HR opens In-house coaching academy

Saving money, honey

2018 is less than a wow wow wow year. We will all need to "tighten our belts", said CEO Stan, which is a term Dad used to use all the time after Mom went on a shopping spree. In those days, there was no big data, just a bill from Simpsons (La Baie).

So I decided to cut our coaching expenses.

In 2017, we have spent $600 on coaching. Ms Axe has a reputation coach and Comrade Carl Marks hired a Ukrainian coach to help him understand a Scottish accent. I signed on the invoices in a moment of weakness. 

In 2018, there shall be no coaching budget whatsoever. However, always resourceful, I have opened an in-house coaching academy. As a matter of fact, I opened it last week. The academy certified all our staff to become coaches. This was done in one day.

The academy offered 2 level of coaching certificates.

1-EC (expert coach)

2-CC (chief coach). I am CC and at this time, I have no deputies, as it were.

The certification process for both levels took 5 minutes, including zenga zenga expertise.

Everyone at EC level learnt to ask three questions:

1-What are your goals?

2-What do you plan to do?

3-How can I support you?

I know that this is tough, but it seems people pick it up easily.

Last week I handled one case myself. I had to be creative, as it were, because I was surprised.

Svetlana from Engineering answered the first question saying, "I want to be the Pope".

I replaced question 2 with "Are you Catholic"?

"No", she replied, "My mother is Russian Orthodox but atheist and my father is Jewish".

Then I told young Svetlana that we have no budget to help her convert.

This is called "alignment of expectations coaching." Only CC level coach can do that.

One  final comment:

1. I am hiring coaches to coach my coaches. The price is $150 an hour. Just to be clear-you pay me! There are so many coaches that I am "leveraging" market conditions, as it were.

My mother and Holacracy

Smarten up, Girl, my Dad used to say

Ever since I have crowned as the First Lady of HR, I have a moral obligation to spread the key elements of basic HR tenets, as it were. Today I will discuss the "5 basic  principles of HR". 

Each and every morning, when I wake and before I open my Blackberry Passport, I ask myself 5 questions in a 20 second HR mindfulness session:

These are the  questions that I ask myself, daily. I suggest you do the same.

1) Do people trust me as HR manager and love me? 

2) Is our health plan fair? 

3) Do I lobby for the people, to ensure that “people” are factored into the decision making of the business leaders?

4) Am I willing to confront my boss and "speak truth to power ?"

5) Am I an advocate of compliance based business ethics? 

6) Is it worth placing a bet on holacracy?

If the answer to any of these questions is YES, then there are several courses of corrective action:

• Gather some big data about what life would be like with no salary. (I cannot ever fathom this; I want to buy a new Prius next year.)

• Hire a cost effective coach to “rewire” you with success, i.e., transactional HR. Please email me directly for a link.

• Consider self-help. Gather big data about why you always position yourself as a loser. Then as my Dad used to say, “Smarten up, Girl".

Sorry for the short post, but my Mother who is losing her memory just called. She keeps asking me "are you still working in Manpower down there in the States? Come home Gloria, and do something more creative". And "Gloria, why are you still single? You need to find someone Gloria. What is this holacracy all about? "

Who's who in the Gloria Blog

Immature Products is the name of the company where the stories on blog take place. No one (except the author) knows what their product is, except that it has plenty of bugs which impact their clients’ revenue negatively. Slimy agents are needed to sell the product in the third world.

The first lady of HR

Gloria Ramsbottom-Lemieux is VP HR of Immature Products.  Gloria studied to be a secretary, then a buyer, and then “naturally,” she moved into the HR space. 
No one really knew about Gloria until five years ago, yet today it is widely recognized that she is the First Lady of HR. She is also a coach and change manager. She earns $150,000 net, yet "money can almost never buy my loyalty".
Gloria admits however that pregnancy interferes with stretch goals and she has busted unionization "in line with my core value of survival".
Gloria grew up in Canada, the daughter of the late Pierre Elliot and Constance Ramsbottom.  She has two brothers (Frank and Earnest) as well as a sister Claire Ramsbottom de la Montagne. .
Constance is a ballet teacher. She is 144 years old. She believes that Gloria "works in Manpower down in the States and needs to do something more creative".
Gloria speaks English and French; she is acquiring a British accent to be more posh. She owns 3 blockchains, one of them is made in Germany.
Gloria's style is not overly cerebral; she is practical, brief, responsive, and sprinkles her conversation with French, in line with her core value of "global". Gloria is learning German grammar from a Viennese tutor.
Nothing is known of Gloria's intimate life except that she gets one  "mental orgasm" from the term "big data", and several from "internetofthings". 
As of late, Gloria uses the term “as it were”. 
Gloria reads text messages only.

Lose morals

Cynthia Axe is the Head of Involuntary Early Bird Retirement. She has fired 45,000 people in her 5 years at Immature Products. She has had 15 life partners in the past 3 years. Her father is the Reverend Oliver Axe. Cynthia speaks English only. One sad fact needs to be added: Ms Axe has been chosen the least popular staff member for 12 straight quarters. She presently has a reputation coach. Ms Axe tried to read the Land of Green Plums, but threw it away after 2 pages.

Soft on my gut

Stan the CEO has no family name. He is white, privileged , travels business class, has a high level view of the firm, loses his temper, and sleeps with Ms Axe on very rare occasions. He resents Gloria forcing him to use a Blackberry, which he calls “a piece of Canadian crap”. Stan sees HR as proof positive that if you pay someone enough and give them a seat at the table, they will tow the party line. Stan thinks that Kim Jong Un has a few leadership traits which need to be emulated. Stan wants HR to ensure everyone is nice.

Wifey is Stan’s brainy wife. She reads management articles and forwards them to Gloria, demanding action. Wifey believes that these articles can save Stan, whom she sees as a failure. Wifey’s real name is unknown, although Selma may be a possibility.  Wifey is currently reading The Land of the Green Plums, and does not understand one word, but has recommended the book to all her cronies.

K Ray Beauregard-Goldstein is Stan’s private chef. He has mixed ethnicity, French and Hebrew. He cooks “cost effective lasagna”  for Stan. However, recently Stan has suffered from hemorrhoids and Stan has asked for food which is “softer on my gut”. K Ray has slept with Ms Axe on more than one occasion. K Ray reads La Presse.

Almost semi irrelevant

Hugh White is the Head of Diversity. Like Ms Axe, he reports into Gloria. Hugh annoys everyone because of his irrelevant comments about diversity. Hugh is White as a lily and heterosexual. He is married to Comrade Ludmilla White (nee Khrushchev) and their marriage has “room for improvement”. Hugh gets beaten up from time to time.  Hugh is currently reading The Land of the Green Plums, and does not understand one word yet believes that books which make no sense have a dimension of diversity.

CCM

R&D chief, Comrade Carl Marks, was born and bred in the USA. No one knows where Carl got his PhD in Engineering. His parents were communists and sent him to USSR where he studied for 4 years. Carl speaks English with a Russian accent, although this is feigned. Carl sprinkles his speech with Russian swear words, rambles, lacks focus and believes that his new product is a “pearl”, although sales are weak and customers curse him. Comrade Carl believes that HR and Sales are the source of all evil. Comrade Carl reads books only about the Battle of Stalingrad.

Juliette Caesar was the Head of Sales. She quit. She had a stellar record until she came to Immature Products. She even sold books on secular liberalism in Teheran, Jerusalem and Jeddah.

Old de Villiers is an engineer  who hails from Bloemfontein and speaks some English. He sleeps during round tables. He is the cloud computing czar. Old de Villiers has been asleep for 4 years.

Mister Herr Krebbs is the CFO. He is German and he loves details. He often ends each sentence with "Ja". As well, when he finishes speaking, he says, "I have finished speaking". Herr Krebbs does not like the fact that Stan calls him Mister Herr Krebbs. Stan thinks that Herr is Krebb's first name.

This blog is read world wide by about 800 people a day, daily.The author claims that the blog is not all that removed from reality, although this may be a stretch of the imagination. 

The author’s grandparents on his mother’s side were British, as it were.

Flexible business ethics enable sales, corruption and compliance

Comrade Carl called me "First Lady of HR"

Comrade Carl Marks (R&D chief) addressed the leadership team today about “what needs to be done to flood the market with our technology”.

I could have sworn that I saw Comrade Carl smoking a joint in the parking lot before the leadership meeting started, but the moment that I took out my state of the art mobile phone, Samsung 98-T-Extra Large and tried to take a photo, I received a text that distracted me.

Comrade Carl said that “ethics and compliance are two-faced concepts of the rich aristocracy and the western world ruling elite. Kibinimat, our product is a pearl! All you need is to give each salesman few envelopes each with a thousand dollars (he said rubles) and you can get deals in Indonesia, China, Mother Russia, Mexico, Israel, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Qatar and many another banana republics and remote Pacific islands, where the value of our technology is appreciated. All we need to do is find the slimy agents and corrupt government officials."

Then Comrade Carl continued, “all we need to do is two things: appoint me as Head of Sales and ask the ladies of HR to rewrite our business code of ethics to be more flexible.”

CEO Stan asked Comrade Carl to stop using the word kibinimat all the time. 
Herr Krebbs was quiet, reading his German newspaper about the welcome influx  of 4 million refugees into what he hoped would be Sweden. Herr Krebbs was not a Merkel fan.

Stan asked me what I thought.

“HR business partnership entails removing the people obstacles, as it were, that prevent work from getting done, in line with our core values. As you know, one of our core values is compliance, but I can issue "service pack" to these values within one nanosecond. HR will do everything to support the business.” 

I took out my state of the art Samsung, issued an update to our sacred core value of compliance by SMS, Whatsapp, Facebook, Telegram and Yahoo messenger, and said "voila". That's French. The new sacred ethics code enables blockchain based sales, corruption and compliance!

Comrade Carl looked at me and I became very worried. He looked lusty, and he said, "Spasiba, first lady of HR". 

Spasiba means thank you. That's Russian.

Updating core values

Performance appraisal, Gungnam Style

Our CEO Stan invited me and Comrade Carl Marks to a meeting at 0900 am.  We sat around the beloved management mahogany table and Stan`s private chef served bagels and cream cheese. My Lord, I live for moments like this. Neither of us is Jewish, but I did enjoy the food. (I did have a Jewish classmate, Sharon Bernstein).

Stan appeared in a jocund mood and he asked us both, ``let`s have an open and candid talk about the performance of your colleague,Juliette Caesar, the Head of Sales.`` This is Stan`s version of performance appraisal.

Comrade Carl Marks spoke up first: ``That bitch Juliette could not sell cold lemonade on a hot beach in August, kibinimat. The product is a pearl, and I know how much popular demand there for our technology. Yet that useless and self serving `suka`` is always pursuing the wrong leads. Stan, you should have checked a big data base before you hired her.``

(I have learnt the meaning of that  word ``suka``.)

Comrade Carl continued: ``Why do we have an HR function in our organization, kibinimat? Why….Gloria has instincts like an alley cat! Her instincts are better than big data.  So why don`t we get input from the first lady of HR, Ms Gloria Ramsbottom, who I have come to adore, and not because of her legs``.

I have two brothers, Frank and Earnest. To be frank and earnest, I did like the title Carl gave me. 

Quoting myself verbatim, as it were, here is what I told Stan and Comrade Carl. Italics show where I used my new British accent.

`Now look heyah (here). We have three choices, as it wehr (were). 

1) I can have Juliette write a mission statement with my coach;

2)  I can have a one on one with her to `sohrt (sort) her out` ;

3) I can arrange a meeting between Ms Cynthia Axe and Juliette within 2 seconds, and she will vanish from the face of the earth in one fell swoop. After which I assume Juliette will sell "internet-of-things".

Stan and Carl ask me what I ``recommend``.I remember what my Dad Pierre Elliot Ramsbottom used to tell me, `Gloria but careful what you cook because sometimes you need to eat it`.

This week I have a ``one on one`` with Juliette.

I love the term ``one on one``.