Your Hiring Brand

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Some real-world examples of situations that are negatively affecting your Hiring Brand:

  • Manager turnover. A Midwest company hired a new Director of Human Resources whose LinkedIn profile shows six jobs in ten years.  How would you react to new policies or ideas if you thought the new person would stay only one-two years?
  • Abusive personality. A manufacturing company hired a new COO who quickly gained the reputation as “the screamer.”  Employees started voting with their feet, and turnover became a serious problem.
  • Ineffective management. A large retail store had an employee that management called “the bitcher” because he never said anything good about the company. Recently, he received his 10-year pin during one of their daily employee meetings.
  • Theft. An 800-person distribution company found that $60,000 had been stolen from their largest branch in an important market. The branch manager, who had major contacts in that marketplace, was the chief suspect. Three months after the discovery, the Regional VP had not even investigated or discussed the theft with the manager.

Today’s employees are tech savvy and impatient with the status quo. They respect people — not their title. If management does not effectively deal with performance issues, they can expect to be trashed on social media. That will have a lasting effect on your Hiring Brand.

How are you protecting your Hiring Brand?

Do You Really Know Who You Are Interviewing?

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I’m old enough to remember when resumes were virtually 100% accurate and gave the hiring manager valuable insight on a person’s qualifications. Not anymore. Consider these facts:

  • Fake college diploma and transcript is a $1 Billion industry. (Source: the FBI)
  • 41% of all interviews are decided on appearance alone. (Source: Investor’s Business Daily)
  • 71% of all resumes contain fictitious information. (Source: SHRM)  
  • Candidate can search – “Best answers to interview questions.”  (Results: Amazon – 96 books…. Google – 13.2 million hits)
  • Candidates have multiple resumes – each targeted to a specific job, company, or industry.
  • Resumes can be written by professionals who excel in making the person look like a sure fit to the open position.

Right now, the hiring process favors the candidate, and the pressure is on the hiring managers to upgrade their skills. Make hiring your competitive advantage.

4 Ways to Lead Your Organization Into a More Sustainable Future

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Over the past several years, consumers have become more conscious about their purchases than ever.

According to the Global Sustainability Study 2021, 85% of consumers across the globe had made more sustainable purchases over the previous five years, and sustainability is now a top purchasing criterion among 60% of all consumers. The sustainability movement has gained a lot of traction in recent years, and the consumer call to support sustainable companies has grown.

In fact, while there was a concern that the pandemic detracted from efforts to address the climate change crisis, the opposite has actually occurred. Gen Z adults cited environmental protection as their top personal concern in 2021, and they are now demanding sustainability and ethical practices from the brands they trust. Reflecting consumers’ concerns ahead of the United Nations’ 2021 COP26 Climate Change Conference, more than 1,000 companies announced they would reduce emissions in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. Today’s consumers expect more from the companies they work with; they want to engage with brands that care about them, the climate, and the future. And companies are increasingly heeding the call.

As a leader, it’s essential for you to embrace sustainability as a core value in order to connect with more consumers and increase trust in your company. As more and more people focus on making purchases that benefit the environment and the earth, it becomes crucial to gain company buy-in for putting sustainability at your organization’s center. By prioritizing sustainability throughout your company, suppliers, and distributors, you can successfully navigate the sustainability landscape and drive your business forward.

The Importance of Prioritizing Sustainability Initiatives

This should go without saying, but the path toward sustainability requires more than raising awareness within your organization. Sustainability success also hinges on consciously working every day to limit the amounts of waste produced and resources consumed. Even the smallest steps matter in terms of sustainability. Consistency is key.

While sustainability requires a lot of self-examination and nuanced work, it helps to focus on the benefits of sustainability and waste reduction efforts. Globally, 1.3 billion tons of food per year are discarded. Wasted food means wasted fertilizer, fuel, water, and manpower. This model is far from sustainable, so reducing the amount of food wasted, even by a few percentage points, would be an improvement.

Additionally, it’s important to make animal feed safer. Doing so improves the health of animals, which means more efficient production of meat, milk, fiber, and more. Better production means a greater ability to produce enough food to feed the world’s population with less land and fewer inputs. The key to lasting change is helping companies reach metric-based goals that are actually attainable.

Strategies for Actualizing Sustainability Efforts

As you can see, it’s becoming even more important for organizations to drive sustainability forward. If your organization has never focused on sustainability, however, it can be difficult to know where to start. To make sustainability initiatives a greater focus in your organization, these are a few steps to consider implementing right now:

1. Get the board of directors on board.

Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan once said, “What matters to society matters to investors.” If investors aren’t buying your initiatives, then your ideas will die before takeoff. To secure buy-in, tell them what you are going to do, how it’s going to get done, and why you are doing it. These are seemingly very simple steps, but they are extremely important for short-term value creation. Once the board understands what you are doing, make sure your management team believes in your sustainability efforts. From there, work to get support from your entire employee base.

2. Define your goals.

Sustainability initiatives are more likely to succeed if they are defined to be specific, achievable, and measurable. What are your organization’s goals? Which outcomes are you trying to achieve, and how will you measure progress? Identify specific benchmarks for your organization so that everyone on your team sees the “finish line” — and the mile markers of progress along the way — before the project even starts.

3. Educate your employees.

Successful sustainability initiatives depend largely on your organization’s change management. Taking steps toward a sustainable future requires leading the changes from the top down, which means that you should take the time to educate your employees about the importance of sustainability and why your company is choosing sustainability for the future. Company buy-in does not happen on its own. Rather, you have to lead by example and show your employees why what you are doing is worth it.

4. Steel your supply chain.

The transition to more sustainable operations requires the manufacturers of certain commodities to use sustainable practices. Many retail companies, such as Walmart, are working with their suppliers to reduce carbon emissions across the board. In fact, the company has worked to give suppliers the resources necessary to make progress toward its climate strategy. Through its Project Gigaton, Walmart is more than halfway toward its goal of reducing 1 gigaton — or 1 billion metric tons — of greenhouse gas emissions from its global value chain. While it’s challenging to reach the goal of net zero across the supply chain, collaboration is key to getting closer to that goal.

Sustainability efforts require more than a few people on board. They require support from the entire company, as well as your suppliers. By adequately preparing all stakeholders for your sustainability initiatives, you will create a realistic sustainability plan that people can support for years to come.

Master These Skills to Increase Your Effectiveness As a Leader

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Strong leaders use their Emotional Intelligence to increase their effectiveness.

Not all of the tactics below will be relevant to your situation, but undoubtedly, some ideas and strategies will assist you in enhancing your understanding of yourself and help direct you in becoming an Emotionally Strong Leader. 

Improve Your Self-Regard 

Leaders who have high self-regard have an accurate view of their strengths and development opportunities. They are more likely to have a genuine concern for others, share success, and hold themselves accountable when things go wrong. They are confident in themselves and don’t shy away from admitting their development opportunities or mistakes.

Tips and Tools for Increasing Self-Regard:

  • Surround yourself with supportive people.
  • Integrate more positive habits daily. 
  • Believe in yourself, and until you do, act as if you do.
  • Challenge your self-limiting beliefs.

Surround Yourself with Supportive People 

Surround yourself with the people in your life who simply “get you” and love you. When you feel bad about yourself, rely on those supportive people to help you counter your self-limiting beliefs or negative thoughts. Solicit feedback about your strengths from your supporters so you can start to appreciate, as much as they do, your natural talents and personality traits.

Integrate More Positive Habits Daily 

This need not be an arduous exercise—in fact, that would defeat the purpose of this building block for increasing your self-regard. The best way to add positive daily habits is to keep it simple, especially at first. Identify the areas in which you are looking to grow or change, and find small ways you can incorporate a new habit or routine into an already existing structure. Do you want to improve your outlook on life? Why not incorporate a daily gratitude statement with your family before dinner? Looking to exercise more? Perhaps plan a walk to fetch a coffee after lunch? The possibilities for small positive habits are endless if you plan and tie them to things you already do.

Believe in Yourself, and until You Do, Act as If You Do

You are capable of achieving amazing things. Believe that you can, dedicate yourself to taking steps toward what you want, and work hard. Create a vision in your mind’s eye. That vision will help you think through your action plan and how your dreams will materialize. Until you feel confident in yourself, act as if you are. At times, you may believe everyone can see your insecurity. But here’s the wonderful truth. It’s invisible—it’s just a thought. As long as you don’t act on that thought, no one can see it. Just act as a confident person would, and start noticing the results.

Challenge Your Self-Limiting Beliefs

Our self-limiting beliefs can control our life choices—what we choose to do and not do. We need to put those negative beliefs aside and work on not letting them rule our life. These destructive beliefs get in your way of being the best version of yourself. With that in mind, think about what you can do, and rather than letting your self-limiting beliefs continue to damage you emotionally, learn to reframe a previously negative mindset into a more positive outlook in your life. For instance, are you are looking at any situation through a negative lens? How could you turn this around and interpret the same set of events in a more positive framework?  

Boost Your Self-Actualization 

Leaders practice self-actualization by continuing to improve themselves. Self-actualization enables leaders to bring creativity, innovation, and an open mind into the workplace. It relates to a motivation to optimize both their performance and that of their teams. Leaders who are strong in self-actualization often participate in activities with meaning and are aligned with their own values, which leave them feeling satisfied, energized, and motivated. They are passionate and enthusiastic and strive to be their best. 

Tips and Tools for Increasing Self-Actualization:

  • Take time to rest.
  • Learn something new.
  • Exercise your way into happiness.
  • Discover your passions.

Take Time to Rest 

Technology has made it possible to stay connected with each other 24/7; messages and emails come flooding in at any time, and we feel inclined to respond, even if our workday has ended. But remember, we are humans, not machines. We need time to rest, rejuvenate, and reconnect with ourselves. Getting proper rest requires discipline. So take some much-needed time for yourself and schedule rest.

 Learn Something New

Learning something new keeps your mind engaged; you are exercising your brain and improving your memory, concentration, and ability to problem solve. Learning expands your world view and perspectives and helps you gain skill sets, opening more doors for you. One excellent way to broaden your social circle is to take a class or pursue a new hobby, which will increase your likelihood of making friends with similar interests. 

 Exercise Your Way into Happiness

Study after study has shown the positive effect being active has on our brains. Exercise produces endorphins and proteins that make us feel happier—it increases our cognitive abilities, helps us sleep better, enhances our self-perception, and improves our whole sense of well-being. It puts more pep in our steps every day. On days that you don’t feel like exercising, go for a five-minute walk (I mean, if you can’t find five minutes, that points to a larger problem, no?). Getting a daily dose of fresh air and activity can help you feel good about yourself.

Discover Your Passions

Ask yourself what fills your bucket and is meaningful to you. Being self-actualized means first discovering and then pursuing what matters to you. That is what fulfillment is all about. Not sure what matters to you or what you are passionate about? Start with determining what you value. Your values are your guiding principles. They determine what you think is important and can dictate how you choose to live your life. See if you can take action and live more congruently with what you value. In essence, that will make you feel more fulfilled. 

Excerpted from “The Emotionally Strong Leader: An Inside-Out Journey to Transformational Leadership” by Carolyn Stern

Your Disadvantages Could Turn Out to be Your Biggest Advantages

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I learned that lesson as a result of my difficult childhood bouncing between hotel rooms, foster homes and orphanages. By the time I was 18 years old, I had lived in 18 or 20 different places.

At 3 years old I was kidnapped by my father and told my mother had died. Dad picked me up in his Ford Roadster and drove me from St. Louis to California to start our new life. He truly loved me—I don’t have any doubt about that. Unfortunately because he was a Merchant Marine he was almost always at sea. He never could catch a break and therefore couldn’t provide a stable childhood for me. 

The constant moving around left me without a sense of normalcy or consistency. I learned to handle change easily and even seek it out. I was comfortable facing life’s changes and transitions and had the ability to shift course easily—which helped me greatly in my business career.

Finding my place from one schoolyard made me more resilient. Achieving some success helped me build my confidence, too. I was good student and pretty good athlete, lettering in high school basketball and baseball.

My adaptability, resilience and confidence carried me to the University of Rochester, the U.S. Navy, and Harvard Business School. And proved to be useful when I held executive roles with financial companies like at E. F. Hutton, Lehman Brothers, and Furman Selz. These skills continued to guide me when I became the Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the University of Rochester and continue to today in my current role as chairman of High Vista, a Boston-based money management company.

My background also gave me the ability to relate to almost anybody. You can’t truly understand others unless you’ve lived and struggled and gone through hardship. That understanding came into play whenever I read resumes of job applicants—I could see into other people’s lives more easily and better recognize who they were underneath their accomplishments and experiences.

But who was I?

When I went to college, I buried my past. I submerged it under concrete, patted it down, let it dry and became a different person. I was ashamed of my upbringing, and I didn’t want to get any benefit or sympathy for it. People would ask about my background and I would say, “My mother died when I was 3, my father’s a Merchant Marine, and my home address is a post office box in San Francisco,” and that was the end of it.

Because I spent so much time moving and reinventing myself, I had the ability to always move forward. That came into play when my mutual fund firm, Greenwich Management Company, folded. I had started the company from the ground up (which I discourage) as a subsidiary of Capital Research. I tried, futilely, to simultaneously to manage the company’s money, market its product, and manage its people, which turned out to be a painful lesson in trying to wear too many hats at once. 

It was difficult to fail but I decided to chart a new course, I resigned from Capital Research and ended up working at E.F. Hutton, one of the country’s largest retail brokerages. That job springboarded me to Lehman Brothers, where I weathered turmoil and infighting while guiding the company’s investment management division to new heights. After Lehman Brothers, I found my dream job becoming the chairman of Furman Selz a small investment bank. 

In 1996, at the age of 60, I finally uncovered a shocking truth buried inside a long ignored suitcase of my father’s letters: my mother wasn’t dead, after all. After I learned about my mother, I grappled with whether to connect with her. I had a wonderful career and a great family, and I didn’t want anything to complicate that. My past had been buried for so long.

“You must take a chance,” my wife Barbara said, and she was right.

I did take a chance, and my mother turned out to be a wonderful presence in my life. Reconnecting with her allowed me to see the similarities in our personalities. It filled in the half of the equation that had been missing. It helped me understand, finally, who I am—and who you are is an interplay between your genes and your experiences. If you’re an only child, or a middle child, or the sixth of 12 children, or if you live in a fancy neighborhood your whole childhood, or you bounce around to 18 different places, your perspectives will be different.

I’ve been fortunate to do almost anything that I’ve wished, including helping to found the Nantucket Golf Club. The golf club has become one of the largest charities on the island and has preserved hundreds of acres of beautiful land from development. It puts two students through college per year with full-ride scholarships, and this year 10 other students received vocational scholarships. The golf club has contributed to more than 50 different charitable causes, provides employment opportunities, and has enchanced many people’s lives and will for years to come.

In your lifetime, try to create an institution or something that will outlast you. A lot of the companies I worked for are gone. But my family, the University of Rochester, the golf course and my relationships with good friends will live on for a long, long time. 

And for that, for everything, I find myself so grateful.

How Benjamin Franklin Can Improve Your Recruiting Efforts

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Is your company or an individual manager’s reputation killing your recruiting efforts? 

Potential candidates search the Internet and social media to learn what current and past employees are saying about the company?

If you want to enhance the company’s reputation, maybe Ben Franklin can help.  He asked himself two questions that shaped his view for day’s activities.

  • In the Morning — What good will I do today?
  • In the Evening — What good did I do today?

Judging from his personal success, and his efforts to help others, I would say this daily activity was successful.  Would managers look at their day’s activities differently if they asked themselves Ben Franklin’s two questions?

  • Would they look at hiring, motivating, and developing their team members differently? 
  • Would they look for more creative ways to resolve employee issues? 
  • Would they get valuable input from employees whose opinions had not valued before? 
  • Would they ask more questions and make fewer demanding statements?  
  • Would they foster a “we” workplace environment rather than a top down, I’m-the-boss attitude?  
  • Would your employees be more respected for what they are “bringing to the table”?

These two questions can have a profound effect on employee selection, engagement, retention, and motivation.  Workplace acceptance and validation can have a positive impact on the company, the employee and their family, and the community.

We have the power to change the world – one person and one day at a time.

Ways to Stop Hustle Culture Destroying Your Mental Health

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Are you a business owner or company leader who seems to struggle with excessive stress, negative thoughts, depression, or anxiety? You’re not alone.

According to a study by UC Berkeley, 72% of entrepreneurs struggle with their mental health. This is obviously a problem, but what can you do to have optimal mental health?  

One of the most overlooked ways for business leaders to keep up with their mental health is to be proactive. You see on social media and the news every day different things you can do to help when you are feeling anxious or depressed, but not as much about how to keep you from getting there in the first place. That’s what I am most interested in. You need to be proactive with your mental health, just like you are proactive with your business. You don’t wait until your business is in a sharp decline to do something about it. You prepare your business, in the beginning, to hopefully keep from getting to that point. It would help if you did the same thing with your mental health, and here’s how.

Start your morning the right way. I’ve talked to many business people, and a vast majority of them say that the first thing they do is check their email. By doing this, you are taking your mind from the most peaceful state of sleep and immediately overloading it with stimuli to your brain. This can cause anxiety, and that’s not how you want to start your day. Your brain wasn’t designed to handle that many stimuli, especially in your first waking moments.

Start practicing giving time to be with yourself to start the day. This could be doing a 5-10 minute meditation, journaling, writing down things you are grateful for, speaking self-affirmations, or even something as simple as taking a short walk around the neighborhood. You’ll find that you will have more mental energy and less anxiety throughout the day. This process prepares your brain to take on all the challenges you will receive in your business for the day.  

The morning isn’t the only time you can be proactive with your mental health. It would help if you took scheduled breaks/time to play during the day. According to The Hustle’s survey, 63% of business owners either feel burnt out or have in the past. In the business world, you are constantly told that you must work hard and work more to succeed. This advice is contradictory. While you feel you may be on the right track busting out 16 hours every day, this will more than likely lead to a burnout that will have you feeling depressed and on your butt doing nothing for a week or more.

All that extra time you put towards your business gets consumed by the time you spend trying to get yourself back together from the depression and burnout. Taking play breaks for yourself doesn’t mean you have to take the day off or even several hours away from your business. You can do something as simple as taking a 20-minute Netflix break to relax and focus on something other than work. Taking breaks is hard for many business owners, but once you see the results, you’ll notice you will be doing better for your business by taking time for yourself in the middle of the day.

Finally, improving your sleep is one of the best ways to keep your mental health on track. We’ve all seen the hyper-successful boast about how they wake up at crazy hours in the morning and finish their day late at night, leaving a few hours of sleep. This is not good for your mental health. According to the Sleep Foundation, sleep significantly impacts your mental health. If your sleep is off, so is your mental health. I learned some quick tips to improve your sleep from the book Sleep Smarter by Shawn Stevenson. Stop using screens 90 minutes before bed.

The blue light from your cell phone, TV, computer, etc., harms your sleep quality. Create a caffeine curfew where you stop drinking caffeine after a specific time of the day. Shawn suggests making it no later than 2 pm as caffeine has an 8-hour half-life. Go to bed and wake up within 30 minutes of the same time each day and night. This will help build a healthy sleep pattern for yourself. Lastly, black out your bedroom as much as possible. You’d be surprised how the smallest amount of light can impact your sleep quality.

You are an example for our future leaders. Lead by example by showing them that taking care and being proactive with your mental health is the secret to a successful business and a happy life. The movement to increase mental health awareness starts with you.

4 Strategies to Better Support Employees Through Digital Transformation

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Digital transformation has quickly become a “must” for all businesses — but many companies are misunderstanding the concept.

Many think of digital transformation as a group initiative to move away from outdated processes and rethink their use of digital solutions, and they’re not wrong. But that answer is shortsighted: What you’re trying to accomplish is a foundational change in the ways that people work. Failing to account for this component when attempting to implement digital transformation can pose serious problems down the line.

Take the average employee. When asked, they’ll more than likely say change isn’t a big deal. In fact, they welcome the idea of it. However, if you were to read between the lines, what most people mean is that they like it when other people change or when processes become more efficient, but it doesn’t actually affect how they accomplish their work. It’s uncomfortable — if not unsettling — to stray from the “traditional” ways in which you conduct work each day, which is what you’re ultimately asking of your team.

Managing organizational change associated with any digital transformation effort must factor in the people who will be using the technology. Otherwise, the chances that these efforts will be met with resistance increase exponentially and may be abandoned altogether. It is for this reason that a change management plan should be at the center of your organizational planning for digital transformation. This approach places your employees at the forefront of considerations, ensuring that the change is both seamless and painless for internal staff.

Factors to Consider in Your Change Management Plan

To avoid getting overwhelmed with your plan, start by focusing on individual aspects and considerations. One aspect that must be part of any change management plan is the ever-growing popularity of remote work options. Remote work has become the norm — largely out of necessity, but also out of demand. After the past couple of years, many people prefer the option of at least a hybrid work model and will gladly consider a move to another organization if those needs aren’t met. At last count, 55% of workers now want greater flexibility with their schedules.

Of course, this doesn’t mean your entire workforce should go remote. Certain responsibilities are best left in the physical office space. Before you get too far into the organizational planning for digital transformation, it’s important to pin down which roles require face-to-face interactions and communicate those needs throughout the company.

The move to remote work has also changed the way people collaborate. At one time, digital collaboration entailed working on a document and then emailing it to another party. Now, it’s gotten to the point where you can store a document in the cloud and multiple people can be working on it at the same time — all the while discussing those changes via a Zoom meeting in real time. Consider what you want collaboration to look like, both in terms of teams and overall company culture, at the end of your digital transformation journey.

Finally, don’t forget about automation growth. It’s a trend that’s gaining traction, and you should factor in how automation and AI will change the way in which teams will conduct business each day. Automation and AI are becoming integrated with the expectations of how employees function. It makes everyone more efficient, allowing team members to put more energy toward higher-level tasks.

Tactics for Better Managing Organizational Change

Managing organizational change is no small feat. You must enter into an initiative with a well-developed digital business transformation strategy. While what that strategy looks like will vary from one organization to the next, certain tactics will always be important— and that often includes the following:

1. Understand the ‘why.’

To drive any change management plan, it’s key to understand the “why.” This is the North Star guiding the company on the digital journey, so be sure you can clearly explain the benefits and solutions of implementing digital transformation. Start by defining the business outcome you’re trying to deliver. Work up a concrete description that you can use as part of your communication plan, emphasizing why you’re doing what you’re doing.

2. Answer employees’ essential questions.

At this point, you’ll have the “why” reasoning laid out, but you still need to answer the rest of employees’ questions. Employees often want further details relating to the “what,” “when,” and “how” prior to implementing digital transformation — and especially the “who” it will affect the most. Connect those specific elements to the desired business outcome and then give employees the opportunity to ask questions. Remember, change is uncomfortable. Lead with empathy; open communication can help to quell many concerns.

3. Listen to your employees’ feedback.

Once you explain what you’re trying to accomplish and open the floor to questions, you need to listen to what your employees are saying and implement practical changes using this feedback. You’ll likely find that their suggestions hold a great deal of weight for making the process more efficient. Besides, taking suggestions has a way of getting employees on board with your digital business transformation strategy. Instead of feeling like side characters to a decision from leadership, they become active participants in the process.

In one of my most successful change implementations, the team was initially opposed to the proposed change: Most of their jobs would change dramatically. I asked the project manager to conduct meetings to collect objections without giving any pushback (this took a lot of discipline). Then, she circulated the tabulated objections to ensure they were all described accurately, and the implementation team set developed a mitigation strategy, with metrics, for each and every objection. We pulled the team back together and went through the objections with mitigations, and the team had no choice but to agree that if the metrics indicated the objections had been mitigated, the change would be successful. Once they had been heard, the team pitched in to put the mitigation plan into effect, and with a lot of hard work, we found success (and had the measurements to prove it!).

4. Provide time to process the change.

There will always be a human element to any change. As your business implements digital transformation, give people the room to think about what will happen. They need time to digest the information presented to them. Even after employees have asked their questions and voiced their concerns, they need time to think and accept how their work will change. If need be, encourage team members to carve out some time in their schedules to think through the things that are happening rapidly. It’s something that I started doing about 10 years ago. The habit’s not exclusive to digital transformation, but I made a conscious decision to put time on my calendar outside of meetings to digest information.

Change is inevitable. How people go about doing their work isn’t immune. However, you can make the process much more efficient and painless by taking into account more than just the technology involved in digital transformation. You must factor that human element into the equation to ensure success.

Hiring is the Front door to Your Future Success

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Today’s employees want to be validated for what they bring to the company. They want to learn and grow professionally, want more life-work balance, and a manager they can respect.  

Importantly, they want to know they are making a difference and contributing to something larger than themselves.

Employees are far more open about their needs and will turn off  or turnover if those needs are not meant. To meet these challenges, CEOs must look at the HR function differently. A supportive role is no longer acceptable. HR must have a seat where the strategic decisions are made.

HR is a supporting role if:

  • Your website identifies the key executives without including the head of HR.
  • Remote branches are “doing their own thing.”
  • HR is blamed for an increase in the employee turnover rate.
  • HR reports to the accounting or legal department.
  • Managers say, “we would have hired better if HR had gotten us better candidates.”
  • HR is not involved on the front-end of the company’s strategic decisions.
  • An executive drops a resume in HR’s desk and says “can you get the paperwork going? We just hired him/her, and they start in two weeks.”

If you answer “yes” to four or more, your company is at a significant disadvantage. One way to gain a competitive advantage is by splitting the HR department.

  • Vice President – People and Culture – this includes the recruiting, leadership and talent development and onboarding. This is an executive level position with the person reports directly to the President/CEO.
  • Human Resources – Administration – reports to the CFO and includes the important support functions like benefits, payroll, compliance, etc.

Hiring is the front door to your future success.  Make sure it is working properly for today’s business environment.

Understanding Your Burnout, and How to get Back to Well-being

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Each year I give a presentation about burnout and well-being to our recently hired physicians and scientists at Mayo Clinic.

During the talk, I ask the participants to raise their hand if they have ever experienced burnout. Five years ago, a few hands would go up. Today, in 2022, nearly everyone in the room raises their hand. Did the rate of burnout for these professionals increase significantly over the past five years? Perhaps, especially recently with the pandemic. Alternatively, we may simply be better at recognizing burnout. We have become more familiar with the language that defines burnout and the metrics that quantify it—so now we can name what we perceive.

And if we as leaders aim to decrease burnout, having a framework to identify and figure out how to approach burnout and well-being is essential. While conducting a recent seminar with leaders of healthcare organizations throughout Asia and the Middle East, I likewise asked the participants, “How many of you have experienced burnout?” Every one of the people, at tables assembled by organization and country, raised their hand—except for the individuals at one table. I thought to myself, “Finally, an organization has figured out how to eliminate burnout.” So I asked those at the table to share their experience.

Each leader at the table looked sullenly at the others. Eventually one of them grabbed the microphone and stood up to speak. “Each of us in our country has experienced difficult childhoods with much adversity. We learned at a young age that the way to succeed was to put our head down and work as hard and as many hours as we could. And we expect this of each other. Certainly, we face adversity. There are times when we feel sad and helpless, but we need to push through these moments.” He looked down and switched the microphone to the opposite hand. “Many of my colleagues who have retired from work reflect negatively upon their lives. They realized that the moments of sadness and helplessness they experienced turned into a career of misery. They tell me that they sense that they had never experienced joy. They regret the life they have lived.” He then looked directly at me. “But we do not label our experience as burnout.”

Burnout is a syndrome of overwhelming emotional exhaustion, feelings of cynicism, and a sense of ineffectiveness. Emotional exhaustion occurs when we are worn out, fatigued, depleted, and without emotional energy. It creates a cognitive weariness that affects our ability to perform our work. A candle requires sufficient oxygen, protection from the wind, and a spark to keep its wax burning; lacking those conditions, it would lose its capacity to make light and heat.

Similarly, our vigor is extinguished when we are emotionally exhausted. Cynicism refers to the negative attitudes that develop when we encounter our work. When we are cynical, we become irritable and lose our idealism. We begin to see colleagues and clients as obstacles in our way. When I think of cynicism, I am reminded of the cartoon character Glum from The Adventures of Gulliver.  When Glum and his friends faced a difficult challenge, Glum would proclaim, “We’ll never make it!” Glum’s friends would counter, “Be positive, Glum.” And then after a few moments Glum would admonish, “I’m positive we’ll never make it!”

A colleague is clinically burned out when they have high levels of emotional exhaustion in addition to cynicism or a sense of ineffectiveness. All of us have moments in which we experience each of these feelings. But it is the combination of relentless exhaustion over time and at least one of the other two dimensions that separates burnout from simple exhaustion.

You likely have a good idea of what promotes burnout. Imagine:

• Your inbox is full of “high priority” messages, a work schedule change bumps a long-planned family gathering, and you’re denied an essential resource because you submitted the wrong form.

• Your boss overlooks your input on a decision within your area of expertise, your colleague barks at you each time you follow his instructions to contact him, and you were just given another important project with poorly defined deliverables on an unrealistically tight deadline.

• The mission and values of your organization seem to exist

only on the screen savers of your workstation—the workstation which, as it happens, suddenly restarts whenever you open the HR portal to complete a required questionnaire about burnout.

• You haven’t had a vacation, you haven’t been eating well, and you don’t have time to sleep. And, in the back of your mind— what wakes you up at 3 a.m. each day—is a perseverative thought about a mistake you made last month. You feel as if you are treading water in a pool with no ladder and a poolside edge that lurks six feet above the water’s surface.

And it doesn’t appear these struggles will ever end. Each of us has the grit to work through process inefficiencies, and excessive workloads, and work and home conflicts, and dysfunction within our organizations. We are resilient and can bounce back after struggles or failure. We may even consider exhaustion to be a badge of honor—proof of our dedication to work—as we speak with pride of the sacrifices we make in service of our pursuits. We face moments of frustration and we persevere. But when these moments repeat, and are unrelenting, and we have no time for recovery over longer periods of time, we are at risk of developing burnout.

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