Questions of a Leader

I had not been on Twitter all day and typed a quick tweet before I rushing out the door to pick up the kid:

lisarosendahl I am the bug on the windshield today. Ahhhh, tomorrow is another day.

What does that tell you about my day? I was having a tough one. I was out two days last week with a sick little girl, and the e-mails, phone messages and requests for my assistance piled up. We were facing a national credentialing deadline coming due today and a bunch of employees not yet finished in the credentialing system. There were more meetings than I had expected, and every one of them ran  longer than they were scheduled for.

Meanwhile, I was reviewing staff actions that were not in line with changes I had requested, discussing appropriate responses to employee misconduct, planning for a meeting Wednesday morning (I am out again Tuesday), preparing an employee message about the upcoming holiday schedule, and trying not to think about the to-do tasks in my right hand drawer.

All in all, it was a typical day in a busy HR office. But the way I worked through the day was not typical at all. It was more than typical for me. Typical tasks, yes. Typical insights, no. I don't like the way the day went today. I was delegating tasks to staff at the end of the workday, while heading out the door to get my child to guitar lessons on time. My first reaction is to look to see where others are not measuring up to my expectations but then I stop myself from that line of thinking. I look back over the past 5 1/2 years in my role as an HR Officer. I see where we started, and I see how far we have come. Even more clearly, I see where we are going and what we can be.

I have to wonder, why are we not there today? Did I get in the way? Have we stepped off the path that would lead us to our objectives? Should it be taking this long? I don't know. I do know that I am not moving the department as fast as I'd like enough for me and I have a hunch that it is because of the work that's piling up on my desk.

My department runs the way that is does in large part because of me: my decisions, my interactions, my communications, my staffing selections, my priorities, my shortcomings, and my strengths. What can I do differently to provide leadership to my staff to get us to where we need to be? 

I will be asking that question to Abigail (my executive coach) tomorrow when I see her.

Smart People Need Processes Too

Open Season 2007 was a disaster.

Each and every employee was served and served well; however, it was at the expense of our HR Assistants' sanity. Not only did the final week of open enrollment coincide with the week performance awards for 1300 employees were to be coded for payment, employees waited until the last minute to make appointments, walk-ins were constant and we had people lined up outside offices throughout the day. We kept a lot of chocolate on hand and I kept a close eye on my staff.

Open Season 2008 was a breeze.

Each and every employee was served and served well, including our HR Assistants. The final week of open enrollment did not coincide with the week performance awards for 1300 employees were to be coded for payment, many employees made appointments ahead of time, minimal walk-ins and no lines outside offices.

I asked one of my HR Assistants what she thought helped make this go as well as it did. Her reply? "We had a process." And that we did.

Open season messages started going out to employees 90 days in advance. These messages provided employees with step-by-step guidance on how to enroll in, change, or decline benefits on-line; provided links to benefits pages;highlighted the importance of benefits decisions and knowing all they can early on; and emphasized the value of an appointment to ensure their HR staff member could provide them the undivided attention they deserved. We pushed the suspense for performance reviews up a week to give us more time to process them and lessons learned from last year were use to facilitate set up and break down of the auditorium.

I have smart people on my staff. It is easy to point them towards the goal and expect them to figure things out; to make them work. They do figure things out and things usually do work out, but at what expense?

Smart people need processes too.