Self Appraisals in the first grade

Several people I work with attended an interesting training here at Oracle.  It was a course designed to give you tips on how to do presentations to executives.  I heard some key themes included: being on message,  brief,  in control, prepared, etc.

Most importantly,  you should make sure you talk about things they care about (not what you care about) and in words they use.

It’s not just that you shouldn’t use jargon, you should be purposeful in your intent to communicate your ideas from the point of view of the audience. Of course, this is always useful, but the higher the career stakes, the more you really want to get it right.

I have a been thinking about this for a few days now as I have a much harder task in front of me than a meeting with executives,  I have to present “what I do” to my daughter’s first grade class.

yikes.

Here is what I do.

Meetings, emails, meetings, emails, IMs, emails, reviewing reports, emails about reports, twitter, blogging, email, thinking, email, email about thinking, document review, email about document review, and so on…

pretty much email. That’s what I do.  Nothing very concrete there.  In fact, I’m sure there are a lot of people who do a lot of email and their jobs would be wildly different than mine.

Of course, I’m not really worried about putting this into first grade language.  I have regular access to a first grader, and I have a good idea what she does and does not understand (or care about). But I do realize that I need to be more specific about what is in the meetings and emails or I will confuse and bore them.

So as I was thinking about what exactly to talk about, I realized that her class is already familiar with the concept of performance feedback.  They do self appraisals every day. The class uses what they call  “Reflection sheets”* to capture when they do (and do not) show evidence of following the school rules (Respect, Useful, Listener, Ethical, Safe).  As you can see, it’s an optimized process for minimal paperwork with maximum utility.

As I work to define what I do in a way that is interesting and meaningful to a first grader, I realize that maybe what I really should be doing is recommending that business consider having more reflection sheets and less self appraisals.

I am finding myself especially fond of the useful one, I think that’s worth a second look.

__________________

*I could only get agreement to have a copy if I promised to black out her name

Ladies please stop [inappropriately] apologizing

As a mother of girls I’m highly sensative to female behaviors — those that I want my girls to exhibit and those I’d like them to avoid.  My rant today is about the inappropriate apology. I am sure that there are men who also have this annoying habit, but I tend to notice it in women.

So as a matter of public service I would like to call out those apologies that you should retain and those that you should drop

You probably owe me an apology if you

• Run into my car
• Step on my toe
• Ruin my outfit
• Say something mean to me
• etc.

You do not owe me an apology if you

• Call my house and the person you are looking for is not there
• Want to ask for 5 minutes of my time to talk about something
• Want to disagree with me about a topic or idea
• etc

Whoever taught you that you need to apologize for your existence got it wrong.  Trust me, you have a lot of great things to contribute.  Don’t tell me to undervalue you.  It’s silly and it’s time to stop.

New blogger on the scene

I’m happy to share a new blog with my TalentedApps and DFoF friends.

My girlfriend Heather has started a fashion blog (I must say this is probably more for the girls…).

As has been well reported, in my world it takes a village and Fashion is one of the first areas that I’m always looking for help.  Heather has taken her advice to the inter-tubes offering great and practical tips to others.

I love her mission

High-heel wearing California Native who solemnly swears to make it her mission to find you something to wear that will earn you a compliMINT (or four).

I, for one, am a big fan of a compliment.

So, if you are interested in broadening out your blogroll consider giving Stylishmint a look.  You never know, you might learn something new and who doesn’t love that?

The March 3rd Carnival of HR? – When’s That?

Drink up, little fella!

That’s right! The March 3rd Carnival of HR is fast approaching. No sooner have you just got off the train for the special February 24th Undercover Boss Carnival of HR, when it’s time to hop on this one!

March is known for many things: it comes in like a lion, yet goes out like a lamb. The Ides of March was not the best time for Julius Caesar. A Madness of sorts takes hold of basketball fans during March. But, perhaps the most popular thing associated with March is the one about drinking serious amounts of alcoholic beverages. You got it – St. Patrick’s Day. And what do we most associate with St. Patrick’s Day? Right again! Hangovers!

There are various forms of hangovers (of which you may have experienced one or more or a combination of):

1. My head is throbbing.
2. Dude, where’s my car?
3. Where am I? How did I get here?

What happened? How did we get here?

There are striking parallels in organizations, and it doesn’t even have to involve alcohol. Trish McFarlane touched on this subject recently, presenting a scenario reminiscent of the plot of “The Hangover” i.e. you suddenly find yourself in a unusual situation that initially makes no sense and you have to piece together the events that led up to it.

You’ve probably experienced a situation where a crisis has developed and no one really knows how it happened. Even if they do know how it happened, they don’t know why the policies or procedures are present that triggered the crisis; it just “has always been done that way.” Or finally, there’s the “no one remembers or is still left who knows” why we’re doing things this way. It’s a sort of organizational amnesia and the organizational “roofies” that cause it can be ill-conceived layoffs and restructurings, over exuberant initiatives, etc. The “hangover effect” is real and can last a long, long time.

So for this upcoming Carnival of HR, see if you have a post that relates to the “Hangover Effect” no matter how. If not, don’t worry, send in a post anyway and we’ll add it to just increase the general chaos (laugh to yourself as people try to fit it into the theme.) Send in a post from the previous two weeks to me: mark [dot] bennett [at] oracle [dot] com by the end of your day March 1st. Thanks!

Alan Garner: Hey what’s that on your arm?
Stu Price: Oh my God – Phil, you were in the hospital last night.
Phil Wenneck: Yeah, I guess I was.

- “The Hangover”

Beer Photo by Zervas

My Intentional Remembering Self

As promised, I’m ready to share a TED learning.  As it happens this was the first session I heard so it has the benefit of being less jumbled.

The talk was from Daniel Kahneman the founder of Behavioral Economics (and yes, everything about that title appeals to me…. seriously — see previous confessions of geek-dom).

His talk was about the difference between our experiencing and our remembering selves.  Essentially,  we remember things differently than we experience them.  It is the memory of the event that we use in further decision making and it is often the expected memory that we use to decide our futures.

I’ll give you a minute to let that sink in as it has a big implication on everything from the types of vacations you take, to the places you choose to live, to the career decisions you make.

After the session, I asked my new friends at lunch how they thought they might use that information,and most people went down the path that they wanted to be more in the moment and intentional in their daily lives.  Essentially getting (and giving) more value to their experiencing selves.

I went the other way — I decided I want to put more effort into intentionally using my remembering self to my career and personal benefit.  Ironically, I had already started down this path I just didn’t have the behavioral economics rationale.

At the start of 2010, I began keeping a gratitude journal (yes, there’s an app for that).  I did this for a very selfish reason.  I had read about a study that suggested the gratitude journals helped college students have a better sense of well being, better outcomes in their schooling and better general health and wellness.

My selfish reason for giving this a try, was that I was tired of being sick so frequently and I was annoyed with myself for not having any fitness goals.  If I am completely honest, I didn’t really want to set a fitness goal, so when I read about the gratitude journal thing, I figured it might be a way to ease myself into a fitness goal.

I figured, instead of trying to do more, I would focus some energy on being happy about what I did manage to do.   A plan with zero downside and possible upside.  Exactly my kind of initiative.

Thanks to this outstanding TEDTalk,  I realize that I was using a gratitude journal to put effort in focusing my remembering self on the positive things in my life, my work and my relationships.

So, while I do think there is a lot of merit in being in the moment, I think you might be able to achieve faster results taking your remembering self a bit more seriously and being intentional in how you define your memories.

In other words, your mother might have been right in her advice to focus on the positives.  I’m currently experimenting with myself, I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

__________

Update 3/1 — this talk is posted if you want to watch it.

Are We Human in the Network?

At an HR Happy Hour a while back, Mark Stelzner made the important point that, “You are the most important tool in the network.” This is absolutely correct, yet within it also lies a hidden danger.

Mark was making the crucial point and reminding us on the call that while which technology tools to use will be an important part of our decision making, a social network has no value without the participation of people in that network. In other words, the technology provides the platform, but it is not the network; the people are the network.

What’s so bad about that?

Here’s the hidden (at least to some) danger: people make up the network and the more that people participate, the more valuable the network can become. However, if the network becomes too much the primary value to its users to the exclusion of the individual, the risk is that the identity and humanity of the numerous participants can become diluted, even to the point where it affects their perception of their own identity and humanity. That is paradoxically the opposite of what was supposed to happen.

A recent book by Jaron Lanier, “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto“, discusses this problem and its philosophical, ethical, and economic effects. While his focus is mostly on Web 2.0 technologies in the public internet, some of the thinking applies to enterprise social networks just as much, especially in the way that management shapes the culture of its use.

Our SVP of Fusion HCM Development, Clive Swan, puts the concern well by wanting to make sure that we don’t end up treating people as “interchangeable carbon-based units.”

How can this happen?

How can primacy of the network affect our perceptions of our own identity and humanity? The network acts in many ways as a mirror that can powerfully affect our perception of ourselves. It doesn’t affect us all the same way and to the same extent, but it happens nonetheless. This effect isn’t a new phenomenon; the propensity for individuals to lose their humanity when they see themselves as an anonymous member of a mob is well-known throughout history. What’s changed over time is the acceleration of that effect through technologies that support things like mass media, assembly lines, and the internet. When radio and film propaganda was used effectively in changing almost entire nations’ images of themselves (by turning the cameras and microphones onto the population itself in carefully controlled ways), we almost lost the world. That danger hasn’t passed either.

As before, it’s not the technology itself that causes the problem, as much as we’d like to blame it. Rather, it’s the warping of the technology to achieve certain self-serving effects directly, or it’s the unintended side effect of some other nobler aim. So, for instance, we hear about the wonderful ability to tap into the experience of our workforce to extract knowledge so that we either improve productivity or stop the loss of knowledge as people leave the company. But here’s the catch: when the network solely becomes a mechanism for people to extract slices of information from “the network” (i.e. information that other individuals provided, but was blended into a homogeneous, albeit organized, mass), then the individuals that made the network even possible in the first place become secondary to the network itself. This can insidiously work its way into the culture with no one really seeing what’s happening because everyone is utterly focused on the first-order benefits.

Re-humanize Yourself

I work all day at the factory
I’m building a machine that’s not for me
There must be a reason that I can’t see
You’ve got to humanize yourself

- The Police

So, we must be vigilant both as management and as individual contributors. Management must adhere to the borrowed phrase of, “first, do no harm.” Resist the temptation to load the organization with too many policies and procedures that end up just obscuring the greater goal. Instead, communicate to people what the purpose of collaboration technologies are, along with general guidelines. Avoid the problem of unintended consequences by making sure that business goals in the use of collaboration technologies don’t create perverse incentives.

As individuals, we must all keep a look out for creeping anonymity. Maintain your identity on your enterprise network and nurture the identities of others. Recognize people and their contribution. Resist the temptation to always just “get in and get out fast.” Sure, there will be times when time is pressing and you need an answer fast or you need to answer somebody else fast. Just don’t let that so dominate your interaction with the network that you have become just a “gadget”. There are times when anonymity might be called for like with surveys, but the majority of your activity should be identified with you and convey as much of the whole you as you can.

Photo by brtsergio

The Mardi Gras Carnival of HR is up!

Michael Krupa over at InfoBox has posted the Mardi Gras edition of the Carnival of HR. He’s gathered a collection of over 30 posts from around the blogosphere. They cover a wide range of topics, so Michael has kindly organized them by theme and provided a brief description with each so that you can better decide if it’s of interest to you.

Some of the standout posts include:

• Steve Boese’s insightful observation about What’s Missing from the 2010 Social Software Predictions.
• Wally Bock’s critical analysis of Dan Pink’s advice in Putting Drive to Work: Intrinsic Motivation.
• Bill Kutik’s keen industry observations in What Does Salary.com Actually do.
• Naomi Bloom’s sharing of her passion in Thinking Is My Job: Blogging Those Thoughts Is Now My Passion.

Go check out the carnival! It’s a great way to get a sample of the best and you might discover a blog you weren’t aware of before.

Try bagging spuds to increase employee engagement

For me, one of the most meaningful and satisfying goals that Meg sets her team each year is that of Community Service.

As a team, we’ve participated in a number of local events each year, helping at various food banks, and local shelter housing projects. I am always blown away by how much we can achieve in a very short time when we work together as a team.

This week we returned to Alameda County Community Food Bank (ACCFB), this time bagging spuds! Working together for just a couple of hours, we bagged 14,000lbs of potatoes, the equivalent of 11,000 meals’-worth. That felt pretty good…until we realized that through their various programs, ACCFB now distribute enough food for 300,000 meals weekly. This put our contribution in perspective, and showed us how much the community needs help from groups such as ours, in order to meet the demand – a demand that has almost doubled in the past 18 months as a direct result of the current economic climate.

This week’s event had an added bonus, since a number of colleagues were visiting HQ, some for the first time, from a variety of states and countries. With such a dispersed global team, we rarely have the opportunity to meet in person, and particularly to get to know new faces as our team grows. Several mentioned how much they appreciated participating in this event during their visit.

Many of us had been cooped up in a conference room for three very full days, and were feeling the effects of brain-overload. So, a complete diversion for a couple of hours, performing a manual task, conversing with friends and colleagues while at the same time doing something meaningful and helpful for others, did us all a power of good.

After each event, we gather somewhere locally for a ‘happy hour’ – another chance to chat with colleagues, and also to acknowledge our gratitude for our own more fortunate circumstances. The camaraderie that this instills benefits the whole organization, as the team spirit that it fosters spills over into our day-to-day collaboration at work.

I feel fortunate that Meg recognizes the value of giving our time and effort for the good of the community, and the beneficial effect it has on our team. Earlier this year, she blogged about her experience with colleagues as guests on Compassionate HR Blog Radio, discussing the various volunteer projects we have taken on in the past year, and in particular how we have been supported by Oracle to do so.

As they pointed out, the volunteering projects that we undertake are as much a benefit to us as individuals, and to our organization, as they are to the community. It is true that we have the satisfaction of accomplishing something meaningful together as a team, which increases employee engagement and encourages closer working relationships.

So, instead of trudging into the office in ‘Friday mode’, brain-dead from a week of meetings, I spent today catching up on tasks with more enthusiasm and with a far lighter frame-of-mind, thanks to our rewarding team ‘down-time’.

A big shout-out to two other TalentedApps contributors, Vivian and Keshav – I am so thankful that you guys never tire of organizing our crowd for these events!

Photo: Anupma Sud

Sundance for Nerds

I am just back in the office after my first TED experience and a quick ski trip with the family.  There is so much to tell and frankly my brain is still absorbing and classifying all my thoughts (or at least that is what I keep telling myself as I have a series of very odd dreams each night).

I will say this, the event was all I had hoped and then some.  The talks were inspiring, mind blowing and thought provoking but the people were amazing.  There were people from so many different backgrounds, disciplines and ideologies who were inspiring in their own right.

I do expect to do a bit of a “best of” kind of post at some point with links to TED talks but right now all the ideas and topics are a bit mixed up in my mind (and only a few of the talks are posted).

I am pretty sure that I’m wrong when I say that what I learned from the talks were

Vaccinating bed nets with zero carbon emissions using video games, suspended animation, condoms and meat houses grown in e Coli, while playing the ukulele and farming sustainable fish with lasers.

So I’m going to take a little bit more time and attempt to work the above into posts that actually make sense, as well as to organize all the interesting tweets, links, etc. that I’ve put into a “save for later” folder.

You might find it interesting to read Scoble’s take on the event, acknowledging the elitist element.  I will also note I have already given away my phone in case you were still hoping…

10,000 Hours of Gaming

Jane McGonigal, Institute for the Future

There were many talks that touched on talent & development at TED, but Jane McGonigal’s was the most surprising. For example, I expected to be enthralled by Mike Feinberg & Dave Levin’s work with the Kipp Schools – featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and totally transforming childhood development. I also expected to be charmed by Sir Ken Robinson and I was not disappointed. He talked of how poorly we as a society are using our talents, how education as it is currently set up purposely dislocates people from their natural talents, and that a full revolution (not reform) is needed. These talks gave me more to think about, that’s for sure. But they did not surprise me.

Jane McGonigal’s talk surprised me. I never thought in a million years that I would be interested in online gaming. Or would, for that matter, ever consider exposing my child to it before he was 18 (please don’t tell my husband I said that). Jane’s premise is that by the age of 21, a majority of kids will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games. According to specialists, spending 10,000 hours doing anything makes you a virtuoso. So, what exactly will these kids be getting good at? (please, make it something worthwhile!) In fact, Jane has found that there is a lot of good stuff being developed. But she doesn’t stop there. She believes the stuff that is being developed through these online games could help solve world problems! (say what?) Here’s a rundown:

• Urgent optimisim – a belief that you will ultimately be successful, even if you experience many failures.
• Social fabric – a sense of trust that others will help you.
• Blissful productivity – a desire to work hard and purposefully.
• Epic meaning – an understanding that one is individually capable of changing the world.

Jane’s plan is to harness this expertise to start solving the toughest world problems. She is currently creating online games such as “I Love Bees”, “World without Oil” and “Save the World.”  The question is: will online gamers move from “World of Warcraft” to “World without Oil”? I am surprisingly interested to find out!

Please find Jane’s talk here!

picture source: boingboing.net