human resources! career advice! cats! of course!

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Last week, I spoke at the Maine HR Conference but missed one of the other keynote  speakers — Cy Wakeman. I heard  she was great. She talked about drama at work and how Human Resources actually causes much of the drama in an office environment.

Shocking, I know. We are a homogeneous group of professionals — 80% are women at the manager-level and below — enmeshed in compliance, risk mitigation and administrative processes. If we’re not driving the drama of an organization, who would do it?!

In my very limited experience, an organization with a more paternalistic leadership style feels like it has infinitely more drama than a cold, stodgy professional environment. Call me crazy, but when  you tell me that my coworkers are like family, I tend to treat them more like family.

• I judge them for their faults.
• I wish they could just read my mind.
• I emote instead of explain.

Alberto-Culver, which was actually run by a family and had many long-term employees, felt like a professional business because it had very rigorous processes and procedures in place to deal with every employee scenario in the book. Pfizer had a very family-like mentality. You were either in or you were out. And that caused a bevy of problems.

Family bonds are strong, meaningful and complex. For many people, the word family means love. But it may also mean contempt, shame or exhaustion to others. And I’ve never seen more complex drama than in a big and loving family. That’s how it tends to work.

In my life, family gives me a space to be less rigid. I don’t want to give my family any feedback in any sort of respectful, formal process because that’s what I do with strangers. With my family members, I just want to speak plainly and candidly.

Get a job. Stop spending money. You do not work as hard as you think you work. Maybe your kids would behave better if you set some boundaries and acted like a parent instead of trying to be a friend. I can’t see you until you sober up. Don’t be a jerk. Stop with the victim mentality. If you can’t have a conversation with me where you don’t bring up your tortured childhood, I am not talking to you.

Yeah. That kind of stuff. That’s not just my kin, right?

The beauty of work — for me — is that it’s not my family. There are SOPs and rules of engagement in place. Those mechanisms can help to avoid drama. When someone gets out of line in my family, there is chaos. When someone bothers me at work, there are performance improvement plans and formal disciplinary procedures to whip that person into shape.

I don’t have any science or data to back me up on this but I think drama at work can be abated if we treat one another a little less like brothers and sisters and a little more like colleagues and peers.

That’s how HR can help the future of work.

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I recently wrote an article for The Conference Board Review where I expressed my shock and concern that nearly one in three kids have been arrested at least once for a non-traffic offense by the age of 23.

That’s right: 30 percent of young people will have faced police handcuffs at some point.

Now that I think about the article, the increase in the number of kids arrested doesn’t surprise me. Life is different in 2012 than it was in 1965. We are now fighting ‘the war against drugs’ and private, for-profit prisons fund large portions of our economy. It’s a sad state for the American economy when a global corporation earns a profit when your kids are arrested and convicted as adults for possessing small amounts of marijuana.

But back in 1965, there wasn’t a push to try kids as adults in local, state and federal courts. There wasn’t equal justice for citizens who had to face a jury of their peers. We didn’t talk about hate crimes. And there wasn’t an awareness or dialogue around the links between race, class and conviction rates in America.

Times have changed. Now we have a man running for President who ‘made mistakes’ as a kid.

• Right around the age of 17, Mitt Romney rounded up a posse of heterosexual boys who pinned a boy down and cut his hair.
• The victim was perceived by his classmates to be a homosexual — and even though the word gay was probably never used, witnesses to the event recall certain euphemisms being used to describe the boy.

I think it’s interesting how we don’t hold people Romney’s age accountable for acts committed when they were younger — even though we do hold today’s children to a higher standard. And god knows Romney probably isn’t the first or last presidential candidate to taunt a boy for being gay. But I wonder — if this happened today, what would be different? Would you interview and hire a candidate who committed this act?

We have real-life examples of other kids being held accountable for bullying kids who are not openly gay. Dharun Ravi is a former Rutgers student who was just convicted of intimidating his roommate. The roommate committed suicide after learning his gay encounter was seen on a webcam planted by Dharun.

Knowing what you know about accountability and bullying, would you hire Dharun to work at your company? When this awful incident happened, both Rutgers boys were barely older than Mitt Romney was during the aforementioned haircut incident.

And what about the very young and impressionable followers of Sam Mullet, an Amish extremist? There are many young men who are in jail and awaiting trial because they are accused of cutting off the beards and braids of non-compliant Amish men and women in their community. Some are asking to be let out on bail so they can work to support their families. Would you hire them?

Childhood mistakes will haunt you unless you have money, power or good political connections to make those mistakes disappear. And even then they don’t always disappear.

I don’t have many answers about anything in life but I think that bullying in any form at any age is detestable and gross. And while 29 states can still fire someone for being gay, I think the HR community has some responsibility to talk about how we can use background checks on some candidates and not others.

What’s our hiring criteria for the President?

It’s an interesting topic. What do you think?

Related articles

• Mitt Romney and bullying: missed opportunity, missing humanity | Michael Cohen (guardian.co.uk)
• Can a bully be forgiven? (writeontheworld.wordpress.com…)

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Matt Stollak asked me if I thought this list still seemed right. I said — I don’t know because I’m only 25 years old.

What do you think?

Top 101 alternative/new wave songs of the 1980s

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Hello, everyone. I’m back from vacation and ready for a great week. What’s new with you? Any news?

I have a few days in the office and then I’m off to Recruiting Innovation Summit. How fun for me — but not for my poor cats who are like WTF? WHERE ARE YOU GOING? YOU JUST GOT HOME!

I had an excellent time in Maine, FWIW. If you’re ever in the Rockland/Camden area, I recommend the following places.

• Cafe Miranda
• Home Kitchen Cafe
• Francine Bistro

We had so much fun touring the lighthouses and the state parks. We loved the art galleries. And when it rained, we shopped in Freeport.

Not too shabby, yo.

It’s good to be back.

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