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At a recent seminar, a woman who helps run a community college stood up to ask a question.
"Well, the bad news," she said, "is that we have to let everyone in. And the truth is, many of these kids just can't be the leaders you're describing, can't make art. We need people to do manual work, and it's those people."
I couldn't believe it. I was speechless, then heartbroken. All I could think of was these young adults, trusting this woman to lead them, teach them, inspire them and push them, and instead being turned into 'those people.'
You know, the people who will flip burgers or sweep streets or fill out forms all day. The ones who will be brainwashed into going into debt, into buying more than they can afford, to living lives that quietly move from one assigned task or one debt payment to another. If they're lucky.
No, I said to her, trying to control my voice, no these are not those people. Not if you don't want them to be.
Everyone is capable of being generous, at least once. Everyone is capable of being original, inspiring and connected, at least once. And everyone is capable of leading, yes, even more than once.
When those that we've chosen to teach and lead write off people because of what they look like or where they live or who their parents are, it's a tragedy. Worse, we often write people off merely because they've been brainwashed into thinking that they have no ability to do more than they've been assigned. Well, if we brainwashed them into setting limits, I know we can teach them to ignore those limits.
Think about your hiring practices, when you seek out new candidates do you fall into this stereotype view of the world?
To my HR purist friends I apologize if you think I believe that HR does not have a vital role within our organizations.I am in no way equating HR to playing the child game of house. What I am suggesting is that there is a new visitor in the neighborhood.
For some time I have had some elementary interest in a new tool to increase employee engagement called gamification. It came to the forefront when I received a LinkedIn Invite from Noreen Poli of Ready, Set, Go Social who asked me how to introduce her platform to the HR community.
The purpose of the gamification effort is to take the concepts alive in the online gaming process and apply them to the business arena. In each instance the employee is rewarded if you will with feedback, rewards and badges to show how well they were involved in the process.
According to an article by Rob Garcia in the upMover there are three areas of low hanging fruit where this can apply now - Employee referral programs, talent management and collaboration and health and wellness. In a separate article from Forbes magazine entitled Gamification: Three ways to use gaming for recruiting, training and wellness the author talks about Marriott using gaming theory in recruiting kitchen managers. The link takes you to an app on Facebook.where you are given the assignment to act as the kitchen manager. It is fun. It is engaging and it shows what we are talking about. Your assignment is to prepare food for customers and then have it sent out to the restaurant floor. Your feedback is the format when the plate is returned to the kitchen and you are able to see how much of the food was consumed. I tried it four times and the first plate came back half empty the rest came back mostly or not at all consumed. Marriott uses it as a recruiting tool to show candidates the responsibilities of the kitchen manager. Obviously since the platform allows you to save your results the candidate is able to show Marriott whether they can handle the job.
If your are interested in learning more there are several good outlets for more information:
1. The online educational site Coursera is offering a free 12 week course on the concepts behind gamification in business conducted by Professor Ken Werbach from the Wharton School of Business.
2. Professor Ken Werbach has written a book about this area called For the Win and it can be found as a Kindle E-Book for under $10.00
We need to keep searching for ways to engage our human capital assets for the betterment of our organizations. With the increasing role of the younger generations in our organizations, gamification allows us to engage them in the world they are comfortable in. Regardless of our generational level, I am sure that many of you out there play the Faceboook and Zynga games. Gamification allows us to bring that feeling to the business marketplace.
Daniel Bloom & Associates, Inc. has created a second blog here on Posterous entitled "Achieving HR Excellence Through Six Sigma - The Blog. Come visit, and join the community to look at how to continuously improve the process we call HR.
http://achieve-hr-excellence-through-six-sigma.posterous.com
On two separate times in the past week, my inbox contained entries which centered around the image that the corporation puts forth to the marketplace. In each one to some degree the organizations involved forgot what their purpose is -- to acquire and maintain customers. To do that we need to have the "right person, in the right job, at the right time and in the right place."
Consider these events. The first involved a cheerleader on the Baltimore Ravens. She was banned from being part of the cheerleader team at the Superbowl because she put on a pound and a half in weight. The second I received from fellow blogger, Trish McFarlane. who posted a blog reference on LinkedIn.It involved a post from the Proactive Employer in which it was reported that based on a message from G-D the HR Manager of the organization was fired after two weeks because her same-sex relationship would not look good for the organization.
Every day I see rants from employers who say that they can't find the necessary talent to fill their positions and yet they become concerned with the answer as to whether they are the fairest in the world. Trust me I know the arguments or have heard them before. When I worked in the corporate mobility world, the relocation management company competition was typically the beauty queen personage who would compete as much on the image as the solutions to the client's problems. But image does not necessarily help you find the right person for the right job in the right place at the right time. It may even be detrimental to your organization under ADA.
So the next time you have a position available consider these matters of fact for sourcing the candidate for that opening:
1. It is what they can do for you, not what they look like that is important - We are in a very competitive, rapidly changing business world. It is far more important to consider what Knowledge Performance Indicators they can bring to the table. It is not the time to select a person on the basis on whether they can compete for Miss America tomorrow.
2. Your needs are here and now in your business - Your sole concern should be finding a person with the right skills for that open slot. You can go out and hire that stereotype glamor individual and still not get the skills necessary to help the organization through these difficult economic times. He or she may lift the spirits of some of your employees but that may not mean that you are now more innovative or competitive.
