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| Volume 8, Issue 4 |
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In This Issue:
 Your boss is a monkey
 Eliot Spitzer's seven deadly sins
Career lessons from the candidates
 Marketing's new 5 Ps: Turning what you know inside out
 On the hunt for talent
 Responding to employee rants: 4 do's and don'ts
25 good interview questions ... and 8 to avoid
Attract and keep young workers with 'Portable' benefits
 Bullying more damaging than sexual harassment
 Electronic surveillance of employees [?]
 The body you've always wanted for just $14
 Eight healthy reasons to drink beer
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Your boss is a monkey
"Managing up" using the tricks of exotic-animal training.
Exotic-animal trainers need a great poker face. Let's say you're a trainer, and one day, a beluga whale spits a mouthful of cold water at you. Your first instinct will be to shriek or jump or curse, but any reaction will probably reinforce the
spitting. If you react, that whale will own you, and you'll be a Spit Bull's-eye for the rest of your life. Instead, you must ignore it and appear unfazed, expressionless -- a training technique called "least-reinforcing scenario," or LRS. The writer Amy
Sutherland studied animal trainers who could teach whales not to spit, dolphins to jump through hoops, and monkeys to ride skateboards. One day, it hit her: What if she used those techniques on her husband? This epiphany led her to write her witty and
engaging new book, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage. Shamu proves that behavioral training works on whales and husbands. But let's apply Sutherland's
approach to another irritable mammal: your boss. Maybe you should start treating him or her like an exotic animal. Say your boss is a yeller...
Read the article. Back to top
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Eliot Spitzer's seven deadly sins
Lust is the least of it. Here's a look at the mistakes New York's sex-scandal-scarred governor made, and the lessons for any leader—in politics or business.
Stunning, shocking, schadenfreude-inducing. All those adjectives have been used to describe the fall of Eliot Spitzer, "The Sheriff of Wall Street" and the man Time Magazine named "The Crusader." On the surface it seems his involvement with a prostitution ring and other
possible illegal behavior are what doomed him as governor. But really they're only the tip of the iceberg. As a leader and manager, Spitzer made plenty of other mistakes that made it untenable for him to stay in office. Here are Eliot Spitzer's seven deadly sins (with
apologies to St. John Cassian, Pope St. Gregory the Great, and Dante), and the lessons they contain for any leader or manager...
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Career lessons from the candidates
Take cues from the Presidential hopefuls—while avoiding their missteps—and apply them to your own career campaign.
News analysts can't stop talking about the most closely followed Presidential race in recent memory. Nearly every day there's a new twist or side story to renew the media frenzy. What can business leaders and career-minded types learn from the candidates'
widely varying approaches to campaigning (which clearly have had unexpected results)? See if our observations on the current and past front-runners' strategies and communication styles might serve you in your own race to the corner office.
RUDOLPH GIULIANI...JOHN MCCAIN...HILLARY CLINTON...BARACK OBAMA...
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Marketing's new 5 Ps: Turning what you know inside out
With apologies to Philip Kotler, whose four Ps—product, price, place, and promotion—have been integral to any successful product or service marketing effort of the past 50 years, today's successful marketing hinges on five new Ps.
Whereas the Ps we studied in college are all from the provider's point of view, these new Ps focus with laser-like clarity on the customer. But customer-centricity can't be the mantra of just the marketing department. Every group, from the boardroom to
product leaders to IT, must place the customer at the core of every decision it makes. Responsibility for evangelizing within the organization rests squarely on the shoulders of the CMO. After all, if the marketing chief isn't living and breathing
customer focus every minute, and encouraging others to do the same, who will believe its importance? The CMO's office must consistently demonstrate to the rest of the enterprise the value of looking at all products, messaging, and brands through the
customer's eyes. The entire organization can then get closer to the hearts and minds of their prospects and customers, with the added benefit of proving the value of every initiative that the company undertakes. The new Ps are composed of five equally
important, tightly interwoven components, designed to more tightly integrate marketing in the future. 1. People 2...
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On the hunt for talent
"Get 'em while they're young!" might be the rally cry for today's talent managers who are starved for candidates and struggling to retain those who've joined organizational ranks.
College campuses are a great place to find the best and brightest, but recruiters have to dip their hands in many different pools to get their attention. The word recruitment often conjures images of job fairs where hordes of college students wait
anxiously for their one chance to impress a potential employer. Yet recruitment strategies today involve much more than the traditional, generic job fair scenario. It has become an ever-changing, ever-evolving strategy to attract the best young talent.
Each class that graduates from college is different from the last, but that doesn't mean the fail-safe methods from 10 years ago should instantly be discarded. On-campus recruiting still is ranked as one of the most effective recruiting tools tied with
company internship programs, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers' (NACE) Job Outlook 2008 survey. Other top recruitment methods referenced include job fairs, faculty contacts, employee referrals, Internet job postings and
student organizations and clubs. Ranking last in the survey were virtual career fairs and video interviewing, evidence that face-to-face time still is important in the recruiting realm."Technology is necessary, but it's not sufficient," said Emanuel
Contomanolis, associate vice president and director of Rochester Institute of Technology's Co-op and Career Services. "I cannot think of any student who basically sight unseen would jump and accept an offer of full-time employment. They may be
connecting with people electronically, but ultimately they want to see a face, they want to see a place — they want to understand the culture because the culture is more
important to them than ever before."In today's über-competitive job market, the best recruitment method is...
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Responding to employee rants: 4 do's and don'ts
Discipline and termination meetings are emotionally charged events that carry the potential for nasty words, hurt feelings and even legal troubles.
As a manager, you never know how employees will respond to discipline or firings. But you need to be prepared for anything—including employees who “let it all out” in long, loud rants. Rants are unpredictable. Some employees simply vent, cry or complain
without pouring their scorn on management. Other employees scream, insult, curse, threaten—or even get physical. In either case, it’s wise to follow these four do’s and don’ts to defuse rants and avoid lawsuits:...
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25 good interview questions ... and 8 to avoid
When preparing to interview job candidates, it’s important for supervisors to plan out their lines of questioning.
Decide which skills are most important for that position, then focus your questions on assessing those skills. Here are some sample questions to work from:
Employment history
1. If you had to evaluate your performance in your present job on a scale of ...
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Attract and keep young workers with 'Portable' benefits
Your organization’s youngest workers learned an important lesson about the workplace from their parents: You can’t count on keeping the same job for your whole career.
That realization dawned decades ago, when companies started laying off employees and replacing them with contractors and consultants who didn’t require benefits—or a long-term commitment. Now that commitment gap has widened to the point that today’s
young employees don’t want to make a long-term commitment to their employers. They have no faith that companies will return the favor of loyalty. So young employees come, and they go. If you want your talented Gen Y employees to stick around, you’re
going to have to change the way you look at employee benefits. Here are three things they want that might surprise you:...
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Bullying more damaging than sexual harassment
Divide and rule, generating conflict to create a more competitive environment, pushing people hard to help them fulfil their potential – there has always been a fine line between challenging, motivational management and bullying.
But according to new research, managers who step over that line do more harm than if they were sexually harassing their team. A study by Canadian academics has concluded that a bullying culture of belittling comments, persistent criticism and withholding
of resources can inflict more damage on employees than even sexual harassment. The research looked at 110 studies conducted over 21 years and compared the consequences of employees' experience of sexual harassment and workplace aggression. Specifically
it focused on the effect on job, co-worker and supervisor satisfaction, on workers' stress, anger and anxiety levels and their mental and physical health. Job turnover and emotional ties to the job were also compared. [While both bullying and sexual
harassment clearly created negative work environments and had unhealthy consequences for employees, the researchers found workplace aggression had the more severe consequences...]
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Electronic surveillance of employees [?]
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In researching and interviewing experts for an article about the electronic surveillance of employees at work, I obtained so much information that the task turned into two articles.
The first, published about ten days ago, was Surfing the Web at Work. Today's new article, Electronic Surveillance of Employees in the Workplace, focuses on the fact that electronic surveillance of employees is increasing every year, according to the
annual Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance Survey, done by the American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy Institute annually since 2001. This review of the pros and cons of electronic surveillance of employees at work will help employers
decide what is best in their organization. Not every workforce, workplace, or work culture and environment is a candidate for electronic surveillance of employees at work. In fact, in some work environments, depending upon the culture and environment
desired, electronic surveillance of employees would injure trust, injure relationships, and send powerfully wrong messages to the workforce...
Read the article. Back to top
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The body you've always wanted for just $14
With the U.S. struggling with a growing obesity epidemic, employers across the nation are wondering which fitness, exercise and weight-loss regimens might best fit with their workforce.
There are dozens of concepts and programs available for employers which can make it difficult to select the most appropriate one. The best choice though, might be cold, hard cash. A study published in late 2007 shows that even a small amount of money can
encourage people to make healthier choices and lose weight. Led by Eric Finkelstein, director of the public health economics program at RTI International, a research institute based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., the study tested how effective two
levels of modest financial incentives would be for some 200 overweight employees from nearby North Carolina colleges...
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Eight healthy reasons to drink beer
Looking for a good excuse to tip back a beer? You don't have to wait for St. Patrick's Day. That's because a decade's worth of health research shows that regular, moderate beer intake--one to two 12 ounce glasses per day for men and one for women--can be good for you,
especially if you're facing some of the most common diseases related to aging. Experts say wine tends to get most of the attention when it comes to the health benefits of alcohol primarily because of the French paradox, a reference to the relatively low rate of heart
disease in France in spite of a diet high in saturated fat. The idea is that daily sips of Merlot make the difference. But a number of studies are showing that moderate consumption of
alcohol, including beer, can have similar...
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