Trying to look better vs. trying to get better

Quick take from the world of the NBA - and no, I'm not tapping the sports world solely to try and surpass in 2013 the number of contributions I had last season towards The 8 Man Rotation - A Look at Sports and HR E-book.

So here's the take - if you are an experienced professional near the top of your game, but still have some room to grow to truly reach your ultimate goals - the big promotion, the fatty paycheck, or in the sports world, it might be the Championship title, etc. the outside advice that you seek and who you choose to engage with makes a pretty big statement about your dedication to your craft.

What do I mean by that?

Let's take a look at two recent examples from the Association:

Exhibit A - Deron Williams of the Brooklyn Nets  hires his own personal beat reporter

Here's an odd story from today's Wall Street Journal, about a new member of the Brooklyn Nets corps of beat writers. Devon Jeffreys is a credentialed reporter like all of the rest, but he's really only at Nets games to cover one player: Deron Williams. And he's there to cover Deron Williams for a website that Deron Williams himself is the owner of: DeronWilliams.com. Athletes having a personal website to trumpet their accomplishments is nothing new, but Williams's site is rare in that it features content that is written like regular news stories, save for the fact that Williams is always the central figure.

Exhibit B - Kevin Durant of the OKC Thunder hires his own personal performance analytics coach/consultant

Kevin Durant has hired his own analytics expert. He tailors workouts to remedy numerical imbalances. He harps on efficiency more than a Prius dealer. Durant sat in a leather terminal chair next to a practice court and pointed toward the 90-degree- angle at the upper-right corner of the key that represents the elbow. “See that spot,” Durant said. “I used to shoot 38, 39 percent from there off the catch coming around pin-down screens.” He paused for emphasis. “I’m up to 45, 46 percent now.”

Pretty obvious that these two 'hires', or personal development strategies represent two strikingly different approaches to performance improvement. Williams' personal beat reporter is there to make Williams look better.  Durant's analytics coach is there to help Durant get better. 

Now to be fair these examples are kind of cherry-picked - Williams might have his own analytics coach, personal trainer, dietitian, etc. to help his actual game improve. And Durant might have his own PR reps and spin doctors to help his public image. Both players have the resources necessary to have all of their professional bases covered. So it isn't completely fair to call them out in this way with imperfect or incomplete information.

But you and me?

If we are engaging with experts or taking the time to get some outside 'performance' help, we probably do have to make choices about where to invest our more limited resources, and perhaps more importantly, our limited time. I think about this a lot in the context of what people do online - maybe it's changing profile pics every other day or making sure they shoehorn in a comment on every LinkedIn group discussion that they know people in their field will see. Or perhaps it's the proliferation of personal branding or career coaches - to me that entire field only exists because people are getting a little too focused on looking better vs. actually getting better.

If you worry about looking better too much, you might end up looking a little better, sure.

If you care mostly about getting better, then the looking part takes care of itself.

The Wisdom of Earl Monroe

Earl 'The Pearl' Monroe, for the benefit of readers who may not be familiar (shame on you), is a basketball legend who had a Hall of Fame career in the NBA with the Baltimore Bullets and New York Knicks in the 1960s and 1970s. Earl's talent was so immense and otherworldly that in addition to his more popular nickname of 'The Pearl' was also known as 'Black Jesus' early in his playing days.

Monroe was a rare player - a creative, almost effortless scorer, (he averaged an astonishing 41 points in his senior year in college), who later in his career became an important and team oriented player on some fantastic teams, including one NBA champion in the 1973 Knicks. 

Earl has a new book out titled Earl The Pearl: My Story, and recently has been doing a number of interviews promoting the book, and the 40th Anniversary of that Knicks championship team of 1973. I caught one of these interviews, on New York sports talk radio, where Earl related a wonderful story of his earliest days learning to play.

Earl got a late start, even for those days, as a basketball player, not taking up the game until he was 14 years old. As you'd expect, in the beginning Earl was not as good or polished as other kids his age who had been playing for a few years. Earl shared how he'd come home from the playground and tell his mother that he wasn't good enough, and that the other kids all mocked and teased him pretty badly.

Earl's mom would have none of it. She told Earl to quit complaining. But in addition to the tough love, she also gave Earl a great approach to addressing his problem. She told him to get a notebook and write down the names of all the other boys that were better players than him and that were putting him down. Once the list was written, she then told Earl to keep working, keep practicing, and not to think about what anyone said.

Then she said, once you improve your game and surpass a player on the list, cross out his name. And keep doing this until all the names are crossed out. Then you can throw away the notebook and know that you have accomplished something you set out to do. And then it would be time for the next goal, and a new list of names in a new notebook.

It was a great story, and you could tell Earl enjoyed sharing it, and the memory of his Mom and how she helped keep him grounded, focused, and determined. 

It's also a really neat approach to achieving a difficult goal. Writing the list in the notebook served dual purposes - short term motivation - 'I need to be better than the next guy', while keeping the longer term goal in view - 'Once all the names are crossed out, I can move on to the next big challenge'.

Very cool and even better to hear a legend like Pearl share the story.

So, who is on your list in your notebook?

If you're reading this, it's because you caught up on email last night

Note: This post was written on Sunday and was set to publish on Monday morning at about 9:00AM ET.

From the 'no one cares but me' department, I will mention that probably 75% of the posts that run on this blog are written on the weekends. For me, the weekends are when I prefer (generally) to do the 'non-work' work - the blog, trying to figure out what to do with HR Happy Hour, (a post on that coming, maybe this week), working on HRevolution, (more on that very soon too), and of course watching my beloved Knicks in the playoffs.

This past weekend however, had a little more 'real work' than most, we spent a fair bit of time working on the agenda for the upcoming HR Technology Conference in October, (and in the spirit of shameless promotion, you really should lock in your plans to attend now, it is shaping up to be another fantastic event). As you'd expect, or maybe not, over the weekend there was a fair number of emailing going on with various presenters, sponsors, internal staff, etc. finalizing copy, double-checking titles and responsibilities, confirming things, etc.  And through all the back and forth over the last two days I was struck by the remarkable levels of responsiveness from people external to the process. In other words, it seemed like everyone we needed some information from was on their work email, pretty much at all times.  The 'sent from my iPhone' may have been in the signature for most of these exchanges, but that's no matter, the connectedness was astounding, although thinking about it more, maybe I should no longer be surprised.

Because we don't ever fully disconnect, at least not nearly like we used to, (and perhaps should). I know that is not really anything you don't know, perhaps you yourself are one of those folks that taps out emails on Saturday morning from the sidelines of the U9 soccer game, or while you are waiting in the line at Starbucks. But while the ubiquity of connection and ability to respond at any time is clearly apparent to everyone, what isn't clear at all, if it ever really gets spoken of, are the expectations around connectivity and response.

What I mean is this - the first time that you as a new employee in an organization get an email from the boss or even a more senior colleague on a Saturday morning is the expectation there that you will respond? If so, then how quickly? And with what level of ongoing commitment, i.e., how long should you be expected to stop what you're doing and more or less, 'work?', assuming the work we are talking about is normal, day-to-day stuff and not some kind of emergency, real or invented. Chances are you, or your new team members don't really know either, at least not right away. When work is always-on, always within reach, and it becomes really, really, easy for it to become a seven-day-a-week proposition, do you know anymore where the boundary or dividing line it between 'working' and 'not working?'

I still can kind of remember the time when if you needed something from someone, you had to get on them very early on Monday morning with a call or an email - before they became inundated with other things and meetings. Then that window of opportunity kind of moved to Sunday night, because it seems lots and lots of folks spend some sofa-time on Sunday nights trying to triage their Inboxes.  Now, who knows, maybe Saturday morning is the new Sunday night which used to be the old Monday morning.

Either way, I think eventually this has to catch up to us, in the way we talk to employees about expectations, about how we ensure people are getting at least some time to disconnect, and how we think about work and all the other things that are not work.

You are a smart HR person right? Have you asked your IT staff to show you an organization email usage report lately? 

How much work went on over the weekend? Besides the work you did.

Happy Monday!

More on the Danger of Hiring for 'Fit'

Late last year I posted 'Work, Play, and Hiring for Cultural Fit', a post that referenced a recent study on hiring published in the American Sociological Review that suggested, essentially, that people tend to hire people that are like them, and they 'get along with', as well as some comments made by some front-line HR professionals at a conference I had attended. While the study, and the thoughts of the HR pros I spoke with last year were both enlightening, I think the ideas expressed in this piece, 'What Your Culture Really Says' on the Pretty Little State Machine blog frames the 'Hiring for Cultural Fit' discussion in the best way that I've seen yet.Pop art American Greyhound - Carol Lynn Nesbitt

It is written specifically to address the challenges and problems common to tech start-ups and other Silicon Valley-type firms, but still resonates more broadly I think. It also is a long-ish piece, and you should take some time to read it all, but I'll pull out the key part about the danger of focusing too heavily on the nebulous idea of 'fit' in the hiring process:

We make sure to hire people who are a cultural fit

What your culture might actually be saying is… We have implemented a loosely coordinated social policy to ensure homogeneity in our workforce. We are able to reject qualified, diverse candidates on the grounds that they “aren’t a culture fit” while not having to examine what that means - and it might mean that we’re all white, mostly male, mostly college-educated, mostly young/unmarried, mostly binge drinkers, mostly from a similar work background. We tend to hire within our employees’ friend and social groups. Because everyone we work with is a great culture fit, which is code for “able to fit in without friction,” we are all friends and have an unhealthy blur between social and work life. Because everyone is a “great culture fit,” we don’t have to acknowledge employee alienation and friction between individuals or groups. The desire to continue being a “culture fit” means it is harder for employees to raise meaningful critique and criticism of the culture itself.

There's lots more in the piece worth reading, and also taking a few minutes to think about your own experiences in your career, and how your organization evaluates cultural fit, relies on employee referrals to staff open jobs, or tends to recruit from the same few universities year after year.

When I first broke into the workplace more years ago that I care to admit, people talked a lot about 'culture' and 'fit' then too. It also had another name - the 'Good 'ol Boys Club'.

Happy Wednesday.

Listen to your CEO. On Twitter

A couple of days before he made bigger news by getting fired, then penning a cheeky letter to the troops letting them know what just happened, then-no-former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, perhaps knee-deep in a frustrating Email session posted this Tweet: 

Possible to write a gmail script to autoreply & bounce emails longer than fifty words?

— Andrew Mason (@andrewmason) February 25, 2013

Perhaps an extreme approach to dealing with Email and message length overload, but entirely out of the realm of useful utilities. We hate and need Email at the same time. I'd say for 99% of the people reading this post, Email is the single most important means of communication in your professional lives.

Don't think so?

Just try to go a day, week, month without Email. You can't do it.

You can forget Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn (at least until you need to look for a new job), literally for weeks and weeks and it probably won't really matter. Try that trick with email and you will probably get fired, lose business, or get reported to the police as a missing person.

But the point of this post isn't another 'email is horrible' riff, rather it is to call out a response to the former Groupon CEO's tweet, from a Groupon engineer no less, that was sent exactly one hour and one minute after Mason's original Tweet:

@andrewmason got something working: gist.github.com/rboyd/5027691 -- just customize variables to suit and schedule to run on a timer.

— Robert Boyd (@rboyd) February 25, 2013

Pretty amazing and awesome, and perhaps instructive as a clever method of sucking up getting the bosses attention in this new Age of Social Media. I have no idea if before he was ousted at Groupon if Mason had any kind of relationship, or even knowledge of Mr. Boyd - but let's pretend for a moment that they did not, and Mason (at that time), was the CEO and Boyd was just one of the rank-and-file staff working away, and personally invisible to Mason.

What better way to get on the big bosses radar than answering his Twitter question, within an hour, with a solution that works - and in the middle of the night?

Just another item to add to your bag of tricks as you try and climb up, over, or around the corporate ladder. If your CEO is on Twitter you ought to follow him/her. And maybe just maybe you can help your own career in the process.