Tamara Told Me To Tell You

I realized I'd fallen down badly on the job vis-a-vis this blog when I went walking by South Boulder Creek this morning with my friend Tamara. Tamara is a marketing guru with her own firm as well as the marketing brains behind the Maverick Institute, a think tank and consulting firm in the operations/process design realm. If you're anywhere near a city where the Mav is conducting a Peer Mentoring workshop this fall or winter, get over there! I went to the Peer Mentoring workshop here in Denver last month. I was curious about it but, you know, not really gripped by the idea until I got in there. Then it turned out to be one of the best workshops I've attended, ever. For one thing, Todd Hudson is a kick-ass trainer, but apart from that, this peer mentoring thing - actually, you could call it knowledge transfer of any kind, on a one-to-one level: it's powerful. I'm bad in seminars -- I get bored and start listing the Presidents in my head:

Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, the younger Adams, Jackson....

Not this time. I was way into it. The potential benefits from installing a sturdy Peer Mentoring culture are powerful - for quality, for organizational learning, for customer relationships, safety, you name it. Peer Mentoring. I would go to the workshop, if I were you. There are tremendous opportunities to keep knowledge in your organization, without spending forty million dollars on a knowledge management system.

All right. I wanted to tell you this HR story, because Tamara told me to. She said it was an Up-POCK-Riffle story. What does that mean?

Here goes. I was a young HR bunny of about 28 years. I was ready to leave the greeting card company I'd been working for, amazingly, for nine years. Yes! I was a baby when I started working full-time: a baby punk rocker. I started the HR function there - this is so long ago, it was called Personnel. First thing when I got the job, I begged them to change my title to HR.

So anyway.

I'm interviewing on the sly, after hours. I go to interview with a big PR firm in Chicago - very glitzy. I was excited! I'd been a manufacturing HR person for all those nine years, dealing with lots of hourly folks and the customer service, sales, operations folks in the office, doing all the usual hiring/comp/bennies/employee relations stuff. I was really ignorant - I didn't know how much I'd had the lucky opportunity to work on, until I got out of my bunny hutch and got a look around.

So I go to interview on a high floor of a gleaming glass-and-chrome building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. I was intimidated. The young lady who interviewed me was the HR manager: she was being promoted, not to manage the person who replaced her, but to do something else in HR at some other location. This is 1988, and here's what she had on: a bright red Nancy Reagan business suit (Nancy's size too, I'd say, a 2 or a 4) and white lace cut-out tights. Remember those? You'd look like a freak in that outfit today. But that was the lady-in-business look at the time. Same timeframe as Dress for Success, but much hipper. She was very proper looking, in a downtowny PR-firm sort of way.

And she interviewed me, and it was right out of a bad movie. She asked slow, probing questions and gave me long stares and nodded her head sagely, and I don't want to say the poor thing was an idjit, but let's say she didn't have the most complex thought processes I'd ever run across. I spent the hour trying to figure out what she did all day. We didn't talk about HR at all. She didn't ask me any questions about my HR experience or leanings or philosophy, hell no, it was all that boilerplate crizzap about where do you see yourself in five years. (Looking back, life was good for me five years down the road: a new VP title in a newly public company and twins on the way - couple of acquisitions under my belt - it's good that PR firm didn't hire me. But I'm getting ahead of myself).

So I wanted to understand what this PR firm HR job was all about, so I asked the young lady, "In your three years in this job, what do you view as your proudest accomplishment?" And I'm sorry to say, I think she was put off by my question. She didn't love it, let's just say that. And she thought for a moment, and she said "I'd have to say it's been my involvement with the internship program. Every year, we have a dozen students join us for the summer, and they work in our office, and they meet for lunch once a week with one of our executives, and this year, I got this for them." And she holds up this mug. The mug has the company logo on it.

So here's the funny part. I'm a non-corporate person from a from-the-ground-up manufacturing environment - I mean, greeting cards, for Pete's sake. We had our greeting cards manufactured at a facility for the criminally insane, I swear to God, it was in Manteno, Illinois, and I'd rent a car and drive down there and do an 80's version of quality circles, very crazy. Eventually, we got the manufacturing out of the criminally insane place and got a 200K sf manufacturing plant of our own, but bad on us, we didn't do squat for due diligence and we put the plant in the middle of the most union-loyal area in Illinois. Not that I'm anti-union, but it wasn't ideal for us at that time.

So I don't know from Michigan Avenue PR firm HR. And here's what I thought: is this a trap? That thing she just said, about the coffee mugs - it's so vapid, so goofy! That's her biggest accomplishment in three years? It can't be. She's testing me. I'm a junior HR person and I fended off a union drive, hired 1ooo or so people, installed a health plan and a 401(k) and an EAP and all that stuff, created the company's first leadership development program and its first training programs - I'm not bragging - that's what the job entailed! No one told me not to! So I couldn't believe that the mug was the big thing this woman had accomplished. I thought it was a sophisticated mind game, some kind of crazy interview stress test. How should I respond?

Remember, post-modernism was new. Letterman had just come on TV. I locked eyes with her and said slowly, "That's outstanding. It's a really nice mug." I didn't know what else to do.

I didn't get the job. A friend of mine, a mezzo-soprano I sang with around town, worked there, and she told me that she heard someone say I wasn't right for the firm, a little brash. I didn't know until then that for years and years, HR people in consulting firms were dogmeat, the lowest of the low, even lower than HR people in general. Because they're not billable. Maybe the mug really was the shiznit for this lady. I went to another manufacturing firm iinstead, and had a blast.

I was kidding - I know what apocryphal means. I wanted to make you smile. What crazy HR stories have you heard lately?