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Volume 7, Best of 2007      In This Best of 2007 Issue:   Top 10 toughest questions - asked and answered   The five causes of employee negativity   Top (10) ways to show appreciation to employees & coworkers   Your personal best: A magical team building activity   [Google’s] Top ten ways to show appreciation   Top 10 ways to be happy at work   How to hold a difficult [employee] conversation   Top 10 ways to retain your great employees   Be kind to your bad boss - Or pay the price   The Great debates about 360 degree feedback   Work like you're showing off   Sample job interview questions for the employer   Employment ending checklist   Talent-on-the-bubble: Addressing human behavior at work   Iacocca’s nine Cs of leadership   6 ways to kill your credit score   Do your employees qualify for overtime?   10 ways project management skills can help your career   7 Lessons from a bad manager   Why you can't get any work done Top 10 toughest questions - asked and answered 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. I’ve written a how-to piece to answer each question you’ve asked. These articles address and answer your toughest questions. 1. How to Deal With a Negative Coworker: Negativity Matters Some people exude negativity. They don’t like their jobs or they don’t like ... Read the article.  Back to top The Five Causes of Employee Negativity The typical workplace has its ups and downs in terms of employee negativity. Many workplaces are trying to be employee oriented. But, even the most employee oriented workplace can shudder under the weight of negative thinking. When employers understand the causes of employee negativity and put in place measures to prevent employee negativity, negativity fails to gain a foothold in the work environment. I’ve written about how an employer can prevent negativity from occurring at work. I’ve also written about what to do about workplace negativity that already exists. The persistent question I receive from managers is: What really causes employee negativity?... Read the article.  Back to top 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... Read the article.  Back to top Your personal best: A magical team building activity Picture this. I'd been asked to lead the final team building activity of the day before drinks and dinner. The audience will have been in meetings since eight in the morning. The attendees would be police officers who are experts at making what they call "cop faces," expressionless features that don't provide much information or feedback for the facilitator. I had to come up with a prize winning team building activity. I think I did; if it worked with them - and it did - it will work with your teams, too. Take a look at the new team building activity: Your Personal Best: A Magical Team Building Activity. It's magical because it was a huge success with a tough-to-please and involved audience... Read the article.  Back to top [Google s] Top Ten Ways to Show Appreciation Attending an ad club event last week, I listened to a Google manager, Grady Burnett, describe his company and their corporate culture. Sure, you've read about the free food, the fact that developers are enabled to spend twenty percent of their time on projects of their choice - many hallmarks of a successful company that is making money. But he gave us ideas for simple employee motivation and team building factors, too... Read the article.  Back to top Top 10 ways to be happy at work Working at Google sounds very cool. I'd be the first to tout Google as a motivating employer: free food, engineers who are enabled to spend 20 percent of their time on their own projects, and a work environment that fosters play and creative thinking. At Google, Genentech, and other Fortune magazine top 100 companies, employers provide best workplaces. At the same time, perks that enable employees to spend all of their time at work exploit people and destroy work - life balance. So, even the best employer may not be best for everyone. These are the factors that will help you find happiness at work... Read the article.  Back to top How to hold a difficult [employee] conversation Employees are not always perfect. Sometimes, they mess up, fail to show up, miss deadlines and commitments, trample expectations, sport messy work areas, and behave inappropriately with coworkers. I have witnessed screaming matches in the middle of work areas; I've had employees purposefully fail at their jobs, in order to be fired. Others have presented false documentation about funerals, lied on their applications, and abused intermittent FMLA time. All of these situations, and many more not mentioned, require difficult conversations. You can become effective at holding difficult conversations. Practice in a variety of situations, and these steps, will help you build your comfort level to hold difficult conversations. After all, a difficult conversation can make the difference between success and failure for a valued employee or, at least, an employee in whom you have invested valuable training and time. Care enough to hold the difficult conversation before the employee is unsalvageable... Read the article.  Back to top Top Ten Ways to Retain Your Great Employees Set Them Free: Two Musts For Employee Motivation 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?... Read the article.  Back to top Be kind to your bad boss - Or pay the price So you think your boss is inept, arrogant or just plain lazy? You're not alone. A recent Gallup Poll found that a bad relationship with the boss was the No. 1 reason people gave for leaving their jobs. But if you want to keep moving up the corporate rungs, you better make nice.... Read the article.  Back to top 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 Work like you're showing off More Factors That Drive High Performance Factors That Drive High Performance In my 27 years of working with a wide range of companies and organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to HR associations to small businesses, it has become painfully obvious that, as the old saying goes, success “isn’t rocket science.” My job is to discover and report what high performance organizations and individuals have in common. What do they do that others don’t? How do they think? What differentiates extraordinary performers from everyone else? It’s a shock to some people to learn that high performance factors seldom have to do with superior talents or skills, and have much more to do with the simple act of making choices. I’ve come to think of high performance as showing off. Showing off, as I define it, isn’t about bragging or arrogance... Read the article.  Back to top Sample job interview questions for the employer Many employers spend a lot of interview time asking potential employees questions such as, "what would you do if …" Now, I do believe some decent knowledge about the candidate's qualifications can come from such questions. I have even heard myself ask them in the past despite the fact that I know a better way to interview. I recommend that you kick the concept of behavioral interviewing up a notch. You want to know, not just what the candidate predicts he or she will do in some future work situation; you want to know exactly what they have already done in the past. These behavioral interview questions will help you know what to ask. Additionally, on the subject of cultural fit, there is a whole group of questions I have yet to write about. They are open-ended, challenge the candidate to come up with original, unprepared answers, and tell you much about how the candidate will fit in your work environment. Several examples of these questions are... Read the article.  Back to top Employment ending checklist Employees leave your organization for good reasons and bad reasons. On the positive side, they find new opportunities, go back to school, retire or land their dream job. Less positively, they are fired for poor performance or poor attendance or experience a layoff because of a business downturn. In each instance, you need an employment termination checklist to help the employee exit process go smoothly... Read the article.  Back to top 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... Read the article.  Back to top Iacocca’s cine Cs of leadership I've never been Commander in Chief, but I've been a CEO. I understand a few things about leadership at the top. I've figured out nine points—not ten [I don't want people accusing me of thinking I'm Moses]. I call them the “Nine Cs of Leadership” - says an excerpt from former Chrysler Chairman and CEO Lee Iacocca’s Where Have All the Leaders Gone? Enter, Robert Nardelli, who private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management named the new Chrysler’s CEO and one with numerous sobriquets, including “The Turnaround Specialist”, “The Hatchet Guy”, “Tough Job, Tough Guy”. The list goes on...When asked by Fortune in April, what he would be doing if he were to be back as CEO of Chrysler, Iacocca, in his characteristic style, put it bluntly: [Here’s Iacocca’s C-list, not only for Nardelli, but for all corporate leaders, as listed in his book...] Read the article.  Back to top 6 Ways to Kill Your Credit Score A low score means higher rates. Here's how you may be doing yourself harm. Lenders, insurers, landlords and others will charge you more or flat-out reject you if you show up with a low FICO score. Here's how you may be doing yourself harm... Read the article.  Back to top Do Your Employees Qualify For Overtime? The answer may surprise you. She's well compensated. He's a manager. They're all on salary. These are some of the common reasons employers give to explain why they do not pay their employees overtime. But in many cases these reasons are not legally valid. That's something business owners have been learning the hard way. Indeed, the number of overtime lawsuits has exploded over the past couple of years. In 2005, class-action suits involving wages surpassed discrimination cases as the most widespread work force class action, according to a recent study by Chicago law firm Seyfarth Shaw... Read the article.  Back to top 10 ways project management skills can help your career I know that I can always count on her to get the job done." In today's digital world, what employers are looking for may surprise you. They assume you're going to be technologically literate and that you have the skills that are specific to your industry. Once you have the basics, they want to know that you can perform, achieve results and play well with others. According to the "National Association of Colleges and Employers Job Outlook 2007" survey, employers rated communication skills, and honesty and integrity equally at the top of their list of what they look for in potential employees. Following closely behind communication, and honesty and integrity were: interpersonal skills, motivation/initiative, strong work ethic and teamwork skills. What struck me as I read those skills was that all of them are inherent in Project Management, and it emphasized what I've believed for years: Project Management is a career accelerator... Read the article.  Back to top 7 Lessons from a bad manager Many people work for bosses who are horrible at what they do. It is an enviable situation that is fairly common. When circumstances such as these arise, most dwell negatively on the situation while complaining about how terrible their plight is. Naturally, this does not yield productive results. Nonetheless, the individual seems to take solace in the whining. A much better approach when confronted with this scenario is to attempt to learn all you can from the situation. The changing of jobs is so common in this era that 5 years is considered long term tenure. People facing this dilemma often only need to deal with it for a short period of time. Typically, either the manager or the employee move on within a reasonable time frame. If an individual tries to gain all the knowledge possible from that person, he/she skills will grow. I encountered a working relationship similar to what others experience... Read the article.  Back to top Why you can't get any work done Slide Show: The Worst Workplace Distractions 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 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! 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