I'll Be Nicer If You'll Be Smarter ...

Unless you've been living under a rock, the economy is on fire in Alberta, Canada. As a matter of fact, guesstimates are that between 20,000 and 100,000 jobs will go unfilled in Alberta this year due to a shortage of labour.

Companies are competing with each other to attract anyone and everyone who wants to work. Although the minimum wage in Alberta is around $7 an hour, no employer in their right mind is offering that kind of money and expecting anyone to apply for the job. Fast food workers are getting between $10 and $14 an hour for dishing out burgers through a little window. There's a ton of money floating in the air in Alberta, and not enough people to grab all that cash.

Now before you pick up the family and move here, know this: there's virtually no place to live. Real estate and rents are at a premium and unless you already have a home here, you'll end up staying in shelters which are already overcrowded.

But that's not the point of my ramblings. So let's get to that point, shall we?

With so many jobs and so few people to fill the jobs, a couple of things are happening right now.

1. We're dipping way down into the labour pool to depths never before dipped and pulling just about any warm body we can to fill a position that needs not much more than a warm body. Let me tell you, that makes it difficult these days to find exceptional customer service. Companies are spending less time on the finer points of customer service and instead concentrating more on getting their new hires up to speed on the goods and services the company offers. Their new hires know much about their companies but not much about how to deliver exceptional service.
2. Because their is stiff competition in the marketplace, managers are having to change their ways of how they deal with employees, especially in sub-par performance situations. The slightest little feeling of not being valued (interchangeable with "having their butt kissed"), any new hire can quit in the morning and can be working somewhere else in the afternoon. One wrong word from a manager, and the company is looking for another new employee and going through the whole training issue all over again.

This got me to thinking.

Whatever you've learned as a manager in past is "out the window" today. You can no longer be demanding, you can't insult your people in reviewing job performance and you sure can't threaten them with a firing. They'll just flip you off walk out on you right then and there.

The new manager in a hot economy has to have people skills. Without people skills and especially soft-skills training, your manager is going to see net revenues decline within their companies as they drive up training expenses by not being smart enough to realize that you can no longer manage by fear.

The new manager has to be diplomatic, encouraging and above all, patient. If that's not you, then be prepared to be spending every waking moment of your day putting out fires of new hires.

Now is the best time to bring managers into the classrooms and teach them how to be people first, managers second. Personal development training is crucial right now for both managers and new hires.

The problems is not with job-skills in a hot economy. The problem is with people skills. You'll never succeed at Time-Management training to a new hire if they didn't have enough self-discipline to go out and look for a job before. Sales training is a waste of time if your people lack self-confidence. Team-building is pointless if your people are only here because of the money they can make.

What the market needs right now is personal development, personal leadership and personal accountability training. Until you convince your people that every little thing they do or say has a consequence, they'll jump from job to job to job looking for someone to coddle them like mom did.

People, managers and workers, need a hard cold dose of reality that every single one of us is exactly where we planned to be or we'd be somewhere else. What we have in our lives is our doing. No one else is to blame. It's time for people to take ownership of their lives. Now if you tried to say that to your people you would likely have a mass-exodus. But guys like me can say it, in a way you can't say it and probably way better than you could ever think of saying it, and your people, including your managers, will get it. And you'll have a better bottom-line because of it.

Think about that today. How much more of both money and people would you like to keep right now?