An article at CLO magazine takes on the topic of leadership. It’s message: that authenticity is a crucial factor in successful leadership.

The idea that a willingness to be openly human makes people better leaders resonates with me. The people I’ve worked with who attempt to control or hide their humanity usually do it out of lack of self confidence. They are afraid to appear fallible. The effect is worse. Instead of appearing human, they come across as overconfident know-it-all jerks. A characterization that doesn’t breed loyalty or respect.

From the article:

Truly authentic leaders will selectively show their weaknesses. No one is perfect, so the old way of looking at leadership development, to point out good traits yet focus on those that need improving, can make someone forget about traits that make him or her special and encourage frustration as the leader in training chases after perfection, which doesn’t exist. “We all have weaknesses,” Jones explained. “And by weaknesses we don’t mean things that are central to your role performance. We mean that all of us have individual foibles, which in some organizations we’ve been encouraged to hide. Selective revelation of weakness or foible has a humanizing effect, and followers want to be led by a human being. We want people to be able to selectively and skillfully reveal weaknesses, which are real, perceived relevant to context, and which convince followers that they’re being led by a person.

So what if your first interview for a job wasn’t with HR, or the hiring manager, or even a human being? What if you got interviewed by a computer? Enter the Nemesysco HR1 Automated Integrity Profiling/Risk Assessment System.

By analyzing the emotional content of a person’s speech, it purports to pick up on such key personality elements as ethics and morals. Basically, using a telephone handset, the computer asks you questions on topics from “loyalty and honesty to drug usage, theft from a place of employment, bribery, kickbacks, fraud and deceit.”

It’s an interesting presumption – that a computer can pick up on more subtle speech cues than a human by analyzing patterns in the voice. It sounds like a beefed up lie detector to me, but perhaps the future of  the interview, or better yet, the phone screen.

Here’s a link to an article about the device

I’m real excited about our new poll (see left column)– the first of many to come as we try to use the blog to gauge some of the trends in our world. This poll functionality is provided free by Vizu. It’s by far the cleanest and easiest to use of the polling services I researched and it was a snap to integrate into the blog site. You can also do things like private polls, enable commenting on the polls, and pretty detailed analysis of poll results. Just fantastic. Highly recommended for polling just about anything.

Cast your vote now to see the results.

So says this AP article in the Chicago Tribune. Across a two year study done by Mercer, they found that only 20% of the 100 largest publicly traded American companies discussed the contribution of human capital in their annual reports.

Conclusion:

“Imagine a company spending one-third of its revenue on a capital investment or an interest payment and never addressing it with shareholders in their annual report,” said Rick Guzzo, a Mercer consultant. “It’s unthinkable.”

Indeed.

In the context of a conversation on outsourcing comes this piece on which HR employees have to be worried about their jobs (Via Gautam).

According to the post, if you are…

“in the area of liasoning with recruiting agencies, shortlisting bio-ds, co-ordinating interview schedules, ensuring people attend training, organising training schedules, ensure people comply to policies, ensuring performance forms are filled by everyone and so on, then in the first place you need to realise that you are involved not in an HR job but an admin job.”

And those who by this definition have admin jobs should be worried about having their jobs outsourced. Administrative work is almost always better off done by “technology or processes.”

So who doesn’t need to be worried? In short, those who pursue the strategic objectives of aligning, motivating and maintaining their workforces.  It’s another perspective on the “seat at the table” argument that we hear about so often. The HR execs that get the seat are those who are focused on true business goals and not administrative ones.

On the lighter side of things, I just came across this blog post from an HR consultancy listing the best company names in HR technology. We’re number 3. Since Recruitmax is now Vurv I think we should get to move up a slot.

I’m just kidding, but this perspective is played-out already in my opinion.  Anyway, Keith Hammonds, executive editor of Fast Company and the writer of the now infamous “ Why we hate HR” article participated in a podcast (audio program) at landed.fm.

The most interesting part for me was when he related the vacation policy at Fast Company. It says, “you should take at least three weeks of vacation a year. If you think you need more, you should take that, too.”

It’s an enlightened approach that puts the responsibility for getting things done in the hands of the employee. Everything else is secondary. Not every company can handle this kind of thing, but it supports what seems to be Hammonds’ underlying message: HR should not be a bureaucratic, rule making group. It should strive toward “less rules and more exceptions for exceptional people.” What Hammonds calls a “more thoughtful approach to Human Resources.”

It’s about 30 minutes and worth a listen if you’re a glutton for punishment interested in hearing some tips from an outsider about what HR can do to be more impactful.

Here is a link to the original rage-inducing article.

Probably not says Regina. She goes on to make the argument for why HR execs need to understand blogs and RSS feeds. Not for their own benefit necessarily, but because it wont be very long before the employees they are responsible for are reading blogs and feeds en masse at work. What should the response be, she wonders?

I’ve got an idea, too, Regina. What if the HR bloggers work together on a Blogs and HR briefing series. Like a “What HR needs to know about blogs” kinda thing. What do you think?

Such is the conclusion of an extensive McKinsey study done at LSE and reported in this article at the McKinsey Quarterly.

The findings are really interesting. To sum them up: it is now proven that for companies to succeed, they must have good managers at all levels of the company. According to the survey, managers are more important than just about anything else; industry sector, geography and regulatory environment included.

(more…)

According to this IDC brief, workforce performance management is the fastest growing segment of the talent management market – growing at over 16% yearly for the next 5 years. 

The report seems to be targeted at both buyers and vendors of performance management systems and offers these headlines:

IDC offers the following key points for potential buyers of WPM software and services:

– Take advantage of others’ best practices, rather than automating a broken or ineffective process
– Build a collective WPM plan with a specific end goal in mind
– Resist the temptation to build a WPM system in-house

The last bullet and the first one are particularly interesting to me – I also think they’re related. So often companies feel they can simply build a performance management system using internal resources. They most certainly can. But how flexible will it be? How scalable? How will it be supported? And to the first point, will you just be automating a (broken) process? And what about usability? Accessibility? Languages?