#HRHappyHour LIVE Tonight - 'The 8 Man Rotation - Season 3'

On Tuesday of this week The 8 Man Rotation gang - Matt 'akaBruno' Stollak, Kris Dunn, Tim Sackett, Lance Haun, and I released our third annual free Ebook on the intersection of 'Sports and HR'.

Titled simply 'The 8 Man Rotation: A Look at Sports and HR, The 2012 Season' - the Ebook is a collection of over 60 sports-themed blog posts and articles from 2012 (up from 45 in 2011), and registering about 150 pages of goodness.

So while The 8 Man Rotation Ebook has become an annual tradition, (and an institution of sorts in the HR space), so too has the 8 Man Rotation's annual appearance on the HR Happy Hour Show to celebrate the Ebook launch - and to talk about all things 'Sports and HR'.

And so as it should be, as it must be, The 8 Man Rotation is back LIVE on the HR Happy Hour Show tonight, February 21, 2013 at 8:00PM ET.

You can catch the show in a few different ways - listen to the live stream starting at 8:00PM ET on the show page here, or using the widget player embedded below:

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

 

You can also listen via the call-in listener line - 646-378-1086, (if you are brave you can even join the fun).

After the show, you can access the replay anytime from the show page, or from the Apple iTunes store - just search for 'HR Happy Hour' in the podcasts area and download the show for free to your iDevice.

I know it will be a fun show tonight - even if you are not a huge sports fan I think there will be some insights on how sports and HR and talent and recruiting and work are all interrelated that you will find interesting.

I hope you can join me, co-host Trish McFarlane, and The 8 Man Rotation tonight!

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!

But he was great in the interview...

This post probably will take 500 words to get to the point which is this: As a talent pro, or more specifically, as someone that has responsibility and obligation to make a career-defining hire, be very wary of a 'great interview' that can cause you to take short cuts in your process, unnecessarily cloud your thinking, and frankly, to make a hire today that if you had given it at least a couple of more days of consideration, you might not have made.

So here is the backstory and yes, I am starting my official 'I am going to continue to write about sports and talent in 2013 campaign' with this post.Stretch

The Monday immediately after the end of the NFL season is known as 'Black Monday', named as such for the normal purge and firing of anywhere from 5 -10 head coaches, (and their staffs) by losing or otherwise disappointing teams from across the league. This purge also sets off a bit of a frenzy of speculation, posturing, interviewing, and hiring by these same teams as they all seem to be pursuing many of the same individuals from what is (generally) a small and highly sought after candidate pool.

One such NFL team caught up in the coaching game of musical chairs (again), was the Buffalo Bills, a team caught up in a decade-plus funk, and owners of the league's longest streak of missing the post-season playoffs. The Bills released their prior coach Chan Gailey on Black Monday, and led by newly empowered team executive Russ Brandon, (this coaching search and hire would be his first BIG decision and will likely define his tenure), set about what Brandon described would be 'exhaustive' and 'leave no stone unturned'.  

This exhaustive search lasted about three days, and resulted in the hire of Syracuse University Head Coach (and former NFL assistant), Doug Marrone, who in four years at Syracuse had won exactly as many games he had lost, (25-25). Depending on your point of view, the decision to hire Marrone, certainly not considered to be among the most desirable of the head coaching talent available, was described as 'curious', a 'stretch', and with 'Who?'

The great sports site Deadspin ran a piece that compiled reactions to the Bills' hiring of Marrone, and I wanted to call out the pull quote from the Sporting News take on the decision:

When Marrone interviewed, he must have been extremely impressive. Marrone wasn't even the hottest college coach on the market

Ouch. And there were other similar kinds of reactions from various media outlets and Bills fans - a mix of surprise, disappointment, and rationalization that a .500 college coach was the right person to tap to rebuild and transform a moribund NFL team.

Obviously, only team executive Russ Brandon and perhaps a select few other team officials know what was really asked and said in Marrone's interview that was 'extremely impressive' enough for the team to conclude its 'exhaustive' search after three days and offer Marrone the position, which for him, represents a huge step up in pressure, expectations, and compensation. But Brandon has to know his own performance, (and likely his employment), is largely riding on whether or not Marrone ends up succeeding as Bills coach - and as a talent professional well, that is quite a bit of stock to put into what must have been an 'extremely impressive' interview.

Maybe it's just me, but I worry a little bit, or am just a bit leery when I hear of coaches, heck any other candidates that are described as being 'great interviews'. It strikes me as just a half-step above being a 'snappy dresser', and we all know how much that helps win games.

Happy Tuesday!

Step stone or destination? If you are not sure, the talent will let you know

In my continued examination of the intersections between Sports and HR, Talent, and Recruiting, there may be no better spectacle and opportunity for examination than the Winter 'silly season' where American college football teams and coaching talent undergo their annual period of firing, resigning, and hiring to re-set the (rarified) talent pool for head football coaching positions.

There are generally three reasons that a head football coaching position becomes available, and they are pretty similar to the reasons any executive, well-paid, position opens up in any organization:

Performance - There are always a handful of these each season. Whether the football team under performed, or there is a true mis-alignment between management expectations and the reasonable likelihood of those expectations being met - either way the 'performance' termination is a common and generally straightforward situation.

Retirement - Head college football coach is an outstanding job. Heck, if you can have any degree of success and tenure in a position, it is a multi-million dollar while enjoying the love and adoration of the fan base and community life.  So naturally, the men (and that is not a sexist take, these jobs are ONLY held by men), that have these jobs tend to hold on to them for a really long time.  But once they hit 75 or 80 or so, (not entirely kidding), they often have to hang up the whistle.

Better gig somewhere else - This one, where the coach, (or for your shop, the Director of Marketing, or the VP of Sales), leaves to take the same or similar job elsewhere, is the most interesting scenario at least in the college football talent pool. Because in football, the 'job' itself is the same one everywhere, so the evaluation of whether or not the next opportunity is a step up, a step down, or a lateral move is completely reliant on other criteria.  Some of these are objective - like salary and bonuses, others are subjective - the 'prestige' of the job mostly driving this.

And the tough part of situation three, when your coach or executive ditches you for what you think is at best a lateral move, is often it takes this kind of high profile resignation and move to make you and your leadership realize where you stand on the industry desirability pecking order.  Make no mistake - the talent, their choices, and the decisions your competitors make do more to 'place' you on the attractiveness scale than most of the things you can do, at least in the short term.

Net-net of this?  It helps to understand where you 'rank' in the eyes of the talent, particularly for those key positions that do not have an enormously deep talent pool.  Your gig can be a starter job, you can be a step along the way for a high-flier, or you (sometimes) can be a true destination.

It's better to know what you are than have the talent surprise you.

Have a great week!