Chad’s Blog-O-Rama

I first stumbled on to LinkedIn two years ago when asked to find a creative way to fill a difficult opening.

It didn’t work, but it was moderately addicting to use so I continued to update my profile and add connections.

Linkedin is an important part of my strategy to maintain a neatly manicured internet identity. It’s the only real front page result from a google of “Chad A. Hanson”

I have had some positive experience with this site.

I have connected to some old classmates, but frankly I talk to them just as little now as I did before LinkedIn.

I recently found a speaker for our company retreat by spamming my LinkedIn contacts.

Useful, but not more so than my outlook contacts.

Before the SIOP conference I created a semi-official SIOP group. Which holds some promising networking potential. But due to the poorly designed functionality of LinkedIn groups all I really get is five emails a week and an excuse to check my profile.

Linkedin does have some real value for maintaining and building a network and promoting your “googleability.” However, be careful not to over connect. As a general rule you should have at least spoke on the phone with your connections.

I plan on purging some of my connections those I never met or no longer remember.

No offense.

I have come to a startling discovery. Wikipedia now says I am Generation X not Y!

This has me wondering what generation am I anyway, and who defines these things?

Well it seems the answer is no one knows.

Today’s Wikipedia suggests the range is 1983-1997

Since I was born in 1981 I don’t like this answer

Entrepreneur.com says 1978-1990

BusinessWeek says 1979-1994

Management-Issues.com goes way out on a limb with 1978-2000

For the time being I going to claim to be Generation Y because it makes me feel good.

For the record I think generation Y should be defined as anyone who couldn’t image how work got done before computers.

Well I’m off to get my news from Jon Stewart (Just Kidding, I only watch Colbert)

I have noticed an odd trend in employee recognition.

People would rather have nothing then something small. Or so they say.

Most of the complaints I get are when the “gift” was meant to be just something extra i.e. Pens, logo items, small gift cards, ring tones and other “swag.”

I have gotten some surprisingly angry complaints and once even had someone throw the item back at me.

I think that this high standard for employee recognition comes from two sources.

First I think company culture has spawned this. Historically employee recognition programs have been “winner take all” with bonuses for the winner (employee of the month, year etc.) This sets the expectation that when you win the payout will be large.

The second reason for this has to do more with good old fashioned behaviorism.

Skinner and Pavlov teach us that the route to desired behavior includes variable reinforcement.
Suggesting that giving out “stuff” to randomly reinforce desired behavior should get you more of that behavior.

The trouble here is extinction. I am eventually going to stop salivating when I hear the bell if there is no food.

The trigger will only work so many times on its own without a reward to back it up.
In this situation the “stuff” is not seen as a valuable reward and the trigger has faded.
Alright, what do we do about this?

I’ve got 4 ideas.

1. Don’t set high expectations for rewards. For example don’t suggest there will be prizes then give out pens.

2. When possible don’t give out junk.

3. Avoid public winner take all rewards. If you have a large population don’t give out 1 employee of the year, spread the wealth.

4. Wait for the system to work. Don’t give up these things take time.

These won’t work in every situation, it’s still ok to give out candy or swag in training and employee of the month may work in small organizations.

As with training it is important to understand the needs, in this case the wants, of your target group.

So I had a minor website related disaster.

I’ve switched from Frontpage to Dreamweaver and I’m going to try again.

I picked up some interesting statics at SIOP.

Most interesting, I thought, was that 50% of managers fail regardless of intervention.

The speaker who followed this quote suggested, based on real data, that personality of team members had a stronger correlation with task completion than any of the leaders KSA’s.

Could someday we all work in leaderless teams, selected by a personality test without even an interview?

Maybe…..

Maybe I’ll be able to drive my flying car to work by then.

When the subject of education comes up I often find myself explaining what exactly it is that my MA degree is in: Industrial Organizational Psychology or I/O Psych for short.

Some times I say its the Psychology version of an MBA (a bit of a stretch), other times I say its workplace psychology, or maybe I say its applying the principles of Psychology to the workplace, then give some B.F. Skinner based examples.

The Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology (SIOP - pronounced “syop”) gives its members brochures to hand out when asked what I/O is. http://www.siop.org/visibilitybrochure/siopbrochure.aspx  My favorite explanation below:

Industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists contribute to an organizations success by improving the performance and well-being of its people. An I-O psychologist researches and identifies how behaviors and attitudes can be improved through hiring practices, training programs, and feedback systems.

I am embarrassed to say that it took until my senior year of college to realize that the “I” and the “O” doesn’t just mean that we will work for Industries and Organizations but have much deeper meanings.

Industrial Psychology loosely defined is the hard numbers side that is selection, productivity, statistics, and things like that.

On the other hand…

Organization Psychology is the mushy stuff. Motivation, teambuilding, change management, that sort of thing.

The idea is that a degree in I/O Psych gives you a well rounded view that will provide that tools needed to change the world…. or at least improve performance in an organization.

I am going to the SIOP conference next week and to be honest I am looking forward to being around people who will not respond to my explanation of what by saying “well you should come to my work there are lots of crazy people!”

Last night I attended a seminar on Emotional Intelligence at Cabrini. For the time being I’ll spare you my thoughts on EI. However, I did pick up an interesting facilitation tip.

We had a couple break out groups, which are popular amongst us corporate trainer types, and I was impressed with the speakers simple tactic to get us back on track after the group.

She asked the whole group to do something (i.e. raise your hand, stand up) and like sheep we all followed her command.

After she told us to sit down she went on with her topic. She confessed that this was a tactic to refocus things. It worked well until she told us what she was doing.

Now getting participants out of their seats is hardly ground breaking and I (like others)use activities often to lively things up. However, never for the sole purpose of getting people to be quite.

I look forward to trying it.

By now everyone has heard the story about a corporate trainer type using waterboarding as a sales training tactic. You’ll be happy to know that apparently it has not hurt sales.

So, while most of us corporate trainer types know that torture is not an acceptable form of training, I was surprised to learn at a Chester County SHRM meeting that during internal EEOC investigations it is acceptable practice to terminate uncooperative witnesses.

Of course termination should not be the first course of action, only a final option.
It was suggested that you work up to this by first “guilting”the witness. Talk about all the bad things that could happen if this goes to court without accurate information. Remind them of the serious nature of holding back facts, people’s livelihoods are at stake.

If the witness is a manager it was suggested they should be reminded of their “duties” as a manager.

Only after trying to logic with them should the possibility of termination be brought up. It would be prudent to give the individual an evening to mull it over if there is time.

It would be just as prudent to take a couple hours to ask yourself if waterboarding is really a good training method.

If your blessed with a union environment check with the union rep before waterboarding or terminating witnesses.

After firing up my favorite website in the whole wide world Google and rubbing my eyes I went into troubleshooting mode.

I cursed Bill Gate’s name while trying to figure out what silly IE7 setting I must have screwed up for the background to be black.

After realizing that it was the benevolent folks at Google and not the henchmen at Microsoft I pondered why I assume that Google is so good and Microsoft is so evil. An opinion I believe is shared by most. (correct me if I’m wrong)

Both companies give us tools we use everyday. Google with its magical search engine and many other magical tools. Microsoft with Windows, Office, and a variety of other tools that the absence of would cause society to collapse.

Perhaps its a money thing. I’ve never given a penny to Google, but I’ve paid a small fortune to MS over the years.

This Google”black out” shows that Google has somehow has built a rock-solid reputation using arguably less technology. MS on the other hand is and probably always will be cursed. Despite that without Windows I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to find Google.

Google seems to have well thought out risking its reputation:

Why did Google choose this specific organization?
We believe in doing our part to help combat climate change, and found the Earth Hour initiative to be a timely, important event. Further, we think the “lights out” idea’s individual-centered nature is something that millions of people worldwide can participate in. In short, we really like it. So we did something about it.

In fact, this bold move will probably only strengthen Google street cred.

I guess this goes to show that a good corporate reputation can’t be bought no matter how many schools of the future you build.

Caution should also be taken when blindly trusting organizations collectively seen as benevolent. What is to stop them from making the whole site red to advertise Macy’s red tag sale … for a good cause of course.

On occasion I hear software vendors claim that their software is “intuitive”. They are of course implying that it just so simple anyone can do it.

 On the other hand I sometimes here complaints that so and so software is not “intuitive” meaning its too hard.

Perhaps I am nitpicking at at vocabulary but it seems to me that no software can be intuitive.

Software skills are not inborn (well at least not yet) so we all must learn the basic skills needed to stumble our way around technology.

Most of my generation was raised on the Apple ][e. A fine machine but not really anything like my fancy new Vista laptop. Today’s kids have been raised on the past few generations of MS and Apple OSs.

My point being that what is intuitive to me isn’t always intuitive to others. It all boils down to what software each individual has had experience with. The broader the experience the more software will seem intuitive.

On the other hand maybe there is an underlying common software psyche, a blend of the most common  software over the past few years.