Posts Tagged ‘Respect’
Is That All You’ve Got?
This isn’t about interviewing.
I love big projects, because as they progress, they evolve. And the way I see them changes. For instance, the big project I’m working on now, which is a specialized website, made me see differently how I wanted it to look and what I wanted it to do. I started with what I knew, thinking, “That will work”. But as I walked forward through it, what I knew started to look more limited while what I envisioned started to look less pedestrian.
I wanted it to have more functionality, which meant more sophistication. For example, on one page, I have simple reviews of several dozen things. Each review has five different aspects. And each aspect has a definition. For someone looking at a review that includes those aspects, they might need a reminder of what those aspects mean. So I added five links beside each thing that could be clicked to reveal aspect definitions. But that just cluttered up the page and made it look more amateurish. I’m no high end coder, but looking at web design these days, it’s obvious that less is more.
So how to put the definitions there without creating an extra 250 links? Then someone suggested something that stays put while the rest of the page moves. The same five links would always be there, but only those five. They were talking about a scroll follow box. It took me a few days to figure out how to build one, but I did it.
Then, I have a great map but I wanted it to be more functional. I remembered that some images can have images inside them. That’s called an image map. So I found instructions on how to build one. BTW, the website W3Script.com is a great site to learn about html and text and .css. The map is almost finished, I think.
Anyway, I said all of that to say it’s work to move beyond what you know. Sometimes, it’s easier to say, “that’s good enough”. And you might say that for a lot of reasons. Maybe you say it as you’re halfway through excellent, struggling toward perfect, and you realize “I can stop now”. Maybe you’ve been beating your head against something for a long time and you’ve had a lot of dead ends and you’re really tired and you decide that maybe it is the best you can do. Or maybe you realize that the people you’re doing something for just don’t deserve your best work as a professional because they don’t respect you as a person.
Whatever the reason, the decision to take the path that moves a project from mediocre to good to something you can live with is always a very personal choice. And I think that once you start moving down that harder path, you can’t really bitch about the work it takes to travel it. The achievement might make it worth it, or the effort might make it worth it. But it is always up to you to decide how far down that path you go.
It’s Not for Sissies
I’ll be interviewing Dr. Harville Hendrix and Dr. Helen Hunt. They’re a marriage and family counseling couple that has been around forever. They wrote “How to Get the Love you Want,” which was a groundbreaker in the 90s. They almost lost their marriage to divorce. So, you know one of the questions I’m going to ask is, “How does THAT happen?” I expect it to be a good interview and you can expect it to be up before the weekend at my website, www.convers.us.
What is a “True Believer?”
This isn’t about interviewing, although it could’ve been. The subject is probably near and dear to at least 150 million Americans. Maybe next time I’ll talk interviews.
True believers come in many forms. There are religious true believers. Sports true believers. Political true believers. There are true believers in family. True believers in our system of Capitalism. And, there are true believers in the United States of America.
What about employees who are true believers? I’m not talking about employees who are coerced into being true believers at the threat of losing their job if they’re not. And I’m not talking about employees who are the movers who shake everyone below them in an organization either. They can afford to be true believers and cheerleaders if they’re making the big bucks or have been given the power to push other people around.
I’m talking about true believers like Zack. Zack works for Coke, and I took his picture because I noticed something special about him. Look closely. See anything, unique? Zack isn’t a big wig. He didn’t ask me to take his picture. And it was Sunday, so it’s not like he had the luxury I did of being off work. .
What I noticed was that he was wearing shoes that exactly matched the colors in his shirt, the colors of his truck, the colors of every box of Coke product from the Pacific Ocean east to the Sea of Japan. I’ve seen lots of Coke delivery guys. They all wear the shirt but the shoes are always different. I guess Coke lets them pick they’re own shoes for comfort since they’re on all kinds of surfaces, all day long – jumping down, climbing up, huffing and hauling. Issuing shoes is probably an expense the company doesn’t want to have to bear. Then again, for all I know, they do issue shoes. But this employee chose to pick these shoes for an extra reason.
They’re just shoes, right? Nope. They’re a small, spontaneous expression of loyalty by an employee that is trying to say how much he likes his job. He’s not sucking up to anybody. He’s not trying to get noticed. He’s just telling himself, “I’m in.”
This is the kind of thing every company, every federal agency, every non profit organization is dying to have; employees that care from the bottom up, from the inside out. This is the kind of thing they pay consultants millions of dollars to conduct months long studies to find.
But for many organizations, it’s elusive, like hunting for snipe. For many organizations, it doesn’t seem to exist at all and for some of them, it’s absent for a reason although they just can’t figure out why. But maybe they should try opening an issue of Forbes, or Inc. or Harvard Business Review or Psychology Today, or practically any business tome between now and the 19th century and they might get a clue.
If bureaucracies beat workers down with policy letters and punitive actions, if they passive aggressively punish passion and initiative, if they use HR like a cudgel to compensate for their managerial cowardice and inadequacy, then they won’t see stuff like this. What they’ll see instead is employees that are “retiring in place.” They’ll see employees who would rather run through the door when their time is up than suffer fake supervisory appreciation that is less felt and more farce. What they’ll get, year after year, are employee satisfaction surveys that put them squarely below average … surveys that say, they as bosses, suck. And they’ll deserve it.
Because, the thing is, lots of organizations have employees who are true believers. And they kill them.
Zack is a Coke man down to his kicks. Coke, this is your public face. It got my attention. Whatever you’re doing, keep it up. I might drink your cola, but I’ll definitely notice your workers.