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Volume 6, Issue 8      In This Issue:   Five of anything ice breaker   How to interview potential employees   Employee development: More than training sessions   How to respond to a reference check request   Ask the right (interview) question   Best place to launch a career: 2006 rankings   The quiet leader - How to be one   What’s to be done about performance reviews   Negotiating in three dimensions   The new science of hiring   Do your employees posses the right competencies?   Choose your weapon   What’s next: The dashboard dilemma   Contagious commercials   Down the rabbit hole   Eight ways big brands screw up search - Case study: Nike.com   Sales secrets of an interactive Biz-Dev guy: Cold calling for fun & profit   Do you deserve a raise?   Easy ways to ease up on your body   Surprisingly healthy foods   Falls most fattening foods Five of Anything Ice Breaker Looking for a winning team building ice breaker that you can use for meetings, training classes, team building sessions, and company events and activities? My new five of anything ice breaker makes group cohesiveness and cooperation a natural extension of the discussion when you use this team building ice breaker. Take a look, too, at the piece I put together to help you make all of your team building activities successful... Read the article.  Back to top Job Interview Tips: How to Interview Potential Employees I admit that the last time I went on an actual job intervew as a job searcher was about twenty years ago. I am lucky in that starting and operating my own business was the right decision for me. For a client company, however, I have interviewed hundreds of potential employees in the past couple of years. This has caused me to take a hard look at interviewing employees from both sides of the desk... Read the article.  Back to top Employee Development: More Than Training Sessions One key factor affecting employee motivation and employee retention is the opportunity employees want to continue to grow and develop job and career enhancing skills. In fact, this opportunity to continue to grow and develop through training and developmental opportunities is one of the most important factors in employee motivation. There are a couple of secrets about what employees want from training and development opportunities, however. Plus, training and development opportunities are not just found in external training classes and seminars. These ideas emphasize what employees want in training and development opportunities. They also articulate your opportunity to create devoted, growing employees who will benefit both your business and themselves through your training and development opportunities... Read the article.  Back to top How to Respond to a Reference Check Request Yesterday, a client company received a reference request for a former employee who had not done well in her most recent job. Yet, in earlier roles with the company, she had apparently performed well. This sparked the question about how to respond to a request for a reference. After typing about a five paragraph response, it dawned on me that I needed to make this question into an article since I covered the topic of reference checking nowhere else on my site. I trust you'll find my suggestions about reference checking helpful. I'd really like you to share your thoughts about reference checking in "comments" below. Am I on target with my recommendations? Responding to a reference check request can be tricky. Fear of reprisal and lawsuits keeps many employers from responding at all. These reference check recommendations will help you respond reasonably to reference checking requests while protecting the legitimate interests of your company and your current employees... Read the article.  Back to top Ask the Right (Interview) Question Starting Smarter Looking for an entry-level position? Take a tip from these recent hires at L’Oréal, JPMorgan, Lockheed, and elsewhere... Job seekers' questions typically fall into one of three categories. To impress and learn about an employer, it's important to know the protocol for each. Savvy job seekers have learned that it's important to show up at a job interview armed with smart, pithy questions. A few years ago, it was perfectly fine to ask, "Who are your company's competitors?" But these days, employers expect you to know the answer to that—and a dozen other company-specific questions. The first thing to know about job-interview questions is that there is more than one kind. In my experience, job seekers' questions fall into one of three categories, and it's good to know the difference—and the protocol for each... Read the article.  Back to top Best Places to Launch a Career 2006 Rankings Launching a Career in New York The Big Apple can take a bite out of you, but learning how to fight back is a key skill for a young professional just getting her feet wet Determining which employers are best for entry-level workers is no easy task. To find out, BusinessWeek used a three-part methodology. First, we surveyed career services directors at leading U.S. schools to learn which employers were tops on their list. We then asked those employers to complete a survey seeking information on hiring, pay, benefits, and training programs, which we then compared with others in the same industry. Finally, we obtained from Universum Communications, a Philadelphia-based research firm, the results of its 2006 survey of 37,000 U.S. undergraduates, who were asked to identify their five most desirable employers. The employer survey counts for 50% of the final ranking, while the career services and student surveys count for 25% each... Read the article.  Back to top The Quiet Leader—and How to Be One If you look behind lots of great heroic leaders, you find them doing lots of quiet, patient work themselves.           —Joseph L. Badaracco Jr It sounds almost paradoxical. A quiet leader? Yet quiet leaders—managers who apply modesty, restraint, and tenacity to solve particularly difficult problems—are more common than we think, says Harvard Business School professor Joseph L. Badaracco. In his new book Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing (HBS Press, 2002), he describes what quiet leaders do and how they make their workplace, and their world, a better place. Badaracco recently sat down with HBS Working Knowledge Senior Editor Martha Lagace to talk about quiet leaders... Read the article.  Back to top What's to Be Done About Performance Reviews? It's the season for many employee performance reviews. Why do they seem to rank alongside root canal dental work on our list of things we look forward to as managers and employees? And what are we doing about it? If we assume that the basic purpose of employee evaluations is to build better-performing organizations, then this has to be one of the most important things we do as managers. But if formal evaluations weren't required, would we even provide them? Much of this season's debate has centered around whether a forced ranking system works in such efforts... Read the article.  Back to top Negotiating in Three Dimensions “Negotiators sometimes can discover hidden sources of value and then craft agreements to unlock that value and overcome barriers created by poor deal design” Tactics, deal design, and set-up are three crucial components of the most effective negotiations. Yet many negotiators focus only on the tactical part, running the risk of undermining their own best interests. How can you negotiate more skillfully and confidently with clients, partners, and adversaries as well as with colleagues within your organization? In this Q&A, James Sebenius and David Lax, authors of 3-D Negotiation: Powerful Tools to Change the Game in Your Most Important Deals, discuss the common mistakes of negotiators, the power of a three-dimensional approach, why negotiating is an essential skill, and where the science of negotiation is headed. Negotiation is a core competence for life, "not merely an important skill to be wheeled out for special occasions," they argue. James K. Sebenius is the Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a principal of Lax Sebenius LLC, a negotiation strategy firm. He also serves on the Executive Committee of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. David A. Lax, a former faculty member at Harvard Business School and investment banker, is now principal of Lax Sebenius LLC... Read the article.  Back to top The New Science of Hiring Welcome. Take a Seat Care to dramatically enhance your chance of finding great employees? Trade in your gut instincts for a systematic approach to interviewing, testing, and evaluating job candidates. What was her company missing? Susan Bowman asked herself that as soon as she plopped into her chair at Tri-anim, a medical-supplies distributor in Sylmar, California. It was two and a half years ago. Bowman had just joined the company as head of human resources, and her highest priority was improving the company's hiring. When she arrived, the HR department was basically shut out of the hiring of salespeople. Bowman wanted to make it more useful, especially after she noticed some hires were fantastic and others were disappointments. What Tri-anim was missing--and Bowman fortunately recognized this--was something most employers in America have been missing: Conventional job interviews don't work. A typical interview--unstructured, rambling, unfocused--tells the interviewer almost nothing about job candidates, other than how they seem during a couple of meetings in a conference room. But what are these people like late at night and under pressure? What motivates them? How smart are they? Have they handled tough projects? Do they prefer working alone or are they better with a team? Regular interviews assess barely any of this, and in fact are miserable predictors of job success. In technical terms, they have a .2 correlation with predicting success. Discouraging, isn't it? It would be--except that industrial and organizational psychologists are on the job, seeking the best ways to evaluate job candidates. A focused three-part approach can make the hiring process as standardized and objective as possible--and can help predict the best performers. The system starts with what is called behavioral interviewing, in which candidates are barraged with tough questions about how... Read the article.  Back to top Do Your Employees Possess the Right Competencies? Gather Round! For a Group Interview Measuring soft skills in an objective manner helped a hospitality company find its perfect fit. Could it work for you? The work environment at a major hospitality company had shifted dramatically. For the first time ever, the general managers would have to market and communicate the company's services utilizing the Web and e-mail.Historically, the company had hired based on hard skills and experience alone, but had seen too many people fail. Repeating the same mistake was not an option. It turned to me for assistance, as the company was about to embark on evaluating soft skills and interviewing candidates in a more thorough, focused and objective manner. What the company was to discover surprised nearly everyone... Read the article.  Back to top Choose Your Weapon Remember that not all employee evaluation tests are suitable for hiring. (Myers-Briggs, we're talking to you.) Here are 10 extensively validated, highly respected tests that are... Read the article.  Back to top What's Next: The Dashboard Dilemma Einstein kept a sign in his office that read, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." Do you manage by the numbers? Be careful if you do: Your data may be playing tricks on you. When the Boston Red Sox reversed their curse in 2004 by vanquishing the Yankees and going on to take the World Series, many fans and pundits were quick to give much of the credit to management's decision to enlist sophisticated computerized analyses of player performance data to make staffing decisions. This year, the team's all-too-familiar collapse left these same observers wondering how the numbers could have led the Red Sox astray. Einstein kept a sign in his office that read, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." Baseball fans are not the only ones being forced to consider that the best decisions aren't necessarily the ones based on analyzing reams of data. Companies of all sorts are setting themselves up for the same hard lesson, thanks to the growing excitement over technology's ability to place all manner of salient data at the fingertips of managers... Read the article.  Back to top Contagious Commercials How to get in on the YouTube craze. One day in June, MerlynDHZ shot a digital video of himself and his buddies flying down ramps, gliding across railings, and doing other skateboardlike stunts in their Heelys, sneakers with retractable wheels hidden in the soles. The next day, he uploaded the clip onto the video-sharing website YouTube. Within a month, more than 2,000 people had viewed the 90-second snippet. A few fans even linked to it on their personal MySpace homepages. What MerlynDHZ's fans may not know is that he and the other skaters in the video work for Heeling Sports Limited, the Carrollton, Texas, company that makes Heelys. Heeling Sports is one of a growing number of businesses seeding YouTube with short videos to generate buzz on the cheap... Read the article.  Back to top Down the Rabbit Hole "Viral is the opposite of brute force," Hale says. "The more force you use, the less viral it becomes." “A virus catches on only if it forms a community where none existed. The infection feeds on fascination.” Making The Blair Witch Project taught Campfire how to tap the power of curiosity. Meet the puppet masters of viral marketing. These days, creating a successful viral campaign--that addictive, self-propagating advertainment that lives on Web sites, blogs, cell phones, message boards, and even in real-world stunts--is the dream of every marketer and ad shop. It's a way to reach an ad-allergic audience and get it not only to notice your brand but to physically interact with it, to live it. Cracking the viral code is no small feat, though. JupiterResearch recently reported that while marketers are increasingly trying to insinuate themselves into social media like blogs and MySpace, 69% of users are skeptical. And as willing as consumers may be to suspend disbelief for a compelling fiction such as "Beta-7," they'll turn on you in a heartbeat. "The bottom line is that viral marketing is so not trusted by people that marketers can go a long way toward making people hate your guts if [they] don't do it right," says Lee Ann Daly, ESPN's former executive vice president of marketing. Or as Hale puts it, black socks under his black Velcro sandals: "Viral is the opposite of brute force. The more brute force you try to use, the less viral it becomes, because people don't want to pass on pure marketing messages. "So what's the trick? Obsession. Observation. Overkill. Creating a viral campaign isn't like filming a 30-second spot and then sitting back and letting it run. It's a marathon, one that takes mastery of numerous media and the creativity to spin out a form of open-ended, multilayered, living entertainment that will keep an audience engaged for as long as possible.... Read the article.  Back to top Eight ways Big Brands Screw up Search—A Case Study: Nike.com After posting a blog entry on our site titled "How big brands screw up search," I got to thinking... let me pick out one such company and give a live example. Today, I am picking on Nike (sorry, guys). I did a search on Nike as a keyword, and just that word alone came back with over 2.5 million searches performed last month according to the SEObook.com tool, which uses Overture's keyword suggestion tool. This does not include the long-tail terms like Nike football cleats, Nike air force one, Nike sports bra, Nike golf balls and the millions of other searches done with the word Nike in it somehow. I wouldn't be surprised if the branded Nike search volume were in the 15 million range. Then think about all the unbranded search terms where Nike could get people to consider its brand... terms like golf shoes, golf gifts, golf clubs, footballs, football cleats, off-road running shoes, running shoes. You can just imagine that the number of searches done for these terms could dwarf the search volume for Nike's branded terms. (Not to mention that an iProspect study found that roughly 36% of people associate ranking higher with being a better brand.) OK, so now we know the potential, let's uncover how Nike is missing the boat and how it could right the ship with a slightly more focused effort on SEO and by improving the customer experience of customers coming from search engines... Read the article.  Back to top Sales Secrets of an Interactive Biz-Dev Guy: Cold-Calling for Fun and Profit Before any assets are organized, before any wire frames are laid out, before any sketches are started, before any pixels are designed, before any lines of code are written, and before any server environments are prepared, before anything happens... you have to sign a project. You mean projects don't just fall from the sky? Well, in one form or another it has to start from somewhere, whether it's a referral, a new client, or an ongoing customer. Even with a killer portfolio, it's not always feasible to wait for the phone to ring. If you're able to just snap your fingers and make work appear on command, more power to you. If not, and you ever find yourself having to do some sales, what follows are some musings from the business development department here at Firstborn about preparation, organization, getting and staying in touch, and keeping it all going. Sounds just like a project to me. Flashback to June 2000: I was hired as a producer at Firstborn for what was at the time the company's largest client. I clearly remember on one of my first interviews asking the owners, "I'm not going to have to do any... sales... am I?" "Oh, no, no, no," they assured me. Cut to one year later, the dot-com bubble has come and gone, and we need to mobilize fast. What to do? "Oh, Kevin...?" Fade to five years later. Under the guidance of Firstborn's President, Michael Ferdman, I'm now the company's vice-president of business development. We've tripled in size since I started... Read the article.  Back to top Do You Deserve A Raise? It’s that time of year again. ‘Tis the season for annual job performance reviews when managers start checking their lists of employees who have been naughty or nice. But more to the point, they’re checking to see if you’re raise- or promotion-worthy. To make sure you’re seen in the best possible light, set the stage. Remember, most managers are overworked too, and they often have shorter memories. Use that to your advantage and remind them of all the wonderful things you did throughout the year. Don't sit by and let your boss do all the work. Come to the review armed with information that demonstrates what an integral employee you are to the company. "Employees that are proactive are most likely to get a good score," says Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ, a leadership, research and training firm in Washington, D.C... Read the article.  Back to top Easy Ways To Ease Up On Your Body Good health isn't just in the details, but small things can certainly add up. Eat 100 calories extra a day and you could weigh ten pounds more at the end of the year. Wearing the same shoes every day can strain your body. Regular exposure to subway noise can not only affect your hearing, but also raise your blood pressure and levels of stress hormones. A poorly organized workspace can result in back and neck discomfort that shouldn't be ignored. "Those little aches and pains--that's your body telling you something isn't right," says Alan Hedge, Ph.D., professor of ergonomics at Cornell University. Fortunately, you don't have to overhaul your life to keep small problems from becoming big ones. There are lots of easy ways to take some of the burden off of your body... Read the article.  Back to top Surprisingly Healthy Foods What you didn't know might help you. Eating healthy may be virtuous, but it just doesn't seem like that much fun. Truth is, most of us prefer the taste of French fries over that of oat bran. A glass of Burgundy sounds more tantalizing than a cup of wheat grass juice. And while a nice piece of fruit is no punishment, chocolate is exceedingly more tempting. The good news: Not all of those seemingly unhealthy choices actually are... Read the article.  Back to top Fall's Most Fattening Foods Ten Leaner, Meaner Lunches How to eat a healthier mid-day meal without giving up taste or convenience. Four times a year, the famed New York restaurant, the '21' Club, gears up to change its menus. The shift ensures that the restaurant offers seasonally-appropriate dishes to its patrons--and it really does make a difference. While most spring and summer dishes are light, healthy, and full of bright, leafy vegetables, the fall and winter dishes are warm, rich and hearty. Cold-weather dishes are the types we all seem to look forward to, from simple macaroni and cheese to decadent foie gras. Unfortunately, while these comfort foods may be tasty, they can also wreak havoc on diets... Read the article.  Back to top Forward to a Friend: Do you have a friend that would like to receive MgmtWatchsm? 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! 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