The Contented Cow Blog

Building Workplaces That Work

Both Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are being considered for important jobs. Their respective supporters have already spent much time bloviating about how little experience the other candidate has, when ultimately, American voters tend to vote not on skills and experience, but on character, values, and attitudes.

Which is exactly what Bill Catlette and I have long advocated is the way employers should hire, but far too often don’t. It’s what we call “hiring for fit”. The best hires seem to happen when we narrow the field of candidates first on character, values, and attitudes - the potential to be happy, productive, and successful in a given job in a given organization - and then refine our selection on other factors, including experience.

Neither Palin nor Obama have the years of government experience that Biden and McCain have. Governor Palin has held elective office for 13 years; Senator Obama for 10. Arguably, Palin has more experience running a government than the other 3 combined.

But when it comes down to making the choice in November, the vast majority of voters will make their selection based on who they feel the candidates are, what they stand for, and what they believe, rather than what they’ve done.

I wouldn’t know much about Sarah Palin, except that I’ve been to Alaska three times in the last 16 months. Alaska’s the only state I’ve been to (and I’ve been to all 50) where ordinary citizens, from across the political spectrum, spontaneously talk about their governor, and only in positive terms. She beat a guy with lots of experience. Because she wasn’t elected on experience, but on values and attitudes. Palin has the highest approval ratings of any governor in America. On my most recent trip, someone gave me a copy of the governor’s biography, Sarah, by Kaylene Johnson. As of this morning, it was ranked #14 by amazon.com, and is out of stock until September 13.

Obama packed Invesco Field this week with 80,000 fans and has energized and enthused more voters and potential voters than any candidate since I’ve been old enough to vote. Millions of Americans are excited about and committed to him, but it has nothing to do with his experience. Again, it’s his character, values, and attitudes.

Americans are values voters. Barack Obama and Joe Biden. John McCain and Sarah Palin. May the better team win.

No sooner had Barack Obama announced the selection of Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) as his running mate than many in the media, with the smiling support of Republican operatives, were chirping about Senator Hillary Clinton having been dissed by the lack of consideration for the job. The question on the minds of many was/is, “why didn’t Obama at least show her some respect by vetting her, even if he wasn’t going to consider her for the position?”

While I don’t know and really don’t care what was on Senator Obama’s mind, I do know that there is a larger lesson here for those of us who daily interview people (or not) for positions on our team. The lesson is this: Gratuitously inflating a person’s hopes by putting them through a sham interview process, or otherwise wasting their time is one of the most disrespectful things you can do to them. Moreover, very few of us have the acting talent to pull off such a charade, hence doing so also imperils your reputation for authenticity.

In the early days of FedEx, company founder Fred Smith called me one afternoon to tell me that, though I had been recommended for a vacant VP position, he already had his mind pretty well made up, and I wasn’t on the “short list” this time around. He added that he had, however, noticed my work and felt sure that my time would come. I thanked him for his candor and kind words about my work, and went about my business, feeling good about what had just happened.

Over the years, I have tried to show similar respect to people who have expressed interest in a position on my team. In many cases, after telling a person that I’m not going to create false hope or disrespect them by putting them through a phony interview, I have asked if we could instead spend some time talking about their interests so that I might get to know them better. Most of them seemed to appreciate it. To me, that type of “courtesy interview” is more productive, and a lot more courteous.

A thought leader in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com

This is a house down the street from us, thanks to Tropical Storm Fay. We were lucky at our house. Nothing big fell on us, and because we live on one of the few hills in Jacksonville, Florida, we escaped flooding. Although we’ve been without power for going on 36 hours now, at least we’re safe, which is more than I can say for the mushy food in our freezer. We’re fortunate. We have friends, family, a Starbucks with electricity, and Marriott Rewards points.

It seems that those of us in Jacksonville anticipated Fay’s arrival longer than we did the announcement of Obama’s veep selection. She taunted us for most of the week, closing schools and businesses prematurely, days before the first breeze was felt. Then she finally got here…with a vengeance, dumping more than 12 inches of rain (after dropping twice that amount on Florida’s Space Coast, just south of here), and blowing winds up to about 60 mph.

Fay was no Katrina, and she’s done less total damage than the trifecta of Florida hurricanes in 2004. Still, we we’ll all be happy to see her fall apart and disappear. And for our electricity to come back.

One of my best friends is the managing partner of a good-sized local accounting firm. One of the firm’s employees, who recently moved here from Maine, expressed great anxiety about her first tropical storm, and asked her boss, “What are we going to do?!” My friend confided in me that at first he wanted to say, “What we’re going to do is turn on our windshield wipers and come to work.” But on further consideration, wisdom prevailed. He told everyone to use their own judgment about coming to work the next day (Thursday). In reality, conditions were fine on Thursday, and it could have been business as usual. But, as my friend reasoned, it was one day, and in the grand scheme of things, one day won’t mean very much.

Natural disasters, or in our case, natural inconveniences, are costly and disruptive. No question about it. Our small business has lost productivity, and the storm has put me behind on upcoming client obligations. But I’ll catch up. And so will my CPA friend. As he said to me on Thursday, when the rain was just starting to fall, “I really think everyone could have come in today. Several of us did. But I’m not going to make a big deal of it. I’ve got a really good group here, and it’s only one day. Besides,” he said with a wink, “I read a book that said something about - if you take care of people when they’re having a rough time of it, they’ll remember that, and take care of your customers. I’m gonna give that a try.”

Richard Hadden is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and his co-author and business partner Bill Catlette, are the authors of the new book Contented Cows MOOve Faster, as well as the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

For better than a decade, business partner Richard Hadden and I have written about leadership and employment issues, offering what we hope is helpful advice to those who are known by others as “the boss.”

Last night, my wife and I celebrated her birthday at Nashville’s Sommet Center, enjoying a rocking performance by another guy known as, “The Boss.” Together with his E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen performed all the oldies and goodies for an enthusiastic audience that included Kix Brooks of Brooks & Dunn, Amy Grant, Martina McBride, and Kim Carnes. Totally aware of his surroundings, the Boss nearly brought the house down with an Elvis-inspired version of “Good Rocking Tonight,” followed by a soulful rendition of Johny Cash’s, “I Walk the Line.”

Notwithstanding the fact that Springsteen’s music is about as good as it ever was, I came away dutifully impressed by his and the band’s willingness to  give it up for an appreciative mid-week audience. After starting the customary 45 minutes late (I still don’t get that part), they performed nonstop for three hours, doing at least twenty minutes of encore to a standing ovation. Those in the vicinity of St. Louis, Kansas City, and Milwaukee would do well to go see them before the “Magic Tour” calls it quits.

A thought leader in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com

The Atlanta Journal Constitution (electronic version) posted a very good article this week by Atlanta labor attorneys, James Walter and Matthew Simpson about a piece of legislation, the “Employee Free Choice Act” (EFCA) now working its way thru Congress. If passed by the 111th Congress, it is expected that the bill would be signed into law by Sen. Barack Obama, should he be elected President.

The proposed legislation would overturn a 43 year old system in which union representation elections are conducted via a federally overseen secret ballot process, and replace it with a less formal “card check” procedure where the rules are enforced not by an unbiased federal representative, but a decidedly partisan union organizer. In essence, it is designed to do one thing and one thing only - to make it easier for labor unions to shore up their shrinking membership rolls, ‘er bank accounts.

The bill has recently drawn considerable attention as the result of union-backed furor over efforts by Wal-Mart, a fervently union-free employer, to alert its management staff to the downside potential of this act, if signed into law, on their business.

As one who for thirty years has been more than a casual student of employee relations, I can attest with some certainty that there is nothing about this bill that is good for American business or its employees. Moreover, as with many of the other labels (e.g., conservative, liberal, values voter) that seem to float unchallenged through our conversation these days, I am totally and completely perplexed by the name of this bill. How in the world can something that actually reduces freedom and eviscerates a scrupulously fair process be known as “employee free choice?”

A thought leader in the areas of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com

One would have to have been in a cave not to have noticed the blizzard of TV commercials over the past month touting the “Pickens Plan” for creating American energy independence.

While our elected representatives are taking a wholly undeserved five (5) week vacation amidst an energy crisis, two shooting wars, and an imploding health care system, T. Boone Pickens has decided to do something about the domestic energy situation. Intrigued by the commercials, I decided to look into what this guy is up to.

According to Wikipedia, Pikckens is an 80 year old “business man who chairs the hedge fund, BP Capital Management. He was a well-known takeover operator during the 1980s. With an estimated net worth of about $3 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the 117th richest person in America and ranked 369th in the world. Pickens has given more than $700 million away to charity.”

The nut of his plan is to capitalize on a natural “wind corridor” that bisects the country from Texas to Canada by building a series of  wind farms sufficient to offset that portion of the domestic power grid now supplied by natural gas (about 22% of total demand). The natural gas, a fairly plentiful domestic commodity would be diverted to use as motor fuel, supplanting about $300 billion annually of imported oil. Other fuel sources (geothermal, nuclear, biofuels, etc.) would then be used to further reduce foreign dependence.

I don’t know whether Mr. Pickens’ plan cuts the mustard or not, but I do know this - it stands in stark contrast as a voice of reason and leadership against the din and prattle of the Beltway bozos. Check it out.

A thought leader in the areas of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com

Another of the excellent speakers we heard at the National Speakers Association convention in New York last week was Bill Strickland, President and CEO of Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild and Bidwell Training Center, Inc.

Talk about someone who does meaningful work! His story is much too long to detail in this blog, and I certainly can’t do him justice. Besides, he’s been written about in Inc, Fast Company, and tons of other publications, and you can read about him there.

In a nutshell, Bill Strickland is a social innovator who runs a company to train and give substantive (not empty) hope to poor inner-city kids, welfare mothers, and others in the Manchester area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He’s taking his highly successful model, which educates people in the visual, culinary, and other arts, and replicating it across the country now.

Here’s just a little of what Strickland said, that stuck in my mind:

• “The only difference between rich people and poor people is that poor people don’t have any money.”
• “People’s behavior is a function of how they’re treated.” (Where have we heard that before?)
• “We have fresh flowers all over the center, because these people deserve to see fresh flowers.”
• When he had his center designed in Pittsburgh, he wanted it to be flooded with light. The people who learn there have lots of darkness in their lives. Strickland knew that light would change their outlook, and their behavior. It has.
• The walls of his center are covered in valuable art. Skeptics told him the art would be trashed within a month. In the 22 years since he started the practice, there’s never been an act of vandalism at the center. Reminds me of a point made by John Houseman in the classic training film, Brain Power, by Karl Albrecht, in which Houseman reminds us, “We get what we expect to get. What are you expecting?”

We heard lots of polished, eloquent speakers at the NSA convention. Bill Strickland was not one of them. It was, instead, his message, not his delivery, that blew me away.

Thanks, Bill Strickland, for being an Extra-Miler.

Richard Hadden is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and his co-author and business partner Bill Catlette, are the authors of the new book Contented Cows MOOve Faster, as well as the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

Bill Catlette and I have been at the annual convention of the National Speakers Association this week in New York City. One of the highlights of the convention was a town hall style session with 2 titans of the travel industry, Bill Marriott, CEO of Marriott Hotels, and Dave Barger, CEO of JetBlue Airways.

Bill and I often speak from the platform about these 2 companies, as exemplary companies to work for. Hearing their respective CEO’s speak made it easy to see why we do.

Some highlights, first from Marriott:

• Marriott’s parents, the hotel chain’s founders taught him “take good care of your employees, and they’ll take good care of your customers.”
• One key to the success of Marriott Hotels is training. Training represents an enormous proportion of the company’s time, attention, and money.
• Another key is providing opportunities for advancement. By far, most Marriott managers started in entry level positions in the chain’s hotels, and were motivated by the strong connection at Marriott between performance and promotion.
• Bill Marriott spends a huge amount of time circulating among his thousands of properties to see the people who work there. “I can’t make strategic decisions unless I know what’s going on, and I can’t do that if I’m not there.”

From JetBlue’s Barger:

• Barger recently took a 50% pay cut.  (He was asked about this, he didn’t bring it up. I know the person who asked the question, and he was not a plant.) “We’re going to be flying less, so our people will be earning less. So I should, too.”
• “This is not a fuel business. It’s a people business. What keeps me up at night is not the price of fuel. It’s how we motivate our people to deliver the best product, especially in these tough times.”
• “We don’t talk about ’survival’ at JetBlue; we talk about ‘winning’.”

As much as I was impressed by what these guys said, I was even more impressed by who they appeared to be. I left the session with the feeling that I had just spent 90 minutes in the presence of a couple of guys who were not only brilliant, but really nice, ordinary (though extremely wealthy, especially Marriott) folks.

Richard Hadden is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and his co-author and business partner Bill Catlette, are the authors of the new book Contented Cows MOOve Faster, as well as the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

The July 28 issue of Nation’s Restaurant News featured a piece by staff HR writer, Dina Berta, on efforts by Claim Jumper Restaurants to nourish their employment brand. That’s right, employment brand. According to Avery Block, a member of Claim Jumper’s HR team, who is quoted in the article, “the CJ brand is commitment to the journey. It represents and reflects the journey the company has been on the last 30 years… We’re committed to our community, one another, and to ourselves for individual growth and development. We want people to feel that when they come to Claim Jumper, they are on a journey.”

Two things are axiomatic in this respect:

1.Like it or not, every organization that has employees (including yours and ours) has an employment brand. At it’s root, that brand reflects your reputation within the community of those who would, do, and have worked for your organization. Not unlike other types of reputations, your employment rep is hard to enhance and easy to ruin.

2. Our employment brand extends well beyond the usual raft of trite, worn out slogans (e.g. people are our most important asset) to the very tangible qualities that define the employment relationship, things like trust, mutual respect, standards, and discipline.

If you’re at all uncertain as to the value of this reputation, chat up any recruiter in the hospitality or high tech industries.

A thought leader in the areas of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com

I have no way of knowing this, but I would bet a tidy sum that the majority of readers of this blog are, like its authors, members of the baby-boom generation. If so, then I’ve also got to believe that more than one or two occasionally worry, as I’ve been known to do, about the danger of personal irrelevance that seems to want to accompany graying hair.

Though perfectly willing to suffer some of the downsides of aging (it beats the hell out of the alternative), irrelevance isn’t one of them. Hence, borrowing a lesson from my 86 year-old father, who daily reads two printed newspapers, in addition to web surfing for e-news, (sandwiched around lots of old shoot ‘em up TV westerns),  I remain on the lookout for ways to stay vibrant, informed, and connected to the real world. In so doing, I’ve become convinced that there are at least three keys to this quest:

Listening – One of the real dangers to having been there and done that is the risk of forgetting why each of us was issued two ears and only one mouth. I can assure you that risk is amplified when one earns a good portion of his living via paid speaking and training engagements. On the premise that “waiting to talk” is the opposite of listening, and that having your mouth fly open the very instant someone else’s closes is pretty good evidence that you haven’t been listening, I’m trying mightily to force myself to become a better listener. I’m finding some (emphasis on ‘some’) success with two methods:

1.)    By being sure to notice the color of a person’s eyes when we’re having a face to face conversation, and
2.)    Deliberately inserting a 3 to 4 second pause before responding. Much more important than merely giving the appearance of listening, it actually forces me to think about what the other person is saying, rather than responding reflexively. For those who might be put off by the pause, I’d a lot rather have people label me a “slow processor” than an arrogant non-listener.

Learning – Though this one goes hand in glove with listening, I’ve finally figured out that if you’re not learning daily, you are becoming less relevant. Though it’s fun (and easier) to hang out with one’s “buds” who are of like mind and vintage, I learn a hell of a lot more from people about half my age. One great example is a 20 year-old Claremont McKenna College student by the name of Ben Casnocha. Were it not for the Internet, we wouldn’t be in the same sphere (thank you, Al Gore ☺) I stumbled on his blog about a month ago and have found it interesting as well as informative.

Laughing – Many days a plain rubber band adorns my wrist as a personal reminder of e.e. cummings’ quote, “The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.” I’ve concluded that it’s virtually impossible to be relevant when one is self-absorbed, and that laughter is a great way to escape the grip of one’s own tribulations and remain more outwardly focused.

Godspeed!