Organizational & Employee Development 

Hidden Drivers of Success                                                                                                                By William A. Schiemann, Jerry H. Siebert and Brian S. Morgan SHRM, 2013 List price: $29.95 276 pages ISBN: 978-1-586-44333-7 Purchase from the SHRMStore “Overdone” and “trivial.” That’s what employee surveys have become in many organizations—yet surveys also can provide vital, strategic intelligence for executives if done right. Hidden Drivers of Success sets out to teach readers how to mine employees’ insights and experiences for ideas and data that may be irreplaceable. Many survey tools aren’t designed to gather information that supports strategic decision-making, the authors say. They advise companies to reinvent those tools to focus on strategic and operational information. To do that, HR leaders should: Figure out who the stakeholders are—the people from whom you need to get information. Full-time employees are key stakeholders, but so are part-timers, contractors, consultants, and anyone else who works for or with you. Customers, including those who walk away unhappy, are sources of information, as are your internal and external suppliers, and constituents such as unions, consumer groups and regulatory bodies. Find out how to assess the value of your department or group—and how to use that information to improve your products or services. Use the book’s “people equity” model to understand your talent issues and optimize your talent. Learn to plan and design employee surveys that meet strategic information needs, show where to invest and indicate where future problems may crop up. A six-step survey process walks readers through constructing surveys from start to finish, including choosing the right issues, structuring the survey and interpreting the results for senior management. Turn survey results into actions by involving the stakeholders themselves, setting goals, monitoring progress and communicating progress as it happens. Learn why surveys often fail and how to avoid pitfalls that diminish their usefulness. Use surveys to evaluate and improve your employer brand and your hiring and recruitment. Surveys can identify what attracts people to your organization, whether your hiring process is efficient and how well your onboarding works. Employ focus groups and surveys to find out why people quit, and learn why the traditional exit interview doesn’t tell you all you need to know. Predictive surveys can identify departments or jobs at higher risk of turnover. Seek better feedback, which includes surveys and 360-degree assessments that can identify potential leaders and help current ones see where they need to improve. Set up an “employee intelligence system” that allows you to capture, analyze and use strategic information from employees as an ongoing process—not a one-time survey. The book includes a diagnostic survey readers can use to assess their own organizations’ current performance and readiness for strategic surveying.

Decisive
By Chip and Dan Heath
Crown Business, 2013
362 pages
List price: $26
ISBN: 978-0-307-95639-2

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Face it: You make decisions based on your biases. You’re irrational and overconfident, and you prefer data that tell you what you want to hear. In other words, you’re human.

Even the most self-aware people make choices that are influenced by their unconscious biases. In Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath ask how we can do better and be better as decision-makers.

The Heath brothers first look at how human weaknesses create flawed decisions. Then they lay out a process to help readers learn to get past their flaws: “Why a process? Because understanding our shortcomings is not enough to fix them,” they write. This book examines why we make biased choices but mostly guides readers on how to reach better, less biased decisions.

People typically make decisions in four stages: encountering a choice, analyzing options, making the choice and then living with it. But the book shows how each stage has a villain lurking within it. For example, we fail to see possible options. Or our analysis is based on self-serving information—what we want to hear, not what we need to hear. Or our choices can be wrong if emotion drives them. Or we are overconfident about how our choices will turn out.

The Heaths show how to defeat the four pitfalls:

• Widen your options. Discover ways to see more possibilities. Techniques include the “vanishing options test” (what if all the options you’re considering dried up?) and the “opportunity cost test” (how much does this option really cost you?). Learn to weigh more than one option at a time. Get tips on how to locate others who have faced similar decisions and how to learn from their choices. Learn how to make and use checklists to prompt more-thorough decision-making.
• “Reality-test” your assumptions. Consider the opposite of what you instinctively want to choose, and encourage some “constructive disagreement” in the organization to root out any biases. Learn how to get an outside perspective on your problem so you can see how others might interpret it.
• Attain distance before deciding. The Heaths teach specific strategies for separating your emotions from your decision-making. They also advocate establishing core principles so that you can refer to those principles for guidance when decisions become emotionally charged.
• Prepare to be wrong. Consider the full range of possible outcomes for decisions—not just the outcomes you wish would happen. Learn to anticipate problems and prepare for them. Use deadlines and limits—such as “We won’t spend more than X on this project”—to prevent you from escalating potentially poor choices.

To Sell Is Human
By Daniel H. Pink
Riverhead Books, 2012
260 pages
List price: $26.95
ISBN: 978-1-59448-715-6

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One in nine U.S. workers is in sales, earning a living by persuading others to buy things. And the other eight of nine don’t know it, but they’re all selling, too—selling themselves, their ideas or their work product.

In To Sell Is Human, author Daniel H. Pink examines why sales and selling are changing and how we all came to be salespeople. He outlines ways to improve your ability to sell what you have to offer, whether that’s an item in retail, an idea to your boss or your influence to your employees.

Pink looks at why today’s economy is more about salesmanship than ever before:

• Some studies show that 30 percent of the U.S. workforce now works alone. By 2020, independent entrepreneurs could become the majority of the workforce. The rise of entrepreneurship also means the rise of sales because entrepreneurs have to sell themselves.
• Pink cites “elasticity” as another driver of a sales mindset. As workers increasingly perform diverse tasks instead of just one function at work, they need to be able to influence others.
• The old idea of “buyer beware” is now “seller beware” because customers are well-informed about what they’re seeking and know they have many other options if the seller isn’t working with them.

How do people sell themselves and their ideas in a changing workplace that is increasingly a marketplace? Pink starts with the ABCs of selling, long known as “Always Be Closing.” That outdated formula gets a remake here as “Attunement, Buoyancy, Clarity.” For each of these attributes, Pink offers a detailed case study.

Attunement is about observing others and bringing your “actions and outlook into harmony with other people and with the context you’re in.” Readers learn about approaching interactions as if they have less power than other participants, as a way to help them see the other person’s perspective. Pink also coaches readers on using subtle mimicry to make others more comfortable (and more susceptible to a sale).

Buoyancy keeps your outlook positive while readying you to take on your task. Readers learn how to practice interrogative self-talk, asking, “Can I do this? Can I make this pitch? Can I persuade this person?” Asking questions helps bring out your reasons for doing things and reminds you how you prepared. Pink also covers how to explain why your “sale” did or didn’t succeed. Those who see rejection as temporary and based on specific circumstances tend to be better at persuading others, Pink notes.

Clarity means seeing things as they really are. Learn to identify the problems that need solving. Try reframing what you have to offer others; how can you contrast your offering with what others have to sell? Try getting a new angle by doing something unfamiliar. And when you want people to take an action, be clear about what they need to do.

Pink also looks at the sales pitch in a world where everyone pitches, all the time. The classic “elevator speech” summarizing what you can do for someone else isn’t the peak of pitching any more. Readers get a tutorial in pitches shaped as tweets on Twitter; subject lines on e-mails; a single, provocative question; and even a single word.

Manager’s Guide to Employee Engagement
By Scott Carbonara
McGraw-Hill, 2013
269 pages
List price: $17
ISBN: 978-0-07-179950-8

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This guide offers practical, how-to tips for improving employee engagement quickly and specifically. The target audience is the manager who needs to make the business case for engagement and who wants to make engagement work, starting today. Author Scott Carbonara:

• Argues that engagement improves productivity and relationships with customers, and keeps good workers from leaving.
• Explains the difference between genuine engagement—being dedicated and committed, and willing to expend discretionary effort on the job—and mere “job satisfaction.”
• Provides checklists to help managers identify employees who currently are and aren’t engaged.
• Guides managers in self-assessment activities to discover their management style and whether they are merely managing or truly leading their employees. Carbonara offers specific actions to take to become the “best boss ever.”
• Examines why employees do what they do and why clear expectations and effective consequences can build trust and improve performance. Carbonara dissects how different reactions to employees—praising, ignoring, punishing, etc.—affect engagement. He explains positive and negative reinforcement and how each works in an office environment.
• Shows ways to get employees to act like entrepreneurs by accepting risks, being creative, being empowered and focusing on realistic solutions.
• Explains how to align goals, vision and mission and get beyond mere mission statements. Readers learn what makes a good mission statement, how turning values into a brand can help employees understand why their work matters, and what to consider if an employee’s mission and the organization’s mission don’t match.
• Outlines how a manager can get to know each employee, one on one. Personal knowledge lets the manager tap into workers’ individual preferences, passions and strengths to build their engagement. Tools include questions to help managers inventory employees’ interests and guidelines for asking personal questions appropriately.
• Looks at how humor at work can increase engagement and how managers can use humor effectively and without offense.

Manager’s Guide to Employee Engagement is part of a series called “Briefcase Books” from publisher McGraw-Hill. As a Briefcase Book, this volume includes short, easy-to-locate sidebars on topics such as specific ideas, warnings about possible pitfalls, definitions of key terms and more.

SHRM 2012-2013 Human Capital Benchmarking
SHRM, 2012
136 pages
List price: $800
ISBN: 978-1-586-44327-6

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“Measure everything if you want to prove the business worth of human capital.” That’s what HR professionals hear in meetings, magazines and books. But where can you go to find the right data on other companies like yours, in your geographic area? Where can you get dollar amounts for organizational revenue per full-time equivalent employee, or the HR-to-employee ratio, or the average annual salary increase for employees in your industry?

Finding these data to use as benchmarks for your own company’s numbers can be tough—unless you examine SHRM’s Human Capital Benchmarking surveys.

These data charts report information by industry, number of employees and region. The book provides more than 40 metrics, including compensation data, HR department and expense data, employment data, and expectations for revenue and organizational hiring. A glossary gives readers detailed descriptions of each metric.

The source of the data is SHRM’s benchmarking database, which contains data from a random sample of SHRM members in the United States in varying industry sectors. Those sectors include for-profit and not-for-profit enterprises, finance, government, health care, high-tech, and durable and nondurable goods manufacturing.

Organizational data include revenues per FTE. HR department data includes total HR staff number; HR expenses; the HR-to-employee ratio; and the percentages of HR staff in supervisory, professional/technical or administrative support roles. Other data cover the types of HR positions organizations expected to fill in 2012.

Compensation data cover annual salary increases, salaries as a percentage of operating expenses, target bonuses for nonexecutives and executives, and reimbursements for tuition. Employment facts include time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, number of positions filled in 2011, annual turnover rates and more.

The book’s guidelines state that any deviation between the data in the book and the reader’s own figures for the same human capital measures is not necessarily favorable or unfavorable. Deviations only mean the reader needs to do more analysis. The guidelines also note that human capital measures specific to the reader’s own industry and business size “are more descriptive and meaningful” than generic data.

Social Gravity
By Joe Gerstandt and Jason Lauritsen
Talent Anarchy, 2012
151 pages
List price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-61558-787-5

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This book aims to help any reader at any level increase his or her social capital—defined here as “The resources available through personal and business relationships.” How those relationships form, how to look at them analytically, and how to create new and valuable connections are all part of this guide.

What’s the true value of a social connection? Social Gravity authors Joe Gerstandt and Jason Lauritsen demonstrate how to evaluate a person’s reach or connections to others; a person’s power or ability to influence others; and staff diversity or differences from yourself. Reach, power and diversity mean a contact has plenty to offer you, including new perspectives and the opportunity to connect with others in the contact’s own circle.

Gerstandt and Lauritsen condense their advice into six rules, larding each with checklists, questionnaires and tools to help readers personalize the advice:

• “Invest in connecting” with others. Put the time and the effort into building relationships. This includes figuring out your goals and the priority of each goal, so you know where to put your networking efforts: If your goal is to ascend in your company, work on relationships there, but if the goal is to start your own business, work on relationships outside the office.
• “Be open to connections.” This isn’t simple. Human nature tends toward making faulty assumptions about people, relying on stereotypes, and embracing biases. The book guides readers on recognizing those roadblocks. Then it covers how to put yourself out there—being more available by phone, taking more opportunities to meet others in person, using social media and e-mail more effectively, and even moving workspace to be closer to those who matter most to your network.
• “Be authentic.” If you follow your real interests and express your real goals, you’re more likely to connect with those who share them and can help you. Learn how to write a personal manifesto that clarifies what is meaningful for you and what you want to accomplish. Assess your gifts, talents, skills and knowledge and how they might help an organization someday.
• “Get involved in meaningful activity.” Directly related to being authentic, this rule urges taking action that matters to you personally and, through it, meeting like-minded people. Still, the authors recognize that formal networking events—though ineffective and “cosmetic”—do take place, and they offer tips on how to make the most of such events and how to start a connection, even where there is no shared, meaningful activity.
• “Use karma to turbocharge your network.” This is about reciprocity: Do things for others and they’ll do things for you. It’s “social currency” between contacts, the authors note, and it means being generous with your help because eventually someone will help you, too. Promoting your talents and skills via your online profiles and in other ways will let people see the ways in which you can help them.
• “Stay in touch.” Learn techniques for maintaining connections with appropriate, consistent and relevant communications with those in your network. The book looks at how social media tools have made connections far easier but also harder to manage meaningfully as they balloon into the hundreds and beyond. Tips on leveraging technology include subjects such as writing effective e-mails, using social sites, knowing when to use phone calls and in-person contact, and more.

While social media aren’t the book’s focus, they do get attention as tools people should use effectively. Just joining sites isn’t enough, the authors caution. You need to blog, update, post and otherwise keep content fresh. The idea of personal branding, both in person and online, is important, too, because it is “packaging who you are for the online community … to help the right people find you online.”

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go
By Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012
126 pages
List price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-1-60994-632-6

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There is a term that “strikes fear into managers’ hearts,” authors Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni write, and that term is “career development.” Managers often dislike the idea of career development programs or developmental assignments that take away their employees. But to Kaye and Giulioni, career development simply means helping others grow—and managers can achieve that through conversations.

Kaye and Giulioni dissect the myths that immobilize managers, such as the myth that there’s no time for career conversations amid everyday tasks or the belief that employees “need to own their careers” and are entirely responsible for their own development, with no need for managerial help.

But career development does not have to consist of a formal program, or even a single, lengthy planning session between manager and employee. Kaye and Giulioni emphasize the power of short conversations and an ongoing dialogue, all year long.

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go offers tools to help managers start and maintain those ongoing conversations:

Learn to look backward, forward and inward. Conversations can focus on hindsight, or looking backward to see what the employee is good at and loves; foresight, or viewing the big picture of organizational needs and how they change; and insight, where the manager and the employee look at actions toward career objectives. Managers learn how to guide conversations to uncover employees’ skills, strengths, values, interests, dislikes, preferences and weaknesses. A detailed conversation guide, complete with specific questions to ask, walks managers through a typical talk to review an employee’s past experiences, jobs and positions.

Feed your employees—they’re starving. Performance feedback through formal channels is important, but most employees are still hungry for ongoing feedback about their abilities, their blind spots and the conditions under which they perform best. The book provides practices for delivering specific, candid and constructive feedback.

Keep employees aware of the big picture. Help them develop foresight and learn how to track external business challenges and changes. Managers learn how to guide employees’ research into industry trends and forecasts and how to help workers connect those larger trends to their own company, department and career goals.

Understand that career moves can be sideways or down temporarily. Advancement doesn’t always mean moving up a traditional career ladder. Kaye and Giulioni give managers questions to guide employees who need to reassess what career success really means.

Help employees “grow in place.” Moving employees into different positions for career development isn’t always possible in today’s trimmer organizations. The writers note, “You may have little influence over getting an employee transferred or promoted, but you are completely in charge of what goes on in your own backyard.” A self-assessment helps managers decide if they are overlooking opportunities to help employees grow in place. Conversational tips let managers and employees think about the skills, information and experiences employees need, as well as how to meet those needs.

Make developmental opportunities happen. Education, exposure and experience provide development opportunities, and managers can work with employees to determine what combination of those three things work best. Kaye and Giulioni add that whatever the employee and manager decide on, the plan should be documented, linked to the organization’s business needs, aligned with the employee’s work goals and bought into by the employee.