Chew on this

Do you ever feel like your life at work is becoming a low-fat/ low carb/ sodium-reduced version of what it could be?

I was feeling this way.

It started with food.  Honestly, I think everything starts with food.

I made a change in the way I approached eating and I did it for no other reason that it made me feel better.  I am a convert of becoming mainly grain-free eating  (I say “mainly” because I would be lying if I said I was 100%).  I didn’t do it for trendy or promotional reasons – I did it because it was what I needed to do to improve how I felt about my health and life.

So, now that I’m no longer a bloated HR lady, I’ve realized there are other areas that are bugging me.

Like the fact that I’m always biting my tongue.  Not with everyone, but in many meetings, discussions, and arenas where I have something to say…I’m holding back.  The worst thing is that I was being encouraged to do so.

And it was starting to eat away at me and leaving me with a different kind of pain in my guts.

And so, I decided that in addition to passing on the grains (most of the time), I was going to stop eating my words.

Organizational culture is a strong force and a tough one to evolve, particularly if you have employees that have been there “forever”.  They will argue against changes and recommend staying the course because that has been the most successful for them.  And by successful they mean that they have managed to hold on to their jobs and remain off the radar.

The problems with this course are numerous.  Number one for me is that it seems like a big pain in the ass to have to constantly be filtering your words, and tip-toeing through a minefield of “oh don’t go there’.

I’ve talked about how I can be a bit cavalier about my future.  I know it’s very cocky of me to think, pfff…whatever, I can bounce back.  But recently I’ve posted about a friend that went through this and it’s not all unicorns and rainbows.  So, I don’t want to cross the line, but I certainly want to walk right up to it.

There is a time and a place to have your say.  I recognize this.  Unfortunately not everyone does and we’ve all been in those meetings where we are silently screaming at our colleague to shut the hell up before it all goes breaking bad.  And because of these loose cannons, we can get a bit shifty eyed and squirmy about saying what’s on our mind.  No one wants to be that person.

However, in spite of the warnings, in spite of breaking protocol, in spite of what it might make me look like..I have been speaking up.  And it’s an incredible relief.

HR should not be offering up “reality-lite”.  It needs to be all natural, home-grown, with all the flavour and none of the additives of the processed and over-filtered crap that we have been serving up.

Trust me – you’ll feel better for it.

What are you doing with your leftovers?

When it comes to making meals – I’m pretty decent and have honed my spécialités: soups and leftovers.

Leftovers?

Oh yes – there is an art to being able to look into the fridge and pantry and pull together a meal that takes seemingly unrelated dishes and mashes them together into something that tastes good (albeit it may look like hell). From this, I get some pretty awesome lunches for work. Of course, not everyone in my house shares this view. So I get a bit irritable when food gets thrown out.

So I started thinking that maybe this type of vision to see potential in last night’s dinner is transferable to recruiting/retention.

Oh yeah, that’s right. I just compared people to re-heated food. All time high for my HR analogies.

(give me a minute to drag my soapbox out)

As a society we are ridiculously focused on consuming. And not just consuming any ole thing, but the new, the latest, the greatest. And when we’ve had a taste, we put it aside and try something else. It’s not often that you want to eat the exact same thing the next day…so we go out and buy more food and make a new recipe and we let the leftovers sit until they practically walk themselves to the garbage.

However, had you taken a moment to consider the potential in that meal – how else can you use that food…add different spices, cook it in another way, make it into a soup….you could have saved yourself some money, time, and come up with something better.

And so with candidates and employees, we may be doing the same. We need to have someone new and fresh, with the latest and greatest…when in reality, you might have someone in-house that, with a bit of coaching, training, and resources, could not only fill the role, but actually make it more than what you had anticipated.

Yes – some times it’s a big fail and you have to throw out your creation and order pizza, but in reality that can happen with any new recipe, regardless of how great the ingredients are.

As a recruiter, I’m often told by hiring managers that we need “new blood”. I get what they are saying, but I also look over their shoulder as they say this and see all the potential that might be overlooked.

And I really hate the idea of wasting good potential.