Surely I Must Have Misunderstood You

The other day, driving around town with the radio on, I heard a DJ repeatedly using the word "effort" as a verb. "He's efforting to get a job there," said the DJ, and followed up a few moments later with, "Well, I've been efforting to -" This was the point where my efforts to change the station bore fruit as, furiousing mutterly to myself, I vocabularied the tuner clean into next week. What is with people?

Granted, you can't expect much from radio DJ's - who are really just salespeople to begin with, and whose only useful function is performed by computer program anyway. (Until recently I would have added, "Except of course for KUT.")

What I don't understand is why, particularly in a language as highly nuanced and rich in vocabulary as English is, these people feel the need to create new terms for concepts which were already so amply represented. Then again, I'm still haunted by the memory of the motivational speaker who claimed that "try" was the most subversive word in the English language, that we should expunge it altogether from our daily speech, and that (as you may recall - though apparently the marketing types at Avis never caught on) when Avis adopted the motto "We try harder," their sales immediately plummeted by some ridiculously implausible percentage.

Or they came out of a slump and finally started to show a profit. Whatever.

Of course, salespeople (and by extension, radio DJs) were designed by evolution to listen uncritically to motivational speakers. Because thinking for yourself? That would be efforting!

They Won't Stop

New employee orientation doesn't typically cover the issue of whether you should bring wild animals to the workplace.

Now that I think about it, this might make a certain degree of sense - at least vis-a-vis some divisions of my current employer, where many of the staff might be classified as wild animals - if not for their qualities of ferocity, or survivalism, or adaptation to the world around them, then at least for their smell.

I still should probably have known better than to bring a turtle to work on Monday.

But it had to be done. There he was (or she!), barely larger than a quarter, tucked tightly into himself in the middle of a 20-foot-wide gravel swath of downtown hike-and-bike. To my left, a 10-foot drop led to the lake; to my right, meticulously mowed lawns spread out as far as the eye could see - or to Cesar Chavez, which is over the top of the slope, so it's pretty much the same thing. Clearly this was no place for a naive reptile. So I brought him back to my office.

Not having an aquarium, and feeling somewhat uncertain of my coworkers' reaction were I to co-opt the office coffeemaker carafe for this purpose, I put the little guy in a potted aloe on my desk. The aloe is the only plant in a large, wide pot, the sides of which rise more than four inches from the surface of the soil. It seemed like a safe enough place to put a baby turtle. I gave him some iceberg lettuce, sprinkled with fish flakes, and left for the day.

But yesterday morning? No turtle. I freaked. Within five minutes, everyone in my office knew that a turtle was running amok in cubicle-land, and it goes without saying that everyone knew who was responsible. We had a staff meeting yesterday from 8:30-11; and while not on the agenda, the issue of unrestrained reptiles took up a good chunk of the proceedings.

The funny thing is, after our staff meeting was over and I got back to my desk, the turtle was right there in the potted plant where I'd left him (or her). It turns out turtles burrow. Who knew?! Well, I told everyone of course, and I took the turtle home yesterday, and gave him to a turtle-aquarium-keeping friend today. No one is the worse for wear. Only my professional reputation is slightly besmirched, though not really in a bad way - only an odd, vaguely age-inappropriate one - as if I had a smiley "Good Job!" star affixed to my business card.

New employee orientation did not prepare me for this at all.

So it's fortuitous that I received an email today from a speaker mill with whom my boss and I have worked, in the past, to hire trainers for our big annual conference. Apparently "new employee orientation" is out. You know how brown is the new black, and 50 is the new 30, and chopped liver is the new caviar? Well, the latest and greatest thing in corporate new-employee training, my friends, is "onboarding."

Since you're not subversive pinko commie scum, I'm sure that term didn't immediately bring associations of "waterboarding" to mind, much less cause you to reflect that - though not at all inhumane when you consider the depths to which any organization's treatment of its subject creatures has been known to descend - new employee orientation cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered pleasant; and that while new employees from the dawn of time have been aware of this, new employers have been historically (not to mention indulgently) regarded as being innocently, if perhaps rather obliviously, unaware of this fact, which is somewhat endearing if not necessarily prone to engender respect; and that therefore it is insensitive at best, and sadistic at worst, for management organizations to adopt a term so immediately evocative of the most shameful violations of human rights in the civilized world during the last 50 years at least.

Subclauses get me excited sometimes. Corporate marketing people are complete morons, that's all I'm trying to say here.

Read for yourself:

Start your new employees off on the right track so they stay around for the long haul.

You invest tons of time and money recruiting and hiring the best. Why waste it all on ineffective orientation practices? Keep your new employees around for the long haul by giving them the best start possible — a personalized onboarding experience.

What's wrong with just letting your new employees - the best and brightest minds available, apparently - pick up the corporate culture and expectations from their supervisors and coworkers? Unless there's something wrong with the existing corporate culture. Do you have something to hide? More importantly, do you actually believe that what you present to new employees during training will override their own observations of the way things are done at your organization? Hah!

Onboarding is a new approach to employee orientation that goes beyond just settling your employees in. It engages, integrates, and gets your new hires productive quicker — directly improving retention rates and the overall success of your organization.

You know, there are lots of turtles around the hike-and-bike trail. There are also squirrels, grackles, mourning doves, the occasional snake, pigeons, and a naked cyclist.

Guess what I'm keeping in my potted aloe next?

Be What You're Like

Do you ever feel that you're doomed to miss your calling in life because your basic nature is fundamentally in contradiction to the things you're good at?

For example, I've often felt that my aptitude in the man department makes me a prime candidate for the convent; yet I'm not religious. It's sort of a shame really.

Today I had so much fun conducting my training class that I was wondering if I could make it as a professional speaker. But there's just no way: feel-good corporate motivational tripe makes me want to yarf. I could never pull it off with a straight face.

The only problem really with being a great opera singer is that it's a lot of work, and you often have to sing Verdi, which I really don't like very much - not to mention ear-splitting new works by such internationally renowned fruit bats as Phillip Glass.

I'd be a famous writer, but...

I do get to conduct another training session tomorrow. I wish you could come sit in. I could try being extra-perky and saying "absolutely" a lot. Maybe I'll make a motivational speaker one day after all.

Day Three: You Learn Something Every Day

Day Three was yesterday, I'm late, sorry. Been kinda busy.

Okay, so yesterday we started off with a motivational speaker/trainer. I liked her better than last year's, and I definitely liked her WAY better than Mr. Wave My Hand in Front of Your Face Oh Look You're Inexplicably Weakened Now I Can Push Your Arm Down for No Readily Apparent Purpose (who, based on a couple of quick interactions with him on the phone when he called for my boss and he assumed I was "just" the secretary, is also a prick) but let's face it, a motivational speaker is a motivational speaker.

There are four types of people in the world, and if you're one of these, you may have learned to ACT like another one some of the time, but you are by nature and in your comfort zone one of these only:

A Director: Speaks in nouns and action verbs. Makes decisions and gets things done. Focused on the ends.

A Socializer: All about the good times, a dreamer, dynamic, vain, self-centered, fun, talkative.

A Relater: Cares about peace and harmony above all else, will do whatever it takes to negotiate a happy balance among others.

A Thinker: Analytical and detail-oriented, goes nuts if things are out of place or don't go according to plan.

Naturally, the problem with putting people in boxes (even if you do remember to poke plenty of air holes) is that they don't necessarily fit into just one - though, when questioned on it, the speaker insisted everyone does. There are four of us here in my group, as it happens, and a couple of the others eagerly seized on the notion that, hey, we've got one of each! A Director (my overall boss, whom I'd classify as a Socializer, if I had to pick), a Thinker (my immediate boss - good enough, but she's nowhere near as inflexible or as uncomfortable with shifting situations as the speaker was saying), a Socializer (me) and a Relater (our section admin). I tried explaining that I'm actually very shy, but nobody would believe me.

Ah well, it'll all blow over.

After that we were back on the bus for tours, as well as our group photo. Have you ever organized a group photo of 90 people? I bet you think it can't be done within 20 minutes. Well, I did it. (I guess maybe the photographer helped.) I was down there with the group screaming at everyone to divide up by height and maneuver everyone into position (the PA system on my bus doesn't work, so I've done a lot of screaming the last few days) and damned if we didn't get that shot done and everyone on their way back to the buses in 10 minutes flat.

I rock.

We also have to do a big cheer for our bus (the green bus again!) and last night, after all the touring was done, I actually had everybody up to my room to practice. This didn't look suspicious at all. First I had to run down to the hospitality suite, where one of our sponsors poured me a glass of wine. "Here," he told me, "this is a really nice red, give this a try.

"Oh thank you," I said as my glass was filled, "I have to go take care of something. Excuse me." On my way out I caught Kevin, the photographer, who's on my bus but was taking care of other duties during our tours this afternoon, so he didn't know about our rehearsal plans. "Hey, could you come with me for a bit? I need help with something," I told him, and led him off to my room.

Hotel rooms are not all that big, it turns out, when you get twenty excited, giggling people into them. We practiced our cheer several times, occasionally shushing each other lest someone from one of the other, lesser buses might be next door. They must not hear it yet. They must not know how badly their little blue and yellow butts are going to get kicked later today.

And then my phone rang. General panic ensued, but everyone shushed down into subsided giggling and I answered it calmly. "Hello?"

"Oh, hi, Elizabeth," said an unfamiliar man's voice, "Is Kevin in your room by any chance?"

Uh-oh. "Um," I said. "I don't, um. Who's calling, please?"

It was someone I don't know, an industry person in town for the conference. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and gazed frantically at Kevin. "It's [so-and-so]," I whispered, "what do I do?"

"I know him, I know what he needs," said Kevin, "I'll talk to him." So I handed over the phone.

That's my old reputation over and done with, and a whole new one just starting out. Hopefully I can 'splain everything tomorrow after our big debut.

Although when you get down to it, why should I care? I'm a Socializer!

Unmotivated

My boss and I went down to San Antonio today for a speaker/trainer showcase: a half-day sampler of motivational speakers broken down into easily digestible, ten-minute chunks.

I mean, the presentations were broken down into ten-minute chunks. The speakers themselves seemed to be more or less physically intact, and none of them looked particularly appetizing anyway.

One of the interesting things about this format is that, when you have to go through them every ten minutes, the gimmicks speakers use to engage and involve their audience really stand out. Or stand up, as the case may be. Stand up, hold out your arms, find out a random fact about someone else in the audience, make a circle with your thumb and forefinger and put it on your chin (as the speaker places his on his cheek and half the audience does what he does instead of what he says - hilarity and enlightenment ensue), close your eyes, take three deep breaths, point in different directions, now point in the same direction, turn around, sit down, stand up, sit down, fight! fight! fight!

Conflict resolution is a popular topic for corporate trainers. It's a great topic to train on, because you can deliver inspiring platitudes all day without ever actually solving any problems, and therefore rendering your further services unnecessary.

My favorite speaker today talked about negotiation. "There are four possible outcomes to a negotiation," he said. "One, you could get everything you want and the other person could get nothing. But how often does that happen? Two, the other person could get everything they want, and you get nothing. Three, you could compromise; but if you do, how do you feel? That's right. Compromised. Or four, you can go for the win-win."

One, win-win is a myth. There's always compromise; in a relationship, you may take turns getting your own way, or you may know and care about one another enough to give on the things that matter to the other person, and stand stronger on the things that matter to you. Personally, I think that's as close enough to win-win as makes no difference. I once took a negotiation-skills class where we divided into two groups fighting over an orange crop, each needing it desperately for our own particular purpose. Of course, once the exercise was over and the groups revealed their instructions to each other, it turned out one group only needed the fruit, while the other only needed the rind. So there really never had to be any conflict at all, and if the students had only been smart enough, we'd have worked together and each of us would have gotten everything we needed for half the price we had been prepared to pay if the other guy got shut out, you see? But come on - is life ever really like that?

Two, he was wrong. The four possible outcomes are win-lose (both of his first two options were examples of that one), compromise, win-win, or lose-lose. He forgot that last one completely, but sometimes I suspect that's what happens most of all: you can't reach an agreement, your pride gets in the way, you need appeasement, the other party feels equally hurt and angry, everything goes horribly wrong, and finally, talks break down completely, nobody gets anything they want (not even what they started out with), and hope is lost forever.

Another favorite gimmick of motivational speakers is the random, unsubstantiated statistic. Did you know that 68% of customers who don't return aren't staying away because of bad customer service - they stay away because of indifferent customer service? Maybe there's a study somewhere that backs this up, but the speaker didn't cite it. I've been leery of statistics like this ever since a trainer I had to listen to in 2001, to back up his assertion that we all needed to expunge the word "try" from our vocabularies ("Don't try... Do!"), claimed that ever since Avis adopted the motto "We Try Harder," their sales had dropped by 75%.

This is obviously rampant bullshit, because of course if there were any truth to that claim, Avis would have gone out and found them a new motto, toot sweet - something less offensive to the car-renting public, like maybe "Avis: We Kick Puppies."

Oh well. At least it got me out of the office all day.

Gianni the Be-Gagger

There's a motivational video one of our staff members is interested in showing at a training session this October.

Yeah, ugh already, but it's worse than that. At work today, I watched a short video "inspired" by the actual video, which will cost you about 900 smackeroos on DVD - that's without the workbooks, profound moral extractions, and other training materials that are supposed to come with it. And actually the training materials only add another hundred bucks or so. Doesn't this imply that the makers of the video are afraid you'll figure it out for yourself? Even given the extremely high likelihood that you work in HR?! So you have to shell out a small fortune for it. You can also rent it for somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 bucks.

Okay, so I didn't watch the actual video, but I did sit and watch the awful, treacle-drenched, feel-good swill that was "inspired" by it. You can, too!

Maybe the questions raised by this short film are answered in the full version, but if you're like me, you'll probably have some trouble not blurting out "bullshit!" at several points during the movie. To name just a couple, I find it unlikely that grocery store executives shell out for high-profile motivational speakers to come in and energize their largely teenaged, part-time floor staff. And what are these little "quotes" that Gianni is giving out to his customers? Are we supposed to believe they're simultaneously inspirational and meaningful to everyone who receives them, without ever being offensive to anyone? Do they all work with the phrase "in bed" tacked onto the end? Also, the premise that customers will give up hours out of their day to stand in a longer line, and even make extra, unnecessary trips to the grocery store, just in order to get a slip of paper with some ill-thought-out cliche scrawled across it strikes me as a motivational speaker's masturbation fantasy. The notion that corporate management offices are encouraging their most temporary personnel to "be creative" and add their own "signature" to the way they do their jobs is perhaps the most far-fetched of all, but I'm not sure; it's got some pretty stiff competition (so to speak).

Well, we have until October to figure it out. As Voltaire says, "By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property." In bed!