you know you've done this at least once), to devalue the relative complexity and contribution of functions of the organization that from the outside seem kind of simple, so simple that anyone could do them. Never mind the fact that it is pretty likely some folks in Operations or Logistics are looking at YOU, Mr. or Ms. Talent Pro and are saying the same thing about HR and Recruiting.

Guys are especially guilty of this kind of hubris I think, and nowhere is that kind of misguided confidence/arrogance manifested more completely in the context of sports.  Most guys have played at least some sports in their lives, more watch professional and amateur contests on a regular basis, and still more 'retired' from their chosen sport more than a little disappointed in how far and how successful they actually were as athletes.

It was from this shared experience of frustration, combined with a good dose of the 'He isn't that great/that isn't so hard' I referenced at the top that led to video below, (email and RSS subscribers please click through), a basketball contest between retired journeyman NBA player Brian Scalabrine, and four talented, but definitely amateur players that all, to a man, must have been thinking - 'Scalabrine? He was a bum. He rode the bench for most of his NBA career. I can take him.'

Check the video below, (you don't need to watch the entire thing, a few minutes will give you enough a feel for what went down.

Long story short?  Scalabrine, the 'bum', and during his career one of the worst players in the league, and no longer in what passed for his 'prime', crushed the assorted challengers by a combined score of 44-6. 

And while the challengers were certainly not professional caliber players, they all tried out for the show to play Scalabrine and were vetted as talented amateur players. From the video you can tell they all were actually pretty solid - the kind of guys that probably dominate their local gyms or rec leagues. But up against NBA-level talent, even the last guy on the end of the bench talent, and now too old and slow to keep playing talent, they all were exposed for what they really are, a bunch of guys who now realize, if only a little, what an NBA player can do.

So what? So what that a few playground ball players lost to a just-retired NBA player? What's that got to do with me?

Maybe nothing. 

But for me, well I just like the little reminder that often even the worst guy at a given job might still be pretty talented at that job, and perhaps more importantly, just because a job looks easy doesn't mean it is, and that just anyone could do it.

Congrats White Mamba...