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| Volume 7, Issue 2 |
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In This Issue:
 Top (10) ways to retain your great employees
Talent-on-the-bubble: Addressing human behavior at work
Job interview tips: How to interview potential employees
Use job descriptions
When tragedy strikes: 11 Tips for your workplace
Top (10) ways to show appreciation to employees & coworkers
 Why leadership means listening
The way to a winning resume
Why ‘forced’ job rankings don’t work
 Letting talent walk out the door: Corporate interview mistakes
Improving quality of hire: A core competitive strategy
The benefits of incentives
Mining the gold of employee complaints
Managers as students
 The halo effect: Debunking some hot business books with one of his own
How changes in marriage, divorce and childbirth are redefining the workplace
 Marketing via stories: The selling power of narrative in a conceptual age
Twelve tips for conducting successful survey’s
 Less Hulk, more Bruce Lee
 Are you an A$&*@^?
How to hold a great meeting
Nine super-nutritious foods
 Mr. Gore goes to Washington
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Top Ten Ways to Retain Your Great Employees
Why Retention? Four Tips for Employee Retention
Key employee retention is critical to the long term health and success of your business. Managers readily agree that retaining your best employees ensures customer
satisfaction, product sales, satisfied coworkers and reporting staff, effective succession planning and deeply imbedded organizational knowledge and learning. If
managers can cite these facts so well, why do they behave in ways that so frequently encourage great employees to quit their jobs?...
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Talent On-the-Bubble: Addressing Human Behavior at Work
One of the great lessons from Talent IQ is that the performance of talent gone awry is very seriously under-addressed in organizational life. Called “Talent
On-the-Bubble,” a pattern of human behavior was identified that can take any organization and its leadership team down if left untended.
Talent On-the-Bubble can make a mockery of organizational values, sap creative energy and drive highly talented top performers out. To the extent that positive energies from
high achievers create a magnet of hope and achievement, talent on-the-bubble behavior constitutes an anchor of negativism, irresponsibility and contempt. While leaders want
to get to the positive side of the performance equation, to the extent they avoid taking responsibility to address the talent on-the-bubble challenge, they drop an
anchor on progress and an evidentiary path of their own on-the-bubble behavior. Here’s what human behavior on-the-bubble is and how to correct it...
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Job Interview Tips: How to Interview Potential Employees
The job interview is a powerful factor in the employee selection process in most organizations. The job interview remains key to assessing the candidate's cultural fit.
The job interview remains the tool you can use to get to know your candidate on a more personal basis. The job interview process helps other employees “own” the new employee who joins your organization. Don't base your hiring decisions completely on the job interview. Consider important factors such as reference and background checks and work experience, too...
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Use Job Descriptions
Effectively developed, job descriptions are communication tools that are significant to your organization's success.
Poorly written job descriptions, on the other hand, add to workplace confusion, hurt communication, and make people feel as if they don't know what is expected from them.
Job descriptions are written statements that describe the duties, responsibilities, required qualifications, and reporting relationships of a particular job.
Job descriptions are important...
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When Tragedy Strikes: Eleven Tips for Your Workplace
As a consultant and writer for twenty years, I am reminded frequently of workplace tragedies. Coworkers die; they lose family members.
Once upon a time, I met with a potential client, with whom I was excited about working. I never heard back from him, which surprised me because our connection had been great.
I learned, when I made a follow-up contact, that he had died the weekend after our meeting. How sad that I never knew him. Here, at About.com, we are consultants and
freelance writers and editors. Yet, you still build a sense of community with the people with whom you work. It's not the same as working with a coworker every day, but
you do mourn the people who experience life tragedies. A colleague died last week, our Financial Planning editor and writer, Deborah Fowles. I am reminded, once again, that
we only have a short time to love and appreciate people in this life. We can deal with workplace tragedies in ways that decrease their impact and allow us to rejoice and move
on. See When Tragedy Strikes: Eleven Tips for Your Workplace Response. Employers do have the opportunity to support employees in times of sorrow and I know this article
will provide guidance...
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Top Ten Ways to Show Appreciation to Employees and Coworkers
You can tell your colleagues, coworkers and employees how much you value them and their contribution any day of the year.
Trust me. No occasion is necessary. In fact, small surprises and tokens of your appreciation spread throughout the year help the people in your work life feel valued
all year long.Looking for ideas about how to praise and thank coworkers and employees? Here are ten ways to show your appreciation to employees and coworkers...
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Why Leadership Means Listening
Today's employees want to be asked for feedback and they want to be heard. Here are four tips to help you become a better listener.
Over the past several weeks, I interviewed a half-dozen well-known business leaders for a new book on communications. One theme came up repeatedly—great leaders are great
listeners. Extraordinary men and women solicit feedback, listen to opinions, and act on that intelligence. Listening skills have always been important in the workplace, but
are even more so when dealing with young employees. Recently researchers at Hudson, a staffing and executive search firm, conducted a survey of 2,000 employees across
multiple generations. The differences they found were striking. One-quarter of "Generation X" employees (born between 1965 and 1979) considered it very important to
get feedback from their boss at least once a...
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The Way to a Winning Résumé
Follow these easy tips, and your CV is sure to impress even the most jaded HR executive.
Your ideal position just opened up in another company, and you feel well-qualified for the job. If you can just get a sit-down with the employer, you know he will be blown
away by your knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm. But to get that chance, you will need to make your résumé stand out from the hundreds human resources has been deluged
with, by both snail mail and e-mail. Résumé isn't a science, and a tip-top one will never guarantee you an interview—let alone a job. But knowing the pitfalls that HR
professionals see coming a mile away can mean the difference between getting a call and getting the cold shoulder. As you proceed up the corporate ladder, it's wise to rethink
various aspects of your résumé, because different strategies are particularly effective at various stages of your career. Also, there are different pitfalls that
await people of different ages. But regardless of your age or stage of career, a smart résumé is essential...
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Why 'Forced' Job Rankings Don't Work
Managers shouldn't have to use arbitrary evaluation systems that pit employees against each other
Ten million years ago, when Ronald Reagan was President, and gigantic reptiles ruled the earth, I was a young HR person in training. During those days, I went to countless
management-training seminars, and heard this mantra over and over: "Management is comprised of four activities. The four activities of Management are planning,
forecasting, budgeting, and controlling." Don't laugh! This was solemn wisdom, back in the eighties. Over the years, we stopped talking about management, and started talking
about leadership...
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Letting Talent Walk Out the Door: Corporate Interviewing Mistakes
Corporations incessantly talk about talent acquisition, talent management, retention and onboarding. You can hear these buzzwords surface when senior executives and human
resource managers meet. Yet, most organizations do not pay attention to how their first impressions really set the tone for successful talent retention.
Corporations incessantly talk about talent acquisition, talent management, retention and onboarding. You can hear these buzzwords surface when senior executives
and human resource managers meet. Yet, most organizations do not pay attention to how their first impressions really set the tone for successful talent retention.
Let's start at the beginning and look at five major interviewing problems that should give any candidate pause when considering accepting a position. These situations are
based on either firsthand experiences or were related to me by a candidate:
* "The Yawn"
* "The Two-Door Interruption"
* "The Endless Interviewing Process"
* "The Lost Soul"
* "The Empty Promise"
The Yawn...
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Improving Quality of Hire: A Core Competitive Strategy
With markets growing more global every day and competition growing more intense, competing for top talent can be challenging. And it is about to get tougher.
Organizations everywhere face a looming scarcity of high-caliber talent as changes in demographic trends, lifestyles, skill shortages and other forces begin to shrink
workforce talent pools and, ultimately, affect corporate performance.
Remarkably, the Society for Human Resource Management's (SHRM) June 2006 "Workplace Forecast" finds 51 percent of midsize employers and 23 percent of large employers are just becoming aware of this critical issue. All, however, will need to compete more aggressively, not just in the products and services markets but in those for talent, as well. Designing and implementing competitive strategy is central to business leadership. Companies invest significant amounts of management time in crafting product, service, and growth strategies to help them succeed in the marketplace and reward shareholders. One of the most effective growth strategies practiced by the world's leading organizations is not simply their product or distribution strategy but their people strategy. Gartner calls this whole area "talent management," and it represents one of the areas of greatest return on time invested in all of business.The major differentiator of high-flying organizations from also-rans is the quality of the talent they bring into their organization. I recall in great detail a 3 3.5-hour job interview I experienced 20 years ago with Microsoft's Steve Ballmer (now CEO). I was a soon-to-be college graduate. He was working with his ex-college roommate Bill Gates to grow talent at his 200-person Bellevue, Wash.-based software company. The entire interview consisted of...
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The Benefits of Incentives
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Incentives have been defined as "what companies put in place — above and beyond straight salary — to get people to do their jobs."
The definition is only partly tongue-in-cheek. The most successful and progressive businesses in the world increasingly are embracing performance-based compensation and
incentive programs. Why? Because most of the time, they meet a need and offer tangible benefits.The need might be strategic: to attract and retain high-caliber talent, manage
risk from rising competitive pressures or lift the levels of productivity and performance across the enterprise. Other objectives for implementing employee incentive
programs are more tactical, such as shoring up sagging customer service, boosting sales or addressing a shift in the balance sheet. Often, they are short-term efforts focused
on driving employee behavior toward achievement of a specific productivity or profit initiative, sales target or service goal. Incentive programs are equally as effective
in either an "up" or "down" business climate. When demand softens, the best competitors recognize the advantage of increasing their share of the market to weather the storm.
During an "up" swing, incentives can help accelerate new product introductions, expand distribution and increase market penetration.
Cash or Noncash? The incentives
organizations offer employees might take the form of bonuses, or they can be noncash rewards. More than three-fourths of the Fortune 500 companies prefer to use noncash
incentives. Expenditures for these programs exceed billions of dollars annually, as companies supplement their employee compensation plans (straight, salaried, or
commissions and bonuses) with noncash incentive programs.The Incentive Federation's "2005 Survey of Motivation and Incentive Applications" examined incentive users'
objectives, practices, costs and results across all levels of American business. Results of the study revealed several trends in noncash incentive use:
• 83 percent use merchandise and/or incentive travel in their sales incentive programs.
• 72 percent use merchandise and/or incentive travel in their nonsales recognition/motivation programs.
• Four out of five survey respondents (80 percent) think travel awards and merchandise awards are remembered longer by program participants than cash awards.
Characteristics of a Good Incentive Program. Whatever form of incentive a company selects, for the program to work well and achieve the desired results, the
first order of business must be understanding the target employee group, what motivates that group and what it considers valuable. Otherwise, the program won't be personal or
productives...
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Mining the Gold of Employee Complaints
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Complaints abound in most organizations today.
There's too much work to get done by too few people, and with the pace of business only increasing, it's no surprise people feel as if they are drowning. Dramatic downsizings and the attendant flattened organizational structures haven't helped matters. A serious absence of trust in management, coupled with a sense of powerlessness, has driven many employee complaints underground, where they wreak havoc with morale and productivity. It's one of the most compelling workplace challenges managers face today, and they must deal with it or accept the sobering reality they are sacrificing the productivity that is key to their organizations' sustainable success. It's easy to ignore complaints. After all, every manager's day is filled with demands that range from trivial to critical. The result? Firefighting has become the default mode. It's also easy for a manager to minimize the importance of the complaints that do surface, going on the often-misguided assumption that the complaints are representative of only a minority of employees. The truth is the complaints that surface are like the tip of an iceberg — the full scope of the issues lies beneath the surface. When managers are brutally honest with themselves, they often find they must reckon with their own sense of powerlessness and inadequacy in dealing with strong emotion, not to mention the implicit suggestion their leadership might need work. It takes both courage and tenacity to reach into the realm of employee complaints...
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Managers as Students
Managers are people too. They have to be trained on new capabilities to grow professionally, just like any other employee.
But when it comes to what they want to learn about and how they want to learn about it, they're quite distinct from the rest of the workforce. This is due to a few factors,
but it all boils down to time — they don't have much of it to spare."As a person rises in an organization, there are often more challenges to become an active learner," said
Nikole Mac, a consultant in the learning and development department at the University of Iowa. "Setting aside time to come to the classroom is a challenge, as people are
often busier in higher levels." This lack of availability appreciably influences their learning consumption preferences, said Drew Morton, who heads up learning initiatives
for management at IBM. Morton is responsible for developing the company's 30,000
managers, in addition to 10,000 employees on the verge of assuming a management position...
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The Halo Effect: Debunking Some Hot Business Books with One of His Own
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In The Halo Effect ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers,
Phil Rosenzweig tears into some of the most popular business books of recent years, including the bestsellers In Search of Excellence and Good to Great. Along the way, he
argues that many of the pat principles bandied about in the business world are based on misguided thinking and flimsy research. While there are plenty of books that promise
the keys to business success, Rosenzweig advises managers to retain a healthy dose of skepticism while reading them. "Some of the biggest business blockbusters of recent
years contain not one or two, but several delusions," he writes. "For all their claims of scientific rigor, for all their lengthy descriptions of apparently solid and careful
research, they operate mainly at the level of storytelling. They offer tales of inspiration that we find comforting and satisfying, but they're based on shaky
thinking." Rosenzweig, who earned his PhD from Wharton and spent six years on the faculty at Harvard Business School, is now a professor at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland,
where he works with companies on issues of strategy and organization. Most management books, he says, focus on the question, "What leads to high performance?" But he asks a
different question: "Why is it so hard to understand high performance?" To get at the answer, The Halo Effect focuses on nine "delusions" that Rosenzweig claims wrongly
influence business thinking -- including one for which the book is named, the halo effect. A company's performance creates a halo, either good or bad, that influences the
way the firm is perceived...
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I Do's and Don'ts: How Changes in Marriage, Divorce and Childbirth Are Redefining the Workplace
According to a new study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, professors of business and public policy at Wharton, marriage and divorce rates in the United States
are both at historic lows. Specifically, the number of people getting married, which has been falling for the past 25 years, is at its lowest point in recorded history,
while the divorce rate in 2005 reached its lowest level since 1970. When Stevenson and Wolfers began to analyze the changing market forces behind these new statistics, one
thing became clear: The same forces that play a role in marriage and divorce statistics -- namely birth control, partial closing of the gender wage gap, the rising age of
first marriages and dramatic changes in home technologies -- have also had a significant impact on businesses and employees..
"The factors that changed the landscape of personal relationships and families play out in the workplace, too, since the same people make up both labor markets and families,"
says Stevenson. "It's always valuable for firms to be aware of the labor market they are dealing with." In a paper titled, "Marriage and Divorce: Changes and Their Driving
Forces," Stevenson and Wolfers acknowledge that when it comes to marriage, economic models have often tried to explain how and why families form. According to Stevenson, a
1981 "Treatise on the Family" by Nobel-prize winning economist Gary S. Becker proposed a marriage theory based on "production complementarities." In Becker's theory, a
husband and wife specialize in the market and domestic spheres, respectively, and hence are more productive together than apart. This division of labor comes in handy in what
Stevenson calls the "production and bearing of one's children."But the two Wharton experts invoke singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's lyrics to The Times They Are A-Changin' to
explain why marriage models like Becker's may need to be reconsidered, noting that "the family is not a static institution." According to Stevenson, the notion of production
complementarities has been undermined in modern family life, and she cites the reasons why. "Increased longevity and declining fertility mean that most of one's adult life is
spent without one's own children in the household, and the rise in marital formation at older ages, including re-marriage, means that many families form with no intention of
producing children," she writes. "Moreover, increases in female labor force participation suggest that household specialization has either declined or taken on a
different meaning." These changes, the researchers suggest, are due to several key factors...
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Marketing via Stories: The Selling Power of Narrative in a Conceptual Age
As A Whole New Mind author Daniel Pink puts it, we have entered a new era: a less linear and more whole-mind/holistic "conceptual age."
As we live our personal lives with a better understanding of how interconnected everything is, our work as marketers should also be addressing that fact in the way
consumers take in our messages. In this more full-service, conceptual age, storytelling—in its many forms—is one of the most powerful tools for presenting the
truths of your product, service, or brand. Whether a story is about the internal/corporate experience or...
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Twelve Tips for Conducting Effective Surveys
We've all been on the receiving end of far too many poorly constructed surveys that required too much time and energy simply to share our thoughts.
Recently, my favorite local brewery failed to retain my interest during its 20-page saga of a survey. Even though the subject was interesting (beer), I lost my interest when I realized my time was not being taken into consideration. Here's a top twelve list of how to...
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Less Hulk, More Bruce Lee
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The JDK crew is a bizarro creative hit squad that helps clients zero in on their psychographic id. |
The striking power of Michael Jager.
It was David versus Goliath, with Attila the Hun thrown in to make it interesting. Microsoft had invited three brand designers to Redmond, Washington, in 2004 to present
a new identity for the upcoming Xbox 360. Landor, the incumbent, was an obvious choice as it had created the packaging for Windows and attained legendary marketing status
for transforming Federal Express into FedEx, including the slogan "The world on time" and the masterpiece logo. Turner Duckworth, out of London and San Francisco, authors
of the Amazon.com identity (with its "logo that smiles from A to Z") was also a contender. And then there was David: JDK Design. From … Vermont. Led by Xbox's global
brand director at the time, Don Hall, some 20 members of the gaming division gathered to hear the back-to-back-to-back presentations. First up was Michael Jager, JDK's
creative director. Standing before the tribunal, Jager (pronounced like the Rolling Stone) illustrated his vision through a combination of street theater, design
psychology, and cultural fluency. Comparing the original Xbox with the Incredible Hulk, Jager used a razor to slash an X in a sheet of paper and then thrust his head
through the hole. "X today is all AARGGHHH!" he bellowed. Pure aggressive power. He then withdrew his head, flipped the paper, and revealed how that X could become a
doorway, "an invitation to an experience." Jager acknowledged power as a critical component separating Xbox from its competitors but urged the company to see it--and
express it-- differently. "Our approach was to transition Xbox from this hulk of escaping power into this quiet power that is lurking, something still incredibly
dangerous but with more of an elegance and grace," he recalls. "The analogy we used was Bruce Lee." And thus were two firms felled by a single stone...
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Are You An A$&*@^?
There's usually one or two in every office. And the word "jerk" or "idiot" doesn't suffice. No, this type of person has a very specific attitude that evokes such dislike,
disdain and meanness that he or she brings the place down. This person is nasty and cruel in a way that jerk doesn't connote.
No, the word for them starts with an "a" and ends with, well, you know, and now someone with a Ph.D. has actually studied these folks in the workplace. Robert Sutton, a
professor at Stanford University and co-director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization there, looks at how to identify and cope with them in his new book The
No A------- Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't.Sutton didn't intend to write the book. In fact, it was born from a wacky pitch to the Harvard
Business Review that he didn't think would get accepted. Not only was it accepted and published in 2003, Sutton received loads of e-mails from readers who agreed that
workplaces are crawling with a-------. He realized there was much more research to be done. He recently spoke with Forbes.com about how to identify them, deal with them and
perhaps even rid your office of them...
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How To Hold A Great Meeting
Ask most people to describe meetings at work, and the adjectives they might use include "boring," "long" and "worthless."
"Hardly anyone does them well, and nobody thinks about how to improve them," says Jennifer Goodrich, president of Benchmark Leadership Training, a management training
firm just outside of Chattanooga, Tenn. But becoming a meeting master isn't the equivalent of searching for the fountain of youth. Just remember a few guidelines...
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Nine Super-Nutritious Foods
You're in the grocery store shopping for a carton of orange juice for tomorrow's breakfast and you're faced with a decision--plain old juice or, for no extra cost, one fortified with bone-building calcium.
You're not alone. Promising better bang for the buck, products like these, called functional foods, are increasingly filling grocery store aisles--and our fridges. But
do we really need them? "There's a finite volume in the stomach and everybody is vying for that volume," says Fergus Clydesdale, distinguished professor and department head
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. "One way to try to get a part of the share of that volume is to offer something that has some health benefit."...
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Mr. Gore goes to Washington
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Former Vice President Al Gore urged quick U.S. action to avert global warming. (March 21)
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Al's magical mystery tour. The packed audience listening to Al Gore on Capitol Hill didn't give him the adoring reception he's become used to. But he made his point
anyway, says Fortune's Nina Easton.
The 80-year-old John Dingell is no Ellen DeGeneres. Still, Al Gore came to Capitol Hill this morning determined to deliver an Oscar-level performance before the Detroit
congressman's joint committee session. And it was quite the star turn. Never glancing at notes, the former vice president (picture Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock) delivered a
fervent made-for-TV, save-the-planet pitch, appealing to lawmakers to follow in the footsteps of the World War II generation of Americans who stood together to rebuild
Europe and defeat communism. "You in the Congress are the repository of the hopes and dreams of people across the earth," he declared. Just as the Spartans faced
Insurmountable odds...
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