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If you are having difficulty seeing this mail or images in it, you can view it in your Web browser. Volume 6, Issue 6      In This Issue:   You Schmooze, you win   Mastering disaster   Twenty dumb things organizations do   Set them free: Two musts for employee motivation   Trust rules: The most important secret about trust   Why dream teams fail   How to build a great team   RAZR’s edge   How I make decisions   Eight tips for better brainstorming   Top ten desktop diversions, 2006   Negotiating challenges for women leaders   The morning meeting ritual   Make the most of your off-site   Peter Drucker on managerial courage   Executive Onboarding: That tricky first 100 days   How to survive a takeover   Sun protection secrets   Are you marathon material?      Great communicators, Great communication      Tap Ex-employees’ recruitment potential      Repurposing HR metrics You Schmooze, You Win Those rehashings of American Idol with your office buddies are actually good for productivity. Your research shows that people who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged on the job. Why? Tom Rath, head of research and leadership consulting at the Gallup Organization, whose new book, Vital Friends (Gallup Press, 2006), draws on more than 8 million interviews: Close relationships and friendships are the single most important human need when it comes to our satisfaction with life. When people leave an organization after a short time, they often talk about how they weren't able to connect with someone. On the flip side, there is something about those relationships that keeps people in jobs, too... Read the article.  Back to top Mastering Disaster The worst is yet to come--and, believe it or not, someone is preparing for it. Is it warm in here, or is it just me? SAS Institute Inc.'s Pandemic Task Force is crowded around a conference-room table, packed with execs from the company's travel, security, health-care, and risk functions, among others. Its members are seated so close together that it wouldn't be hard to catch a cold--or worse. Which, in an eerie way, makes the point. The scenarios on the table aren't imminent; there are no confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission of avian flu. But SAS, a $1.7 billion software company, has to acknowledge the possibility. Joanna D'Aquanni, the continuity of business program manager, keeps a mushrooming list of questions: How to persuade SAS's legendarily loyal employees to stay home if catastrophe strikes? How to pay people if the payroll system can't be accessed? Which decisions belong to the company's CEO, Jim Goodnight? As the threats to companies proliferate, business-continuity planners like D'Aquanni are acquiring new organizational stature--and much tougher jobs. Amalgams of blue-sky thinker, military-style logistics guru, and professional worrywart, they're the folks who make your palms sweat when you see them approaching. "Sometimes people call us the 'doom and gloom people,'" says Marie Johnson, business continuation analyst at Target, "but we have to ask, 'what if?'"... Read the article.  Back to top Twenty Dumb Things Organizations Do... Even the best organizations periodically make mistakes in dealing with people. They mess up their opportunity to create effective, successful, positive employee relations. But, there are twenty, especially dumb things that organizations do, to mess up their chance to develop powerfully positive relationships with the people they employ. And organization after organization tend to repeat these mistakes, despite their known impact on employee morale. You'll want to check out these twenty employee relations mistakes... Read the article.  Back to top Set Them Free: Two Musts For Employee Motivation Every person is motivated. The challenge at work is to create an environment in which people are motivated about work priorities. Too often, organizations fail to pay attention to the employee relations, communication, recognition, and involvement issues that are most important to people. Find out more about two important factors in employee motivation: Set Them Free: Two Musts For Employee Motivation... Read the article.  Back to top Trust Rules: The Most Important Secret About Trust Trust. You know when you have trust; you know when you don’t have trust. Yet, what is trust and how is trust usefully defined for the workplace? Can you build trust when it doesn’t exist? How do you maintain and build upon the trust you may currently have in your workplace? These are important questions for today’s rapidly changing world. Trust forms the foundation for effective communication, employee retention, and employee motivation and contribution of discretionary energy, the extra effort that people voluntarily invest in work. Learn more about what trust is, how to build trust, how to keep from injuring trust, and how to make trusting relationships build a successful workplace. Read: Trust Rules: The Most Important Secret About Trust. Quotations about Trust and Trustworthiness... Read the article.  Back to top Why dream teams fail It may be tempting to recruit all-stars and let 'em rip. Don't do it. Dream teams often become nightmares of dysfunction. In what universe is it even conceivable that the United States could fail to reach the semifinals of something called the World Baseball Classic? Not only fail to win, but could field a team that included Roger Clemens, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, and Johnny Damon and then lose games to Mexico, South Korea, and - wait for it - Canada? Yet it happened this year. How could a movie starring Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Julia Roberts, directed by Steven Soderbergh, get tepid reviews and gross less worldwide than the star-free My Big Fat Greek Wedding? That movie was Ocean's Twelve. And how could a FORTUNE 500 company run by a brilliant former McKinsey consultant, paying fat salaries to graduates of America's elite business schools, dissolve into fraud and bankruptcy? It happened at Enron... If someone tells you you're being recruited onto a dream team, maybe you should run. In our team-obsessed age, the concept of the dream team has become irresistible. But it's brutally clear that they often blow up. Why?... Read the article.  Back to top How to build a great team Harmony. Cooperation. Synchronized effort. It's difficult, but it can be learned. Watch the great teams very closely - and then join one of your own. FORTUNE Magazine) - In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These four men promptly escaped from a maximum-security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team. The A-Team went off the air in 1987 - still wanted by the government - but television has never produced a better blueprint for team building. The key elements of its effectiveness: a cigar-chomping master of disguise, an ace pilot, a devilishly handsome con man, a mechanic with a mohawk and an amazingly sweet van. Those particulars might not translate to all business settings. But clear definition of roles is a hallmark of effective collaboration. So is small team size - though four is slightly below the optimal number [of]... Read the article.  Back to top RAZR'S edge How a team of engineers and designers defied Motorola's own rules to create the cellphone that revived their company. Hundreds of Motorolans jammed into a company auditorium in Schaumburg, Ill., last December to mourn the sudden death of their storyteller-in-chief. It was a bittersweet moment for Motorola. Geoffrey Frost, the 56-year-old marketing genius responsible for the company's snappy "Hello Moto" ad campaign, had died in his sleep of a heart attack two weeks earlier. Thanks in no small part to Frost's dramatic flair, the proud but humbled company was on the upswing for the first time in years. CEO Ed Zander, who eulogized Frost that day, had promoted him to executive vice president only hours before he died. Frost, you see, had become a symbol of Motorola's resurgence as an unexpectedly stylish technology powerhouse.For a few engineers and industrial designers attending the memorial service, though, Frost represented something more. The celebration of his life drew attention to their greatest accomplishment, the creation just two years earlier of the ultrathin, superhip RAZR V3, the hottest Motorola phone in nearly a decade. Frost had been the phone's cheerleader; he'd come up with its catchy four-letter name. He also had spun an appealing narrative about how Motorola was cool again, and a myth about the slick downtown Chicago design studio where the phone had taken shape. The story behind the RAZR's creation. What the unsung team of heroes knew, however, was that the actual story of how the RAZR came to be is even more compelling than, if not quite as glamorous as, the version Frost had peddled... Read the article.  Back to top How I make decisions FORTUNE asked eight bold, creative people - from the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to the man who found Harry Potter, to the woman who picks next year's hip colors - to describe what guides their decision-making. Here is what they said... Read the article.  Back to top Eight tips for better brainstorming A recent Wall Street Journal story took on the hot topic of brainstorming. Titled "Brainstorming Works Best if People Scramble For Ideas on Their Own," the piece quoted research showing that people are "more creative" when they "brainstorm" alone rather than in meetings and offered supporting testimonials from managers. This is a subject I am quite familiar with. Along with Andy Hargadon, I completed an 18-month ethnography in the 1990s on how the innovation consultants at IDEO do creative work, and we've both spent much of the past decade studying other innovative organizations. At the time, Andy was my PhD student, and now he is an associate professor at the University of California at Davis. We agree that badly managed face-to-face brainstorms do stifle creativity and we agree that, even when brainstorming is done right, people probably can still generate ideas faster when they work alone. But it is total nonsense to conclude that if you want creativity, you ought to keep your people in solitary confinement where they can't "waste time" listening to and building on the ideas of others. Here's the problem: Most studies of brainstorming are rigorous but irrelevant to the challenge of managing creative work. For starters, comparing whether creativity happens best in groups or alone is pretty silly when you look at how creative work is actually done. At creative companies, people switch between both modes so seamlessly that it is hard to notice where individual work ends and group work starts. THEORY VS. PRACTICE. At group brainstorms, individuals often "tune out" for 5 or 10 minutes to sketch a product or organizational structure inspired by the conversation, and then jump back into the conversation to show the others their idea. In another typical scenario, I recall an IDEO brainstorm about a cool haircutting device, after which one participant, engineer Roby Stancel, ran off to build it. Drawing a hard line between "individual" and "group" creativity in these and dozens of other examples is pointless. What really matters is... Read the article.  Back to top Top Ten Desktop Diversions, 2006 Take a break from the daily grind by scoping out your house in satellite view or sending a friend a monkey message or... This time last year, we shared with readers a set of 10 amusing or instructive online diversions, and we've been hearing about it ever since (as copies of our Top Ten Time-Wasters list get passed from office drone to office drone). So this year, we've come up with a new list of 10 ways (all free) to take a mental break -- notice we didn't say goof off -- and recharge your batteries. Supervisors, take note: Recharging one's batteries is a good thing. In the long run, it makes employees more productive... Read the article.  Back to top Negotiating Challenges for Women Leaders If you don't negotiate for your salary, they walk away happy that they paid you less but wonder why they hired you.                     — Kathleen McGinn Women don't have a problem developing an effective leadership style. What they do struggle with more than men, however, is claiming the authority to lead, according to Hannah Riley Bowles and Kathleen L. McGinn. The gender gap in leadership is the focus of "Claiming Authority: Negotiating Challenges for Women Leaders," a chapter in the forthcoming book Psychology of Leadership: Some New Approaches, edited by David Messick and Roderick Kramer (Lawrence Erlbaum Press). As influential experts on negotiation who examine these questions from an economic perspective, Riley Bowles and McGinn believe that negotiation skills are crucial to closing the gender gap in leadership. Riley Bowles, who earned her doctoral degree from Harvard Business School, is an assistant professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. McGinn is a professor and a director of research at HBS. Below, excerpts from an interview. Lagace: What is an example of an experiment you've conducted that looks at differences in how women and men negotiate? McGinn: One of the interesting first pieces of data we looked at was job offers to MBA graduates. Once we controlled for a whole bunch of things such as industry and other variables, we found that men and women didn't tend to negotiate very different salaries, especially in industries where salaries were normative. But men and women did negotiate differently for other packages. And a question comes up: Why would that be? Why, when women were going in and getting the top salary on the list when they knew what the range is, wouldn't they be negotiating as big bonuses, as generous moving allowances, those sorts of things? One of the big differences that Hannah first realized was that there are some situations that are much more ambiguous. If you go back into economic sociology studies and studies of wage gaps, you find that you can pull out those situations that are fairly unambiguous and say that there aren't gaps. But if you go into those situations and industries in which there is quite a bit of ambiguity, you start to see wage gaps... Read the article.  Back to top The Morning Meeting Ritual Is your organization plagued by inefficient communications, finger pointing, and lack of accountability? Get all key decision makers to the table—same time, every day. Welcome to Marty Linsky's The Morning Meeting. From Harvard Management Communication Letter. “Issues cannot be covered over, and people can no longer hide.” A global petrochemical company struggling to create a coherent strategy after a merger with a very different kind of firm. A small advertising and design house trying to manage itself during a time of rapid growth. A public agency facing a series of budget cuts that threaten core services and deeply held values. An established bank losing market share to new boutique players coming into its market and cherry-picking high-margin products. As diverse as the challenges facing these organizations seemed, when my colleagues and I looked closely, we recognized that they shared two closely linked underlying causes: chronic communication problems within the executive team and a lack of shared accountability. When communication is stifled and turf protection the order of the day, an organization's senior leadership team is less than the sum of its parts and cannot grapple with strategic and operational challenges most effectively. Expertise and energy go untapped: less than frank communication sometimes means that team members do not know the full extent of one another's issue; and a lack of shared accountability leads some to think, "Hey, that's his problem and he's got to fix it." In contrast, two qualities characterize high-functioning leadership teams:... Read the article.  Back to top Make the Most of Your Off-Site The key: advance preparation. This means restricting in advance the scope and number of issues to a manageable few. And don't invite too many people. An excerpt from Harvard Business Review. “The meeting is not the place to plod through data.” “If most companies have too many participants, they have too few off-site sessions.” A strategic off-site's success is largely determined by what happens before it convenes. To make sure the meeting generates tangible results, its designer must do three things. First, answer the most basic questions:... Read the article.  Back to top Peter Drucker on Managerial Courage Each product, operation, and activity should be justified every two or three years, wrote Peter F. Drucker in 1963. But that's a hard step for managers to take. A Harvard Business Review classic. Unfortunately I know of no procedure or checklist for managerial courage. I do not propose to give here a full-blown "science of management economics," if only because I have none to give. Even less do I intend to present a magic formula, a "checklist" or "procedure" which will do the job for the manager. For his job is work—very hard, demanding, risk-taking work. And while there is plenty of laborsaving machinery around, no one has yet invented a "work-saving" machine, let alone a "think-saving" one. But I do claim that we know how to organize the job of managing for economic effectiveness and how to do it with both direction and results. The answers to the [following] three key questions . . . are known, and have been known for such a long time that they should not surprise anyone. 1. What is the manager's job? It is to direct the resources and efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite—and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to "problems" rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimum impact on results. 2. What is the major problem?... Read the article.  Back to top Executive onboarding: That tricky first 100 days The business of helping executives get off to a good start is booming. Being boss of an American firm may be fabulously well paid, but never has the position of top banana been harder to cling on to. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a consultancy, 728 chief executives left their jobs in the first half of this year—some willingly, many not. That was 6.9% more than during the same period in 2005, a year with an all-time record high of 1,322 departures. Many of these changes were at smaller firms, but there have recently been several sudden, high-profile exits at firms including Kraft, Novell and Williams-Sonoma. With increased turnover comes reduced tenure in the top job—and, indeed, in other senior positions. Executives are now being judged more quickly than ever, it seems. This trend has spawned a business designed to help newly appointed corporate leaders to hit the ground running. “The average CEO is in the job for under four years now,” says Rich Rosen of Heidrick & Struggles, a recruitment firm. “So firms are looking for a new CEO to make a quicker impact, and are prepared to invest in making sure it happens.” Reflecting the management industry's addiction to jargon, this process has been named “onboarding” (that is, helping a new executive successfully climb on board)... Read the article.  Back to top How To Survive A Takeover At most any company, few things are more unsettling than a new set of suits showing up at the office. And yet that's just what's happening at an ever-increasing clip, as private equity firms gobble up more and more companies, creating prolonged periods of suspense and uncertainty for existing managers and other employees. This week's announcement of a $33 billion private buyout of hospital chain HCA (nyse: HCA - news - people ) by Bain Capital, Merrill Lynch (nyse: MER - news - people ) and Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts is the biggest deal yet in a year that's already seen a record $158 billion worth of corporate takeovers by private equity groups, according to data from Thomson Financial. Private deals now account for about a quarter of all M&A activity. [For a manager whose unit has performed at or below par lately]... Read the article.  Back to top Sun Protection Secrets If you think slathering yourself with sunscreen will keep you from getting skin cancer, think again. No, the sun protection industry hasn't been waging a misinformation campaign. The fact is, "sunscreen" is not the same thing as "sunblock." And if you don't know the difference, you're not alone. It's one of the many misconceptions and unknowns surrounding sun protection--and unfortunately, ignorance in this area can cost you. Most of us are guilty of some form of sun worship. When the weather is bright, we lounge at the beach, run out for a round of golf or putter in the garden. Such simple acts of leisure can lead to more serious consequences than sunburn. Daily exposure to ultraviolet rays can add up to premature aging, wrinkles and skin cancer... Read the article.  Back to top Are you marathon material? Runners start the New York City Marathon last November. The running of the 36th annual road race featured one of the most competitive fields ever, including 35,000 participants from 99 countries and all 50 U.S. states. Endurance events are trendy, but crossing the finish line is still tough. Jacob Havenar ran his first marathon in 2000 with some soccer buddies who were looking for a new challenge. His motivation to keep up with the guys — and earn bragging rights — helped him make it to the finish line. But his main drive came from deeper within. "It's nice to be able to say you've done a marathon," he says. "But for me, the part that meant the most was the sense of personal accomplishment. It changed my life. It made me feel like I could do anything in the world." Like Havenar, more and more first-time marathoners are getting in the race. Statistics from USA Track and Field show that more than 400,000 runners now compete in an estimated 400 U.S. marathons each year, up from about 236,000 participants in 1990. Marathon running is increasingly popular for several reasons, Havenar and others say. Some people are inspired by success stories common in the media and want to achieve such a big personal goal. Some are hoping to improve their health or lose weight. Others want to do a good deed; more participants are now competing to raise money for their favorite charity. And why they decide to participate may make a big difference in whether they'll succeed, according to new research by Havenar, now a doctoral candidate in physical activity, nutrition and wellness at Arizona State University. Going the distance isn't for everyone... Read the article.  Back to top                                                                                                 Great Communicators, Great Communication Benchmark Data on the 50 Best Companies List of Best Small Companies to Work for in America Great employers understand that it’s good business to talk -- and listen -- to their employees. One Saturday night several years ago, Adam Goddess was having dinner with friends when he shared some shocking news. “I was working Sundays then,” says Goddess, “and I remember telling my friends that I was looking forward to going to work the next day. They were pretty surprised to hear me say that I was going in on Sunday and that I was actually looking forward to it.” Today, Goddess holds a new position but he remains with the same company, the Grand Circle Corp., which has been named to this year’s list of the Best Small & Medium Companies to Work for in America. And after nine years with the company, he still looks forward to going to work. Goddess is not unique. We found similar examples of passionate involvement among employees at many companies on the list. How do organizations foster that kind of commitment? It’s actually pretty simple: Great employers communicate openly and often with their employees and ask for frequent feedback in return. Then they take the next step: They listen and respond to that feedback. The process is different at every company, but the end result is the same: Employees know they have the ear of management, and management taps into employee expertise when making company decisions. Open, Courageous Communication “We help change people’s lives” proclaims a banner above the front desk in the offices of the Grand Circle Corp., an international travel company based in Boston. That’s a pretty lofty goal, but it’s one this company takes seriously... Read the article.  Back to top Tap Ex-Employees’ Recruitment Potential Staying connected to ex-employees can pay staffing dividends. Need to find the right person to fill a vacancy or help expand your business? You can advertise, of course, but more employers are tapping lists of former employees who may be able to provide just the right referrals because they know what kind of workers fit the bill. And, who knows? An employee who retired, or someone who left to take another job, might miss the scene and want to come back. They just need to be asked. “Reaching out to former employees has really been rewarding for us,” says Jocelyn A. Giangrande, SPHR, director of recruitment and HR services at Detroit-based Henry Ford Health System (HFHS). “We do a lot of rehires and find that a significant number of employees who leave our community come back,” Giangrande says. Like many employers, HFHS is taking steps to actively stay connected with former employees, having found them to be a valuable resource for... Read the article.  Back to top Repurposing Metrics for HR HR professionals are looking through a people-focused lens at the CFO’s metrics on revenue and income per FTE. What if one or two metrics could help you plan future staffing needs, better motivate employees with compensation and provide support for various training initiatives? And what if the data were already being collected for you? Most likely, in your CFO’s files or spreadsheets is a wealth of information that you can analyze and interpret with a “people” point of view—if you know how to apply the numbers. That data—operations revenue per full-time employee (FTE) and income per FTE—can help human resource professionals gain an understanding of employees’ productivity and better manage compensation, training and staffing. To be sure, these are not the only measurements that HR will want to use to gauge employees’ productivity or to make significant organizational changes. One or two calculations alone won’t provide definitive insight or an action plan. When you analyze revenue and income per FTE, “generally what you get are not answers but better questions,” says Steve McElfresh, SPHR, principal and founder of HR Futures, an HR consultancy in Palo Alto, Calif. “They’ll point you a little closer to the truth.” Further, you will need to look at these metrics with a careful eye, making sure you fully understand what these numbers represent. Nonetheless, measures of revenue and income per FTE, especially when viewed over time or in comparison with similar firms, can provide a credible indication of employee productivity... Read the article.  Back to top Forward to a Friend: Do you have a friend that would like to receive HRWatchsm? Perhaps you know a peer within your organization, or associate at a partner company that would benefit from applying to receive this publication. Inviting a friend to experience the benefits of joining the BusinessWatch Network is easy! Just FW: this newsletter to the person you know who may have an interest and ask them to click here http://www.businesswatchnetwork.com Your friend will be glad you did! If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from HRWatchsm simply change your status, or send a letter requesting opt-off to: The BusinessWatch Network Privacy Mailbox, 1321, Marblehead, MA. 01945 DISCLAIMER: HRWatchsm and the BusinessWatch Networksm are service marks of DMS. 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