A "Trust-busting" Hiring Practice: When Employers Ask for Facebook Passwords

There have been a number of articles about the practice of employers asking job seekers for their Facebook login information (Job seekers getting asked for Facebook passwords) in order to check into their backgrounds. This is, in my opinion, a reprehensible practice.

In addition to privacy issues (which have been discussed widely in the press), I see this as an egregious violation of trust. When employers ask for Facebook login information they are, in effect, saying to prospective employers, "We are requesting you to break your promise." 

Let me explain.

When I signed up to use Facebook, I agreed to their Terms of Service (TOS) which includes, under Section 4 (Registration and Account Security): "You will not share your password, (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account." The issue here is safety and privacy. I need to trust that Facebook is doing all it can to protect me. In return, they are trusting me to be a responsible member of their community. In other words, we made promises to each other to behave in a trustworthy manner.

Thus, when a prospective employer says to someone, "Give us your password,"  they are also saying, "We have no respect  for any prior agreement you have made with anyone else. Do what we ask or you won't have a job." Quite simply, this is an attempt to bully someone into breaking a promise.

Even worse, the employer is announcing to the entire world, "We are an untrustworthy organization: our word is NOT our bond."

Facebook's TOS includes, under Section 3 (Safety), the following: "You will not solicit login information or access an account belonging to someone else." A prospective employer that signs up for Facebook with the intent of asking (prospective) employees for their passwords is doing so with the willful intent to violate the TOS. Again, that hardly inspires trust.  Who would want to do business with such an organization? Would you feel comfortable being one of their customers?

Finally, let's consider the impact of this "trust-busting" hiring practice on employee satisfaction.  As the graphic below demonstrates, nine out of ten employees (91%) define true success as being trusted to get a job done, surpassing fulfillment from money or a title. My guess, an employer who goes about destroying trust by asking employees for their passwords probably has a lot of disgruntled employees!

Click on slide to enlarge

'Nuff said!

Click here for more articles on building trust.

The test of an organization is the spirit of performance

The following is from Peter Drucker's Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. There's not much I can say but, "read this and study it well."

The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things.

           

No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and unreliable. It is the test of an organization to make ordinary human beings perform better than they seem capable of, to bring out whatever strength there is in its members, and to use each man’s strength to help all the other members perform. It is the task of organization at the same time to neutralize the  individual weaknesses of its members. The test of an organization is the spirit of performance.

The spirit of performance requires that there be full scope for individual excellence. The focus must be on the strength of a man – on what he can do rather than on what he cannot do.

“Morale” in a an organization does not mean that “people get along together”; the test is performance, not conformance...there is no greater indictment of an organization than that the strength and ability of the outstanding man becomes a threat to the group and his performance a source of difficulty, frustration, and discouragement for the others.

Have dinner, and then have breakfast, with your members.

In a previous post, I asked, "Why not spend a day - or two or three - in the life of your members? Imagine what you could learn by just observing!" This time I will ask, "Why not have dinner, followed by breakfast, with your members?"  Your response will probably be, "But that happens already." If so, consider the following twist used by the executives of the Hampton Hotel chain:

Six or seven times a year, Phil Cordell, Hilton's global head of focused service and Hampton brand management, selects guests in a key market to meet with him and his leadership team for dinner. The next morning, after their stay at Hampton, he meets with them to get a critique. Among other things, some wondered why hotel soap is square and pointy, unlike what they use at home. Hampton changed its soap, as well as addressing dozens of other suggestions to improve a brand that -- with free in-room Wi-Fi, complimentary breakfast, a money-back guarantee and super-friendly service -- already had many satisfied customers.

You will note they meet with the guests before and after. This approach, as opposed to simply having dinner or doing a focus group, yields unexpected insights.

Let's apply it the association setting by asking: What if, on the eve of your annual meeting, staff were assigned to have dinner with members who were attending (as well as exhibitors). On the last day, they get together for breakfast for a critique of the convention. Think you might learn something? Just asking!

Related articles:  

• Are you wasting money on market research?  
• Could a Five-Minute Interaction with Members Boost Staff Productivity?

A fun, storytelling exercise

The following is an exercise I wrote for the ASAE publication, Embracing the Future. Enjoy!

Click here to view larger image.

Are you wasting money on market research?

Okay, this is a deliberately provocative question. My goal: To get you thinking about the best way to learn about what your members really need. 

Let's begin by considering this example of how Honda, when it was first designing the Civic back in the 1960s, eschewed traditional marketing research in favor of a more direct approach: observing its customers:

A U.S. Honda design team, stalemated on a trunk design project, spent an afternoon in a Disneyland parking lot observing what people put into and took out of their car trunks and what kind of motion was involved...Honda didn't hire an outside market research firm to provide stacks of data about trunk usage. They took a more direct approach and ultimately came up with anew design. 

(From: Competing for the Future by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad)

So ask yourself: Would a "more direct approach" work for your association? Why not spend a day - or two or three - in the life of your members? Imagine what you could learn by just observing! While you mull that over, take time to read a classic article, Spend a Day in the Life of Your Customers. The authors note, "A senior executive’s instinctive capacity to empathize with and gain insights from customers is the single most important skill he or she can use to direct technologies, product and service offerings, communications programs, indeed, all elements of a company’s strategic posture."

'nuff said!

Related article:  

Could a Five-Minute Interaction with Members Boost Staff Productivity?

Are you preparing your staff for the job that is coming at them?

Here is a interesting and thought-provoking exchange between Jon Stewart and Mario Batali about bosses who yell at, and demean, their staff. Stewart has asked Batali about the infamous Gordon Ramsey, whose insulting tirades are the staple of a certain reality show I'd rather not name:

Stewart:    [When] you’re at your restaurants, are you Gordon Ramsey? Are you yelling at these people in the kitchen?

Batali:    I am decidedly not Gordon Ramsey. Although, I respect him for finding his voice in whatever world it had to be.

Stewart:  Why can’t he use his inside voice?  Why must he always use his outside, angry voice?

Batali:     You have no idea how complicated that inside voice may be...that’s yelling at him from inside. Generally, cooks that yell at other cooks, or chefs that yell at other cooks, are expressing their own self-loathing for not having prepared their staff to do the job they knew was coming at them.

Stewart:   Hey Gordon Ramsey, maybe it’s time you took a look in a pot of sauce named you.

With this in mind, reflect back upon the times you have been angry and disappointed with your staff and colleagues and ask yourself, "Did I do everything in my power to prepare them for the job I knew was coming at them?" In other words, did you do your best to help them succeed?

'nuff said.

And here's the full interview. The segment cited above begins at the 3 minute, 30 second mark:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mario Batali
www.thedailyshow.com
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A Handbook for Micro-Managers?

This is just for fun (or maybe I'm trying to make a serious point). A friend recently went into a rather extensive rant about a boss who happens to be a micro-manager  Which got me to wondering: how does one learn to be a micro-manager? Is there a handbook these people use? That led me to imagine a special edition of the classic management book, The One Minute Manager.

Why not a special edition for the micro-manager in your life?

Making Sense of Innovation: Three Questions to Ask Yourself

A lot has been written about innovation - perhaps too much. As a topic and as a practical matter, it can be hard to your head around it. To that end, here are three questions to ask yourself as you try to figure out how make innovation happen in your organization. 

1. Which "pathway" to innovation is best for your organization? 

It turns out there are a number of pathways to innovation (as illustrated below). The trick is understanding which will make the most sense for your kind of organization. 

• The "Expertise" Pathway:  Developing superior knowledge and expertise to gain leverage. Consulting firms, when they are able to establish a clear intellectual leadership in a particular field, are a good example.
• The "Re-mixing Common Elements Uniquely" Pathway: Innovation is realized by how an a company packages or presents its products or services. In its heyday, for example, The Gap's clothing was not impressively unique, but its method of merchandising and presenting were.
• The "Unmet Customer Needs" Pathway: This reflects the ability to match products with unfilled consumer needs. Church & Dwight, maker of Arm & Hammer baking soda, has expanded it sales by finding new, unfilled needs for its sodium bicarbonate: toothpaste, carpet freshener, and mouthwash.
• The "Leveraging Functional Excellence" Pathway: The ability to execute, consistently, a certain function better than one's competitors. The Ritz-Carlton defines functional excellence for customer service in the hotel industry while Procter & Gamble has mastered the skills to excel in consumer packaged-goods marketing.
• The "Pure Imagination" Pathway: Using imagination to see possibilities that are not always logically evident. Walt Disney Company has given the lexicon of marketing a whole new term - "imagineering."

2. Do you have a well-defined approach to Creative Problem Solving?

It is not sufficient to simply say, "let's get together and brainstorm a solution" and expect consistently good results from your innovation efforts. Staff needs to be in-sync about how to proceed with Creative Problem Solving. .For that reason, a number of organizations train their staff in the Osborne-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Model, which consists of six well-defined steps:

1. Determine the objectives or desired outcome.
2. Assemble the facts. 
3. Define the problem that needs solving.
4. Generate ideas for possible solutions.
5. Determine the best ideas leading to a solution.
6. Determine strategies to make sure the solution will be accepted and implemented within the organization. .

3. How will you manage the team?

Execution is the name of the game, here. This requires a framework for managing a team working on an innovation project. One approach is to use the the C.A.R.E. Profile® -- an instrument that identifies five key roles in innovative team performance:

1. Creator: Generates original concepts, goes beyond the obvious, and sees the big picture. Hands off tasks to an Advancer.
2. Advancer: Recognizes new opportunities, develops ways to promote ideas, and moves toward implementation. Hands off tasks to a Refiner.
3. Refiner: Challenges and analyzes ideas to detect potential problems and may hand plans back to an Advancer or Creator before handing off tasks to an Executor.
4. Executor: Lays the groundwork for implementation, manages the details, and moves the process to completion.
5. Facilitator: Works throughout the process to ensure tasks are handed off to the right people at the right time.

The C.A.R.E. Profile enables a manager to choose the right people to fill each of these roles so a team has a balanced mix of skills needed for success.

Related articles:

• Solve the Right Problem! 
• An Innovation Challenge: Would You Implement the "30-Day Rule?" 
• A Lesson in Creative Problem Solving