HR social hour

HR Social Hour with Jon Thurmond and Wendy Dailey

Why it’s important to provide opportunities for employees to grow

I'm grateful you're joining me for this episode. This one's a little bit different than most because I have not one but two guests. Those guests are Wendy Dailey and Jon Thurmond. They are the co-hosts of The HR Social Hour Podcast, which is broadcasted weekly anywhere. They host a biweekly Twitter chat. Jon Thurman is the Mid-Atlantic Regional Human Resources Manager for Team Fishel, an engineering and utility construction firm. His experience includes working in the construction, public utility, healthcare, accounting and finance industries in roles encompassing employee and labor relations, recruiting, training and HR leadership. Jon is nationally recognized as a speaker on social media recruiting, workforce development and podcasting. Wendy is a talent acquisition professional in South Dakota with over twenty years of experience in human resources. She's worked in a variety of industries including healthcare, construction, airlines, and banking. She is active in her local and state SHRM groups and DisruptHR.

We did this on LinkedIn and we chat about the state of HR and talent development, where things are going and what might be missing from talent development. A little bit of perspective from Wendy and Jon since they also interview a lot of guests on their podcast, The HR Social Hour. If you haven't heard of it, I recommend you check it out if you're in HR. You go to episode 103, and you can check their interview with me on that show in which we talked about how I got started in talent development. How I organized the first conference that we did, the Talent Development Think Tank. As well as my favorite movie, favorite musician and favorite TV show and many other things that we talked about during The HR Social Hour. If you're lucky, you might even get to hear my children, barging into the room, which they did because it's one of the few interviews I've done where I recorded at night. I could not stop them from coming in. It was a bit of a BBC moment. If you remember the guy who was on BBC trying to shuffle his kids out of the room during a live interview.

Don't forget, if you're not already subscribed to this show, please hit subscribe. If you haven't left a review, I'd love for you to leave us a review on iTunes or anywhere you read the blog. They do help other people find the show. If you're not connected with me on LinkedIn and not following me on social media, I would love for you to do that. I am posting daily on LinkedIn as well as pretty regularly on Instagram and a little bit less often on Twitter as well but trying to get a little bit more active there. Trying to add as much value as I can out there in the community and engage with people who are doing the same. I'd love to connect with you. Don't forget to subscribe, connect, follow and I will see you around. Without further ado, here is my interview with Wendy and Jon from The HR Social Hour Podcast. 

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I am excited that you are joining me. I've got a special treat for you because I have Jon Thurmond and Wendy Dailey from The HR Social Hour Podcast. I rarely get to have not only other podcasters on, but we get a trio conversation going instead of one-on-one that’s something you do regularly. Welcome to the show.

I appreciate it, Andy.

Thank you so much for coming out. We interviewed on your show. I would love to start with a little bit of background and understanding of what each of you does for work and we can get into The HR Social Hour, which is a great movement that you've put together, not only with the podcast but especially on Twitter as well. Wendy, why don't we start with you?

I have been in talent acquisition for right around twenty years. I work for a healthcare system that's based out of South Dakota, one of the largest ones in this area. I moved into strategy doing some workforce planning. I'm working on some projects, getting into a lot of DNI and how we can improve what we do when it comes to bringing talent into our organization. I’m excited to be able to work on talent acquisition rather than the daily grind.

What about you, Jon? 

I've been a human resources practitioner for many years. I started my career in recruiting, became a supervisor and then decided I wanted to go work with unions for a while and got into a labor relations role. I got downsized in that company and had to go find myself. That's when I discovered social media, particularly from an HR perspective. I'm an HR Manager for a construction company based here in Richmond, Virginia. I do all the front office things when it comes to recruiting, employee investigations, training, those types of things. I don't touch payroll and benefits much but get to do all the other stuff that I enjoy doing. I started my career as a teacher. Training and development is a passion and an interest of mine and was fortunate to find a place where I was able to do a little bit of all the things I enjoy doing.

Making Talent Development Better

I know I said, "We're going to talk about talent development, is there anything that you're particularly passionate about?" Jon said, "Yes, we need more of it." Tell me a little bit more about your interest passion there and when you say more of it, what do we need? How can we make talent development better? 

There are some tremendous opportunities out there. It used to all be classroom learning and I get my class of 5, 10 and 15, get up and stand up, conversation, book learning, whatever it may be. There are many other alternatives low cost, no cost and accessible 24/7. In other words, I don't have to schedule that class. I don't need those twenty people to all see it at the same time. Maybe it's a webinar or maybe it's a podcast. Maybe it's some other type of beyond giving them a book saying, "Go study." There are a lot of different tools and tricks out there that we don't use necessarily well in some cases. It's a matter of making sure that the people that have the opportunity to deliver that training are doing it. They understand what's out there and that people are willing to give it a shot. I've always found change management to be one of the worst things that most companies do. They don't do it well because they don't teach people how to do it and then you go through these big changes. Let's say it's delivering training or changing the way you deliver training. We never get people to explain, why there's a need for change? How do I get them excited about it? How do I make sure that I give them the tools and to be effective in whatever that is and then reinforce the fact that we are making those changes? Most people don't. They drop things out and say, "We're changing things." People are scared. They don't understand it's a problem and it bums me out.

I've seen it in a lot of places I've been, and it's something I'm passionate about. The fact that as we talked about on our show, leaders, in particular new leaders often are putting those jobs because they are producers. They do well. They know their craft. They may not have a clue what it means though to teach somebody else or to coach somebody to have difficult conversations about performance. This is what I expect from you. This is what the company expects from you. We struggle and if they don't get better, to your point, then they leave. I'm not getting what I need here. There's a lot of opportunity in that training space to do things differently, to offer it in different ways. We don't utilize those enough.

HR Social Hour: Make sure that the people delivering the training are doing it right and that people are willing to give it a shot.

You're speaking my language there, especially about a culture change or change initiatives, change management. Many companies, many executives and leaders think we'll put together a PowerPoint explaining what we're changing and we'll have a town hall, we'll send the deck out in an email and then everybody will follow this and they will go with the new strategy. What happens is people open it and they're like, "Whatever, this will change. I'm going to go back to what I was doing before." 

I used to say I worked for a company that when they bought new acquisitions where it was in the power business. We buy a new power plant. We would walk in, run our company, flag up the flag pole, jam SAP in as the system of record and that was it. We never understood culture or got them to understand the culture. I've been gone from that organization for a while. It took years and some and they still struggle because they didn't get people to understand this is how and why we do the things we do. This is why we're successful. "By the way, this is why we're the ones that are buying this company because you're not being successful and somebody else couldn't figure out a way to make it successful." They don't do that. They run up and they give you a new shirt. You get a new shirt with a new logo on it.

You've got to gain alignment and a lot of times that starts with engagement. It starts with the top, people living the values. It's much we can say about that. Wendy, what about you? What do you think about the state of talent development? What do you think that we need more of or less of in talent development?

Not to say ditto but Jon's hitting the nail on the head. A lot of times, we're shoving things in fast and changing things fast. We don't take the time to sit back and make sure people are absorbing it and understanding how it works. The world is moving fast and we're trying to keep up, but it's hard to learn something new, gain new skills and still do your day job. You're still supposed to be successful and producing yet, here's a new tool. How do I use it? I've got this special hobbled together process we did on this thing, but does it still work in the new process and how does this all fit together? We need to slow down, figure out what people need, figure out what are their strengths, what are their weaknesses and how do we help play up those strengths. The other thing that I've been reading about talent development too is we spend a lot of time figuring out how to bring up people's weaknesses when maybe we don't need to because someone else who can pick up that slack. Let's play to people's strengths more. Let's not force everyone to be a pick on us.

Not everyone can podcast. Everyone should podcast. There are other skills out there where you can be a part of that. We were talking about that with my oldest daughter because she took some tests at school and she's supposed should go into video in some way, shape or form. Producing videos, editing videos and doing animation type stuff. She and I were talking about it and I was like, "When you think about video, it's not just pointing a camera at somebody." My husband does that. He would know all the ins and outs. If you're on a big show, there are a lot of different moving pieces and you need all those different skills to have a successful show. We need to think about that more in everyday workplaces and how we can all fit together to make a successful show and get to that ultimate end that we're looking for.

Finding Your Strengths

You’ve got to start by understanding people's strengths. I had a few people talking about the StrengthsFinders and there's more of a strength movement out there. I have gotten more into this as I've gotten older and more experienced to get into self-awareness, understanding my strengths. Think more about how do I leverage those and not worry about the weaknesses instead of spending much time trying to fix the weaknesses. Many companies and the way they're set up with performance reviews and things like that. Let's evaluate people. Let's hone in on those weaknesses and give them feedback so they can fix those instead of spending time thinking about, "What are their strengths? How can we move them around the organization and map them with a role that would leverage their strengths and get them excited about coming to work?"

I hate the traditional performance evaluation. I haven't come out of one of those in a long time feeling good about myself, even on positive ones because they have to come back with, "Here's something you need to work on. Here's where you suck."

That's one of the issues. My philosophy on that is a review should have no shocks. In other words, if I have done my job effectively as a leader and I have coached you throughout the year, I told you what's going well. To your point, not trying to make everybody boost up what's poor, but certainly working on the things you need to work on. If I've told you that throughout the year when you walk in, you shouldn't be shocked, disappointed or upset because it ought to be memorializing what we've talked about. If anything, it should be more of a springboard for, "Here's what went well. Here's what you need to work on. By the way, people talk about career development.” We don't talk enough about that either. What do you want to do we grow up? Andy, what do you see is your next step here? Where would you like to go? A lot of companies they're trying to improve. To your point, you hear more about people using skill finders in determining, what may be a better fit as far as those skills. A lot of times it's the lack of training or change management. It's also that lack of coaching and being effective when it comes to telling people how they're doing, what they're doing well, what they're not doing well. If it's an annual review which has been a big thing when the past years blow it up. Do you do quarterlies?

A lot of companies are growing up. Everybody's trying to figure it out and saying, "Continuous feedback, no surprises at the end of the year." Remember that project that you worked on a few months and you didn't show up to work on time that one day. It's ridiculous. I love that you brought up career development. People figuring out their strengths, self-awareness, what do they want to do when they grow up? We're always in a state of, "We're going to grow up one day." We never have it all figured out. I'm glad you brought it up because I'm writing a book on this topic about taking ownership of your career because many people are not doing that.

They're not figuring out what are my strengths? What do I like? Where do I want to go with my career? What do I want to do? They're not having those discussions with their managers or their colleagues and finding out where they can go. The managers aren't doing that either. The thing I'm hearing the most about, which is that inflection point of 2 to 3 years where people leave their companies because they're frustrated and they don't know what to do. I'm wondering, are you seeing that? Are you hearing that with people you talk to as well?

Part of it is a maturity thing. Reflecting on twenty years I've been doing this, I look at my path and it's all over the place and I fully acknowledge that. I love the fact that I did all these things and bounced all around in the business. I'm in a place where I know what I want, what do I like doing, and what I do well. Thankfully I'm working for management that is supportive of that and wants me to do those things. In other words, I've found what works for me and what works for them. As long as we continue to produce, we're homing along. It took me a long time to figure out what that was. Maybe it's a partial age. Part of it was I used to worry about, I got to have a paycheck. I'd have this, that and the other. I'm home alone and do what I need to do. I got to a point where midlife crisis where I decided I want to be happy with what I'm doing and who I'm working with. Through the podcasts and all these other things, I found that sweet spot.

We're all still trying to figure it out. My good friend, Kevin Yates, who is speaking at my conference, he commented, "I'm still trying to figure out who I want to be when I grow up." We all are.

HR Social Hour: We need to slow down and figure out what people need, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how we can help play up those strengths.

I was having a conversation similar to this before at work and someone was like, "Kids these days don't want to stick around at a job and you’ve got to stick it out for a while." I'm like, "Why? We've done that." Nobody's waiting at the end of the road with a gold watch for you anymore. Who wants a gold watch after putting your time?

Is it an Apple Watch? 

If it's gold Apple Watch, maybe then I will. People talk about how employees don't have loyalty. Employers have never had a lot of loyalty to their workers. There have always been layoffs. When they're going to reduce costs, the first thing they look at is labor, which is, in my opinion as an HR professional is not the first place you should be looking to save money. That doesn't help you. We need to think about careers differently. It's okay if you're doing something in your 40s that's different from when you're in your twenties. When I graduated from college, I thought I was going to go to law school. I worked as a paralegal for a few years and I'm like, "I don't want to do this." I went and did some customer service.

I was working for United Airlines in baggage service and my boss' wife worked in recruitment and he's like, "Wendy, do the thing you'd be good at this job. My wife has an opening, you should go apply for it." The next thing I know, I'm in recruitment. That's how it works. You take it along and got laid off from the airlines, had to go find, "What else am I going to do?" I ended up in healthcare. I found that I do enjoy healthcare. I tried some other areas of HR, I don't like the other areas. I feel like 47 years old and I know what I like doing. I like the work that I'm doing at the healthcare system, but I also have found the podcasting world and the tweeting world. If someone would pay me to go to conferences and tweet out HR knowledge, I would be happy.

While we're on this subject, I'll ask the question to you that you ask all of your guests on your show. What was your dream as a child? What did you want to be when you were growing up?

It was a lot of different things. Growing up in a small town, it was a nurse for a while or a teacher. When I got to high school, that's around when I was like, "Maybe I want to go to law school or teach at the college level." Four years of college, I was done.

How about you, Jon?

It’s simple. As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. It's all I dreamed of. I studied space. I had every book NASA published for kids. I went to Space Camp. I was there right before they filmed the movie. That shows my age. I was the last camp before they started filming Space Camp the movie. It was all I wanted to be. I had an astronaut wallpaper up until I was in high school. I'm a big boy and I have poor vision. It wasn't going to work out. That was from about 5 or 6 up until middle school even. It was something I dreamed of and I'm not good at math, it wasn't going to work out that way. I thought I was going to be Mr. Holland and save the world as being a band director and that didn't work out either.

Learning In Different Ways

I was telling on your show I wanted to be a professional baseball player and I wasn't good at it. I always led my team in strikeouts, which is not a stat that they're attracted to. I'm trying to make the big team. Coming back to HR, Wendy, something you said about learning at work and trying to figure out how to make time for that. One of the biggest names in HR is Josh Bersin. He's known for something called Learning in The Flow of Work. He talks about it all the time and how learning needs to be integrated into that world of work, yet it's a pretty difficult concept to implement because many things are going on. Do you see companies implementing this well? How are they doing, learning in different ways?

To do it right, you need to have a concerted effort to it and you need to demonstrate to your employees that it is important and that you give them the time to do it. Where, at my healthcare system, we were doing a lot of learning for our talent advisors, our recruiters and our leaders are modeling how they want us to act during this training. We do some in-person training. We do some of it online. Whenever we're in a call together, everyone turns off their email. Our leaders are in the room and they're not answering their emails. They're not on the phone. They're in there with our learning. That's what leaders need to do. If you want it to be part of your culture, you need to lead it, and you need to model it because otherwise, you're giving it lip service. If you're in a training session and your team is in there and you want them to pay attention, but you're on your phone or you're answering emails, they're not going to pay attention. They're not going to get anything out of it. They're like, "I could be back at my desk making phone calls." You give them a little leeway in some of their performance metrics because we know we're not going to get as many offers out because we're doing three-hour training but this three-hour training is important. Nobody's going to get dinged for that.

What do you think, Jon? 

I'm fortunate to work for a company that you think construction, you don't necessarily think of training other than maybe how to swing a shovel. It's much more than that. One of the things we pride ourselves on is that there are standards in terms of every teammate. It doesn't matter what you do, whether it's in the field, if it's as an HR person or if it's across the board. Every teammate has certain hours they have to do in training every year, which is great because some of it is driven by a DOT, OSHA or things that we have to do from a compliance perspective. A lot of it is self-driven. For me, it's going to conferences, it's doing those types of things. My peers, maybe they want to go take a class, "I'm an engineer and I want to get better at this." Go take that class of engineering or whatever it may be. I know that's not common in a lot of places. I appreciate the fact that I'm in a place where we support it. I'm also excited because we're launching an internal podcast. A focus of that is going to be training and delivering it in a different way knowing that we can't get to everybody all the time. Here are some on-demand things that every once in a while, you're going to get questions about what we do. There you go. Go out, pull it down, listen to it, ask questions when you need to and go from there. I certainly see it and everybody's work in progress.

[bctt tweet="Change management is one of the worst things most companies do. They don’t do it very well because they don’t teach people how to do it." via="no"]

I feel like people want to do things the right way. The majority of people, we see that in our community that we've developed through the podcast or the Twitter chats. A lot of practitioners are working for organizations where they're trying to get better. They want to be better people, develop more productive, healthy and good citizens. Beyond what we do, there's a lot of good that people don't hear about and hopefully what we do, what you do, people do hear those things. Maybe they hear it from somebody, I'm also a big believer in that. You never know. You may say something entirely different than I do, the same content but you say it in a way that it hits somebody, whereas I may say it to somebody else and hits them differently too. Putting those out there and putting your voice out there and making sure that we're having those conversations is critical.

The HR Social Hour

Starting an internal podcast, more companies are doing that to get information out to their people. Everybody's listening to podcasts anyway. It's the best way to learn. I'm starting to hear from more audiences to reach out to me and say, "I'm thinking about starting an internal podcast, can you give me some advice?" I have a friend that's his main business is starting podcasts for companies internally. I want to get to your podcast because you have The HR Social Hour, which is big in the HR space. I'm curious how you got into podcasting and how that got started?

I have been podcasting for years. I do an '80s podcast with friends of mine. My friend started his show and it celebrated now for many years. That show is called Star Joes. It's everything '80s property, Star Wars, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, the whole nine yards. I've been a co-host on that show. As much as we found passionate people in the HR community, I found passionate comic book, G.I. Joe, and Transformers nerds that I've gotten to be friends with doing it. We had launched our Twitter chat, The HR Social Hour mid-2017. I called Wendy and said, "I love podcasting. I love this medium in many ways and for many reasons." I have a lot of windshield time. I listened to a lot of content from a lot of different sources. I said, "I want to do this. I want to have a co-host. Would you be willing to try this with me?" She said, "Sure." We wanted to do something different from other podcasters. There are many great shows in our space but we wanted to focus on the people piece and the individuals. As we say, the cool people that we get to meet like you, we want to introduce cool people to cool people. The whole idea behind the show, our tenants or the power of connection and giving back to your community, be it HR or your community at large. The whole idea of building your network just like you talk about a lot. It's a 30-minute conversation, a cup of coffee with somebody getting to know them.

If you meet them down the road, "Andy, I heard you on Jon and Wendy show, I understand you like Mulan. I love Mulan. It was my kid's and my favorite movie." What we've learned is that we get people to tell stories or talk about themselves in a way that they're typically not. We're not necessarily talking about training and development from a technical perspective. It's more the, "We need to get better at it because here's what happens when we suck." It's a more personal conversation. What we find is that you may know somebody for years, but they end up saying something on our show that you would've never heard because you don't necessarily have those conversations. We launched and we recorded our first show. Episode 99 came out. We've put out 143 shows. We're proud and excited. It keeps humming and it's been a great ride.

What episode number am I on? 

It’s episode 103.

I also want to highlight something because as you know from our conversation on your show big on networking has been for many years, both in person, going to conferences and networking events, things like that. Also, online through social media. I've made many friends through Facebook, LinkedIn that have turned into real-life friends like Kevin Yates who's been commenting. We connected on LinkedIn and then finally had lunch in person when I was in Chicago. He's speaking at my conference. These are how things come together. I understand the two of you met on Twitter, is that right?

We did. Jon dug into the backlog of Twitter and found it was 2014 the first time we connected online. We were invited to give the keynote address at the SHRM Young Professionals event at the SHRM National Conference. We met on Twitter chats, SHRM hosted one called Nextchat. It was weekly and you could go there Wednesday afternoon and chat with other HR professionals about some HR topics. That's where the community that we're connected to blossomed out of. Various connections that happen that way. The web of the world I'm proud of. For us, it was natural to go into the Twitter chat world and start there with building the community through The HR Social Hour, which came out because we weren't at SHRM National Conference. We had met in 2016 at a national conference. Neither one of us could go in 2017 and were we having serious FOMO online. We're like, "Let's have our Twitter chat." We did. Almost several years, here we are with the two monthly chats. It's nice because I find online, Twitter, LinkedIn networking, great for the initial contact. When I go to a conference, I like to know who I'm going to meet. I like to know who set up meetings and lunches or coffees and have that opportunity to meet people one-on-one. I'm introverted, I don't like to go out and mingle randomly.

I've never liked the networking events where you were trying to collect the most business cards. Being able to make those connections ahead of time, make those plans and say, "I know I'm going to go out Tuesday night and meet these people and we're going to go to this restaurant." I can stalk them online a little bit more and figure out, "What should we talk about?" That's where our podcast comes into. If you want to meet somebody, you can listen to the podcast and then, "We have these things in common." I know what we're going to talk about.

It's The HR Social Hour, but you also have Twitter chats. It's about socializing, which some people scoff at social media. It's the modern way that you can connect with many amazing people and then you can take that friendship and take it to an IRL as they call it, In Real Life. You can be real friends and we can be on video and we'll meet at a conference and it'd be like, "We've hung out many times already." 

The fact that we met people, we met HR practitioners from the other side of the globe, Australia, South Africa, India, we met them online, had conversations online. When we met them in person, we sat down and cracked out the recorder and had a conversation. While the legal things are different, based on the country you're in, many of the people's issues are the same. Your training issues with the same, people paying people enough could be an issue. There are many universal things out there, that to me was one of the best things that have come out of this whole thing is meeting great people. We had a guest one time said, "You have the largest Rolodex of HR professionals and everybody I know.” All these people if whatever we need, "Somebody for training, somebody for an ATS." Whatever it is, we probably know somebody. We probably had somebody on this show that is an expert in that. If we haven't, they know the person that knows the person.

You do it through the podcast and social media connections. I always say my goal is to be the most connected man in talent development. How am I going to do that? I'm not going to go to every office in America. You’ve got to do it through the show.

HR Social Hour: Leaders need to model staying in focus during in-person trainings. Otherwise, the rest of the team will not pay attention.

You can't go to every conference.

HR And Talent Development Trends

I’ve tried. I've got a business to run, kids and a limited budget. It’s a little bit difficult. I do go to a lot of conferences and I love it for networking and that's why I started my own, which is coming up. That's cool how you brought that together and you've had many great guests on your show. Other than what we've maybe talked about, what's the biggest trend that you're following in HR or talent development? Wendy, we'll start with you.

Many things are going on. I'm watching a lot of stuff in the DE&I space, Diversity Equity and Inclusion. They're adding equity into that. Watching people be more intentional and what it means to be inclusive and finding those definitions there. Helping people figure out the new world that we're in, but it is. What's the new normal and how do we normalize those conversations after growing up for many years, we're all colorblind, which is a lie. Recognizing not just the special challenges but the special knowledge and experiences that everyone brings into the organization. I'm excited to see where the world is going as many bad things as there are. There is much good happening in the world of DE&I, I'm excited to see where that's going.

Jon, what about you? What's the biggest trend you're seeing or following in HR or talent development?

Diversity Equity and Inclusion have certainly been big. AI, we heard about the bots and Skynet's real. For me, we continue to be in this market where there are fewer people than there are jobs. That’s not changing anytime soon. The whole way that companies communicate with the passive candidate, keep them engaged and keep them interested. Make sure that they're telling their stories in a way to get those people interested so that if you do suddenly decide I'm going to look for a job, "Did you know XYZ is hiring?" they've got positive thoughts, good ideas about you. We've been interviewing interns and I see that as a tremendous pipeline of talent to determine, is that person a long-term fit for us and are we for them? Not every company is for every person and vice versa, but it's been interesting to talk to some of these students, some of which did a lot of research. I wanted to make sure they understood who they were talking to. What they told me is, "We're reading up on you. We're talking to other people, finding students that have worked there, asking those questions." Trying to build a positive brand and images you can. It's going to be interesting knowing when the pool is tight as it's going to be. How are companies keeping themselves in front of mind for those people that may not be looking but that may be the right opportunity comes along? They say, "That's a place I want to be."

Recommended Books And Movies

It's building a brand and I've come across more companies that have positions, people who are in charge of employee branding and how do you build that brand externally and internally and keep marketing to people because you've got to keep building that pipeline of talent. When they're ready and the timing is right, then they'll come in. I went to the LinkedIn Talent Connect Conference. Speaking of conferences, back in September in Dallas where 4,600 people are there. I met quite a few who were in charge of employee branding. It's a big and growing title or position. I always love talking about how the world of work is changing, positions are being created and eliminating them. That's something that probably didn't exist much before. I didn't prepare you for this question but I always like to ask for a book recommendation from my guests. What's a book that's made a big impact on you or that you end up recommending a lot?

I'm going to go with the one I finished because it's the best book I read is always the last book I read. I finished The Memo by Minda Harts, where she talks about her experiences in the workplace as a woman of color coming up and the challenges. It's a hard book to read, but it's encouraging about how to not just get your seat at the table, but bring other people along. Especially women, where we get our seat at the table and we're like, "No more, no one else can come up." Lending out that helping hand and lifting others because there's plenty of rooms. Life is not zero-sum. I highly recommend Minda's book. I love reading it. It's a little challenging, but I'd go pick it up.

What about you, Jon? 

Most people are going to find this hard to believe. Wendy and I are fortunate to attend a lot of conferences as well. We're speaking, sometimes we go with social media team members where we're tweeting and sharing content during keynotes and such. We attended an event in New York City HR Redefined where we heard Valorie Kondos Field, who is the retired UCLA gymnastics coach, seven-time National Championship Coach. Coached pretty much every name female gymnast that you can think of. She touched them and some work with them in some way. Her books called Life is Short, Don't Wait to Dance.

I know people probably are surprised that this middle-aged guy is talking about this gymnastics coach. She is one of the few people that almost made me cry when I heard her speak. An incredibly powerful woman that's got this amazing background. We had her on our show. She’s the one guest we've ever had to work through an agent to get and it was worth it because she gave us 40 minutes of her life. We asked her, we said, "What else are you up to?" She said, "I got off an interview with USA Today." We did explain to her, "We saw you speak at HR Redefined, we know you're probably surprised. Why do these two HR people want to talk to you?" We talked about how did she put a team together?

She's not a gymnast, she was a dancer, but she put together a team of specialists to help coach her students and her gymnast. Seven-time National Champion she's done all stuff and it's this powerful personality and speaker. She was friends with John Wooden, she told us about her relationship with him and the part of his life. That book is great. It's a different perspective on leadership. She is a bundle of energy that cannot be contained. If you get a chance to let her speak, go do it because she'll make you dance. She'll make you cry. I love her. I've told people that I don't care who's listening, that she was my favorite interview and it was sadly one of those shows that didn't get as many downloads because she's not an HR person. People were like, "Who is this lady?" The fact that this lady who again, retired as the preeminent coach in her field, left UCLA, came home, got on the phone fifteen minutes with us, apologize and said, "I'm sorry. I thought I'll do it here," whatever it was. She spent 40 minutes with us talking about these things, which she never had to do that. Since we share it, every once in a while she'll retweet or she'll comment. That's my book recommendation, Life is short, Don't Wait to Dance.

That's not what I would've expected from you. We got a comment on the LinkedIn feed from one of your fans, Renee Robson, who said, "I'm never surprised about anything you say, Jon." Since we talked about a book you're reading, one of the questions you always ask your guests is, what’s your all-time favorite movie? I'd love to know your answer. You asked me this in your show. Jon, what's your all-time favorite movie? 

[bctt tweet="Learn your business. You can have certifications or degrees, but if don’t know what your company is making, you’re not going to succeed." via="no"]

My all-time favorite movie is A Christmas Story. I'm a huge fan of Jean Shepherd and my uncle's name is Ralph, my uncle and my father of that vintage. My uncle had a Red Ryder BB gun. If you've never read the book, it's In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, which was a series of short stories that Jean Shepherd wrote for Playboy in the '60s and they put them together. That movie is based on the Christmas Story in the book, but some other things are pulled in. Jean Shepherd was an American treasure. The guy was an incredibly brilliant writer. I've read all the books that he put out. I saw it in a theater in 1983 and we watch it every year with my family at Christmas. It is a family tradition since 1985 when we had a VHS copy off of HBO. Hands down my favorite movie of all time.

What about you, Wendy?

I have two. The first one is also a Christmas movie, Christmas Vacation. It's a tradition in our house as well. After Thanksgiving, we watch Christmas Vacation and put up the Christmas tree. I can watch it every day. We say the lines together. It's a phenomenal show. The other one is The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston. I am a sucker for a big massive, overblown, overbudget, classic Bible story told with no biblical references. Not read it in history, but I adore the overacting from that show. That's another one where usually around Easter we'll watch it. I'll grab myself a glass of wine, put in the Blu-ray and I'll live tweet it.

Andy was the kicker. We live-tweeted the Star Wars Holiday Special from 1978, which if you are a Star Wars fan and you haven't seen it, don't subject yourself to that pain. People probably haven't forgiven us yet.

Advice From The Pros

Let's bring it back to HR and bring this home. For those reading in HR or talent development, who are looking to accelerate their career and be successful in that field, what's one more piece of advice you would give them? We'll start with you, Jon. 

Learn your business. I don't care if you know every law and every subset code. Those are important, don't get me wrong. Those are important to understand. You can have certifications, you can have degrees. All those things are wonderful but if you don't understand what widgets your company is making and you can't speak to that, you're not going to be successful. You're not going to get buy-in. You've got to understand whatever that product is. I tell the story because I can. I worked for a public utility. I worked with a lot of great practitioners. Some of them had never been to a power plant. I don't understand how you can work for a company that their primary business is generating electricity. How you can't go to a power plant and understand how the power is made because of how the power is made and distributed and the bills get paid is how you have a job. If you're trying particularly, as a recruiter, I had to be able to talk to engineers, operators and people. I never operated a single piece of power plant equipment in my life, but I spent enough time in him that I could talk to people and have a reasonable conversation about it. I'm a big fan of, whatever business it is, read up on it.

There's no dumb question. If you're in a session and somebody throws out an acronym, ask, "What is blue-haired banana boat driver mean?" It shows your level of interest and engagement. People are going to listen to you when you have to tell the rank and file subset. You're doing this and this. We're not the compliance police anymore. We shouldn't be, but you're not going to get past that if you don't understand the business and aren't able to explain it.

I run business simulations for a living and I teach people how the business works and I think that's the biggest challenge in HR and more HR professionals need to get to know how the business works. I agree. What about you, Wendy?

I'm also encouraging you to get out of the office but in this one, not just to learn about your business, but learn about your profession and not how you do it in your organization. Get out, network and learn from other people. Just because you've been doing something this way for however many years, it doesn't mean you're not doing it right, but it may be you're not doing it the best, most effective way. There are a lot of great processes and great things to learn out there. People are doing awesome stuff, but if you stay within your four walls of your organization, if you only network with people in your organization, you're not going to get any better. You're not going to do anything different and you're not going to help move your organization to the next level. You can't do that within your four walls. You have to learn from other people.

It's safe to assume that all three of us are a big fan of networking and it shows. In the spirit of networking, learning and people connecting, where is the best place for people to connect with you and follow you? We'll start with you, Wendy.

The best way is on my blog, MyDaileyJourney.com. All of my social is there. We always like to encourage people to join our Twitter chats. We are the 2nd and 4th Sunday of each month, 7:00 PM Eastern Time. Join us with the #HRSocialHour on Twitter and we have a lot of fun. Sometimes we're light, sometimes we might be a little bit heavier. It was all about talent acquisition and finding a new job. We partnered with Job Hunt Chat. We've got Centennial coming to the last one and we'll have more fun topics throughout the year. I’d love to see you all there.

What about you, Jon? 

HR Social Hour: Move out of the four walls of your organization. If you only network with people in your organization, you’re not going to get any better.

Find me at HRSocialHourPodcast.Podbean.com. You can find all the access to all my information there. You can find the show wherever you may be reading this. We're on all your major platforms and love for you to check us out and give it a shot.

You can connect with all of us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter. I'm also active on Instagram as well. Find me there. This has been awesome and to connect with both of you like-minded, podcasters in the HR space. It's fun we had a couple of other active HR, social media, people following us along and it was cool to see them. Jon and Wendy, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of your knowledge, wisdom and experience. This has been fantastic for me.

Thanks, Andy.

Take care. 

• Jon Thurmond
• Wendy Dailey
• The HR Social Hour Podcast
• Team Fishel
• Episode 103 – Andy Storch’s episode on The HR Social Hour Podcast
• Talent Development Think Tank
• iTunes – Talent Development Hot Seat
• LinkedIn – Andy Storch
• Instagram – Andy Storch
• Twitter – Andy Storch
• Josh Bersin
• Star Joes – Podcast
• Episode 99 – Previous episode of The HR Social Hour Podcast
• SHRM National Conference
• LinkedIn Talent Connect Conference
• The Memo
• Life is Short, Don't Wait to Dance
• In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash
• MyDaileyJourney.com
• Job Hunt Chat
• HRSocialHourPodcast.Podbean.com