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| Volume 8, Issue 10 |
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In This Issue:
 Reaching consensus: Delivering bad news…the good way
The truth behind the (resume) lies
 200 questions job candidates may ask your company
 6 signs you don't care about workers
Your best hire: It may surprise you
 Five simple keys to building solid teams
Pare back perks at your peril
 Beyond flextime
 We fix machines, why not staff? 5 ways to retool employees
7 steps for effective, stress-free performance reviews
Employers pumping gas perks: 8 high-octane tactics
 Coping with a bad boss
Fourteen reasons you're not sleeping
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Reaching consensus: Delivering bad news...the good way
Deborah Zarsky is a principal with Consensus. Consensus is a negotiation and conflict resolution firm offering consulting, training and development, and
international peace building services to private and public sector clients throughout the world.
Due to the economy and recent cutbacks, I won't be able to promote Chris, one of my best team members, as planned. I'm not only worried she’ll get angry when I break the bad news, but I'm also concerned she might quit upon hearing it (before I have the
chance to promote her next year). Any advice? Being the bearer of bad news is neither fun nor easy. However, the words, tone, and medium we use to communicate bad news can have a profound effect on the way the information is received. They can make the
difference between peaceful acceptance and indignation. While many are inclined to work up to the matter at hand by engaging in small talk and beating around the bush, you will probably have more success by being direct (although not harsh) right from
the start. You want to avoid your employee feeling tricked and caught off guard—one minute thinking everything is wonderful, the next being shocked with disappointment. Ease her into the conversation by alerting her that bad news is to follow: "I have
some disappointing news to share with you." Once you have prepared her, you should proceed by sharing three pieces of information. The first is...
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The truth behind the (resume) lies
Forty-nine percent of hiring managers report finding a lie on applicants' resumes, according to a CareerBuilder.com survey
Pop Quiz: What do the following people have in common: George O'Leary, former head football coach of Notre Dame; Marilee Jones, ex-dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Sandra Baldwin, past president of the United States Olympic Committee?
A) They all held prestigious jobs
B) They all no longer work in their aforementioned positions
C) They were all fired from their jobs because it was discovered that each of them lied on their resume
And the answer is…all of the above.
Resume fabrication is becoming a serious and all-too-common phenomenon, with nearly half (49%) of hiring managers reporting they have caught an applicant lying on a resume, according to a recent CareerBuilder.com report. Of the 3,100 managers
surveyed, 57% report dismissing the lying applicant on-the-spot, while another 36% continued to consider the potential employee, but did not hire him. A small, and surprising, 6% of managers hired the employee despite catching the lie. The most
common lies found on resumes include...
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200 questions job candidates may ask your company
Here are some questions that applicants may ask recruiters, managers, HR pros, and others. Some of them you may start hearing more often as the balance of power continues to tilt toward employees.
Do you know the answers to these questions? Some of them you may start hearing more often as the balance of power continues to tilt toward employees. Others, you’ll never hear from a candidate’s mouth. Still, asking yourself these questions -- and finding
out or exploring the answers -- can give you a deeper understanding of your company [and ultimately the key to more successful hires...]
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6 signs you don't care about workers
It has become a sad cliché: "Our People are our Greatest Asset."
That hackneyed phrase doesn't mean anything in particular, so it's an easy bit of boilerplate to stamp on hallway posters and marketing brochures. When certain employers do elevate their talent-retention and team-welfare initiatives to the level of strategic priority, it's obvious. Google (BusinessWeek.com, 10/25/07) (GOOG) is a
hot stock, but it's even hotter as a desirable workplace because of the attention paid to hiring and keeping the best folks on board. When companies talk about valuing talent but don't put that talk into action, it shows. As a business leader, there are
easy ways to gauge whether the happy talk about employees has a basis in reality. Here are our Top Six not-walking-the-walk red flags...
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Your best hire: It may surprise you
It's tempting to hire people with personalities like yours, but the better move may be to find people with the strengths you lack.
I had lunch with my friend Bridget, who said: "Wait till you meet my new marketing manager. She's incredible—so bubbly and full of ideas." Oh dear, I thought. That doesn't sound promising. But I met the marketing manager, Elaine, and I thought she was great. She was just as bubbly and idea-filled as Bridget had said. There was only
one black cloud to mar the scene: Bridget herself is as bubbly and full of ideas as a CEO could be. Her problem isn't generating ideas. It's implementing them. So Bubbly Bridget and Idea-Faucet Elaine worked together for six months, generating grand schemes, and ultimately missing the company's sales goals by a mile. Bridget learned
during the Elaine Era that a hiring manager's favorite job candidate is not always the right person for the job. [Long ago, a boss told me: "Hire into your weakness." That's a tough pill for managers to swallow. To make the puzzle even more challenging, there's this: It's not enough to hire into our weaknesses. We also have to hire people
who are at least as good as we are in all sorts of arenas, and then we have to empower them to tell us when we're off base. It's a double whammy. I learned this when, as a corporate human resources vice-president, I hired a director of compensation and benefits, a guru at the quantitative side of HR that bores me to tears...]
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Five simple keys to building solid teams
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Dan Bobinski is a training specialist, author, and an accomplished keynote speaker. He's been the president of Leadership Development, Inc., providing workforce and management training to Fortune 500 companies as well as smaller, regional concerns for more than 18 years. |
Ask any supervisor, manager, or leader what is necessary for building a solid, dedicated team, and you're likely to get a wide range of answers. The reason? People
value different aspects of teamwork. Individual preferences and comfort zones affect what people believe to be important.
I'm no different. But as a consultant and management skills trainer, I have the benefit of having worked with hundreds of teams over the past twenty years, across a wide spectrum of industries. That doesn't make my opinion the last stop on the road of teambuilding wisdom, but it does afford me the opportunity to see that some factors
are needed across all businesses and industries. What might shock some readers is that most of these five components are surprisingly simple. So simple that it's easy to say "no kidding!" But I list these "simple" factors because so often when I ask teams what they would like from their supervisors, these keep coming up. One would think the
simple ones should be automatic. Well, obviously they're not, or teams wouldn't continually be mentioning them. Therefore, if you're a supervisor, manager, or leader and you perceive any of these items to be obvious, please don't skim over them. It's quite possible you think you're providing these things, but you're not. Or it may be
that you are, but your teams aren't seeing it. And guess what? If they're not seeing it, it's not their problem. It's the supervisor's responsibility to adjust so the teams do see it. Here are the five keys...
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Pare back perks at your peril
In a downturn cutting back on benefits may seem like a win/win decision. After all, you're simply taking a slice out of something most employees rarely notice or take for granted and are even less likely actually to calculate their true value.
But, according to leading U.S business school Wharton, firms that take an axe to their benefits may live to regret it as it could lead to, at best, a disgruntled and, at worst, a disappearing workforce. On its Knowledge@Wharton website, the school has
highlighted the decision earlier this summer by Google dramatically to raise the price of its day-care programme, a move that prompted some employees to weep and, more seriously given its importance as a retention tool, a sharp reduction in the numbers
on its waiting list. The furore over Google's decision illustrated the difficulty in eliminating any employee perk, argued Wharton management professor Nancy Rothbard. ["If you are taking anything away from employees, it's important to...]
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Beyond flextime
Trashing the workweek.
For Linda Skoglund, getting a pedicure on a busy Tuesday afternoon was a career turning point. It ran against her Midwestern work ethic. And certainly, there was plenty of work piled up at J.A. Counter & Associates, the $2.5 million insurance and investment advisory firm she owns in New Richmond, Wisconsin. On the other hand,
canceling her visit to the salon that day could have sent a bad message. It risked signaling to her 15 employees that they weren't allowed to do whatever they wanted at any given time during work hours. And that would tank her plans to overhaul the work environment at J.A. Counter. In recent years, profits had been sluggish, and the
company was lagging 15 percent behind industry benchmarks for revenue per employee. Skoglund had started doing more comprehensive performance reviews, increased the company's sales goals, cut expenses, and fired a couple of employees. Those adjustments boosted the bottom line slightly, but at a cost. "There were so many
changes, it affected morale," Skoglund says. "A lot of people feared for their jobs." Not only that, she was constantly being forced to put out minor fires, which prevented her from focusing on sales. "I was tired of problems always ending up with management," she says. "I wanted to move away from KinderCare." Finally, last spring,
Skoglund decided to implement a new way of managing -- a system known as a results-only work environment, or ROWE. Now, J.A. Counter's employees can...
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We fix machines, why not staff? 5 ways to retool employees
All companies have a large investment—time and money—in their human capital.
A company would never hesitate to fix a machine, repair a plant or improve a work site, so why not treat human assets the same way? Yet, in many cases, a quick termination is the end result and the loss of a valuable human asset. The key to
correcting performance problems is a collaborative effort...
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7 steps for effective, stress-free performance reviews
Performance review meetings can bring anxiety to both sides of the desk. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
With the right planning by supervisors, the meeting can be a productive, morale-boosting exchange that becomes a mutual learning experience for you and the
employee. Here are seven steps for running productive and stress-free meetings, according to Marie McIntyre, author of the Your Office Coach e-letter:...
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Employers pumping gas perks: 8 high-octane tactics
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Where's the cheapest gas? Help your employees find the least expensive gas in town. Punch your organization’s ZIP code into one of these online price-spotters and share the info with employees via e-mail or intranet.
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In a recent survey, nearly a third of HR professionals said they know at least one employee who quit in the past year because the high price of gas made the commute too expensive.
Rather than watch those employees jump ship for jobs closer to home, some employers are actively addressing the driving dilemma—and revving up their retention programs. Here are eight real-life trends around the country: 1. The year of the four-day workweek...
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Coping with a bad boss
Is your boss a yeller, a micromanager or clueless?
Does he put insulting notes on memos that co-workers can see? Does he throw things? Amy Cunningham's first boss at a Minneapolis public relations firm was a yeller and a micromanager, a tough challenge for a new employee just out of college. After a series of unpleasant incidents, the boss finally exploded when he found out Cunningham had
put together a media kit without showing him the separate pieces before assembling it--a routine task she'd done many times before. The boss stormed into her office, got in her face, yelled and cursed. "He tried to throw out any personal insult he could come up with," Cunningham says. "I've never been in another situation, business or
social, that was that scary." It all worked out. Cunningham approached another executive at the company and got reassigned. The boss left a few years later, and Cunningham stayed on--15 years, and counting. Having a bad boss is more than an annoyance. It's the main reason people leave their jobs. [So if your boss is a jerk
and you feel you have no choice but to stay, how do you cope? Here are some basic tips: The best way to deal with a micromanager is to...]
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Fourteen reasons you're not sleeping
Maria Hetem, the 47-year-old owner of a dog grooming salon based in Lebanon, N.J., noticed changes in the way she was sleeping over a decade ago but never thought to talk to a doctor about it.
Instead, she sought out medical advice pertaining to her frequent headaches but doctors were never able to determine the cause. Hetem attributed the fact that she never felt well rested and was frequently waking up at night to the growth of her business and her age. Eventually, thanks to the suggestion of a friend, Hetem got a
sleep test and found she had sleep apnea, a sleep disorder that disrupts breathing and can cause headaches. She guesses she's had the condition, which causes sleep deprivation, most of her adult life. "You just start to think, 'This is normal,' until somebody points out that it isn't," she says. Hetem's situation is an all-too common
one for millions worldwide. In the U.S. alone, it's estimated that one in 10 adults struggle with chronic insomnia, not to mention the one in three who occasionally deal with the condition and those who suffer from other sleep disorders...
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