Ep. 11: The Human Seems to be Missing From Human Resources

Career Design Podcast

Episode 11

Lindsay 00:00

I'm Lindsay Mustain, and this is the career design podcast made for driven ambitious square pegs and round holes type professionals who see things differently and challenge the status quo. We obliterate obstacles and unlock hidden pathways to overcome and succeed where others have not stagnation feels like death. And we are unwilling to compromise our integrity and settle for being average in any way. We are the backbone of any successful business and those who overlook our potential are doomed to a slow demise. We do work that truly matters aligns with our purpose, and in turn, we make our lasting mark on the world. We are the dreamers, doers, legends and visionaries who are called to make our most meaningful contribution and love what we do. I am excited about today's topic. No, we had to reschedule it, because I wasn't feeling up to talking about this, I think it's really easy to look at someone like me, who goes and does a lot of presentations does a lot of talking does a lot of belief around helping empower job seekers into their self worth. And let me tell you, I couldn't show up for that call. I just couldn't. Why I had something that happened in my life, where a story was put into my lap, that I interpreted as being that I was not worthy. Something about me was not worthy. And that story. Like when you think about motivation, motivation is one of those things that doesn't like it just, it comes and goes it's not tends to be you know, some people are very self motivated, that's tends to be, but motivation is one of those physical things like we wait to be motivated. There's a difference between routine and structure and motivation. And so what happened for me is I do have a routine and structure, but I lost the motivation and the ability to show up that day. And it became from a place of, of fear of feeling lack of feeling, a low level of self worth, in that moment. Now, here's the deal about this is that I know that high performers, we get this. And because tends to be that we really truly care, we don't really we're not, we do high performing work, because we want to do work that matters. And so when somebody tells us a story that says our work doesn't matter, or our work is less than that those stories really infiltrate our hearts, and they can really kind of kill that can really kill our vibe on some of that. So I wanted to share that because I think it's important for you to understand that nobody is perfect. on this journey. Nobody is perfect in feeling amazing all the time. In fact, as you continue to expand and contract, you what happens is somebody tends to rise above the level of their peers or of their group. And people see that and they go, Oh, Who does she think she is? And I'm going to throw stones at a balloon that is rising, just to pop it to watch you fall on your face? How many of you have been there? Somebody's done that for you? How many of you have secretly been incredibly envious of somebody else? Me? Okay, so it's not it's not uncommon. But here's what happens inside of human resources is that, and I should say is that human resource has been inside of organizations we have this also happens, where narratives happen, where things will become people, management. People management has become a process of actual friendly fire. And I'm not this is not me getting started into the actual that we're gonna be talking about today. But and that's friendly fire means that we take cheap shots at people who are inside of our organizations, there are peers, there are the people who who we work with. They're our vendors. They're the people who support us and other teams. And these cheap shots actually are disempowering stories that take away someone's motivation. And here's the problem is that this is nearly celebrated, like, I had this person come in, and you will believe what he said. And here's how I told him how it really was. How many of you have heard those stories, these stories of self power, which is not really power, it's really self force. And it's a projection of a place of very weak career power. It's a projection from a place for somebody who doesn't feel good about themselves. So when you get feedback from the source and when the feedback comes from the right way, people management has become nothing other than people the bullying. Yes, I'm going to talk about that today. A little bit. Oh, so good. Yes, Shimano. Exactly. And these ideas here of what we tell people, but this idea that the story reason these narratives, we create friendly fire, we take cheap shots. And you know what that does for people? Let me be really clear, have you ever been shamed and bullied into doing better work? No, because that's not how it works. That is the perfect lead into this podcast. Because we're talking about how we put the human back in human resources. Now, human resources is a department inside of most organizations, and even if they don't have an organization, they have some sort of human resource function. Now, there's really six main core areas in human resources. There's recruiting, there's safety, there's employee relations, there's total rewards, there's training, and there's compliance. Now, the how people define these there might be like things where we use talent management, all of these things are all traditional HR. And here is what I have to say about traditional HR. Traditional HR is no longer about actually helping empower and improve human beings, who HR is a place where we manage human being problems, okay. And it's at the point where if you ever see like, I've heard the phrase that a man who thinks he's going to die tomorrow is going to find a way to make it happen. Human Resources, is all about the investigation of issues and mitigating risk for a company. Okay, so there is a reason why CEOs do not see our HR departments as value added, because they manage problems. They're there to prevent us from being sued. And we truly act as policy checkers, gate keepers, we check the box, and we become the cops inside of organizations. And this is why universally human resources is not seen as a value added department. For candidates, we see this as a necessary evil a process that we have to get by. And then we wonder why HR is not about actually helping people. It's not the human resources, we talk about managing productivity, and not actually managing people potential. So I want to talk about why we've eroded this idea of adding humans, humanity back into human resources, why can't we, we seem to do that. And it comes down to this idea of leadership. That's really the biggest issue. And most of the time when we talk about being good leaders, that means we help empower our teams and our people to be more successful to create more profitability for our business. That is what leadership is meant to do. Instead, leadership is task management. Okay. How many of you've been there you have something that you were excellent at. It's your expertise level. And you have somebody who micromanages you about your work, and disempowers you from making decisions because you needed a babysitter. Okay? That is actually what we call authoritarian management. It's transactional. And let me tell you, this is what all people all people start here. So you, you don't start out typically being an amazing leader. The message is, Do as I say, that is what authoritarian management looks like, okay. It's not about how do I help somebody be more successful? It's all about how do I create barriers, so this person does decent work, because I see them as a problem. Okay, so let's change that paradigm and say, This person has incredible potential to step into a place of power, where we can align that power into doing work that creates massive performance, high performance, that in turns create creates profitability. This is the core concept that is missing behind human resources, we started to manage problems, instead of managing people potential to create profitability. So when we go back to human resources, and thinking about these six core concepts, I want to talk a little bit about why this should be the 20% solution. And instead, we should be focusing on align people into a place of career power. And what that means is that we actually empower people to do their best work in their zones of genius. This is kind of like a no duh thing. We should be empowering people to do work that matters for themselves and for your business. You hire people who are experts, you hire them to make a difference, and then you handcuff them and throw them in the deep end and wonder why they can't swim. And this is where we could do things like, well, they need a training. Well, no, what you needed was a good leadership team. You needed an onboarding process that actually set somebody up for success. You need to empower them to take ownership of their own career to go find the answers, okay? When we talk about recruiting, recruiting, We always need people. We're always having turnover. Guess what's wrong with your recruiting practice. It's all about leadership. If your numbers are not improving year over year for retention, it's a leadership issue, okay, which means you don't have leaders, you have managers, and we do have to have managers, we do have to have people who are task oriented. But overall, we talk about aligning leadership as the way to increase profitability. Okay. Now, compliance and law, safety in the workplace, these are things that are automatic, and they should be set up from the beginning. So guess what, when we're dealing with safety and compliance issues, what do you think it comes down to it's a derivative of a problem of not having good leadership from the beginning, okay, because if you don't create a safe workplace, if you don't create systems that create compliance, then you are managing problems, then you are spending all of your time for what is 3% of the workforce, okay. 3% of the workforce creates 97% of the work that we do in human resources. Now, what if instead of we spent 97% of that time amplifying people's power zona genius, to create profitability? What happens when we do that? Okay? Do you think that we could go further together, we can. But the problem is, we have task managers, and then we also then we go into, you know, authoritative leadership, which is I empower you to make a decision, I don't give you a lot of other help or a lot of other structure. And I'm gonna say, this was me and my business, I came on, and I am a good leader. But coming into a new job, guess what I wasn't, I have a new job, new business, I had no competency, and what I did, so as a leader who was not competent, I wasn't able to be successful in leading other people effectively, until I had that taken care of. So then I could be the right leader. And so this is the other thing is that we do this idea of called a Peter Principle. The Peter Principle says that will continue to promote somebody, especially people who are individual contributors, or technical specialists, meaning they're very good at what they do, to the point where they reach and competency because the next natural step in our career paths is to put those people into people leadership positions. I don't know how many times I've dealt with executives, and they say, I absolutely do not want to lead people anymore, I want to stay in my zone of genius, which is in here as an individual contributor, we need to stop penalizing high performing individual contributors. And stop putting them into leadership roles and assume that is the default setting. So how do you do this one, you create principal level roles, which means they get to stay in their zone, they don't have to manage anyone but themselves and allow somebody instead of putting somebody who is going to be an incompetent leader, because they don't even want to be putting them in that role. We give them a chance to be successful. And this is truly truly where it comes to the idea of how do you create intentional career roadmaps for your people? Because that's the problem is that we look at people and we say, Alright, here's this box. Here's this box, I'm using a post it note here to example, here's a box. All right, here's my job description. And your job is to fit right in this box. Oh, you have skills over here, you have skills over here, guess what, this is your job, you stay in the box. That is traditional human resources. Now, when you line somebody in a career power, we say, Oh, this is your job. But you're good at that. Let's see how we can move you closer to that, or Wow, that was amazing. That created a massive return for us. So how can we move them over further? How do we get them aligned? How do we elevate higher and higher to get them aligned into their zone of genius? Instead of saying stay in this flippin little box, do what you're told and go home, when you're finished, work until you die and go home. So we can choose to either empower people to be leaders of their own work and to do a place of power or we can truly choose to put them into a box, minimize disempower and then wonder why they're massively unhappy and they leave us the answer comes down to creating a problem, a leadership transformation inside of your organization. You have to look as people as the solution instead of the problem. When you understand that your people create your profitability. Stop managing them like task managers, stop managing them for tasks and start managing them for results. start managing not instead of productivity, but what they create for progress. What do they create for progression? What do they create that creates profitability? Stop managing whether or not they checked all the damn boxes. Did they do something that was even more powerful? Because when we stop trying to see people as being the problem instead of being the solution, this is what creates a transformation. And we call this this transcendent CEO. And the transcendent CEO. The idea behind a transcendent CEO is someone who has realized that people are actually the answer to your solution. Okay? Now we have all these massive, massive, amazing, disruptive organizations, who are literally shooting themselves in the foot, because they haven't understood how to tap in to the natural abundance of genius and resources, and unlimited energy when you align people into their zone of genius. Because when you're in that place, work doesn't feel like work, work feels like play, work is something that they want to do work is something that becomes a part of their life. And they're excited about what they do, instead of being miserable every day and searching for a job while they're at your work. Because they could hope to get they want to run as fast as they possibly can. They could hope to get out of there any sooner, they would leave. Okay, because guess what, more than 60 people every single day think about quitting their job every single day. Why do you think that is I'm going to tell you, one of the most important people in your life is your supervisor. They control whether or not you have a good life or not. Okay. And this is where we have empowered, bad leadership, we've empowered endorse, and even put in bullying in place as a way of creating performance that does nothing except disempower your people create resentment, increase turnover, increase shrinkage, and decrease the effectiveness of your workforce. Now, we already know that an engaged workforce makes better sense. However, we don't seem to fucking care, actually. So we say that, and then we go and shoot ourselves in the foot by trying to manage to metrics instead of figuring out why things aren't going wrong. We look at Oh, well, you didn't do this, because this is going wrong. And instead of saying, Oh, well, turns out, we actually should have been troubleshooting an issue that was much further upstream. Because the outcome hump comes from a misalignment in leadership in direction, and in creating confidence in your people. That's actually the issue. It's not about the outcome. When people look at the outcome, it's like measuring the outcome, the result without actually looking what happened in the first place. And that's where you really have to go deep into this problem solving idea, and stop looking at people as being problems, because they're not their problem, because you have decided they're a problem. If you looked at them and said, this person can dramatically transform my business, if it is the right person. And this is the other part, we'll talk about this another time. But if they're the right person, that means that you have a real true, honest conversation. What is it that you want to do in your career? What is it that you're excited about? What would make you motivated to take the next step? What do you want to learn more about? What can I help you do to grow? If I had that conversation versus saying, well, Nicole, you didn't do 15 of these. So guess what? You're on my shit list. That's normal leadership. That's corporate America, that's big tech. Instead of saying, How can I help you win, because as leaders, your job is not to create barriers for your people, it's to create bridges. Your job is to protect, defend an advocate so that your people go further faster. If you haven't gotten that, guess what? You're a bad leader. That's it. You're a bad leader. Now, I'm not saying you can take that and be like, wow, if you, Lindsay, I'm telling you, here's what the deal is, you can choose to change that. If you don't understand that part. Guess what, this is the time for you to take that step of moving into a place where I truly serve my people. by serving my people, I know that I'm gonna get better results for me, and my team winning means that I win. There is no us versus them. It is always we win. We either win together as a team, or we lose together as a team. When loser draw, we celebrate either way, or our team together, and we find a way to correct it. But we're going down together and we're going up together. But when we do this, where we piecemeal, we fire and give cheap shots to other people, we disempower them. And this is where you take your best players, and they hate their job, and they could never want to work for your company again, because of how you treated them. It's a very simple, simple change. As soon as you understand that the real issue with human resources comes from a misalignment to understanding that your people are your greatest source of power and profitability. will stay tuned. I'll see you guys very soon.