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| Volume 7, Issue 5 |
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In This Issue:
 The great debates about 360 degree feedback
Performance management process checklist
Does everybody hate HR?
Want a superior workforce? Hire the best employees
 Real life career changers
Running on an empty tank
Why you can't get any work done
Calling the policy police
Time off: The europeans do it right
 Taking on the recruiting monster
 Steering employee-driven benefits
 Leadership is a muscle
 How to retain your gen-X workforce
The top 12 presentation mistakes
 Kindness pays dividends
Squealed, fired, rehired
Love at first sight?
Medical symptoms you shouldn't ignore
Ten top cities for foodies
 50 best small & medium companies to work for in America
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The Great debates about 360 degree feedback
Each of us wants to know how we’re doing at work.
We especially want data from our supervisor that tells us that we are doing well. We have a great need to know how others view our work but we want the information in a kind and
gentle fashion. When learning how to provide effective feedback, managers discover how to give meaningful feedback in a way that ensures the employee shares meaning,
my favorite definition for communication...
Read the article. Back to top
Performance management process checklist
Regular emails from readers ask hundreds of questions each year. Patterns emerge about the toughest situations you face in your organizations.
These are the ten toughest, but most frequent, questions you send my way.
Performance development planning in most companies should have concluded by now. The third quarter is underway and employees deserve a concise understanding of
their expectations for this quarter. They also like timely feedback about how their work was perceived during the second quarter.
That said, the best goals are measurable and employees should "know" how they performed. Still participating in an old-fashioned, traditional performance appraisal system? Your organization
needs this information...
Read the article. Back to top
Does everybody hate HR?
Factors That Drive High Performance
Driving to lunch with a manager, I supported the employee view about the need for HR support. The response was interesting: "Do they 'really' want an HR Director?
They should be careful what they wish for. After all, everybody hates HR." The comment reminded me that I had blogged an earlier article from Fast Company about why people hate HR. I've heard this
view before, in fact, many times. Isn't this amazing? Why do you think so many people hate HR? I hate to tell you this, but "Why We Hate HR" from Fast Company is the
best article I've read in ages... It puts its finger on the pulse of the problems with HR in organizations today. The article also confirms for me that I am on the right
track - have miles to go before I sleep - but my writing and teaching, and actions usually, too - are on the right track. Can you say the same for yours? Take a look at Why We Hate HR...
Read the article. Back to top
Want a superior workforce? Hire the best employees
Six Disciplines
contracted with market research firm, Research for Action , to survey 314 businesses that employ 10-100 people to determine the factors that were most important in their
success, late last year. They found five factors that stood out as most significant. In fact, they found that “high performing organizations scored at least 100% better on these
five factors than their competitors.” These were the top five success factors...
Read the article. Back to top
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Real life career changers
A Navy vet and a former schoolteacher, like many people starting new careers, find much of what they learned in previous ones is applicable, even in a starkly different context
To Eric Green, co-managing a $50 million hedge fund in San Francisco isn't all that different from renovating a hospital in Estonia, which he did 10 years ago while
in the Navy's Civil Engineer Corps. The Detroit native, who served for seven years as a lieutenant in the Navy before going back to school for his MBA, says skills he
developed in his first career have transferred well to his new one.
Running a 50-Member Team
"An important component to the success of the mission is to communicate to the team how our work translates directly into a bigger, more-strategic vision of our senior military commanders," says Green, comparing his leadership in Estonia and San Francisco.
"I use these same skills now in translating our strategy into our investment process." Green says that overseeing a 50-member construction team, and working with the local community to build support for the Navy's presence in the northern European
nation, helped him understand the importance of attention to detail, and allowed him to develop the risk-management and people skills he needs in his current career. Green, who has an undergraduate engineering degree from the Naval Academy in Annapolis and
a master's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Virginia, now spends his days researching investment opportunities in micro-cap equities, communicating with investors, and developing risk-profile models as a managing partner at Osmium
Partners, which he joined in early 2005. Although many of his skills carried over, Green says it has been difficult learning "how to filter the signal from the noise" when it comes to using market data to develop business strategies and pinpoint opportunities
for growth...
Read the article. Back to top
Running on an empty tank
We expend huge amounts of emotional and mental energy every day at work. You need to replenish periodically to avoid crashing and burning.
One time about 10 years ago, for no apparent reason, I broke out in hives. I couldn't for the life of me imagine what I'd eaten or drunk or rolled in that would have caused these awful red spots to appear. I asked my wise voice teacher, Winifred, for
advice, and she filled me in on the Barrel Theory of allergy. Your body is like a barrel, she said. We can only take so much exposure to allergens without any trouble. When the barrel is full, that's it: One more chemical in the dry-cleaning fluid on your suit or the wrapper on your ballpark hot dog, and you've got hives. Often, it's not
any one thing that does it, but the accumulation of toxic stuff that just fills the barrel to overflowing one day. At work, we have things to do and people to see and deadlines to meet all day long. And as we work, we expend tremendous amounts of mental and emotional energy. Some days are productive and empowering; others are
frustrating, boring, or crazy-making. The good news is that the energy doesn't all go in one direction; our work can fill our fuel tanks up as easily as it can drain them. Little things like praise and companionship and encouragement give us the energy
to keep going. Ever notice how there's one recurring meeting or event (often connected with budget time!) at your job that sucks the energy out of you—while other activities give you extra juice? It's good to pay attention to these energy-giving
and energy-draining aspects of your job. The truth is, you can't run a race on an empty tank, and if your job is taking more fuel than it's giving you, you're going to hit empty. There are a few ways to keep the needle on your fuel tank out of the red zone...
Read the article. Back to top
Why you can't get any work done
Workplace distractions cost U.S. business some $650 billion a year. Here's how managers can keep employees focused.
Sly Kodrin, vice-president for operations at a hinge manufacturing company in Alliance, Ohio, likes to maintain a shop floor that balances passion with productivity,
allowing his 75 employees to listen to music and socialize, as long as it does not interfere with their work. But when a stamping press operator brought golf clubs to work one day and began swinging at rolled-up work gloves while he was in charge of
an automatic stamp press, Kodrin's line had been crossed. "Most people, I tend to believe, thought it was funny at first," Kodrin says about the incident, which rose above the ordinary distractions of equipment noise, weather, blackouts, and news
of the day. But the humor dissipated quickly [It is estimated that American businesses lose around $650 billion a year through workplace distractions, such as]...
Read the article. Back to top
Calling the policy police
Sure, sometimes you have to write down the rules, but too many policies is a waste of time and makes employees feel you don't trust them.
You might think that as a 25-year human resources leader, I'd be a big fan of policies. Lots of HR people are simply crazy for policies. They'll enact a new policy every day if you let them. I take the opposite view: The fewer policies, the better. What I've seen in my years in HR is that policies are expensive, in several important ways.
Policies spring from situations that arise in the workplace. We used to say in my old HR department, "Once is a fluke, twice is a pattern, three times is a new policy." Maybe it's how to handle an employee's request to be paid part of his tuition reimbursement in advance. Maybe it's a policy defining the kinds of slacks that must be worn beneath
the logo'd polo shirts in the company's booth at industry trade shows. You can write a policy for just about anything. And that's a problem, because policies come with costs...
Read the article. Back to top
Time Off: The Europeans do it right
I applaud a whole continent shutting down for a month. The only way we can really shut down and enjoy time off is with our colleagues' help.
Ten years ago, I was living on the road—way more than was healthy. We expect to see 25-year-old management consultants living out of suitcases, but when you're in
your 30s and have small children at home, a heavy business travel schedule is a major encumbrance. Two weeks every year, if I was lucky, I'd get to pack up the kids and the gear and take a family vacation. But there was a problem: The work didn't stop.
Even when I was hiking in the mountains or sitting on the beach, counting heads bobbing in the waves, my phone would ring...
Read the article. Back to top
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Taking on the recruiting monster
By embracing the latest web technology and crafting its product to suit power users, scrappy Jobster is laying into industry giants.
Eat a meal with jobster CEO Jason Goldberg and you'll quickly notice his disdain for menus; the man already knows what he wants. Why waste time on an exhaustive list
of options? And it's not just a food thing. Years ago, as T-Mobile USA's strategic planning director, Goldberg grew frustrated with the flood of unqualified applicants he usually got from job boards. The laborious vetting process hardly seemed
worthwhile, especially since the best prospects often came from employee referrals anyway. So in 2004, Goldberg approached Ignition Partners (ignitionpartners.com), a venture firm in Bellevue, Wash., with a plan to reinvent online recruiting by
combining the referring power of a social network with the focus of a recruiter's perspective. He called his creation Jobster. Three years later Monster.com and the other online giants that once snatched the recruitment business from newspapershave
reason to watch their own backs. Hiring managers, their most important customers, are weary of ordering off the menu, sifting through thousands of online résumés in
search of the perfect applicant. Upstarts like Jobster (jobster.com) are eager to turn that dissatisfaction into dollars. And that's exactly what's happening...
Read the article. Back to top
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Steering employee-driven benefits
Benefits, whether they're retirement investment accounts or health insurance, are guided more and more by their consumers — employees.
The primary reason for this comes down to individual responsibility and where it should rest: with the individual or with the organization employing the individual. In today's business climate, the idea of a company taking care of its employees, watching
over their health and steering them into retirement, is widely outmoded. For one thing, the cost of doing so has become a crippling disadvantage in a highly competitive, global economy. Further, the idea of doing so in an age in which an employee might move
to several companies over the course of a career is unrealistic. So, responsibility for health and retirement benefits now is placed with the employee more often than not, and new ways of giving employees control over such benefits continue to emerge and
mature. For talent managers, then, it's important to understand the advantages and potential pitfalls of allowing consumers to direct and drive benefits...
Read the article. Back to top
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Leadership is a muscle
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In the business world, we're schizophrenic about leadership. We instinctively prize innate leadership. And although companies are clearly in
the leader-creation business, how far does the tolerance for believing that you can grow your skills go?" |
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Bobby Fischer was playing chess at age 6. Mozart wrote his first symphony at 8. Could it be that Jack Welch was firing direct reports at 9?
There's a long-standing debate about whether leaders are born or made. But let's not revisit nature versus nurture. Instead, let's ask a weirder question: Could it be that
your point of view on this issue is what actually makes you a better or worse leader? And if so, is nature or nurture the more career-enhancing POV? This psychological
puzzle starts with the research of Stanford's Carol Dweck. Her latest book, Mind-set: The New Psychology of Success, should be on every business manager's bookshelf. Dweck
has found that individuals succeed or fail based on how they think about intelligence. She says people have one of two mind-sets on the matter...
Read the article. Back to top
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How to Retain Your Gen-X Workforce
You've hired them. Now how can you keep them around?
Things aren't always what they seem. If I could give you one bit of advice on dealing with the latest generation of employees to come under your management, it would be to remember those words…things aren't always what they seem. If you are like most
business leaders, you've no doubt noticed a trend in the way employees behave in recent years. Most likely you consider it a negative trend—too much entitlement, not enough loyalty, no work ethic, only interested in themselves, and on and on. But I challenge you to consider that perhaps these are not negative trends, just different ones.
To better understand who your employees are and what drives them to succeed, perhaps it's easiest to understand who they are not—you. That's right. They may even be your offspring but in the workplace they bear little resemblance to the "you" of
yesteryear. Gen Xers (born 1965-1979) and Millenials (born after 1980) are operating in this world with a completely different perspective. Their definitions of loyalty, time and success are often quite different from yours. Rest assured they do recognize
all of these concepts and value them in very important ways. The key to your organization's future success is understanding how the Millenials view the world and using that knowledge to motivate them in a way that works. Here's a hint:...
Read the article. Back to top
The top 12 presentation mistakes
Mistake #1: Overlooking "Murphy"
If it can go wrong, it will go wrong.
This mistake basically means that you walk into the room where you're going to present and something is wrong. LeRoux tells a story about a multimillion-dollar sales
presentation to which "Murphy" paid a visit—in the form of missing curtains and a boardroom window overlooking a huge pool surrounded by bikini-clad swimmers (you can
guess what the attendees looked at instead of the presenter). Remedy: Visit important presentation rooms at least a day in advance. If that's not possible, have someone take
pictures from different angles and email them to you.
Mistake #2:...
Read the article. Back to top
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Kindness pays dividends
It might sound like an oxymoron, but Steve Harrison is a business ethicist. He's worked at the outplacement firm Lee Hech Harrison for 25 years helping fired employees get back on their feet.
In that time he's witnessed some pretty despicable behavior by companies. With the bad comes the good, though. And it's the kind behavior that he discusses in his new book,
The Manager's Book of Decencies: How Small Gestures Build Great Companies (McGraw-Hill, $24.95). Aside from just being a nice person, Harrison argues that small gestures such as...
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Squealed, fired, rehired
Talk about potentially awkward moments by the water cooler.Last Monday, Scott Bechtel returned to the job from which he'd been fired two years ago, knowing that his employer Competitive Technologies still wants to get rid of him and has been trying for months to keep him from returning.
Bechtel is one of the first former employees to actually go back to work under Section 806, the Sarbanes-Oxley provision protecting whistle-blowers. About a half a dozen others have won reinstatement from companies ranging from Washington Mutual
(nyse: WM - news - people ) to a tiny Virginia bank Cardinal Bankshares (otcbb: CDBK - news - people ), but cases are still being appealed and settlements negotiated. While many publicly traded companies have spent time and money complying with
Sarbanes-Oxley accounting and corporate governance reforms, few have paid as much attention to the statute's whistle-blower provision. So far, they've had little reason to do so, as there have been few rulings and only a handful of cases that have
gone against employers. The few that have are still largely being appealed. That is likely to change if more cases are decided in the employee's favor and as the number of complaints of whistle-blower retaliation under Sarbanes continue to rise...
Read the article. Back to top
Love at first sight?
One will make you money. One could break your budget. Yet, they are to be approached almost identically--most of the time.
The job interviewing process and the dating game are so analogous that professional career coaches compare the two as if they both involve a resume and rosé. Hardly. But
the similarities are striking. Carole Martin, an author and professional interview coach who has taught at the Haas School of Business at the University of California,
Berkeley, centers much of her tutelage on the notion of job interviews being like first dates...
Read the article. Back to top
Medical symptoms you shouldn't ignore
When people have heart attacks in the movies, they clutch their arms to their chests and double over in pain, crying out for help. In reality, the signs of a heart attack are much more subtle.
Since symptoms can include mild pressure in the chest, lightheadedness and sweating, it's often hard for the average person to identify one. That's what researchers at the Yale School of Medicine found in a study of 24 women 55 and under who'd had
heart attacks and were admitted to a hospital. It showed that 42% didn't recognize the warning signs. Despite the fact that 88% of the women had a family history of heart disease, many thought they had indigestion or heartburn, and half waited more
than an hour to go to the emergency room, says Judith Lichtman, associate professor in epidemiology at Yale and lead author of the study. Why the laid-back approach to their health?...
Read the article. Back to top
Ten Top Cities For Foodies
When Helen Lee plans her vacations, she is often more focused on what she'll be eating than what she's likely to see.
"I love to eat, and the first thing I do when I'm away is to check out the food," says the 31-year-old marketing manager from New York City. "And, I'm more motivated to go somewhere if there will be great food." Her passion for good grub explains why
she has visited Paris, a city that she considers the ultimate destination for foodies, three times in the last five years...
Read the article. Back to top
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50 best small & medium companies to work for in America
This joint endeavor of the Great Place to Work® Institute and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) provides an opportunity for small-sized companies (50-250 employees) and medium-sized companies (251-999 employees) to compete for the
honor of being named one of the "Best Small & Medium Companies to Work for in America"...
Read the article. Back to top
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