1. Accolades, etc… - YourHRGuy.com was featured on BSchool.com’s 50 Top HR Blogs. Take that Fistful of Talent’s Honorable Mention! I was also featured not once but twice on Brazen Careerist’s Top 100 articles.
2. Gen Y Bloggers Unite - Speaking of Brazen Careerist, they just launched a new version of the site that allows you to see neat-o profiles of your favorite bloggers (and me) and apparently some other stuff too. Check it.
3. Ooooh, Diss - InterviewBest, a presentation tool for people looking for a job, got absolutely thrashed in this Business Week blog (and also features yours truly). I am glad to know I am not the only person who would be irritated by someone giving me a 20 minute planned pitch instead of coming in better prepared for an interview.
4. And In Failing Alma Mater News… - Washington State University is playing University of Washington in their annual football rivalry game (creatively called the Apple Cup). The problem? The teams are a combined 1-20. The winner gets the Apple Cup trophy along with knowing they weren’t the absolute worst team ever (just very, very close)
5. A Different Gift? - Regular commenter and awesome HR blogger Chris Ferdinandi of Manager’s Sandbox has a business that will set photos of your choice to music of your choice and put it on a handy DVD. Great for relatives who think you never visit enough!
6. Bailout For HR Vendors - Cash flow may be tight in the HR vendor world with the economy riding the roller coaster like a guy with a Six Flags annual pass. Have no fear, HR Marketer is here with some help for vendors.
7. Think Twitter is Useless? - Not if you follow (the real) Shaquille O’Neal. You can check the backstory here. For the most part, it is exactly what you’d expect from him. You can also follow me if you’re already on there.
8. From The Kennedy Recruiting Conference - Two great posts from Jon Ingham (including a picture!) and one really fantastic post from Laurie Ruettimann of what came out of their trip to Florida. Examining the photographic evidence, it didn’t look like a tan.
9. Spreading the Traffic Love - Awesome dude Chuck Westbrook thought of a great idea to get people to read under-appreciated and under-read (but really great) blogs: get a group of people to commit to broadening their blog reading by one blog every couple of weeks. He blogged and tweeted about it and it gained steam. His first two bloggers FeverBee and Zoe and are fantastic.

And finally, the lovely Maren Hogan wants me to tell you seven things you don’t know about me already. Here’s the list:

1. I am paranoid and particular about my milk. I don’t like my milk in paper cartons and I don’t like milk that has been in my fridge for more than a couple of days.
2. I don’t like anti-bacterial soaps. I also prefer to not get vaccinated for diseases that won’t unduly harm me. My body can deal with it.
3. I really enjoy spelunking (exploring caves). There are many areas around here that have intact lava tubes (many unmarked).
4. My favorite player on the Portland Trail Blazers right now is Travis Outlaw. He isn’t the best player but he is fun to watch and he is an even better interview.
5. What’s for dessert? Tillamook Ice Cream, specifically their Chocolate Peanut Butter.
6. I just found out that there is a storm on the planet Neptune that shares the name of my cat (Scooter).
7. I schedule almost all of my posts but I always choose consistent times to post them so it doesn’t look like I am as schedule crazy as I actually am.

As for the tagging portion, you can just tell me a couple things I don’t know about you in the comments if you like. Have a great Friday!

I was filling up my water bottle one day at work when I saw a business card pinned up on the bulletin board above me. It was for a photographer, who happened to work for my company, and did some professional photography on the side. So I headed back to my desk and decided to look up her name in our company email list. I emailed her and asked her if she had some time to come photograph my family. We emailed back and forth a couple of times, and then I decided that I should probably meet with her to go over a couple of things. I emailed her, and asked where her desk was, “It’s two cubes away from yours.” What? Ok, I was feeling pretty lame at this point. Thankfully, she initially thought I was in another wing of the building as well, so we both had a good laugh over it.

But this little instance made me ask the question, “How are we building community in our workplace, when we aren’t talking directly to one another?” Now I must preface my email encounter with a little personal background. First of all, I just started at my company, QualitySmith, this fall, so it’s totally understandable that I wouldn’t know who everyone is and where they sit. Second of all, I only work two days a week, which slows down the process of getting to know the people I work with.

My primary job is raising my two little boys, and before coming to work for my company, I had been out of the work world for five years. Boy, how things have changed. Remember when you first came across email and it was so great to have an instant response from someone? Well, at QualitySmith they have something even faster than email. It’s called Jabber, and everyone has it on their computer. You can send someone an instant message right to their computer. And you know they will respond instantly because the message system indicates if they are at their desk or not. I have chatted with people that I have no idea who they are. Sometimes it can be a little odd, but it is always incredibly efficient.

My company is also unique because we are an online marketing company. So much of what we do involves talking to customers across the country, or making sure our website is at the top of the list when someone types in something like ‘HVAC systems’ into Google. Very little interaction is needed with fellow employees to create a high-functioning company.

QualitySmith is very aware that it would be easy for some of their employees to come to work and stay in their cube all day long before heading home. Since I have been here, though, I have been impressed with how my company has made an effort to create a culture of its own. They do this by taking a simple concept and using it with the purpose of connecting employees and building community. For example, shortly after I arrived here, the company held a “Get to Work Green Day.” Employees were encouraged to carpool, walk, bike, or take public transportation to get to work for one day. One couldn’t help but feel bonded to fellow employees as we rolled in to work together on our bikes. It also helped that we were featured on the front page of our local paper. It made us feel like we had done something together to help contribute to a greener environment, thus connecting us as a team.

I couldn’t possible mention all of the things my company has done to get employees out of their cubes to connect with one another, but some of my favorites, so far, are the brown bag lunches where a guest speaker is brought in. The most recent speaker was from a local food bank. Its needs are dire, and we, as a company, are all bringing donations as a result. Another favorite was a day spent volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. We play an integral part in the construction industry as an online marketing company, but we don’t ever come close to picking up a hammer. It was rewarding to be a part of building someone’s home, and fun to get a little dirty in the process.

We all spend a lot of our time at our desks, including me. But in this age of email and instant Jabber, it’s important to not forget that people need to build community wherever they are. It doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. It doesn’t require fancy cocktail parties or extreme outdoor adventures, either. Building community at your workplace can be done by taking a simple concept that people are interested in, and sharing it with everyone.

I could go on. So when I heard that CitiGroup will be laying off 53,000 people by the end of Q1 2009, I didn’t feel like writing about it because other layoffs have occurred and more will continue to happen. It is exhausting.

That’s when I thought it might be a good catalyst for something that has been bugging me for a long time. It is something that both businesses and employees could learn from too. And it has something to do with following the crowd.

Businesses And The “Me Too!” Argument

When the economy is in the toilet like it is today, some businesses are legitimately impacted by the change and need to make adjustments to their workforce. CitiGroup may or may not be in this group but I am inclined to believe that they are impacted significantly. It is a really crummy situation in general but even best laid plans can get blasted by a bad economy.

There is another group of businesses that piggy back on a bad economy to blame or fix things that were previously broken. For example:

• A company that was way overstaffed to begin with now uses the down economy as an excuse to cut or relocate staff that they should have done two years ago. By the way, two years ago, the employees they are letting go could have found a job much easier. Now? Not so much.
• Instead of dealing with temporary lower profitability, building employee goodwill and branding yourself as a stable company, CEO decides on cutting 5% of the workforce to hit his profitability bonus for that year. Short term gains for long term pain.
• An employer asks some of its employees if they will become 1099 employees and become responsible for their own health care, retirement and taxes. If things get worse (or you were just trying to get rid of them anyway), you can cut them and there won’t be a need to pay them severance.

A lack of leadership coupled with short term focus results in a business suffering much more if they would have sucked it up or taken responsibility for their mistakes earlier.

Employees Aren’t Much Better Than Employers

Unfortunately, the same crowd follow technique plagues employees as well. Some of the best people I know are sitting at their desks this Monday morning paralyzed because they don’t think they can get another job or start a business in this climate. Some of the things I hear:

• There is more competition than ever for the best positions at companies. Never mind that you still may be the best choice for the position.
• I can’t sell my spouse or my friends on changing jobs in this climate. Never mind that it doesn’t make much sense to stay at an unstable company in this climate.
• I couldn’t possibly find financing for my business idea with the economy going in the hole. Never mind that investors are always looking for better bets than whatever is failing currently.

Never mind any of that stuff. If everyone else is afraid of doing anything and they must have good reasons for doing so. The only guarantee is that you’ll never rise above what the crowd is doing if you always think the crowd is right.

A Call To Action

Ultimately, you have to find your own motivation to stop following the crowd. If you don’t, I can’t tell you how to deal with the uneasiness of jumping into the deep end when you can’t see beyond the surface. I can’t tell you how to deal with the spouse or your friends who want to tell you what you can’t do. I can’t tell you how to deal with a skeptical investor or feeling like you’re out in front of this market naked and cold.

I can’t tell you how to deal with any of that stuff because if you don’t have your own motivation, there is no advice that will help you succeed. And if you find your motivation, then you’ll find a way to deal with all of these things. Seems like a cop-out doesn’t it? Too bad! I can’t help you with this.

I know where my motivation is and it excites me. It also scares me. It is time to find yours and stop following the crowd.

No, they probably don’t know me terribly well. They might not consider me a friend. That’s fine with me though. But it is rewarding to see somebody that you saw some spark in turn out to be a great employee. It is quite another feeling when one of your candidates ends up as an unmitigated disaster.

One of my favorite movies is Snatch and one of the key scenes is an illegal boxing match where Mickey (Brad Pitt) is supposed to go down in the round and it looks like he is going to do it after getting knocked to the mat. As he is almost being tapped out, he jumps up and pulls his fist back to deliver the knockout blow. Then the action freezes. At that moment, you know everything will change for the characters in the movie. Mickey isn’t going down and it is going to be absolute hell for everyone.

That freeze frame is what How To Self-Destruct by Jason Seiden reminds me of: people who have come into our organization with such promise only to turn that around and self-destruct in a matter of days (or hours, or minutes). If you follow the instructions in this book, you are guaranteed to go down the path that has frustrated me for the past five years: boundless potential turned into an unhirable mess. It isn’t pretty.

On the other hand, if you are looking to completely avoid this fate, it may be a worthwhile book to pick up and learn from. Sometimes we can learn from ways people screw up and this book is stuffed full of that. I am hesitant to mention that there might even be some useful lessons tucked into the back of every chapter. The reason for my hesitation is that it gives seriously useful advice in an otherwise hilarious look at bombing at work.

This is the most entertaining book I’ve read in the career advice sector. Period. Most of these books are really crappy, filled with old, recycled advice or new advice that is just plain wrong. This book is filled with neither and that is extremely impressive.

I would encourage you to check out Jason’s website (where he is in the process of releasing chapters in his book so you can see what I mean) or follow Jason on Twitter if you are so inclined.

In discussing the results of the election, there has been a lot of talk about what’s next for the Republican party, what they did wrong and how they need to change. Much of this advice has come from Democratic strategists who, while being successful this round, don’t necessarily have the best interests of Republicans in mind.  There is an important HR and life lesson embedded here:

Don’t Let Your Opponents Define You

Your HR Guy loves listening to feedback from other business leaders. I believe this advice, taken with the proper amount of salt, can help you hone your skills to be a better leader. The problem is that people are naturally agenda driven so their agenda doesn’t necessarily have your best interests in mind. The “advice” I often get from business leaders is that they want me to do their job. Now if I listened to them and followed their advice, I might get on their good graces but that wouldn’t be beneficial to me (or them really). When a business leader wants me to do their job, I help them do their job better. I get what I want and they get what they need. It might not make them as happy as they would have dictated, it demonstrates my value in a positive way.

While I’d love to believe that I could hold hands and sing kumbaya with my peers (and that I really hate the “them vs. us” mentality), ultimately you have to do what is best for you and for your industry. That means you’re often ignoring, disregarding and even flying in the face of feedback you receive.

Learning What You Are (And What You Aren’t)

That doesn’t mean we don’t have anything to learn from other business leaders. Many of the articles that deal with people’s frustrations with HR and responses to my last post about it (both on my site and on Brazen Careerist) have valuable insight about where I could better demonstrate value. Both the original posts and some of the comments demonstrate that it is important that you listen to feedback but that you ultimately have to define the problem, your part in it, your value and the solution.

The HR department is not the Sales department.

Republicans are not Democrats.

Other people are not you.

But It Works Right Now So Who Cares?

When you let other people define your problems, your value and your solution, you always (and I mean ALWAYS) lose. Even when the end result is a good thing, you still lose because you had no part in it.

So how do you take charge of the process?

1. Stop listening to idiot allies. People in your industry, your party or your life have steered you wrong yet you are tempted to continue to listen to them because they are on your team. Find people who not only have a vested interest in your success but also have great ideas.
2. Find people who will be honest with you. Not only do you need someone who shares in your success, you need someone who can be completely honest with you. Without this, you will continue to rely on idiot allies to help you find a way.
3. Listen to your opponents (differently). When somebody gives you advice and they don’t have a vested interest in your success, listen closely. What assumptions do they make about your weaknesses? How could their “solutions” benefit them?
4. Understand your own value. If you don’t define and understand it, there is a 100% chance that nobody else will either. You have to understand how you can impact the world in a positive way in order to move forward.
5. Define the solution. Stop listening and waiting for someone else to come up with a great idea in your area of expertise. If people are continuing to give you advice in your area of expertise, you haven’t reached the solution yet. Hint: The “solution” is impossibly hard to achieve so you’ll be stuck on step five for a while.

This works in HR, politics and life (and it probably works in sports too!). What else would you add or change?

Work on your professional development.

This should be a no-brainer, but staying on top of current trends, technologies, and applications will make sure that you stay in the game.  When it comes time to make cutbacks, your value and place in the company will be based upon what you can do if they decide to keep you on board, so you must be more qualified than your co-workers.

Be a proactive problem solver.

Don’t wait for things to happen; work on your forecasting abilities.  If you see something that isn’t working, figure out a solution before it becomes a real problem.  Your benefit to the company will come across loud and clear—especially if it ends up helping the bottom line.

Think outside the box.

Though this may sound cliché, figuring out solutions to problems that aren’t currently being used in your place of employment may be just what your company needs to stay afloat.  This all goes back to being proactive.  Use your knowledge and skills and figure out new and innovative way to help your employer work around the obstacles they are currently facing.

Improve your communication.

If you are not one of the loudest voices in the room, whether in meetings or emails, let yourself be heard.  A fresh perspective from someone who usually lays low may just help you to get the recognition that you need and will establish your place as one of the people who’s trying to get things accomplished, rather than someone who’s watching things happen.

Offer your services.

More than likely, there are projects and other things around the office that are not getting done efficiently.  Speak with your supervisor or someone else in management and offer to help pick up some of the slack.  Do your best not to appear to be kissing up, but show a genuine concern for the welfare of the company and help get things done.  Management will greatly appreciate this and your dedication won’t go unnoticed.

This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of the medical transcriptionist. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com.

Is this the best way to pick a leader? If you subscribe to the maxim that leaders can only be as good as those who pick them, how does this perverted process help us make the best decision? And when a good portion of the population is always dissatisfied with the process and choices, how do we move forward?

HR and the Failure of Leadership

I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking: “This somehow relates to HR (or at least Lance thinks it does).”

Of course it relates to HR!

When I was reading a blog post on BNET about “Why Everyone Still Hates HR” (thanks to the many of you who sent it) and it references the source of many angry HR rants “Why We Hate HR“, I continue to think that these people get the HR department they deserve. It is truly a failure of leadership (from ownership on down) when HR departments don’t execute.

Oh yay. I am trying to blame someone else, right? Not my fault, right? Not exactly.

Why Do We Treat HR Differently?

Imagine if your sales department was constantly under-performing. Other departments complained about its performance and thought it was really an anchor on the company’s success. Not only that, imagine that the sales department was more concerned with marketing the product rather than selling it. So they went to trade shows and instead of trying to line up sales, they concerned themselves more with branding and putting on a positive image. In fact, when a potential customer came up and said they were interested in ordering, they said they couldn’t do that there.

Quick quiz: If you are in the C-suite overseeing that department, what do you do?

1. Meh, that’s just how sales is! You’ll just have to deal with the poor results.
2. Have a meeting to talk about what could be improved but never do anything about it.
3. Hold sales accountable but never tell them exactly what they are being held accountable for.
4. Fire the head of sales but replace them with a person that shares their philosophy.
5. You realize that your sales department is under or wrongly trained but it just isn’t in the budget to fix it.
6. You get new leadership, retrain your sales department to actually sell, let go those who are incapable and hold them accountable on their critical metrics.

What sort of insane person would not do number six? What if the response to the problems in sales were any of the first five? Could you imagine a company being in business for that long if nothing was ever done about the situation?

So why do we hate HR? If you are a rank and file employee, it is because their incompetence and organizational value is never addressed by the leaders of the company. If you are an executive, you hate HR because you have no idea how to fix it and make it better. And fixing it is fairly easy if you look at HR and expect the same things as you do from every other department.

The Scapegoat for Poor Leadership

It is sort of like how everyone bangs on the President or Congress but never changes their own behavior to fix the issues. If you consider that the American people are the owners of our country (and we are essentially shareholders), we become frustrated because we can’t figure out a way to get better leaders. So while there are a million posts stating things like “How did we get these choices?” or “I wish our Congress would do something for once” or “Why can’t our government be more pro-active?” there are very few posts on “How we can get better choices” or “How to get your Congressman to vote the way you want” or “How do we elect leaders that will see our problems before they hit us smack in the face?”

When you respond to attack ads and lies by doing the same thing at every election and never expecting much from the government because “that’s just how they are”, you aren’t much better than the executives who continue to allow HR to underperform and never expect more than what they delivered yesterday.

Sure, HR and our elected officials may be incompetent. Guess who picked them though? Guess who allows them to be incompetent?

My guess is that it is easier to pass blame than to take responsibility for your part.

When I was playing basketball, I used to say “stupid easy” all of the time. It refers to a task that should be so incredibly easy, you can do it in your sleep, after a few sips of an adult beverage … anything. A layup, a free throw and really any shot within 10 feet of the basket should be stupid easy if you’ve played basketball regularly. It is all about repetition and muscle memory.

That’s why when Nick McCormick sent me his book Lead Well and Prosper, I was so happy to see its size. It is a short 96 pages so I read through it twice. The first time I went through it, I did what I do for most of the books I read: focus on covering a lot of ground, skipping sections that are obvious or redundant. That took me about a half an hour. The next night, I read through it word for word and it took me about an hour.

The first thing you should know about this book is that it is a teaching book. The underlying message is that this book gives you advice on how to handle much of the tactical, day to day processes of being a manager. You may be tempted to note or highlight in the book. Please do! That’s what paper was made for after all.

The more implicit point is that good leadership is stupid easy. Anyone can learn the skills necessary to be a good leader in their organization. If a book that is 96 pages and holds your hand through the process doesn’t convince you that you too can be a good leader, I don’t know what will. This book could easily be used as a leadership training manual.

You’ll also notice that I am differentiating between good and great leadership. We have a shortage of good leaders in Corporate America. While our great leaders are often visionary, there is a dramatic drop off from that. I believe being a good leader is stupid easy and that people only need a few pieces, repetition and memory. It is a path that nearly anyone can take.

If I had to pull my favorite pieces of advice out of Nick’s book, I would take the following:

Listen - A skill that must be practiced, repeated and constantly checked. It isn’t difficult, it just takes time to form the habit.

Do What You Say You’ll Do - If you say you’re going to do something, execute. Don’t overbook yourself as it is better to say no at the front than when it is needed.

Embrace the Uncomfortable - Problem employee? Boss who throws everything out of whack? You have to be willing to take care of these things head on.

For the other 12, you can check out the book. We’ll also be doing a contest over at HRM Today to give away a few of these books too so stay tuned.

With the US elections just a week away, I’ve started to think more and more about how politics and the workplace intersect.

I’ve always been interested in the nuts and bolts of how companies operate. This is why, at its core, I chose HR over other business paths. People are the drivers of business they say so HR touches on people that drive the business from start to finish. The problem with having people drive your business is that they can often be incredibly unpredictable and can respond to the same stimulus in completely different ways. I am no psychologist but when it comes to how politics and the workplace interact with each other, I couldn’t think of a better case study. Consider these situations:

• The company CEO sends an e-mail to the entire organization encouraging them to vote (and mentioning his favorite).
• A president writes editorials in a newspaper in favor of one candidate.
• A union representative uses scare tactics in encouraging members to vote a certain way.
• A company’s executive team is intimately involved in lobbying in their industry.
• The company’s political action committee (PAC) communicates with employees via mailers and workplace fliers.
• Employees want to be moved away from each other after getting in a political argument.

All of these have happened to me in my professional life. This spans industries and job function (not all of these happened when I was in HR).

In the past, these things used to make me freeze up. I would ask myself a million questions: How are people going to react? Will the conversation continue past this instance? Will people start questioning my political beliefs if I don’t speak up? I would be cool in other workplace conflicts but when it came to politics, I would clam up. I honestly don’t know what my problem was.

I had to rethink the equation to really start to understand and embrace the role politics plays in the workplace. How’s that?

Politics directly impacts all aspects of the work environment. Consider the 40 hour work week or the tax incentives that mean the difference between being in business or shutting the doors? How about labor relations and pay equity? These are two major issues that will be impacted by the result of the elections in one week. The government giveth and the government taketh away. As long as the government impacts the workplace, unions, employees, executives and corporations all have a responsibility to be involved in the electoral process.

But how do you get involved in politics without employees feeling like you are big brother? There is a fine line to be walked

For Companies and Unions

• Focus on accommodating discussion rather than driving it - Maybe one candidate is offering a business incentive to your company. Maybe another is advocating stronger union rights. You want to talk about these issues to show that political decisions will also impact the business and union. Throwing something out there and letting people discuss it in an open environment can go a long way rather than intimidation or scare tactics.
• Make it time appropriate - Set aside a time and let people choose whether to participate or not. Some people may not be interested in discussing politics at work and that should be respected.
• Be sensitive to alternative views - People choose to vote for a variety of reasons and you should respect those reasons. If someone is voting for a candidate that you believe will kill your business or union, people should still know that they will be judged on their performance, not political views.

For Executives and Employees

• Don’t interrupt or dominate the conversation - If you are expecting to have a productive conversation about politics, you have to be able to listen. That includes not interupting, not dominating and being a polite listener in general.
• Remember, you are still co-workers - You still get to work together, even after November 5th. Emotions can run high so it is best to keep a respectful tone. I’ve seen people get worked up over sports teams so politics isn’t much of a stretch.
• Don’t use your position of power or subordinance as an excuse - If you are in a position of power in your organization, do not think you have a greater need to get your point of view across than anyone else. Similarly, if you are an employee, don’t let yourself be held back from a conversation because you may not have enough power in the organization.

I am looking forward to the conversations that will be happening this week coming into election day. I hope that you can find a way to enjoy the important discussions taking place as well.

I used this last week and it is a funny question, isn’t it? The statement not only asks the question but it also confirms the premise. If you are the one asking, you already know you are the bad guy and you probably already know why too.

In HR, you’re always the bad guy because that’s the role you are playing. No manager wants HR to handle the job offer. That’s good news, that’s easy. But what happens when it is time for discipline or termination? Call HR, they want us involved. Being the bad guy isn’t all negative though. If you are being the bad guy for one person, you are probably the good guy for another. Also, being the bad guy means that you have to make an unpleasant decision. It shows courage and reliability in the face of conflict.

So why am I talking about Gen Y (or Millennials or whatever)?

People use me as a sounding board for Generation Y angst. Why not? I occasionally post about generational issues in this blog. I think that generational issues are generally overblown. I think that people that speak for an entire diverse group of people are full of it. I think that people that want to stereotype a huge group of people are also full of it.

On the Recruiting Animal’s Talk Show, we spent the last few minutes talking about generational issues. He gave me a quiz on Gen Y and summarized that I wasn’t a real Gen Y (or a Gen Y in age only). And I had to agree: I don’t identify with the Gen Y “culture” very much. I read Brazen Careerist (basically “the” Gen Y blog portal) and really only connect with a few authors there.

So I was talking to Chuck Westbrook about this and he felt the same as me. I don’t like Gen Y’ers that talk about being Gen Y all the time and/or who confirm people’s biases about the sense of entitlement that our generation supposedly possesses. In fact, the whole idea of blogging in this way confirms people’s biases about Gen Y being self-centered.

Many of my friends who are in the same generation as me have great stories. They’ve worked hard and done things beyond the stereotypes of our generation. They’ve reaped the rewards in both a job satisfaction and monetary sense. Teachers, accountants, lawyers, marketers, executives, sales, PR … and they probably work with you every single day in some way. They help their bosses, they put in the overtime, and they are generally silent on generational issues because they are too busy being successful.

What does that say about me? (Haha, that was a joke. Everyone laugh. Seriously.)

So I wanted to link to some of my favorite blogs written by Gen Y’ers (mainly from my interactions on Brazen Careerist). They are exceptional because they blog about issues that are transcendent of generational differences. I think these are powerful voices in Gen Y and have greater influence because of these characteristics.

• Chuck Westbrook
• Milena Thomas
• Dan Schawbel
• Ben Casnocha
• Breanne Potter
• Chris Ferdinandi
• Jacob Share
• Jaclyn Schiff
• Rachel Robbins
• Dorie Morgan

Do you have any others that you would add to the list?