Julie Kniseley - HR (and More) in a Minute
This week I visit with a friend from years past who has established a powerful and "snackable" platform ("HR in a Minute") for helping organizations navigate the unique people challenges - and that includes managers! Julie Kniseley steps into The Bosshole® Chronicles studio to share her insights and tips for elevating one's approach to coaching team members.
Links and Resources from the Episode:
Click here for Julie's LinkedIn profile
Click below for Julie's "HR in a Minute" samples:
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The Bosshole® Chronicles
“Julie Kniseley - HR (and More) in a Minute”
Original Publish Date: 11/28/2023.
Host: John Broer
John Broer: A warm welcome to all of our friends out there in the Bosshole Transformation Nation. This is your host, John Broer, welcoming you to another installment of the Bosshole Chronicles. So excited to have you here because this is a subject matter expert episode, and I am joined today by Julie Kniseley, and Julie is the President of James Moore HR Solutions. Julie brings over 30 years of experience in human resource management and she and her consulting team work with all kinds of organizations: startups, nonprofits, government entities, companies in construction, healthcare, manufacturing and so much more. She is also known for her video series HR in a Minute and, by the way, go to the show notes because we have posted three of her videos that are specifically geared to managers. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Communication from the University of Toledo (Go Rockets) and she is a member of the Society for Human Resource Management and a certified SHRM Senior Certified Professional.
I actually met Julie years ago when we both worked during summers in high school and college at a grocery store in Toledo, Ohio, and it's just so neat to see what she has done with her career in the world of human capital and helping people perform better. So let's get right to the episode. The Bosshole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, a talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode. Well, Julie, it is so good to have you on the Bosshole Chronicles. Welcome!
Julie Kniseley: Thank you, appreciate the invitation.
JB: Oh yeah, absolutely, and, as our listeners know, we go back a ways. It's just some wonderful days back in good old Toledo, Ohio, at the old grocery store where you know what. One of the things that we had mentioned before we hit record is that we had a nice little community of workers there and we'd love to do stuff outside of work in addition to work. But what I'm so intrigued by and, as our listeners also know, I started to see some of the work that you were doing, especially in your videos and, by the way, to our listeners, go into the show notes, because Julie has provided three really good snippets of her videos HR in a minute that she does through the HR practice at James Moore. But I really would love to hear, and our listeners would love to hear, what you're seeing out there. It's all about transforming Bossholes into capable and competent managers, but tell us what you've been experiencing and what you're seeing in the management ranks these days.
JK: Yeah, I think that you know we've been out there doing this a really long time and I think the old model is just not going to work anymore, you know, for a host of reasons. So if you have a hierarchical leadership structure, top down, everybody's got a manager who reports to another manager or director. You know that kind of structure is just not what the younger generations are working for, and as well you know we've been talking about 40, for 40 years how a flattened structure is better, right, right, a flattened structure is better. More team, more team development, team leadership, peer leadership is really, I think, where it's going, because one, there's not going to be enough people to have that same multi-level management structure that we used to have. I mean, I'm at the tail end of Boomer, I think you are too and so we've got how many years left before we're out of here and there's not enough people coming up behind. So, you know, I think I was reading a couple of articles about AI and the AI impact on business and how there is a lot of things more transactional type items that AI is going to be able to take over, and my hope is kind of, you know, a few jobs might disappear, but my hope is that as AI is more and more introduced into work, then that frees up more time for people to become better managers and crunch it and those types of things, because you know now we take somebody who and you were talking about this on one of your prior podcasts you take people who are really technically great at your job and you say congratulations, you're now a manager, but we give them no tools on what that means, we don't ask them if they actually want to do that and we don't take work away from them. So now they're doing the job they were doing before, but now they have to manage to and we complicate the heck out of the process as well. So I think that because these younger generations do not want to do that kind of stuff anymore, that's not the career path they see that they want to be on anymore. We're going to see more and more peer leadership team, team, groups, projects. You know, managing projects by team instead of individuals top down. You know. You know, you're seeing that the word managers going away, supervisors going away what's it being replaced with? Coach? Coach, yeah, yeah.
Kind of difference, but the but the meaning is so much different, and that is what the younger ones want to see. Also, they want to see more of their role, that they have a purpose. You know it's not coming in and getting a paycheck. They want a purpose, they want to understand the why. They want to understand why they're doing it, what the greater good is of what they're doing and and you know more about being an architect to their own direction and an architect to their future, versus just being the recipient of whatever career path their current company is on. I was in a couple of different sessions and we spent a lot of time talking about how they. There has to be a purpose driven mindset in the in the leadership group. Purpose driven mindset in the leadership group. You can't just talk about hit this number.
You know, it's not about revenue anymore. It's I mean, it's important, certainly, but it's not about profits, about purpose, not profits, it's purpose. So if you're managing people, then you'd be better be talking about the purpose behind what somebody does, not what the bottom line is at it.
JB: So let me ask you this, Julie, and and I, I love that, and I, we all know, or at least in our work, that if it doesn't, if it isn't modeled by senior leadership, by the executives, how can you hope that anybody else will care? So if you don't have a purpose, if you don't help people understand their why, they can't make that connection. You know, if I'm going to do this every if I'm coming into the office, if I have a hybrid arrangement, if I have a virtual arrangement, how do I see my role in my work in a useful and purposeful capacity for the organization and how am I growing too? But in your work so our listeners know you oversee the HR consulting practice for James Moore. You're working with all kinds of different organizations, thank you.
When you talk about that old model, I also refer to that as the command and control, because coming out of the war, post-war, heavy industrialized command and control was the way people were trained to manage and supervise and we, let's face it, you and I saw a lot of that, probably in our career. We'd love to see that taper off, but it continues to seem to show itself. How are you in your work, in your practice area, get away from command and control to more of trust and autonomy. How are you guiding clients and leaders in your organization, in organizations, to do that?
JK: Well, I mean honestly, it's being really upfront and honest about it, Because these days it's adapt or die. Adapt or die, you will not attract people, you will not hold on to them, you will not be able to grow your business and, if anything, you're going to go backwards. If you do not adapt to the changing work environment, like remote. Look at remote. In my existing company we were doing remote before COVID happened, but then now. So now you've got a lot of people used to remote and the good news is companies realize, hey, you know what remote can actually work under some circumstances.
For all of us it's obviously working in a hospital. That's not going to happen. But remote or flexibility has become an expectation. So if you are and it's not because of the work, but if you are still very stagnant and saying, well, no, everybody's got to be in for eight to five, you get an hour lunch and you did it. And no flexibility, none of this, and it's not really a job requirement. You're not going to get people. Your competition this is what I say to clients too your competition went national.
You know, your competition went national, when maybe before you were competing for talent within a 50 mile radius of your business. That's not the case anymore, because somebody sitting in the Midwest working for a California company making California money and be sitting in Iowa. So how do you compete with that? And the way you do is by providing that flexibility and a good experience for the employee while they're there. And if you're still in the hierarchical mindset it's not going to work, you're not going to attract to younger people, no matter what industry. And that's one thing I will say. We work across all different kinds of industries, from governments to private, to healthcare, manufacturing, construction, et cetera, et cetera, right small to large. But that holds true for absolutely every single one.
JB: Yeah, well, the adapt or die is, you know, that phrase has never been more true, and you remind me of a colleague. He's a owner of a company and he is working to hire a senior level position, and this is - they actually work regionally. So I think that the work that they do is more on the eastern half of the eastern half of the United States, but they're based in a particular area and he is trying to get the senior position and they are not in a really densely populated marketplace, so there aren't that many candidates locally and he wants somebody that's local and I said that's okay. You will be searching for a long time. If you adapt and start to think about something that's more blended or hybrid your choices are exponentially greater and he will not do it and I fear for the future.
I mean, it's not that they're going to go out of business, but they're going to be suboptimized and struggling and if they can't break free from that old model, candidates will see that and say I know, thank you, I have no interest in. You're rooted too much in that command and control. I need something different moving forward and they're going to have to do it or if not, it will be to their own demise.
JK: Exactly. I mean it's going to stay in one fashion or another, it just is. Yeah. I mean, nobody was expecting a COVID to happen, but some great things came out of it, and that's one of those, I think, to me, I think that's one of those things Is it companies realized that flexibility is not necessarily a bad thing. Right.
You know, being able to work from home, even if it's only occasionally or whatever, that's not necessarily a bad thing. You know, and that doesn't mean somebody's not doing their job because you're not watching them and you're not sitting next to them. That's one thing that we had a client who, at the beginning of COVID, asked if they could have cameras on their employees all day.
JB: So somebody actually asked that question.
JK: Have cameras on all their employees all day, make them keep their cameras on so that they know they were working, and I'm like that just sounds exhausting to me, and you're telling your employees you do not trust them. Yeah, have gut manage the problem.
If there's somebody, that's a problem that you suspect as you know, I got the second job on the side or is not where they think they're supposed to be, okay, manage the problem. But if we go back to management skills, right. Yes, yes, one of the things we don't teach people is how to actually communicate effectively when there is a problem, because we avoid it like the plague right. We avoid conflict like the plague. Right.
And that is the worst thing you can do as a manager, yes, either. Or a coach right. It's like, okay, be, be upfront and honest, and if you don't, then you're the one that's going to pay the price, as your team is going to pay the price for that, yeah. So I think that you know trust. Again, another one of your podcasts you talked about how you know trust is one of the most important things in leadership, and if you're putting your employee on a camera for eight, nine hours a day, that is the first thing out the window, right?
JB: So luckily, they didn't do it on some stage, advice from me which, basically, I was going to say thank goodness they asked you, because I mean talk about lawsuits and that's crazy, that's absolutely crazy. Right, yeah, the, that's a first. I can't believe anybody actually was really thinking about doing that, but thank you for sharing that with the Bosshole Transformation Nation. By the way, don't ever, you know, just to our listeners bad idea, bad idea. Thank goodness Julie stepped in there, but I want to get. I want to get back to something that you said.
Most of my career has been in a, in a remote office, and I've and I've had roles in an office too in my career. I've done both. I know what I prefer and I know where I work. Well, you know when you, when you talk about the idea of remote work and not trusting that they're getting the work done, I'm reminded of Dr. Todd Dewett. He's been on the podcast a couple of times and he's he's big in LinkedIn Learning, got a number of books but he talked about the difference between managing by outcome versus managing by observation.
Old model is managing by observation. I can see what you're doing and in reality, that's not true anyway, because people can screw off in the office even though they're there. You know in person, but it takes a new manager, a new supervisor coach, to be able to understand how do I manage by outcome and not have to hover over them all the time, and whatever hours they work, it really doesn't matter. It may matter in certain circumstances, sure, but that is a different mindset and requires a different kind of manager, and that's in. In the presentations I've been making over the last couple of years, reinventing the manager has been probably the topic that has resonated the most, with people going we have to do that and we will be right back.
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JB: Okay, let's get back to the program. I want to get back to the idea because I told you before we hit record I was going to ask you this question. Let's talk about remote work. Let's talk about in person hybrid and remote work. I think it was SHRM, in one of their recent articles that highlighted a study. I think KPMG did it. I may be wrong. I can go back and check that. A large number of CEOs predict that by 2026, we will primarily be back in the office. What do you think about that?
JK: I don't think I'm gonna agree with that. I think that that's what they want, yeah, but I think that people won't do it. People are going to seek out those opportunities, or that is not required. At the end of the day, I think we're gonna end up with some kind of hybrid model, yeah, yeah, where I know a couple of clients that have everybody's gotta be on on Wednesday, everybody's gotta come in on Wednesday because that's when they try to do all their team building. And again, I mean remote has all of these wonderful things. But boy is it harder to be a good coach, to get people, like it's simulated, into your culture or get them to buy into your culture. It's really hard in a remote situation to remember that they're out there sometimes.
JB: Right.
JK: Because if I, if I, if you're remote, and I'm remote and I, if I have some a question, I'm gonna seek you out. But I'm not necessarily going to set up a team or a Zoom call just because I wanted to see how you're doing. So you have to be so much more purposeful with the remote thing. So I do see that it's gonna end up being some kind of hybrid and again, CEOs might want that, they might require that. But I think, if I saw that same study or a different study, that I think there's that acknowledgement that it's gonna have to be, there's gonna have to be some flexibility. It won't be five days a week. The CEOs are saying, okay, but you gotta be in three days a week.
JB: Right, right okay well.
JK: So I kind of see the hybrid thing working at the existing company. That's kind of what we do. You basically can however, you want, you wanna come in all the time you wanna be remote all the time. You wanna have a hybrid situation. That's good. Now of course you know you can't generalize. There are some positions where that's not possible.
JB: Oh, certainly, is really manufacturing construction.
JK: You know you can't do a lot of this stuff.
JB: I can't build a building via Zoom, that's right. That's right.
JK: But can you provide flexibility? You know we have some clients that have gone to four-day work weeks. All right. Well, if you're a manufacturer, why does it matter that it's running five days a week? If somebody wants to work and you have a crew that wants to work, you know 10-hour days four days a week and have a three-day weekend in a manufacturing environment awesome, you're gonna get more people - right, right - than if you're doing the traditional five days a week. So to me I think it's more about flexibility than necessarily remote versus in.
JB: Yeah, and you and I are on the same page on that. I look at it with a little trepidation, simply because I've also seen some comments from CEOs that say, yeah, we made a sizable investment in real estate and offices, we want people there. It's like okay, now I'm really starting to see what's behind this. This is you've got empty spaces, and I totally get that. I realize that this has had a dramatic impact on the commercial office space market, but I do not believe we already know that when organizations have mandated that people come back and this happened as we were coming out of the pandemic they lost people. I mean, people absolutely refused. And I love the idea. And let's get back to the idea. When you talk about creativity and listening and being more receptive and understanding of what the emerging workforce needs, and let's face it, we're getting close to the exiting workforce from the workforce, not like, yeah, you know what I mean? The emerging workforce is one that wants that connection, they want that community, they want that purpose, they also want that flexibility. Well, I've heard of organizations that are saying you know what, instead of mandating Wednesday or Tuesdays and Thursdays in the office, you don't have to come in other than maybe once a month, and we're gonna bring everybody together for more of a social purpose, to connect, and maybe we will do some team sessions. We will get together and talk about some projects.
I believe that the onus now falls to leadership managers and supervisors, coaches, to be able to say how can I do this more creatively with the tools that I have. But I think, Julie, you bring up a great point and I've always said this I mean even when I started this work back in the 90s in working with managers and supervisors, you cannot pile on management responsibilities and not take away those individual contributor tasks. You just can't add on. If you really want to have your managers to do what they're supposed to do and that's develop other people assign, help them delegate what they were doing as an individual contributor to somebody else and let them invest in those people. I mean, part of it is a process change, but it absolutely has to start with a different state of mind from executives, and you work with all kinds of organizations, not only all kinds of organizations, but different sizes of organizations. Have you noticed anything relative to the size of organizations that are adapting better these days?
JK: Honestly, it has more to do with who's in the C-suite, who the owners are, and this is being frank. I think in some cases our generation is going to have to retire. The rest of us, Boomers, who are brought up the old school way you paid your dues, you worked on yours, you worked your nine to five or whatever it happens to be, I think, in some cases it's really hard for some people to change, because what happened to them? Well, I had to pay my dues, so everybody else should too. Right.
In some cases it's hard to change after a long time. Oh yeah, I think it's a, we're going to have to get some people to retire and move out and make way for people that have that different mindset, because that's something that they were seeking when they were starting their careers. Yeah, again, it's around the corner. I'm going to be 60. I don't have that much more time left. But others, it's just yeah, we're just going to have to nudge them out into retirement and make way for the new ones.
JB: In other words, you're talking about our kids. You're talking about our kids that have watched us work. I think you and I share a similar philosophy. I mean, I love the word. I'm blessed with work that I love to do. Yes, did we? You and I probably both had jobs that sucked and that we, but they were very, very beneficial in shaping who we've become today. But the work we get to do right now is, to me, the work that we get to do at Real Good Ventures is so incredibly fulfilling. Yes, and our kids have watched us just sort of immerse ourselves in work and they're going. Why would you do that? Well, I get that and you're right until we've sort of been put out to pasture. We haven't made room from them yet, but they're coming up behind us. That's a great point.
JK: Yeah, I have four kids and there's not one of them that wants a desk job or has a desk job. It's like the most horrifying thing for them, like, oh my gosh, I don't want to have to sit there all day like you do mom, I'm like appreciate it, you go do whatever makes you happy. But yeah, again, we came up at a different time and I think one of the things, too, is what's great about being around as long as we have is we can see the change.
We can and we're able to impact that, you're able to impact that knowledge and transfer the things that work well and don't work well and the things that do need to die off. And so I think it's such an interesting time, especially with the pandemic and everything, to have to kind of try to figure out OK, now what, how do?
We adapt now to what's just recently happened and people. Really, I think one thing the pandemic did is people re-evaluated their priorities right and that work until you die at your desk, other than maybe a very small percentage of the population, is not happening anymore. It's just not going to happen anymore. People like they need the balance. I don't like work-life balance. I think that has just gotten so overused. Agreed.
But one of somebody that I've worked with in the past said it's really more. The balance really is sometimes work comes first, sometimes home comes first. That's the balance. Sometimes you have to just shift your priorities, but sometimes the work does have to come first.
JB: It does. Yeah, and one of those legacies was hey, when you get here, leave your personal life at the door. That's unreasonable and it's irrational. It doesn't make sense. You get the whole person if we're going to really embrace that. But again, that's going to take a different kind of coach, a different kind of person to grow that, Julie, in the work that you're doing, one of the things that we talk about is, inadvertently, we can sort of move managers and supervisors into the Bosshole Zone because the only way for advancement is into management.
We have heard the term for generations climbing the corporate ladder. We have Real Good Ventures thinking it ought to look like a jungle gym. In other words, you have an opportunity, as it should have, an opportunity as an individual contributor to grow in that individual contributor role and never manage another person unless you really want to, or maybe you are trained to do that. How do you address that these days? Because that idea of the individual contributor pathway, building that out and in your expertise in the world of HR and human capital, that's foreign to some people and it's more foreign than I would think it would be. What are your thoughts on that?
JK: Well, interestingly enough. So I work in the public accounting industry right, I've been doing this for 15 years and public accounting is kind of a really different animal from an industry standpoint and standards, and our work hours and tax season is tax season. You got to work a lot during a tax season. But the old school public accounting mentality 20 years ago was up or out. Your career path was to keep moving up until you got to the partner level or you left. There was no way you could stop at any point, up or out. So you automatically were gonna be made a manager, whether you wanted to or not.
And there really has been such a shift in that industry and others that it's okay to stop where you want. It's okay to stop where you want. Maybe you wanna raise a family or do something else. You have a hobby that is really important to you. It's okay to decide where you want your career path to plateau. And if you wanna stay as an individual contributor, why do you wanna put somebody who doesn't wanna be a manager and make them a manager?
JB: Exactly.
JK: It's not a natural skill set for 99% of the population.
JB: Exactly yeah.
JK: Not, and if you're not going to invest money and time in how to train them on how to be an effective coach manager et cetera then why are you gonna do it?
I mean, you're taking somebody who doesn't wanna do it and it's gonna be a losing proposition. So again going back to kind of where we started, I think you're gonna see more peer leadership. I think one of the things that we can do a better job at, I mean all industries is giving them the opportunities to see what being a coach or a manager is at a much younger time, before they get the official title. There are opportunities to lead teams or if there's a project manager team, you can do that very young in your career. Remember when you used to have to do group projects in high school or college? The group project, oh it's just sometimes. You just really hated that because there was always two people that did all of the work.
But kind of the group project mentality somebody is gonna make somebody, somebody can lead, that that gives them that kind of initial opportunity amongst their peer group to be a leader. Yeah, to start to.
JB: Yeah, safely.
JK: Safely, correct? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly, and you also kind of get an idea of who really wants it or might be really good at it and might enjoy it, and who will not. Yes. And again, if we try to force it, people are just going to quit. Yeah, they're going to quit and go somewhere else.
JB: And if they don't quit, they're going to make everybody else miserable because they don't know how to grow and develop people. Yeah, and they haven't been equipped to do it, and they're maybe right. Maybe they don't even have a desire to do it. What I love about that, Julie, is not only is it safe, but that really speaks more to sort of a cultural norm of an organization of no harm, no foul. You know what? If this isn't for you, that's okay. Right, don't worry about it. But how often do we promote the wrong person into a management or supervisory role and they fail and just make it a little bit more hostile, and just making them an individual contributor becomes like a walk of shame, right, and that's more in shame on us if we do it.
JK: Shame on us, that's exactly right, yeah Right.
JB: That is on the organization, but ultimately it translates to a weakness or a deficit for the individual, and that's just not fair. Not fair at all, right.
Yeah, Julie, as we start to draw a close to our conversation today, and a reminder to our listeners go into the show notes, check out some of the HR in a minute Videos that Julie has provided, because they're great, and what I love about them, Julie, is they're simple, they're "snackable. What encouragement or guidance would you You've given us a number already, but give our managers that are listening in, our coaches. What encouragement would you give them as they start to think differently about their role?
JK: Find a good mentor.
JB: Okay.
JK: Find a good mentor, whether it's in your existing company or outside the company. Find somebody that you would want to work for. Find a good mentor, especially if you're trying to navigate as a new coach, new manager, new supervisor, you know, I mean, we in our lifetimes we've had bad bosses that we've learned a lot of lessons from, and then I've had amazing, amazing mentors which I think about every single week. There is a reason that I'm thinking about a mentor I had in 1986 because of a lesson I was taught then that I tried to impart on my team and also guide our clients with as well. So I think of anything.
You know you can't do it on your own and you know some people find the method of works right. Some people love reading the books, doing LinkedIn learning classes, going to webinars, going to sessions. That is not my personal preference for how I learn. I don't learn best like that. I learned best by having conversations, hearing the stories, hearing how they handle the situation. So that's why I kind of always go to find a mentor, whether it's official or not, somebody that you admire, that you think would be able to kind of help you navigate the first couple of years in that role so that you get on the right footing. You know bad habits are hard to break, so you want to start out the right way. And a really good mentor coaches would be my biggest gift, or would have been the biggest gift to me, and I did. I had really good ones a couple of years in after I got out of college, but, boy oh boy, you learn a lot from the ones that are not so great.
JB: Oh, sure you know, whenever we do an episode and somebody comes in and shares their Bosshole story, we always ask them to what degree did you contribute to this story, to this strained relationship? But what did you learn from this?
And inevitably, people say it was painful. Some of these stories are horrifying. I mean, they're awful and you'd think how can one human treat another human being like this? But it happens all the time, which is sad, which means we're never going to be out of work trying to, you know, transform people. Transform people from being Bossholes, but there is that learning that can take place. So that's powerful and actually I got to tell you it's been great to reconnect I'm.
So I mean congratulations on the success you have on the consulting practice that you're running at James Moore. It sounds like you're crushing it and for our listeners, the work that you do is a sizable number of your organizations don't have HR people in an HR role, so you can provide that. But you also have a sizable number of clients that do have HR people and you supplement that and really provide best practices, because we all know that sometimes and this is horrible, but HR becomes a little bit of an afterthought and it's like, well, let's get so and so to do it because they're available or why not? Your human capitalism is the most valuable part of your organization and it shouldn't be secondary to who gets to support it. But that's the kind of work you do, so I just think it's great and congratulations on your success.
JK: I appreciate it and this has been, this has been awesome. It went by so fast.
JB: I know. I know we'll have you back sometime. Come on when you write your- I'll tell you what, you write your book and then come on back and we'd love to have you here. But thanks everybody for listening and we'll see you next time on the Bosshole Chronicles.
We'd like to thank our guests today on the Bosshole Chronicles and if you have a Bosshole Chronicles story of your own, please email us at mystory@thebossholechroniclescom. Once again, mystory@thebossholechroniclescom. We'll see you again soon.