Think Moneyball

It's the post with the picture of Brad Pitt.

I recently wrote a post at Compensation Café called The Young and the Restless, about how Generation Y is more likely to leave an organization they are satisfied with than other generations. 

Why?  Because they aren’t tied down by things like kids, mortgages and 15 years of experience in a particular field.  They are unfettered - at least the ones who didn’t borrow $80K to major in History at an Ivy League school -  and can afford to take chances, try something new and even fail.

As topics tend to percolate, when my friend and HR influencer Dave Ryan and I were talking recently about ‘big HR trends’ he also brought up the fact that a mass exodus is predicted as the job market loosens up.  Since this topic seems to get a lot of air time we decided to write about it as a Project Social topic.  Dave’s post on this can be found over at HR Official, which has a modern new look.

It seems to me that the mass exodus everyone fears is not the only or even the biggest problem in all this.  I mean, let’s assume everyone’s as miserable as the latest data suggests and ask ourselves who’s really going to leave? 

1. People with highly sought after skills
2. Highly connected people
3. People in their 20s with no skin in the game

For the most part, everyone else is probably going to stick around:

• People who can’t find a better job elsewhere
• People who don’t have the flexibility to make a change
• People without an influential network

Now, call me crazy but I find the second list scarier than the first list.  The real problem is less who you lose, it’s who you don’t lose and what you do about it.

You don’t lose the people who can’t leave.  The bad news is that many of them don’t want to be there, which will impact their every decision, deliverable and customer interaction.

The good news is that the people who stay may be extremely talented, even though no one else apparently wants them.  They may not be obviously marketable but decision makers have been known to undervalue talented people who don’t quite fit the mold.

Think Moneyball.

To weather the storm of those leaving while everyone else sticks around hating life, companies should invest in developing the people they have left.  That's right, invest in the people no one else wants and who don't want to be there.

This approach will address two problems: 1) It will immediately have a positive impact on engagement by giving people a taste of opportunity; and 2) it will help mitigate any critical skills gaps resulting from the exodus of the more mainstream talented people.

It doesn’t have to cost a lot.  Be creative.  Think mentoring, think tapping into underutilized talent pools, think lateral career paths…

The war for talent is won from within. 

Directing Our Own Futures

Guest post by Jaana Eubanks

In May, a whole new chapter in my life starts as I graduate as an MBA from the University of Nevada, Reno, and move back to Finland after living in the United States for almost seven years. Exciting as well as absolutely terrifying times!

For the past seven years, I’ve been living the academic life style and also played collegiate sports during my undergrad studies. Before coming to the United States, sports played a major role in my life, and most of my youth was devoted to training and competing.

Even though my sports career didn’t workout the way I had hoped, it gave me so much: the opportunities to travel the world, make life long friendships, a scholarship to study abroad and it also instilled in me the values that make me who I am today. The journey has been an amazing adventure and something that I’m truly grateful for.

I’m excited to go back home and start my career, with a great confidence and vigor to find something that I’ll actually enjoy doing (don’t we all?). Since I’m very into the “human side” of business I’ve focused my search on marketing and consulting jobs. The job hunt has by no means been easy. For the past months, I’ve applied to several positions online, most of which seem to end up in this mysterious “black hole”… Some of the applications, I’ve received calls for.

But I’m not letting myself feel discouraged. Things don’t happen over night.

What has been important to me in finding the right kind of career path is to look for opportunities where I can grow and develop as an employee and a person as well as being part of an environment that is challenging. I believe that there is no reason for me (or anyone for that matter) to “just get a position, somewhere”, but to look for a career that would be rewarding and a good match.  That is the reason why we work so hard in life and school, right?

My future career to me looks like something that I can be enthusiastic and energized about, waking up every morning being happy to go to work and provide value. I strongly believe that one can have both in life, a wonderful life and a career one is happy with. At the end, I’ll make my life the way I wanted it to be. So can you.

My advice to you, fellow young professionals, is to remember that you are in charge of your own career (not your parents, your degree or your boss) and no one else is going to reach your goals for you. So get proactive, confident and brave. Network. Read. Remember your worth.

Be kind to others, good things happen to good people.

Go after it!

…And wish me luck!

Jaana Eubanks is a Finnish MBA student seeking opportunities to develop herself and her career while connecting with others.  You can read more from Jaana on her blog Jaana Eubank's Journey or follow her on Twitter @JaanaEubanks.

Project Social: Young Manager

According to a recent survey, 25% of supervisors are younger than the people they supervise. That’s not really surprising given that not everyone over, say, 40 is a supervisor and someone has to be managing all these people.

It’s also not surprising that we see a large volume of blog traffic on the topic of young managers, managing older workers and dealing with generation gaps in the workforce.

My take is that the problem – if we want to call it that – between younger and older workers has less to do with age per se and more to do with a clash of style and experience level.

I was a young manager once. I called lots of meetings and did most of the talking. I worked crazy hours and had limited respect for people who didn't. I had all sorts of great theories that didn't work very well in practice. There may have been spreadsheets…

Basically, I was pretty annoying to folks who’d been around a while.

If you're a young manager there's a good chance you're annoying. But it's not because you’re 'young.'

It’s because you haven’t been around the block yet. You haven’t lived through the ebbs and flows of business. You don’t know yet which problems are really problems and which will go away by themselves. You can’t evaluate which 80% really needs to get done and which 20% doesn’t matter.

Basically – and please don’t take this the wrong way - you’re clueless.

That’s OK. All great leaders have to start somewhere and plenty of more experienced managers are annoying with far less justification. If you’re a decent person who tries to be a good boss, most of your team will forgive and support you. If you’re a micromanaging know it all, they will hate you.

And yes, the older, more experienced people will hate you more because they know what they’re doing and just want to get on with it.

I’m not saying you should let older workers have it all their own way. If someone on your team undermines your authority or does poor work it's your job to address it, for example like Dave Ryan’s son did (read all about it over at HR Official.)

But here’s some free advice for managing people with more experience than you:

• Don’t micromanage – They know what they're doing and micromanagement kills creativity, enthusiasm and pride in one’s work.
• Be humble – Some of the people on your team have been working since before you were born and might know a thing or two you don’t.
• Lighten up – You'll laugh at yourself in 10 years when you look back on your first manager gig.

Remember: You may be barely old enough to drink now but some day you’ll probably end up working for someone younger than you, too. There is such a thing as karma...

Always Available, Always Broken

'Always Available, Always Broken' is the name of an article I read recently in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

According to a study of people working in the IT branch throughout Germany, there is a level of stress permeating the entire industry that can negatively impact health and productivity.

There are several predictable culprits, for example:

• Fewer people having to do more work due to the current economic situation.
• The expectation that one is available round the clock via several different types of media.
• The ever changing nature of information technology, resulting in an overwhelmed feeling.

And one culprit that may surprise you: performance management, in particular goals.

The study cites 'new management techniques' involving the rollout of goals and frequent performance reviews. Sound familiar?

But wait, we like performance management and we sort of like goals. And frequent performance reviews are a plus for the employee, in fact some bold thinkers have even referred to timely and constructive feedback as part of employee compensation now that there's no money.

Plus, we all know that Generation Y loves regular reviews because they can't wait a whole year for feedback.

However, the researches who conducted this study warns that this can lead employees to feel like they have to permanently prove their right to be employed. And that can be unnecessarily - as in not value adding - stressful.

Because it creates a feeling of control and insecurity rather than trust.

And the results?

Well, for one thing, more people come to work when sick, which is not good for productivity or general workplace health. Or the national health care bill, come to mention it.

And of course team work tends to get shot to hell in this kind of paranoid, suspicious atmosphere.

But more importantly, highly qualified workers, who are expected to be pretty scarce in just a few years, are being systematically burned out.

This definitely raises some interesting questions about the level of stress of employees in other countries that have a less generous social net and vacation policy than Germany. Not to mention the possible social cost of stress related illnesses over the next decade.

In any event, it sounds like somebody's missing the boat on talent management. If done correctly, one doesn't expect big German men to cower in a corner weeping or laughing hysterically during a simple job satisfaction survey.

(This is why I always say you should talk to people, you don't get nearly as much depth from an online survey.)

What do you think, when does performance management turn into unhealthy micromanagement?