Paul Falcone, Time Warner’s VP of employee relations and author of 101 Tough Conversations to Have with Employees, chooses his words carefully when he has to counsel employees—and he wants you to do the same.
Falcone urges managers and HR pros to tackle tough workplace conversations head-on—but he doesn’t want you to enter the battle unarmed. That’s why he developed a series of “scripts” to use when speaking off the top of your head just won’t do.
Covering an array of topics—from bad breath to time card fraud—Falcone’s language emphasizes treating employees with respect, politeness and firmness...
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Bosses hear some wacky one-liners when perfectly healthy workers try to justify taking sick days.
Here are some real examples from a recent CareerBuilder survey of employers: I got sunburned at a nude...
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The famously disciplined and productive management expert discussed his method of self-organization in a recent interview with Harvard Business Review's Bronwyn Fryer.
Jim Collins is all about discipline. The man who described Level 5 Leadership not only understands the inner fortitude of the best-performing companies and leaders; he's famously disciplined and enormously productive, as you can tell from his website (jimcollins.com). A runner and mountain-climber, he is the picture of
fitness. How does he manage his time? "I use a stopwatch," he says. Does that mean that like any excessively busy, highly successful business researcher, author and consultant, he runs from meeting to meeting, tethered to his Blackberry calendar, measuring out his worklife in minutes and seconds? When I sat down with Jim at the
annual CIPD conference and asked him, among other things, about his working style, I was surprised to find that rather than filling up his time, he intentionally empties it. When he says he uses a stopwatch, he means that he tracks his time to...
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As the recession forces more older workers to postpone retirement, a major shift is under way in the makeup of the U.S. labor pool.
Calls for "Tennis, anyone?" are going unanswered. Foursomes on the fairways are few and far between. Retired Americans who thought they would be golfing or shopping with grandchildren are sharpening their tech skills, updating résumés, and scouring job boards instead. America's recent retirees are talented, innovative and
energetic—and millions of them have found that retirement just isn't for them. They're joined by millions more who have realized they can no longer afford to stay retired, following last year's stock market and housing crash. The AARP says that 8 out of 10 baby boomers will work part- or full-time past retirement age. That's 64
million unretiring Americans, the biggest demographic shift in the American workforce since WWII—and 93% of the growth in the American labor market from now until 2016, according to the Pew Research Center. Welcome to "Gen U"—Generation Unretired—America's newest, bona fide workforce segment. To sail through this sea
change in the labor pool, managers need to recognize the unique set of opportunities that Gen U presents...
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Amid so much downsizing, it's risky and unnecessary for managers to let feelings confuse what ought to be a clean transaction.
Since January, more than a million jobs have been cut in the U.S. Although the pace of layoffs has been declining, the downsizing is by no means over. Job cutting is never easy, but it often becomes progressively harder as we go deeper into an organization. At the beginning, employers may be able to lay off only weak employees
they might have considered letting go anyway. While these weak performers are human beings worthy of dignity and respect, we can make ourselves feel okay about their terminations because they are based on merit. The deeper we get, the less likely it is that we honestly can say that a job elimination is simply a matter of letting go
those who should have been let go years ago. Now we are letting go of solid performers who would remain employed in a good economy. Every organization has solid citizens who do fine in anything but a deep recession. But we are not done yet. We are told to go even deeper.Now we must let go of good, or even stellar
performers—employees who add value and who at a different time might be considered for promotion, rather than termination. [Here are 10 things you should never say when terminating an employee:...]
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It was Robert Heinlein, the American science fiction writer, who observed that "progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something." How right he was.
The annual study of IT failure by the Standish Group, the "CHAOS Report", suggested that more projects are failing and fewer are delivering successful results. "This year's results show a marked decrease in project success rates, with 32% of all projects succeeding which are delivered on time, on budget, with required features
and functions," they said. Additionally, some 44% were " challenged" - late, over budget, and/or with less than the required features and functions - and 24% failed entirely and were cancelled prior to completion or delivered but never used. So what is going wrong out there? Why are your projects being challenged in this way? Could
it be that your project managers are working too hard to be successful for you?...
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Getting ahead at work is getting harder nowadays. It isn't just because belt-tightening companies are slashing management layers and freezing salaries. Blame postponed promotions, too.
More Americans are finding an anticipated advancement pushed back due to the incumbent's delayed retirement or an employer's shrunken fortunes, according to career coaches, leadership consultants, hiring managers and recruiters. Coping with a clogged promotion pipeline requires improving your skills and marketability in
creative ways. Among them: Volunteer to perform aspects of the higher role, arrange management support for your expanded involvement in a trade group, or accept a lateral move. Stalled promotions are growing more common largely because...
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This is the time of year when all of us think about giving back. But for some, it seems to be in their blood.
When Cory Doctorow co-founded the open-source software company OpenCola in 1999, he was just another techie genius. Then he had a discussion with people at the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- a technology advocacy nonprofit and proponent of Internet civil liberties -- and he became passionate about liberalizing copyright
laws so he could help EFF provide citizens with greater access to and use of digital material. Mr. Doctorow sold his software company and began working with EFF to further the cause of free digital media sharing. "They couldn't afford to employ me at first, but then they got a grant and I became their outreach coordinator," he
says. "I set up blogs, went to meetings with studio executives, and helped to defeat proposals that weren't in our favor." Mr. Doctorow eventually became the director of European affairs for EFF and was able to boast of a career as an activist. For those who are interested in doing the same, he stresses the importance of...
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With so much competition for every job listing out there—there are more than 6.1 job seekers for every job opening, according to the latest job-opening and turnover data from the U.S. Department of Labor—wowing a recruiter during a job interview is even more crucial.
According to a new survey of nearly 500 human-resources professionals released by the Society for Human Resource Management, there are plenty of ways to derail a job interview—and some of them may surprise you. The basic don'ts: arriving late to an interview or trashing a previous employer. But some hiring managers say even
experienced professionals have made other slip-ups. Often, job candidates...
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Imagine this scenario: Every person you know—each family member, friend, co-worker and casual acquaintance—receives an anonymous email from a stranger making terrible accusations about you. How would you feel?
Renee Holder knows: "Devastated." Several years ago, Ms. Holder discovered that dozens of her MySpace friends had received an anonymous email calling her a tramp and a home-wrecker. For weeks, she tried to counter the allegations, which she says came from her new boyfriend's former girlfriend. She methodically contacted each
person she believed received the email and explained that she hadn't started dating her boyfriend until months after he had broken up with his ex. But the harm was already done...
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Mark Twain's 19th Century adage, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it," is applicable to 21st Century business presentations.
What everybody talks about in business today is Microsoft PowerPoint, the medium of choice for presentations, and how to avoid making a visual hindrance of what is supposed to be a visual aid—e.g., how to avoid being guilty of that all-too-common opprobrium: Death by PowerPoint. Multiple Amazon listings, abundant bookstore
shelves, countless Websites, and numerous state-of-the-art graphics studios are all bursting at the seams with advice about how to design slides for presentations. Yet nobody is doing anything about the other vital element that is meant to complement graphics: the presenter. Oh yes, there is ample advice about body language, but
nobody is providing advice on how to integrate the body language with the slides and the narrative. This missing link creates a distraction during presentations as disconcerting as watching a film with an out-of-sync soundtrack. The movie audience, irritated by even the slightest mismatch of picture and sound, is likely to call out
to the projectionist or even to ask for a refund. The business audience, struggling to relate what they are seeing with what the presenter is saying, is likely to interrupt or simply to tune out, rejecting...
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Companies can't predict the future, but they can build organizations that will survive and flourish under just about any possible future.
The economic shock of 2008, and the Great Recession that followed, didn't just create profound uncertainty over the direction of the global economy. They also shook the confidence of many business leaders in their ability to see the future well enough to take bold action. It's not as if we don't know how to make good
decisions under uncertainty. The U.S. Army developed scenario planning and war gaming in the 1950s. And advanced quantitative techniques, complete with decision trees and probability-based net-present-value (NPV) calculations, have been taught to MBA students since the 1960s. These approaches are extraordinarily valuable amid
today's volatility, and many well-run companies have adopted them, over the years, for activities such as capital budgeting. Here's the challenge: Coping with uncertainty demands more than just the thoughtful analysis generated by these approaches (which, in any event, are rarely employed for all the business decisions
where they would be useful). Profound uncertainty also amplifies the importance of...
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Most people waste what should be a valuable experience.
Up and down the chain of command, year-end performance reviews fill people with dread or with resentment, and very rarely with joy. Both the givers and the receivers spend a lot of time on the reviews, yet they generally see them as an empty exercise. After all the procedural T's are crossed and the I's dotted, it
takes people skills to get a real return on investment from this important, labor-intensive process. Leaders need to set an example by turning a ritual into a productive effort. This column addresses giving a review. In a subsequent article I'll tackle how to get the most out of receiving a review. Both articles aim to
challenge you to shift your focus to the emotional experience on both sides of the table, and to increase the payback from year-end reviews by developing some key psychological skills...
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Do yourself a favor and don't believe them.
In my two decades of work with executives on their communications, I've seen some myths come up over and over again about how best to succeed at speaking in public. The three most common are: "I want to begin with a joke"; "Too much rehearsal is bad for me"; and "It's better to go right to Q and A." Let me debunk each one in turn, in the hope I may save executives and their audiences from future mishap...
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You may lose employees if you don't do it right.
I used to love this time of year: the holidays, the presents, the annual bonus. Ah, the anticipation. The renewal of hope, if not in mankind at least in my manager and the organization for which I toiled so hard all year. Not anymore. The season of bonuses has turned bleak. Outside of those Wall Street sharpies who ironically are being rewarded handsomely for taking the role of the Grinch to new heights, most of us still on the payroll will be happy with a lump of coal in our stocking--anything but the proverbial pink slip. Yet as grim as it may seem from the receiving end, those doing the giving, managers, face an equally joyless season. [The problem is that a lot of those good people, the ones working so hard to keep themselves and their organizations afloat, are seriously thinking about jumping ship when the times get better. They're thinking "it's got to be better over there…"--and there is about everywhere but here. How managers handle this bonus period may make that decision for their employees, and it will play a critical role in determining whether or not organizations still have their best talent when the good times return. So what should a manager do?...]
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Every twirl of your hair, crossed leg or micro-expression gives off a message. Learn how to take control over how people view you.
Say please and thank you. Don't raise your voice. Sit up straight with your legs together and hands on your lap. Don't draw attention to yourself. And never ever brag. These are the lessons many parents teach their daughters. And while these attributes--politeness, deference, humility--and the way they are projected through
our gestures, gait and self-presentation can certainly help in the classroom and certain social settings, they could be holding many of us back professionally...
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