I’ve been busy with the SHRM conference in New Orleans this past week, so here are a few leftover July Fourth fireworks for you to ponder over the long holiday weekend:
“Jerks are annoying, but they aren’t stupid,” he writes. “They know that first-class nitwits make mouth-watering targets for human resource officers with layoff quotas. The office jerk has not disappeared. He is merely hiding in the hills. One day, he will come down from the mountains and wreak havoc again.”
And, Queenan feels that the jerks-in-hiding dynamic is actually one of the really good things coming out of the economic downturn.
“The grim specter of the return of the office jerk is perhaps the only reason some of us wish this recession goes on for a while,” he writes. “At least that way, some of the more odious office jerks will have a chance to get run over by a truck or start writing a blog. The solitary blogger is unquestionably a jerk, but a self-employed jerk is a threat to no one.”
Hmmm … I think I may have encountered a couple of these solitary blogger/jerks at SHRM in New Orleans. You know who you are. And yes, I’m with Queenan that the self-employed jerk is a good thing for workplace harmony everywhere.
So, here’s an early prediction for SHRM 2010 in San Diego next June: Don’t bet on attendance to be any better than 2009 in New Orleans. In fact, it may actually be a little bit worse.
Why do I think this? Overriding Reason No. 1 is because we will soon be going into the budget season for businesses and organizations planning for 2010, and given the lackluster unemployment numbers that came out today, it is clear that we aren’t going to be out of the woods with this recession for a while.
This means that companies will continue to hold tight on discretionary travel for events like the SHRM conference for another year, at least.
Overriding Reason No. 2 is that SHRM 2010 is in San Diego.
This bugs the hell out of us West Coasters, but people living east of Denver get all worked up about long trips to the Pacific Time Zone. This is more perception than reality, of course, but my educated guess is that there will be a lot of would-be SHRM attendees who will opt out simply because they think San Diego is just too far to travel to.
Now, I used to be a mega-frequent flier on United, but their service and customer experience has absolutely gone in the toilet the last few years. I don’t fly them much anymore, so I can’t say this with 100 percent certainty, but my guess is that today—leading into a long holiday weekend with a major computer glitch at its biggest hub—is a day that neither United workers nor customers will soon forget. Great fireworks for a happy Independence Day, indeed.
If there is one thing that can help us forget our troubles, it’s the big game that will take place Sunday in Florida between the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers.
Yes, this is Super Bowl Week, and along with the throngs of people who are descending on Tampa to attend the many football-related events, there are also a number of “contingent workers” who think this is a good week to be in Tampa too.
Yes, contingent workers in the form of exotic dancers, aka strippers, from all over the country are descending on Tampa because “there are, by one count, 43 strip clubs in the Tampa metropolitan area—one for each Super Bowl,” according to an Associated Press story published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And, it added, “the week of Super Bowl XLIII is to Tampa’s naughty nightlife what Black Friday is to America’s shopping malls.”
“ ‘Tampa has a reputation for having the most strip clubs and the most girls who are a lot of fun,’ says a 25-year-old exotic dancer named Claudia, who left her usual gig in Las Vegas,” the AP reports, “to work the Super Bowl week here. (She asked that her last name not be used to save her family any embarrassment.)”
Here’s what caught my eye in this story: “Claudia says she’s worked four previous Super Bowls and expects to make as much as $2,000 a day performing … Most clubs treat the dancers as independent contractors who pay a flat fee to the house and keep the rest … The clubs have been busy auditioning more dancers and upgrading their interiors. Some will stay open 24 hours.”
I’m not a strip club aficionado, but $2,000 a day sounds like pretty good money to me, especially for contingent labor. And although some may find it surprising that Tampa is such a hotbed of strip clubs, I’m not. I used to work for a magazine company (a large publisher of pet and animal titles) that always sent a large group of employees to an annual trade show that was held there. And the first thing I heard from the sales staff (mainly the New York-based guys) when I joined the company was, “Just wait until we get to Tampa!”
Apparently, the sales guys loved Tampa because of the quality (not their exact description, of course) of the strip clubs there. One club apparently towered over all others. That club (and I’m not making this up) is the Mons Venus, described in the Associated Press story as “a joint that is listed among the best strip clubs in the world by users of a Web site called The Ultimate Strip Club List.”
I never attended any of the after-hours get-togethers the sales staff had at the Mons Venus, or at any other clubs in the Tampa Bay area, but these guys had a trained eye and they clearly appreciated the job the “contingent workforce” performed at these establishments.
It all goes to show you: Even in a down economy, when lots of people are out of work and the job prospects are grim, there are always economic sectors that experience an upturn. “ ‘Based on what we did last Super Bowl (in 2001), the numbers will quadruple during (this) weekend,’ ” said Nick Polefrone, general manager of 2001 Odyssey, a landmark club known for the spaceship-shaped VIP room rising from the top of the building.”
Yes, Sunday’s Super Bowl will be time for many of us to get away for a few hours and forget our troubles, but it’s also time for some uniquely qualified and experienced contingent workers to make some big money and profit from the excesses of the week in Tampa. And maybe that’s just one of the many things we need to help get our economy going again.
Here’s a management challenge to ponder as we begin a new year: How do executives and top managers create a strong and long-lasting sense of purpose in the workforce? How do they get a diverse group of people to focus on a shared goal?
The late, great management guru Peter Drucker wrote about this quite a bit, and in his view, “creating [a] unified vision in an organization of specialists” was one of the great challenges of any information-based organization. And Drucker believed, as I do, that while “management must have considerable authority, its job in the modern organization is not to command. It is to inspire.”
Inspiring people means getting workers to wholeheartedly buy in to the goals of the organization. This is what the big push for employee engagement is all about: getting workers to completely embrace the goals of the organization and give an extra measure of effort to help the team reach those goals.
Drucker points to the Manhattan Project, the code name for the U.S.’s World War II development of the atomic bomb, as a great example of how a team can be built with a strong sense of purpose. He also notes, with some irony, that this was incredibly surprising given that the Manhattan Project “was heavily staffed by university professors who, in their natural habitat, are remarkably resistant to change and notoriously slow to innovate.”
Of course, the university professors involved in the Manhattan Project had their teamwork and sense of purpose fueled by a very basic instinct—survival. They knew that the Nazis were working on a similar project and that future survival of the U.S. and its allies rested upon the ability of their team to develop the bomb before anyone else did.
You can see this basic instinct on display today as well. This week, a half-dozen passengers on Delta Airlines Flight 110, which was trying to land at Los Angeles International Airport, came to the aid of a flight attendant who was struggling with a man seemingly determined to open the plane’s rear emergency exit.
“I thought this guy was going to open the door. I was thinking, ‘I’m not going to go down with the plane,’ ” passenger Chris Llewellyn told the Los Angeles Times. The story says that “along with half a dozen other passengers, Llewellyn ran down the aisle into the galley area and jumped on the man, pulling him away from the door. ‘He was struggling hard-core,’ Llewellyn said. ‘I was holding down his arm. Somebody had a foot on his head. Everyone was holding down a different body part. He was going nuts. I was telling him to chill because he’s not going any place.’ ”
Llewellyn and has fellow passengers subdued the man, who was arrested when the plane arrived in Los Angeles.
The incident points to a key lesson for any manager trying to get people to buy in to supporting a goal or project: Nothing motivates a sense of purpose better than the basic survival instinct. In other words, it’s easy to create a shared sense of purpose when the basic human need to live kicks in on a plane flying at 35,000 feet.
I know what you are thinking: How do we build that sense of teamwork in a workforce when the situation is not quite so dire?
There’s an easy answer today that we couldn’t draw on a year ago: You use the economy to motivate your workplace team to pull together, just like the passengers did on Delta Flight 110.
Your workplace situation is not comparable to what the Delta passengers were facing (I hope). But building a strong sense of purpose around your organization’s need for economic survival is something that just about every employee should be able to embrace. Your job—granted, not an easy one—is to create here on the ground that sense of mission that comes so instinctively to people who are challenged at 35,000 feet.
Why is it that real leadership is so hard to find? I thought about this over the long Memorial Day weekend when reading a New York Times story that contrasted the annual shareholder meetings last week for Southwest and American Airlines. Both airlines are headquartered in Dallas, of course, but that’s where the similarity ends.
As the Times notes, “The [American] meeting itself could not have been more downbeat,” and the discussion by CEO Gerald Arpey was about all the bad things the airline industry is suffering these days—$130-per-barrel oil, capacity cutbacks, worker layoffs and customer surcharges.
Contrast that with this: “The Southwest Airlines meeting began a few hours later,” according to the Times, “[and] Southwest, of course, is the great success story of the airline business—the only company that has been consistently profitable through these tumultuous times. … Its annual meetings tend to be love fests. This year’s [meeting], though, was the love fest to end all love fests. The company’s beloved co-founder, Herbert D. Kelleher—known to one and all as Herb—was stepping down as chairman after 37 years.”
The story goes on to talk about how an overflow crowd at the Southwest meeting—everyone from shareholders to members of the pilots union to rank-and-file employees—showed up to sing the praises of Kelleher on his retirement. But the outpouring of love and affection for Southwest’s outgoing chairman and longtime leader raises a simple question: Why does Kelleher command such loyalty, love and respect from his workforce? Outside of Warren Buffett and a couple of others you hear about here and there, very few CEOs or senior executives command the kind of loyalty—or have the kind of impact and success—that Kelleher has had at Southwest. How does he do it?
Well, simple questions sometimes have deceivingly simple answers, and if you listen to Herb Kelleher tell it, he succeeded in large part because he simply cared about his people.
“Over the years,” the Times noted, “whenever reporters would ask him the secret to Southwest’s success, Kelleher had a stock response. ‘You have to treat your employees like customers. … When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us.’ As he stepped away from the company this week, his line didn’t change. ‘We’ve never had layoffs. …We could have made more money if we furloughed people. But we don’t do that. And we honor them constantly. Our people know that if they are sick, we will take care of them. If there are occasions or grief or joy, we will be there with them. They know that we value them as people, not just cogs in a machine.’ ”
I’ve worked for a number of years at a number of companies, and if I have observed any common principle it’s this: Consistently treating workers right—with fairness, dignity and compassion—is the exception and not the rule. Herb Kelleher’s style, despite its obvious success, is something far too few executives seem willing to follow.
“When you look at a company like American, with its poisonous employee relations and its glum customer base, and compare it with Southwest, with its happy employees and contented customers,” the Times observed, “you can’t help thinking that Kelleher was on to something when he put employees first.”
The Times is right; Kelleher was on to something. But it makes you wonder: Given how little original management thinking seems to be out there these days, why don’t more CEOs who are looking for a successful leadership model to emulate try copying Herb Kelleher?
But that was then, this is now, and Donovan and Nardelli are long gone. It’s not really surprising that Home Depot, a company that has really been struggling, is cutting more staff. What is a shock was the wholesale gutting of the HR infrastructure by cutting 50 percent of the company’s 2,200 person human resources field staff last week.
The move is designed to put more workers on the sales floor, which is ironic because floor staff was whacked so severely during the Nardelli/Donovan regime that you couldn’t find anybody to help you or answer your questions. The old, people-oriented culture of Home Depot was dramatically changed during their time together, and it’s pretty clear to me that the company has struggled, in large part, because of that decision.
So, I applaud the company’s new “Aprons on the Floor” program that should help customer service, but I wonder: is it a good tradeoff if you get more “Aprons on the Floor,” but lose your HR support throughout the company? As part of the cutbacks, Home Depot is creating a HR service center near Atlanta that will handle most of the company’s human resource needs by phone. Stores won’t have a dedicated HR manager but instead, “district teams” will be established that will divide three HR people among a small group of six to 10 stores.
What does it say about a company that it goes from having the highest paid HR executive in the U.S. to a phone-based human resources support structure in two years’ time? Analysts like this move–one told Workforce Management that the old HR structure “was way overdone and not typical for retail operations like Home Depot”–but analysts are always fond of short-term cost-cutting and are less concerned with the long-term impact.
I’m not sure if this move to minimize HR and maximize help on the floor will work any more than the old strategy did, but it will be interesting to watch, because it’s a real-time case study on the value HR brings to an organization. If Home Depot can make this work, it may push other companies to re-examine the value of their own HR departments. And when that happens, HR can kiss that seat at the table goodbye.
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