I’ve sat on both sides of the interview table enough times that I don’t really think of one person as the interviewer anymore. If I’m hiring, I’m trying to decide whether somebody can do the job and handle the responsibility I’m about to give them. If I’m applying, I’m trying to figure out what I’m…
In a previous life, I delegated a lot more than I do now. I had to. I was responsible for more than 2,300 employees who depended, in one way or another, on the decisions I made, and there was no realistic way I could personally handle everything that came with that. On a normal day,…
When I first became a police officer in 1997, the people around me who wanted the job actually wanted to be police officers. Maybe they had wanted it since they were kids, or maybe they came to it later, but they were working toward putting on the badge and serving the public. Nowadays, I see…
It’s easy to look like a committed leader when something goes wrong. A complaint comes in, somebody misses a deadline, an employee makes a mistake, or a problem finally gets enough attention that it can’t be ignored. Now there are meetings, new expectations, closer supervision, and plenty of conversation about what needs to change. For…
The lawsuit against Workday began as a challenge to software that can determine which job applicants ever reach a human recruiter. Now, the case is expanding beyond its original allegations of race, age, and disability discrimination to include claims involving sex discrimination and California employment law. On March 6, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin…
Most organizations don’t keep bad employees because nobody realizes there’s a problem. They keep them because everybody realizes there’s a problem and dealing with it is harder than working around it. The supervisor knows who isn’t carrying their weight. The coworkers definitely know. Sometimes customers know, and in government the public probably knows. Yet the…
I like the idea behind Cal Newport’s Deep Work. There are certain things I do better when I can shut everything else out and concentrate on one problem long enough to actually think through it. Writing is one of them. So is working through policy, reviewing a complicated issue, or making plans that affect the…
I’ve heard employers complain about employees for most of my working life. They can’t find anybody dependable. Nobody wants to work. The new employee has a bad attitude, can’t handle the pressure, won’t take direction, or isn’t what the company thought they were getting. Sometimes they’re absolutely right. There are bad employees, and I’m not…
Most good employees don’t wake up one morning and decide they’re done trying. It usually happens a little at a time. They come to work wanting to do a good job, take responsibility for things that aren’t necessarily theirs, help coworkers who need it, and try to fix problems before those problems become somebody else’s…
Software can do a lot more than organize job applications. It can decide which applications anybody bothers looking at, and that’s the part of Mobley v. Workday I find more interesting than the AI label. Derek Mobley and other applicants allege that Workday’s hiring technology scored, sorted, ranked or screened applicants in ways that discriminated…