{"id":1893,"date":"2011-09-20T01:00:27","date_gmt":"2011-09-20T09:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1893"},"modified":"2011-09-22T09:40:03","modified_gmt":"2011-09-22T17:40:03","slug":"the-pain-threshold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1893","title":{"rendered":"The Pain Threshold"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lance Armstrong was a US National Champion and a World Champion long before he ever won seven (eight?) Tours de France.\u00a0 The man was always known in cycling circles as the next big gun in US cycling.\u00a0 In one race (San Diego I think), we were riding a horrifically fast pace, many of us in the pack heckling Lance often simply because he was a captive audience, when he just decided to ride away from us for a while to get a workout in.\u00a0 Severely humbling.\u00a0 He was known as a big, strong guy.\u00a0 The guy who won that world championship was a guy who could sprint, a guy who had incredible short term bursts of power.\u00a0 But he was never going to win the Tour de France.\u00a0 That was, until, he got cancer.\u00a0 Cancer did a couple things to him.\u00a0 First, he lost a crapload (technical term) of weight and it transformed him into a leaner version of himself, but tapping into the same level of power that could now get him of 5 mountain passes in the Alps instead of just the last 500 meters of a race at 50mph.\u00a0 Secondly, it taught him to experience pain in a way that he would never experience again.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ll be honest, these days when I\u2019m on the bike, the barrier for me is not usually my legs or my lungs.\u00a0 If I have a few rides under my belt, I\u2019m really pretty good.\u00a0 The problem is all mental.\u00a0 I\u2019m not in college anymore and I really don\u2019t like pain.\u00a0 There are times I\u2019ll be doing an extended climb and one of my riding buddies will \u201cattack\u201d and while I often could follow, something in the back of my head says, \u201cnah.\u201d\u00a0 I could follow the lead, but I know it will be painful.<\/p>\n<p>Transforming HR is really, really hard work.\u00a0 For much of the readership, it\u2019s not just hard work for us, it\u2019s even harder work for the employees we would deploy to the effort.\u00a0 When our execs chose to switch out the payroll system, guess who gets to work long hours in December prior to a January 1 go-live?\u00a0 We deal with a lot of pain to implement systems, both in effort as well as cash, and the ROI is not always financially obvious, but to get to the top of that hill, it\u2019s something we have to commit to, and something our staffs need to commit to.<\/p>\n<p>In understanding the work behind HR transformation, there are a few things to remember:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>People actually don\u2019t like change.\u00a0 When you change their processes, they will resist doing something different than what they have done from years.\u00a0 It\u2019s not that they don\u2019t want to support better processes, but a certain amount of fear arises when they are unsure how well they will perform in the new environment.<\/li>\n<li>People resist making others change.\u00a0 HR transformation is just that \u2013 we are changing ourselves.\u00a0 But teams often protect people internally realizing that friends will lose jobs, or be forced to make unwanted shifts and compromises.<\/li>\n<li>We get to do multiple jobs for a significant amount of time.\u00a0 Not only are we going to have real jobs to do, but there will be project roles as well.\u00a0 I don\u2019t care if you bring an army from one of the large consulting firms, the internal team is going to be burdened with more work.<\/li>\n<li>Outsourcing done right is hard.\u00a0 Organizations don\u2019t remember the depth of retained organizations that are needed, SLA\u2019s need to be formulated to be specific and measurable, and internal staff are resistant to seeing their jobs performed differently than how they did them themselves.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Often when we deploy and new system that has the opportunity to be transformational, we focus too much on the external.\u00a0 We train managers, communicate to employees, figure out who the main audiences are that we need to convert.\u00a0 We assume that our own people are already bought in.\u00a0 All I\u2019m saying, is we can spend some time to look internally.\u00a0 Give them some love and attention.\u00a0 Encourage and motivate them.\u00a0 Otherwise you\u2019ve got a Justin at the top of the hill looking down, wondering where the hell I am and why I didn\u2019t make it up there with you.\u00a0 It was just too much pain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lance Armstrong was a US National Champion and a World Champion long before he ever won seven (eight?) Tours de France.\u00a0 The man was always known in cycling circles as the next big gun in US cycling.\u00a0 In one race&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1900,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,28,10,8,2,34],"tags":[453,437,325],"class_list":["post-1893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-change-management","category-communications","category-engagement","category-strategies","category-hr-technology","category-implementation","tag-change-management","tag-engagement","tag-pain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1893"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1913,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1893\/revisions\/1913"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}