Liz Ryan

CEO Human Workplace, coach, creator. Empowering working people to build the lives and careers they deserve.

[Liz Ryan @humanworkplace]

THE TEN PILLARS OF FEAR-BASED MANAGEMENT

1. Attendance policies for salaried employees
2. Stack ranking
3. Bell curve performance reviews (limiting the # of folks who can be excellent, above average, etc).
4. PIPs
5. Insubordination as a concept (much less a disciplinary issue)

[🩰 @bambolinalara]

Accidentally ordered my sudoku book in Chinese but it’s fine

[News to Remember @allchronology]

Listen to this. And then listen again. And again. Until you get it.

[Liz Ryan @humanworkplace]

It’s weird that I never hear folks sharing opinions about what men should wear to work.

But what’s even weirder is that both men and women are telling me how they share unsolicited advice with their coworkers if they think their coworker needs to hear their opinion.

The thing about advice is that you’ll know it is wanted when someone asks you for it.

If they don’t ask, bite your lip and keep your opinion to yourself!

[Liz Ryan @humanworkplace]

@BustedNutz @therealmaf_ Ha ha LITERALLY

[Liz Ryan @humanworkplace]

LESS INCLINED

[Liz Ryan @humanworkplace]

This post makes no sense. There is no requirement for employees in the US to submit a resignation letter at all. They don’t have to say anything about leaving, either. They can get up from their desk or their post at any moment and leave. What is this person talking about?

[UYI @miz_uyik]

He took out his phone and showed me.

A story. Black background, white text:
"2 weeks left. It's been real."

I said, "That is not a resignation."

The Gen Z said, "It has the date. It has the time. It has 41 views."

I said, "Did your manager see it?"

He scrolled down.
"He's number 17. He viewed it twice."...

[𝗱𝗮𝗻𝗻𝘆🫧💚 @beyoncegarden]

OH HE ATE HIM UP SO BAD LMFAOOO😭😭😭

[Liz Ryan @humanworkplace]

If you interview candidates as part of your job, keep in mind that everybody in the room has a decision to make. You are going to decide which person to hire, and they are going to decide whether they want to work with you.

Candidates have just as much power in the equation as interviewers do.

A candidate might need a job, but they don't have to choose THIS job.

The quickest way to turn off great candidates and send them straight to a competitor is to insult them by treating them like a lower life form.

Yet interviewers do this all the time.

Virtually every candidate has experienced it.

An easy rule of thumb is this: never ask a candidate a question you wouldn’t be happy for them to turn around and ask you immediately after.

"What’s your greatest weakness?"

Are you serious?

We are not dating.

It is not a given or universally agreed-upon fact that everyone even has weaknesses—that is closer to a religious belief than a law of nature.

But even if everyone did, why on earth would you feel entitled to know what a perfect stranger's weaknesses are?

Are you going to share your personal weaknesses with them?

I doubt it.

The best thing you can do for yourself as a manager, a professional, and a person is to shed the idea that when you are interviewing, you stand in judgment over a person and they do not stand in judgment over you.

Don’t ask them what kind of animal they would be, what kind of tree they would be, or how many telephone poles there are in Pittsburgh.

They are not there to dance for your amusement.

These questions trivialize what should be a serious conversation.

They rest on a presumed power inequality between the interviewer and the candidate.

They come from a place of maximum privilege and insensitivity. I’ve never heard of a single independent consultant being asked these questions.

They are only asked of prospective employees, because in our invisible but deafening culture and conception of work, employees are interchangeable cogs in the machine.

If you don’t have a specific problem you need solved, then don’t interview anyone.

No one would call a plumber and say, "Before I invite you over to fix my leak, can you please tell me about a time you dealt with a difficult customer?"

It’s only in the broken, toxic institution of employment that anyone would be so bold, so arrogant, and so rude.

[News to Remember @allchronology]

I believe this will be considered one of the most important videos in US history from this time.

[Max Otto von Stierlitz⭐ @kleptocurrency1]

'If You're Not Working Now, We Won't Hire You' via @forbes @humanworkplace https://t.co/94YMWLW5Lk

[Jenni @hashjenni]

And this is what companies are dumping millions into instead of paying actual people livable wages 😭

[QBgami @QBgami]

The Milwaukee Brewers are the first team in the history of American sports to get swept 0-4 in the postseason and then sweep that same opponent 4-0 the following year.

A “revenge sweep” has only happened 4x prior - never in consecutive 7-game series, and never in the MLB at all.

[Warren @swd2]

Republican Andy Harris crashes out after a bad debate and threatens a reporter.

🎥 baltimorebanner

[Meidas_Charise Lee @charise_lee]

What kind of men don't defend a woman when she's getting beat?

[BrilliantlyDumb @RobbyBerger]

Chipotle has a huge locker room issue on their hands

[Liz Ryan @humanworkplace]

If the interview is insulting, you don’t feel safe or it’s a waste of your time, you can get up and leave.

Here’s how to do it:

The interviewer will ask you a question and then pause.

Instead of answering their question, stand up and extend your hand for a shake.

Say, “Thank you so much for your time today, but I can see it’s not a great fit so I’ll leave you to your busy day.”

Shake their hand and walk out the door.

This is why when you go to a face-to-face interview, you have to pay attention to whatever turns you make or elevators or staircases you run into between the lobby and the interview room - so you can get out on your own if you need to.

On a zoom call, it’s even easier to excuse yourself.

They’ll ask you a question and then pause.

You’ll say, “Thanks so much for your time today, but I can see it’s not a great fit so I’ll just get off the call and leave you to your busy day.”

Give them a moment to respond, and then get off the call.

[Liz Ryan @humanworkplace]

TELL ME WHAT “CULTURE FIT” MEANS

- so Liz, you’ve never had a hiring manager say, I’m rejecting this candidate based on culture fit?

- not when I was in HR leader, because we talked about hiring criteria and the interviewing process all the time. My teammates knew that a generic assessment of “not a culture fit” is not a valid reason to reject anyone.

However, I’ve heard this objection quite a few times as a consultant working with organizations and their hiring processes.

I have heard from hiring managers who were frustrated that they found a great candidate for a position in their department, but their boss rejected the candidate because they thought the candidate was not a culture fit.

- why is it not a valid reason?

- if you are going to eliminate a candidate from a hiring pipeline, you should be able to explain why, specifically.

What did the candidate do or say that gave you concern?

When we talk about the topic openly, we can examine whether whatever the candidate did or said that concerned you is actually an issue worthy of rejecting them, or whether it’s related to a personal preference that has no bearing on the candidate’s ability to do the job.

- can you provide an example?

- sure. I consulted with a large firm that was hiring several internal recruiters.

A director who had no direct authority over the recruiting team but was one of their internal clients wanted to reject a candidate because they had only worked for recruiting agencies, not on the client side.

Rather than reject the candidate, we agreed to bring up the topic with the candidate and get their thoughts on moving from agency recruiting to internal recruiting.

Unsurprisingly, the candidate had thought about it and was ready to do it and was hired and did a great job.

Agency recruiters move into internal recruiting roles all the time and vice versa.

So in the end that director was concerned about nothing. That’s a big problem with the “culture fit” objection.

The thing about preferences and biases is that we don’t usually know we hold them.

We don’t consciously think about them, but we make decisions out of those preferences and biases.

That’s why it’s so important to dig deeper and ask the question, “What specifically gave you pause?”

[Liz Ryan @humanworkplace]

@LinkedInHelp Thanks, how did you write to me – a direct message on LinkedIn or an email message?

[Liz Ryan @humanworkplace]

Hi @LinkedInHelp — I need your help.

For three weeks, my LinkedIn newsletter has experienced what appears to be an email distribution failure.

My two previous issues received 128,000 and 130,000 article views. Then views plunged to 4,360.
At the same time, the email open rate plummeted from 21% to ZERO. With 640K subscribers that's so statistically improbable it's essentially impossible.

Then as of today, there is no open rate at all on the newsletter analytics page.

My newsletter has 640,000 subscribers.

Now LinkedIn has removed the email open-rate metric, and Support tells me the problem is with reporting, not necessarily email delivery.

Can someone please investigate whether my newsletters were actually emailed to subscribers? That's the question I've been asking for three weeks.
Subscribers are telling me they haven't received the newsletters. My own coworkers also haven't received the newsletters.

I'm a publisher. My readers subscribed via email because they trusted that they would receive my newsletter in their inbox every week. I have sponsors. I need to know whether my newsletters are reaching their intended audience.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.