Say what you will about Jack Welch, but he ALWAYS has a lot to say about HR.
To that end, Welch gave some of his great management and business insights to SHRM attendees in a question-and-answer session with Claire Shipman of ABC News. He was provocative, funny, a bit earthy and generally entertaining. And as someone who has heard him talk on numerous occasions, I can tell you that Welch didn’t just lean on what he has said so many times before.
One of his key points: Trust is an essential quality for all human resources professionals, and that means both trust going down to employees (they need to trust that you’re helping them) and coming down from your boss (who needs to also trust in what you are doing to manage the workforce). Welch believes that the best HR people exhibit pastor-parent behavior: They keep confidences (like a pastor) but can also tell it straight (like Mom or Dad always could).
One interesting moment came when Welch asked the audience members to raise their hands if the HR leader in their organization had equal status to the company’s CFO. Only a few of hands went up, and Welch said that this is proof that HR still must do more to get the respect of their organization—and that more organizations need to push for HR-CFO equality.
Welch also said that holding on to top talent is going to be a bigger challenge because “what you hear is, ‘I want to get the hell out of corporate America.’ ” More workers, he said, are opting to become entrepreneurs in the wake of the huge number of layoffs and corporate downsizing. “HR needs to challenge the organization to be more exciting and more accessible,” Welch added, “because people just don’t trust corporate America.”
Overall, Jack Welch delivered an upbeat HR pep talk here in New Orleans, and his presentation was the most focused and HR-specific opening speech of any I have heard in the past half-dozen SHRM conferences. I didn’t agree with everything he said—for example, I don’t buy his argument that women must make a decision between having children and getting a high-level executive position—but then again, I never agree with everything anyone ever says.
One last thing: There was also probably more written about this SHRM speech than any other in the history of the organization. I had a hard time keeping up with the tsunami of HR “tweets” and blog posts flowing live from the ballroom at the Morial Convention Center, where Welch was speaking.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill: Never have so many written so much, so quickly, about so (relatively) little. As much as I like Jack Welch, the social-media flood to get out his speech was overkill, and probably a sign of the times. I don’t think we’ll be able to shake it anytime soon. Get my latest blog updates and workforce management news by following me on Twitter.
If you’re a leader, you know it’s a little bit like marriage: You’re a leader in good times and bad, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse.
In other words, real leaders know they can’t just choose to be leaders when things are happy and times are good. If you accept the leadership mantle, you also buy into being the leader when things go bad and times are terrible—when those you are leading probably need your leadership the most.
And, that’s why you have to wonder about the would-be leadership of NBA superstar LeBron James.
Unless you are brain dead and living under a rock, you know LeBron. He’s 24, a mega-millionaire, and one of the best basketball players in the world. He helped lead the United States to a gold medal in men’s basketball last summer at the Beijing Olympics, and this year, he led his Cleveland Cavaliers to the best regular-season record in the NBA. Plus, he’s a one-man marketing machine with multiple national campaigns built around him—a person people like and aspire to be like.
Yes, LeBron has been a great leader and role model during this past year when things were going so well, but last weekend, he hit a bump in the leadership road. His Cleveland team was eliminated from the NBA playoffs by the Orlando Magic, and although James made a superhuman effort to will his team to victory and a place in the NBA Finals, it was not to be. Cleveland would not win an NBA championship this year.
That’s where the LeBron James leadership story takes a wrong turn.
Saturday night, after James and his Cleveland Cavaliers lost to Orlando, James did something very much unlike him, and very much unlike someone who has taken on the role of team leader: He walked away, silently, refusing to talk to the media or engage in the customary handshake with the other team. He then showered and quickly left the locker room, refusing to say anything to anyone.
Diane Pucin in the Los Angeles Times put it plainly: “Hey, LeBron. You want to be a star and have puppets cavorting in your honor on television commercials? You let talk ebb and flow about how you need the bigger stage that New York might provide in another year when you are a free agent and everyone will beg for your otherworldly basketball talent and indisputable will to win? Then show up when it hurts too, when the world isn’t being operated like a, well, puppet on a string in your favor.”
LeBron James is no mere athlete; he is someone who has opted to take on a major leadership role in a major business with all that entails. To opt out and walk away from it because things go badly is the worst possible thing a leader can do, because it is in tough times and difficult circumstances when true leadership truly reveals itself.
Real leaders are leaders 24/7, in good times and in bad, when things go your way and, especially, when they don’t. Real leaders stand up and know that only when they learn to lead with dignity through the bad can they also stand up and bask in the glory of when things go good.
In other words, real leaders don’t take a night off, or skulk away because they just suffered a crushing defeat—especially if their name is LeBron James.
Say what you will about Sam Zell, winner of the 2009 Workforce Management Stupidus Maximus Award, but one thing is clear: He has infused a sense of consistency and predictability in his management minions at the Tribune Co., who then are relentlessly efficient in carrying out the shortsighted, regressive, ham-fisted management policies that he inflicts upon his workforce.
Here’s the latest “Can you really believe this?” action from Zell’s Phi Beta Kappa management team: Three editorial staffers at Tribune’s Baltimore Sun were laid off last week as they were in the middle of covering a Baltimore Orioles baseball game from the press box at Camden Yards.
“Yes, it felt just as bad as you imagine it would,” Steele wrote, “but it’s a little different when you’re 44, when you’ve been in the business more than half your life … and when it’s your specific job, not your entire newspaper, which has just become defunct. And when the people responsible for giving you the news were a few dozen blocks away, calling you on your cell phone in the middle of a baseball game you thought you were going to write a column about for the next day’s paper.”
Steele says that the first thing he did after getting the news of his layoff was to let all his friends and family know what had happened. “The overriding theme” from all of them, he wrote, was the same thing: “They [Baltimore Sun management] couldn’t tell you to your face?’’
“They had their reasons,” he noted. “Step back far enough and squint really hard and you can see them. As long as you ignore the fact that they made arrangements to get a replacement column into the paper long before they ever dialed my number. And the fact that if you go up high in the stands behind home plate, you probably can see the Sun building from Camden Yards. It’s not a plane flight away. It’s literally walking distance; Sun people with tickets had been making that walk since the ballpark opened.”
I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again here in the Year of the Endless Cutback: Firing someone is a one-on-one activity that should be done in person, face to face, supervisor to worker. There’s a reason for this, and it is simple: It should be handled that way because management should be forced to personally confront the consequences of its actions. And that’s why doing it by e-mail or phone is a cop-out. It dehumanizes a process that is pretty inhuman to begin with.
Why did the management of the Baltimore Sun opt to terminate staffers by phone from the ballpark when they could have easily done it in person?
David Steele has an answer: It’s because “the people ultimately responsible, for the gutting of the paper and the callous treatment of its employees, whether they were in the office at the time or not, are a plane flight away. Clearly, to them ‘Baltimore Sun’ is just a line on a balance sheet. Or a bankruptcy claim, in this case. Practically speaking, none of us should even have had low expectations for how this would be handled. ‘No expectations’ was probably shooting too high.”
Like Steele, my expectations for Zell and his management team are so low that they are on the floor. Nothing Zell does should surprise me, and that’s why he’s so deserving of this year’s Stupidus Maximus honor.
Simply put, it’s because he’s a guy who not only is adept at demoralizing his workforce, but also highly skilled at making himself look crazy at the same time. And as I noted before, in a world with so many bad managers, that’s a really tough combination to beat. Get my latest blog updates and workforce management news by following me on Twitter.
The overpayments weren’t that big—they ranged from hundreds of dollars up to $5,000 per employee—but the notion of requiring laid-off workers to pay back a relatively small amount of money due to a company foul-up seemed pretty callous. Microsoft senior vice president of human resources Lisa Brummel ended up having to do damage control on this one and eventually fell on her sword and said the company erred in asking for the money back.
She said that senior management has “asked leaders across the company to minimize the amount of e-mail sent today, as employees told us the e-mail volume in January was distracting.” For the latest round of layoffs, Brummel wrote that Microsoft “leaders have agreed to streamline their e-mail communications.”
Of course, The Wall Street Journal found out about the don’t-talk-about-the-layoffs e-mail when a copy of Brummel’s memo “was posted in the comments section of Mini-Microsoft, a blog run by an anonymous Microsoft employee that’s popular with company staffers.”
This just proves one of the basic rules that every smart, thinking manager should inherently understand: Trying to muzzle or otherwise pressure employees to limit communications about something as serious as a mass layoff is both futile and shortsighted.
Microsoft management will undoubtedly claim that limiting e-mail communications in this instance is a good thing. In fact, Brummel’s admonition is that “rather than sending e-mail, we encourage you to meet with your employees face-to-face or via Live Meeting, where possible, to address their questions.”
Face-to-face communication, especially about something as critical as a mass layoff, is always the best way to go. But, most anyone who has handled layoffs will tell you that over-communication is always preferable to under-communication, so why would Microsoft want to limit in any way a critical tool they have to help communicate with both the departing and surviving employees?
Never mind the odd notion of a high-tech company wanting to stifle high-tech communications; trying to tell employees NOT to discuss something as serious as a mass layoff, in any way, shape, or form only invites more rumors and discussion of the very thing that management is trying to curtail.
And, it fails to understand the psychology of layoffs. This will be the ONLY real topic that Microsoft people will be talking about right now, and a management admonition to limit discussion about the situation in any way is simply futile and counterproductive, because workers will be chattering about the layoffs ad infinitum, no matter what management says.
This just proves another management truism: Don’t ever underestimate the ability of smart companies to do dumb things. You’d think Microsoft would have learned this lesson from the overpaid-severance fiasco, but clearly, handling layoffs the right way is something that even highly successful companies like Microsoft have a hard time getting straight.
Here’s one of those word-association questions: What do you immediately think of when you hear the term “job for life?”
If you’re like me, your mind probably jumps to this: the pope; the queen of England; Supreme Court justices; Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe; dictators in Asia and Africa; and tenured schoolteachers. I don’t know anyone who equates the notion of a lifetime job with journalists or newspaper professionals, but that quaint concept is at the heart of the ongoing struggle for the survival of The Boston Globe, New England’s leading newspaper.
“The Boston Globe dodged a corporate bullet [this week] as the New York Times Co. … backed off a threat to notify federal authorities that it plans to close the paper within 60 days,” according to Howard Kurtz writing in The Washington Post. The Globe managed to avoid a shutdown notice because the Times Co. reached an agreement with six of the Globe’s seven unions, including the Teamsters, over its demands for $20 million in concessions, “but not with the Boston Newspaper Guild, which has accused Times executives of ‘bullying’ tactics.”
So what’s the hang-up with the last union, you might ask? According to the Post story, “The sticking point remains lifetime job guarantees for 170 of the guild’s 660 journalists, advertising and business office employees, previously negotiated in return for other concessions.”
The fact that yet another newspaper is on the brink of closing down isn’t a shock, of course, given all that’s happening in the newspaper business all over America. The surprise here, at least to me, is that anyone would actually think that the concept of a “lifetime job” is sustainable in our 2009 economy, and, that a union like the Newspaper Guild would be foolish enough to put a lifetime job guarantee for 170 ahead of the survival of the business and jobs for everyone else in The Boston Globe’s workforce.
The notion of a lifetime job, he adds, “was born of arrogance on the part of [newspaper] publishers who thought their market supremacy would endure forever, and arrogance on the part of unions who once wielded sufficient power to intimidate management into agreeing to this perfectly preposterous proposition. Apart from federal judges and tinhorn dictators, no one has the luxury of a job for life. And no one should.”
Don’t get me wrong; I love the concept of a “job for life,” but I put that in the same category as buying a ticket in hopes of winning the lottery. It’s a wonderful fantasy, but totally removed from the reality of day-to-day life. And, a lifetime job is an “unsustainable” business proposition, notes media critic Dan Kennedy, especially “at a time when the newspaper business is getting much, much smaller.”
My grandfather used to tout the concept of lifetime jobs, and I heard it when he retired from his position as a printer for the New York Daily News back in the late 1960s. As much as I loved him, I questioned it as a kid then the same way I question it now as an adult so many years later.
The notion of a “lifetime” job wasn’t sustainable in my grandfather’s day, and it isn’t sustainable now some 40 years later. It’s a relic of a time long past, and proof once more that organized labor too often is completely out of touch, and they would rather argue over out-of-date concepts than focus on the difficult economic realities of the 2009 workplace.
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