One truth that we live by is that we need to look out for Number One… if we don’t toot our own horn nobody else will do it for us. It seems that we have all suffered from the perception that our trust has been betrayed by those we expected to help us. In a knee jerk reaction we rely on egoism to guide our actions and we learn not to expect help from anybody.… Read More »Egoism: Enemy of Employment
I enjoy brainstorming with my professional colleagues about the value of having a cohesive culture within a company that promotes the achievement of business goals. Most people assume that this is a good thing, but productivity at the expense of individual employee beliefs might in fact be a form of bias. Multiculturalism is defined to be a where there is an environment of diversity embracing more than one culture. As you may expect, culturism is… Read More »Controlling Capricious Culturism
One thing I have learned from working in the HR arena is that Human Resources professionals are most definitely not a protected class. The HRism bias is alive and well. This is not another cynical rant that we don’t have a seat at the table or a lament that employees don’t understand what we do. This vital work is often a thankless job caught in the no-man’s-land between management thinking and employee’s thinking. There is… Read More »Taming Rampant HRism
I have not done an exhaustive study on the subject, but it seems to be human nature to simply dismiss people that are not like us. The first lesson in my [almost] adult life was when I was working a summer job between my freshman and sophomore years in college. Looking back, I can see the wisdom in my father’s push to get me a job in a factory environment as a place to learn… Read More »Defense Against Dismissivism
It is appropriate after a week of talking about people watching that we look at how our culture makes up meaningless rules that we may choose to obey or ignore. It is not the nature of the rules that is fascinating as much as it is the behavior of people who make and follow them. People who are in a position of authority can sweep out the old rules in favor of their own personal… Read More »From the Archives of Make HR Happen – Those Times We Talked About Made-up Rules