Mardi Humphreys

For Your Review

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! No, not Halloween; performance reviews! What? You don’t like performance reviews? I get it, but instead of thinking of it as your manager’s opportunity to remind you how far short of the company’s expectations you fell, turn the spotlight on how valuable you are. Employees have more leverage than ever to get both a promotion and a raise. You’ll probably have to ask for both, but how?

Justify

Your company pays you for the profitability you bring, not for your personal circumstances. Don’t base your case for a pay increase on the amount of your bills. Build it on your accomplishments that helped the company achieve its mission. The easiest way to do this is to keep a folder on your desktop with a collection of evidence proving your worth. It’s not only helpful for performance reviews, it boosts your confidence all year long. The folder can include:

Emails thanking you for a job well done
A link to the recommendation section of your LinkedIn profile. You ask people for LinkedIn recommendations, right? If not, do; and offer to give one in return
Notes on your Top 20 List of Achievements. Include:
- Projects you led that moved the company closer to its goals
- Revenue you brought in
- Savings you attained
- New clients you acquired (and their worth)
- Initiatives you originated and their positive financial impact

This is a job interview. It requires rehearsal. Ask someone to role play with you. After summarizing your Top 20 List of Achievements, encourage your practice partner to ask you hard follow-up questions. Frame all your answers around why your company would benefit by promoting you. Here are a few questions to help you hear your pitch out loud then get their feedback:

How will advancing your career positively affect the company?
What projects/initiatives/clients will this new role allow you to obtain?
Who in the company has to invest their time, energy, and attention in you so that you will be successful in the new role?

Specify

Now that you know and can demonstrate your worth, you have to respectfully communicate that you expect to be recognized and compensated for it. If your manager asks how much money you expect to make, ask them what their budget is. This can prevent you from not asking for enough. Whether or not they offer a number, enter the conversation with a salary range in mind and ask for the top. If the salary range for the position you want is public information within the company, then it’s easy to find. If you have to dig for it, is there someone who held that position whom you can ask? If not, research other job descriptions with the title you want as the keywords. What is the current salary for someone with your level of education, experience, and track record who lives in your city? Bring these statistics with you. They provide credibility of your value in the talent pool.

Clarify

If the company can’t afford to give you more money, but still wants to give you more responsibility, then think carefully before deciding. A performance review is a negotiation. Don’t think of their answer as a no. Think of it as a not yet. You can negotiate for compensation other than money right now and revisit the salary conversation later. For example, will they:

give you a better title?
approve working remotely two days a week?
assign you to lead more high-visibility projects?
reimburse you for leadership development training?

If you can reach a compromise, then get in writing exactly what your additional duties will be, the compensation you will receive for them, and for how long. Request to revisit the pay increase discussion in six months. Schedule that meeting before the conversation ends. Make sure it’s noted on your manager’s calendar and in your personnel file. The two of you are not the only people looking at your performance review. HR (at least!) is too. Make sure as many people as is appropriate know this conversation is not over.

Asking for a raise is not about what you want. It’s about what your performance has earned. You uniquely contribute to your organization and they benefit from your work, your influence, and your networks.

Is this how you prepare for a performance review? What did I forget? Please share in the comments.

Scary Stuff

There is plenty to be scared of this Halloween from unreal threats like horror movies to real ones like war. Let’s talk about what we can control. What scares you? Heights? Elevators? Networking? If all three, then finish reading this article before you RSVP regrets to your client’s happy hour event on the 20th floor of their office building.

The advice to face our fears goes back at least as far as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s suggestion that conquering a bit of fear everyday is the secret of life. Whether it’s fear of failure, loss, or change, getting out of your comfort zone can help you at work, but why should you and how can you?

Why? Because

You Can’t Avoid Scary Things – Unexpected illness or injury, destructive tornados, the consequences of other people’s decisions, these are setbacks that you cannot control. Setbacks happen and fear tells you they are bad, but fear lies. Setbacks are growth opportunities. They reveal what doesn’t work and that’s valuable data. Like Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb. Learning to put scary things into perspective helps you navigate your reality.

Facing One Fear Gives You Confidence to Face More – Let’s imagine that you want to quit your job to start your own business and are afraid to tell your partner. Pitch it to them as if they were a client. Their questions may be a good basis for your business plan. Answering their concerns helps you rehearse for meetings with investors and clients. Talking through how you’re going to make the transition gives you a better idea of your timeline.

It Makes You Empathetic – Do you think you’re the only person scared to drive on the highway? I did. Since I began sharing my fear, I’ve encountered at least three other people with the same issue. I partnered with one to face the fear together. We ended up talking about other things that we’re afraid of. It made me more understanding and tolerant (I hope) of people whose fears are different from mine. Will this habit help me be a DEIB ally? (I hope.) I still get nervous driving on the highway, but it no longer prevents me from refusing opportunities like it used to.

How?

Imagine the Worst That Could Happen – Visualize what you would do in that situation. Having a plan gives you confidence.

Affirmations – Once when I had a precarious job, I wrote an affirmation on a sticky note and kept it on the corner of my laptop where my right hand brushed the paper every time I typed. It was a touchstone that helped me keep going when fear attacked.

Put the Work in – Doing what scares you makes what scares you less scary. Start small. For example, to lessen my fear of driving I take roads I previously traveled and tell myself that I’m just going a little bit further down them.

Fear serves a purpose. It helps you identify threats. When you get startled by a loud noise, you typically duck your head because it triggers the acoustic startle reflex we’re born with. This was useful to our ancestors who had to run from rockslides. It’s also useful to employees whose supervisors yell when they’re angry. You should run from them too.

Have you done any scary stuff at work lately? Please share in the comments.

Secret Identity

In 2018, Mike Robbins wrote a book called, Bring Your Whole Self to Work: How Vulnerability Unlocks Creativity, Connection, and Performance advocating authenticity in the workplace. If you have about 12 minutes, his TEDxBerkeley Talk is worth watching. Since the concept depends on interpretation, how do you know what bringing your whole self to work looks like at your organization? As an employee, what is your responsibility? Is it really a good idea to bring your whole self to work?

What Does it Look Like?

In 1990, through his research in diverse workplaces, organizational psychologist William Kahn defined employee engagement. He theorized that employees have personas they put on to go to work, like actors portraying characters. The gap between employees’ true selves and their personas depends on how engaged they are with their jobs. For example, when an employee wants purpose from their job, they are crushed when they don’t get the promotion they expected. This can lead to disengagement like complaining about the job or looking for another one. If the employee doesn’t base their identity on their job, they recover from the same setback more quickly. At the most basic level, bringing your whole self to work means revealing what is impacting your life outside of the job and how it is affecting you on the job. It also means respecting coworkers who share that information about themselves with you.

What is Your Responsibility?

At minimum, managers should strive to create an environment where people feel accepted and respected no matter how invested they are in their work personas. Normalizing the fact that what we experience outside the workplace (e.g., family responsibilities, discrimination, COVID-19) affects us on the job produces a more loyal workforce. It takes a great deal of courage to bring your whole self to work. It also takes cooperation, tolerance, and patience. It has to be part of an organization’s culture. It is work in addition to the job you were hired to do. Bringing your whole self to work requires self-awareness and emotional intelligence. As a team member, you have to pay it forward by extending grace to your coworkers. For example, if you gave your best effort to a project and the client still rejected it, do you blame the coworker who was distracted by a sick child? Or do you choose to believe that they gave their best effort too?

Is it a Good Idea?

A workforce enabled to be real is a workforce empowered to show empathy. This is especially useful in relation to customer service. Some things are universal, like the desire to be heard. For example, when a customer has a complaint, they want acknowledgement. When a member of your workforce spends time listening to the customer’s experience, the customer feels more positive toward your business even if their problem isn’t immediately solvable. Now, having said all of the above, it is not lost on me that the rules of bringing your whole self to work are different for people of color. That is a whole ‘nuther conversation, and you can start it here.

How do you define bringing your whole self to work? Please share in the comments.

Your Pool is Leaking

Let’s do a Great recap. The iterations the workforce has gone through since March 2020 are The Great:

Retirement
Resignation
Reshuffle
Recognition
Realization
Reprioritization
Relocation

We are now in the Great Renegotiation. In all these evolutions, the workforce evaluated the role that employment should play in their lives. Many took control of how they produce income by trading traditional full-time employment for gigs, part-time, or starting their own businesses. There were 11.2 million jobs available in America as of the last business day of July 2022. There are more jobs than there are people willing to do them. What is the disconnect?

Employers say: No one wants to work
Workforce says: No one wants to work under the conditions employers are offering

Two plus years into the pandemic, the workforce has more agency than ever to choose how they make money yet so many employers refuse to accept that the balance of power is shifting. Too many employers are trying to attract workers with the same benefits they offered pre-COVD like signing bonuses, titles, and promotions. This strategy may attract traditional employees, but there aren’t many of them left swimming in the talent pool. The majority of available workforce want the flexibility to work remotely, mental-health support, and a manager who cares about them as a person.

The Great Rethink

For employers, it’s time to decide if you are willing to do what it takes to stay in business. For example, if you have a crucial position that’s been vacant for at least 90 days, then it’s time to look at your employee value proposition. Have you adjusted it to meet the needs of the current talent pool? Look at your notes from the interviews of recent candidates.

What were the majority looking for?
Did they expect both career development opportunities and autonomy to complete projects?
Were they not hired because you don’t fund upskilling?
Did any decline offers because they were not willing to work 40 hours a week on site?

Evolve to Survive

If you decide to update your benefits packages, you can use the answers to the above questions as a guide to attract the talent you need. To retain the employees you have, meet with HR and evaluate your company’s culture as objectively as possible. For example, If you say you have an inclusive culture that embraces work-life balance, but penalize employees for calling out microaggressions or taking a parent to a medical appointment, then employees will quit. Not only will they leave, but other employees who observe these contradictions may resign too. If culture adjustment is a huge undertaking for you, consider hiring a consultant. Someone who is trained in managing perception, can make impartial observations, and can help you refine your approach based on the currently available talent pool.

A Better Leader

Rethinking does not mean you are weak. Rethink about it like this: we are in an age where we must learn a skill, use it, then unlearn it to learn the updated version, use it, unlearn it, rinse, and repeat. Consequently, we should not be afraid of appearing indecisive when we change long-held opinions because new data, like this is available. Rethinking means you are both a realist and an innovator.

How are you adjusting to The Great Renegotiation? Please share in the comments.

Cyber Scary

October is practically here and while that means full on Halloween celebrating for most people, in my world, it means Cybersecurity Awareness Month. You know to keep your Personally Identifiable Information (PII) like Social Security number and bank account information secret, but you have no control over those banks getting hacked by Threat Actors. Nor can your computer’s and phone’s firewalls stop every phishing email from reaching you. Last year, identity theft cost Americans $5.8 BILLION. Here are some Don’ts and Dos to protect your identity.

Don’t Believe Everything Your Phone Shows You

We’ve talked before about not clicking on links in texts or emails unless you are expecting the communication. Now cyber scammers are getting bolder. They call claiming to be a representative from your bank, spoofing the bank’s phone number so that it looks legitimate on your caller ID. They speak in an urgent tone claiming there is something wrong with your account and they need to fix it right now using your bank’s money transfer service. They instruct you to transfer money out of your account and into their holding account, but the only holding going on is the cybercriminal holding on to your money and vanishing.

Don’t Be Lazy

From January – June, 2022, 817 American companies were compromised by cybercriminals with 53.4 million victims affected. Check here for a list of the most stolen PII. Before giving any company your PII, check their website to see what their cyber defenses are. If that information isn’t on the site, ask customer service: How may attacks have they withstood? What is their protocol for notifying you that a breach happened? How often do they update and patch their cybersecurity systems?

Don’t Leave It On

When you’re not using Bluetooth-enabled devices, turn Bluetooth off. Leaving it on allows hackers to see devices that you previously connected with. They can pretend to be one of those devices to access another one and steal your PII. For example, if you have a wireless printer in your home office, turn it off when you aren’t printing. Here is a good resource for more information.

Do Enable Two-factor Authentication

When a website, for example, your bank or favorite social media platform, gives you the option to enable two-factor authentication, say yes. I know you are rarely in the mood, but the protection is worth the time it takes to set up. It will take way more time to try to get back the identity a cybercriminal stole than it will take you to wait for and input the code the company sends you.

Do Shred

If you still receive paper statements for your bank accounts, credit cards, student loans, or any documents with PII on them, then shred them on a regular basis. If you don’t own a shredder, or have a friend who will let you borrow theirs, go online and search for “community shredding events near you.”

Do Monitor Your Accounts

Ultimately, you are responsible for your own cybersecurity. If you do not currently check your bank accounts weekly, then start. If you see something weird, like a transaction you did not initiate, contact your bank and investigate. If you do not check your credit score twice a year, then start. If you have experienced an attack on your credit, consider freezing it. Freezing your credit is a bit of a task and has pros and cons. Read about them here.

What do you do to protect your PII from cybercriminals? Please share in the comments.

We Belong

A couple of weeks ago, I received a DM on LinkedIn from my friend, Tonya Casey, Director of Finance, Miami Valley Hospital, Dayton, Ohio. Here is the thought-provoker that she sent:

“Getting a seat at the table is not what’s important as much as WHAT happens at the table. So, when you are seeking a seat, and you are fortunate to be offered that seat, remember that WHAT is said and done is the most important thing, not the mere fact that you are physically present.” Sylvain Trepanier, DNP, RN, CENP, FAONL, FAAN, SVP, System Chief Nursing Officer at Providence

Since recent studies indicate that diverse and inclusive businesses outperform their competition by 35%, most leaders welcome the idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace. They even take measures to hire and form project teams of diverse employees and include a DEI session in their annual trainings. Great! Now what?

Belonging (DEIB)

Building on Dr. Syl’s quote above, what do you say and do once you are sitting at the table? Belonging is the next iteration of the DEI process. To me, this means building a community and that begins with the people who are at the table with you. Here are three ways to get started.

Communicate

If you are assigned to lead a diverse team, when you come together for a kickoff meeting, you may want to plan on not discussing the project. Instead, focus on how you will work together. A good place to start is adopting Brene Brown’s mindset. Her motto is, “I’m not here to be right, I’m here to get it right.” This attitude requires a commitment from everyone at the table to be courageous, forgiving, and vulnerable. To facilitate this, you can set ground rules for the learning moments that will inevitably happen during meetings. For example, agree on a signal, like raising an index finger, indicating a team member wants to offer gentle feedback or ask for clarification. The good news is communication builds trust. The bad news is trust takes time and attention to build.

Engage

Trust is something we assume we have from our coworkers. You know what assuming does. You don’t give someone your trust without first observing proof that they are worthy of it. Your team must offer trust to one another before they can do the actual project you’re tasked with. Building trust won’t happen in one meeting. Allow time for your team to have intentional getting-to-know-you conversations outside of the conference room. Suggest a coffee in the break room between 2-3 teammates. Encourage them to tell each other what brought them to your organization. Begin your next meeting with one teammate telling the group one thing about one coworker they had coffee with.

Nurture

Once minimum viable trust is in place, follow up is key. This is where it gets uncomfortable. As the leader, it would be wise to say out loud to everyone at the table that belonging is an investment and while it is not the responsibility of anyone at that table to educate anyone else about DEIB, are team members open to suggesting appropriate resources that can? For example, what books should we read to learn how to promote belonging?

This is obviously a bigger conversation than 500 words. Thank you Dr. Syl and Tonya for starting it.

What suggestions do you have for fostering belonging in the workplace? Please share in the comments.

Passed Examples

The Sunday after Labor Day is Grandparents Day in America. This resonates with me because as I was growing up all of my grandparents worked. From birth to age thirteen, I had four grandparents. One set of maternal and one set of fraternal. The two sets were very different from one another.

Stoic vs. Emotional
Never went to church vs. Went to church every time the doors were open
Mail carrier and former U.S. Army Air Corp captain married to a children’s librarian turned bank employee vs. Factory worker and former marine married to a waitress turned factory worker
One set paid for my freshman year of college vs. One set invited me to do my laundry at their house every week
Lawrence Welk vs. Hee-Haw

Grandparents have seen more of society’s evolution, experienced more heartache, strived more to make ends meet, and learned more lessons on setting priorities. Here are things I learned about work from my grandparents.

Sometimes Your Job is Just a Job

When I was a child, my maternal grandfather worked at a car manufacturing plant. He did not talk a lot about his job. He did not love his job. He did not expect it to be his calling. He worked so his family had food, clothing, shelter, and fun. He found his greatest fulfillment in God. His love of the Bible, his church, and its people was his calling. It is where he invested his T.E.A.M. From him I learned that work can simply be a means to an end.

People Come First

When I was a child, my maternal grandmother was employed at the same car manufacturing plant as my maternal grandfather. My fraternal grandmother worked at a bank. On occasion, both babysat me when my school was on a break and my parents were at work. I remember watching television at my maternal grandparents’ house while my grandmother cooked and did laundry because for her a day off from the factory meant a day working at home. I also remember going to the local bank with my fraternal grandmother with a tote bag full of snacks, books, and seek-and-find word puzzles to keep me busy in the break room while she did her job. (This was waaaaaay before Bring Your Child to Work Day.) Both women found ways to help my parents watch over me. From them I learned helping people takes priority over work.

The Correct Way to Cut a Pie

When I was a child, my fraternal grandfather was a mail carrier. Before I was born, he was a POW during WWII for 11 months. During that time, food was scarce for him. When my parents and I spent Thanksgivings with my fraternal grandparents, my grandmother always made two pumpkin pies for the five of us. My grandfather got one all to himself. After dinner, he settled in front of the television with his pie to watch football and say, “There’s only one way to cut a pie. In half. One for the first half and one for the second half.” From him I learned to reward myself for putting in the work.

What did you learn about work from your grandparents? Please share in the comments.

It’s Just a Pause

I have a confession to make. I’m Team Oxford Comma. People can get passionate about correct comma usage. I did not realize there is such controversy over a crooked little mark. It’s just a pause, people! Sometimes a sentence has multiple commas because the author wants to slow down, make a list, or clarify. These three things are also useful in the workplace.

Slow Down

Plan A does not always work. When your team is trying to complete a project and hits an obstacle, pausing can help cool their frustrations. For example, I ask my clients to tell me what hurts. Their answers give me clues to solving their problems. Sometimes just thinking about the pain and how wide-spread it is sends them into a panic spiral. They talk faster, the pitch of their voices gets higher, their eyes get wider, their flight-fight-or-freeze mechanisms activate. That’s when I know it’s time to respond with slow, low, gentle-toned reassurances full of commas. By the same token, encouraging your team to take a pause helps everyone reset. Then you can calmly regroup and figure out together how to deal with the obstacle.

Make a List

Every task on your to-do list is the top priority and needs done yesterday, but you’ll get more work done if you stop what you’re doing. This is very counter-intuitive, but it’s like a flywheel. You can’t see the progression of the wheel turning while you’re pushing it. Much like you can’t feel the earth constantly turning while you’re standing on it. When you complete the push that makes the flywheel take off, you suddenly have lots of time. To get to the final push, sometimes you have to use a comma. Take a minute to box breath, then look at your task list. Determine which tasks are important and which are urgent. Take one action that gets one urgent task closer to completion, then pause. Look at your important tasks list. What is one action you can take in the next 15 minutes to get one item on it closer to completion? Then continue on with your urgent task list. At the end of the workday, reflect (another comma, btw). Celebrate how far you got on both the urgent and the important tasks, especially if you did not mark everything off both lists. Do not dwell on what is still left to do. Make a quick note of the next steps you’ll take on both lists tomorrow.

Clarify

Mental noise surrounds you 24/7/365. There is an overwhelming amount of information available to you. How do you make sense of any of it? Use a comma.

Pause – Stop. Breathe. Drink a glass of water
Reflect – Your wheels are turning, but you’re upside down. How did that happen?
Focus – What is the Why?
Refine – What is the most important next step or course correction?
Iterate – Take the next step
Repeat

How do you make the best use of pauses at work? Please share in the comments.

Emerging Expectations

A year ago Google gave their employees access to a pay calculator that let them estimate how permanently working remotely would impact their salaries. For most workers it meant a reduction. Since then Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft revealed similar policies. What is an employer’s justification for cutting pay if their employees work from home? Should you lower your expectations for compensation if it means you can work 100% remotely?

Employers Parry

Tech companies that have national and International workforces like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft revise an employee’s salary when the employee changes the location of their residence. For example, If the employee moves to a lower cost of living area, then their pay is reduced. Conversely, a few companies (e.g., Spotify, Reddit) raised the compensation of remote employees during the pandemic to match the salaries of their workforces that are based in New York and San Francisco. Google’s explanation for decreasing remote employee’s wages is that their compensation packages are always based on location since they pay employees top of the range for the market the employee lives in. Facebook said they had to adjust an employee’s salary to their location for accounting purposes and tax requirements. VMware and Gitlab also commented. Read more here. Companies cutting pay for working from home may be using it as a device to get employees back in the office. Maybe they think it signals a return to business as pre-pandemic usual. Maybe they feel if your manager doesn’t see you working, then you must not be. Maybe they believe physical presence boosts collaboration and innovation. These expectations need to be re-examined. We are living in a business as unusual, homing from work, videoconferencing our heads off era. Work-life integration advances both work and life.

Employees Counter-parry

Studies of productivity during the pandemic revealed that remote workers not only accomplished the same tasks as they did in the office, they also worked longer hours to do so. Employees feel like they should be paid for the work they do, not where they do it, but the majority of their managers disagree. Seventy-three percent of managers affirm that productivity was great. Their problem is, managing their remote workforce caused 69% of the managers to burnout. The study also indicates that 51% of company leaders believe employees want to return to an office and that incentives like free food and happy hours will lure them back. If employees are willing to give up promotions and wage increases to work from home, snacks are not enough of an incentive to return to an office. However, on-site childcare would be a good start.

Touché

This fencing match isn’t really about money. It’s about power. Employers have traditionally held all the power in the relationship. The pandemic gave employees a sense of agency and a means to prove they can handle it. A significant percentage of the workforce discovered that it does not make sense for them to stay in one place 9:00am-5:00pm Monday – Friday to do their jobs well. And so far nothing management has done to lure them back has changed their minds.

Would you accept a pay cut to work from home? Please share why or why not in the comments.

What Did You Expect?

Once upon a time, I worked for a manager who gave me a priority list every Monday. Then every Friday I gave him a status report which shaped his list for the following Monday. He gave me in writing what he expected over the next week, month, and quarter. I knew what he wanted and he knew what I was doing. Our expectations were aligned and we worked happily ever after. Sound like a fairy tale?

In subsequent employment, my procedure is to figure out what my manager wants and give it to them. Sometimes I’m a hit. Sometimes I’m a miscommunication. Here are a few things I’ve learned about aligning expectations with managers, teammates, and clients.

Managers

Communication is hard. Conflicts happen. These are opportunities. Even if the only upside is that your emotional intelligence gets a workout. You can only control you. You can’t control other people’s opinions of you and sometimes that stings. One of the best ways to take the stinger out is to get curious. For example, ask, “What events led to this conclusion?” “What boundary was crossed?” “Please define the non-negotiables.” The answers to these questions can reveal what your next steps should be. Maybe a different department is a better fit for you. Maybe a different company is a better fit for you. At the very least, conflict gives you better questions to ask. This data is useful because you rarely have the full scope of variables that led to the conflict.

Teammates

Everyone brings their preferences for working together to the team. You approach a project thinking you know how this is going to go, and so does everyone else. Organizations hire people for different positions, put them on a team, and expect them to get projects done. If they don’t assign and communicate roles, expectations, and how tasks should pass from one coworker to another, then how will anything get done? Throw in the fact that Plan A rarely works, and you have a mess of wrong intentions, confused roles, and misaligned expectations on your hands. To remedy this, have a kick-off meeting for each new project and ask each team member to answer these questions out loud. “What is our goal?” “What is your role in achieving it?” By the end of the meeting every member should know both their role as well as all their teammate’s roles in achieving the goal.

Clients

If you do the above with your coworkers, then satisfying the client is much easier, but it’s only part of the equation. You need to close the loop by consistently aligning your team’s expectations with your customer’s. On the team side, you can check with direct reports after giving instructions. For example, ask, “Do you have any questions?” On the client side, you can reiterate the instructions you receive. For example, “This is what I heard you say that you need from us…” You can also survey clients after a project. For example, ask, “What did you like best about the way we communicated?” “For future reference, what improvements in communication would you like us to implement?”

One wrong assumption and adverse reaction leads to another. Habitual unchecked communication fuels suspicion and negative reactions. Once this pattern is normalized, it’s hard to break. You cannot build effective working relationships without effective communication.

What is your process for aligning expectations at work? Please share in the comments.