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Friday, August 31, 2007Flexibility leads to Engagement leads to Productivity leads to Profit leads to pay rises for all!
Think about the tools that people use outside work, think about what that is telling you about how to engage people internally. Here are some terms and how you can use it to attract talent to your very personal leadership brand 1. User Generated Content - At work, do you give them freedom to think and create for themselves? Do you TRUST them to create? 2. Community - At work do you find and attract people of similar values? Do you allow them to interact, to share stories, to collaborate on ideas? Do you actively encourage a community feel. 3. Visual and Audio - People are used to receiving information now in short, fun ways - are you embracing this technology that appeals to their senses, in your communications? 4. Micro Information - People are now used to IM, texting, to Twitter, to short videos etc They receive and give short messages, small chunks of information. Have you evolved your progress reports etc to mirror the way people feel comfortable receiving/giving information? 5. Join the Conversation - People expect to be able to comment, be free to express their opinion, that is normal...that is expected. Expression does not mean lack of respect, it means two way respect. Your leadership brand depends on leadership line extensions! You need to flex your style to each team member...not your values, but the way you interact. Flexibility of style can engage different generations, different personality types.....Why, should you be flexible? Because Flexibility leads to Engagement leads to Productivity leads to Profit leads to pay rises for all! Labels: human resource  
What Should Be Given Priority And When?
He’s right—and it applies to every level, from execs to admin. Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS, who works nine to five and doesn’t bring work home, discourages his employees from working extra hours. He says, “Quite frankly, the type of programming that goes on in the employee’s ninth and tenth hour is usually thrown away the next day — it’s usually not very good. You just start making mistakes -— you get sloppy. “I would rather you go home and rest, and come back fresh the next morning, instead of spending all morning correcting mistakes made last night when you were too tired.” (I recently cited this interview in another post) If you, too, want to get rid of busy work, change your mindset and get to know your family/community/hobbies/etc. again, here’s how to start. 1. Separate out everything you can delegate or outsource. This often requires a change in your MAP, the part that accepts that others can do the work, whether they do it in the same way as you or not, and the results will be at the least adequate, possibly better. (It’s called letting go and it’s not as easy as it sounds, especially for entrepreneurs and owners.) 2. Take what’s left on your list and evaluate it on a what-if scale. That means you run each task against the question, “What really happens if this doesn’t get done today or this week?” Will the earth shift on its axis? Will a thunderbolt strike? Will our competitors kill us? Will our customers desert us? Will our employees revolt? Will the company fold? Although similar to prioritizing, this is different. Most prioritizing is done in a now mode that often gives stuff a higher priority than it deserves. Running it though the what-if filter adds a reality check that frequently removes the item from “today” and, at times, from the list completely. I have yet to have a manager do this who wasn’t amazed at the results and at the amount of time that was suddenly available. Just remember, that new time isn’t for more work, it’s for more rest, fun, bonding, etc., both inside and outside of work. Once you learn to use a what-if filter, share the skill with your organization, and watch both productivity and retention improve. Labels: human resource
How To Cope With Workforce Challenge
Especially interesting is the survey of 2,000 Americans in middle management and above, 25 years and older, on work, now and in a decade. Some of the responses were expected, some surprising, some sad, a few hilarious, but all are interesting. Here are a few of my favorites: Now 90% of managers think that they’re among the top 10% of performers in their workplace. (LOL/ROF) 11% of men, vs. 5% of women, are scared of their spouse. 36% say people got more done before the era of email. 6% of respondents under age 30 have accidentally called their boss mom or dad. Ten years from now 82% believe that self-fulfillment, as opposed to fear, will be the most powerful workplace motivator. However many of the individual of articles you choose to read, there is one particular piece of intelligence that had better penetrate your brain. Whatever your business, large or small, global or local, at all levels, you’d better concentrate on retaining your talent, all your talent, top to bottom, because it’s becoming more and more irreplaceable, as well as more and more expensive when you do—a trend that won’t be slowing down any time soon! Labels: human resource
Thursday, August 30, 2007To have the most productive employees, you must build a partnership
And although the efforts are equally valuable yours must come first, because it’s your contribution, as their manager/leader, that enables your partners’ to contribute their share. Although what you need to do can be summed up in a few words, the effort required to actually do it never ends. What you do—you must respect them all and treat them fairly, help them grow to reach their true potential and then not limit their upward mobility because it inconveniences you. What you get—your people will respond by going the extra yard, working the extra hours, becoming, if they aren’t already, real 10 per centers. Your payoff—your reviews and promotions will reflect the high performance and increased productivity of your group, whether it’s a team, department, company, or something in-between. Your retribution—if you try to fake this attitude and pay it lip-service only, your people will know, if not instantly then within months. The result will be low productivity, a high rate of attrition, rotten reviews and no promotions. As always, it’s your choice. Labels: human resource
Changing Culture Can Save Company?
Merck’s Board was smart in promoting the insider; during his 35 years, Clark had watched the company degenerate into a collection of fiefdoms more focused on advancing their own agendas than on getting the right drugs to patients. To revitalize drug development he’d need to get Merck’s 60,000 employees–scientists, regulatory staff, and salespeople–to work together. Clark set out to blast open deeply blocked channels of communication. Over the years, Merck had fallen out of touch with customers. Clark wanted to get employees to stop thinking about their specific job functions and to instead focus on the diseases they were trying to conquer. So he began placing people in teams defined by therapeutic fields such as cancer and diabetes. He encouraged the teams to huddle with doctors who prescribe Merck’s products, patients who take them, and even insurers that decide whether or not to pay for them. “It’s a different way of doing business,” says Clark…Bringing disparate voices together from Day One “is the way work should get done in companies.” Clark also recognized, and R&D chief Peter S. Kim concurred, that they needed to overturn some of the most deeply ingrained behavior of the scientific world, not just at Merck. “One of the hardest decisions any scientist has to make is when to abandon an experimental drug that’s not working. An inability to admit failure leads to inefficiencies. A scientist may spend months and tens of thousands of dollars studying a compound, hoping for a result he or she knows likely won’t come, rather than pitching in on a project with a better chance of turning into a viable drug. So Kim is promising stock options to scientists who bail out on losing projects. It’s not the loss per se that’s being rewarded but the decision to accept failure and move on. “You can’t change the truth. You can only delay how long it takes to find it out,” Kim says. “If you’re a good scientist, you want to spend your time and the company’s money on something that’s going to lead to success.”" Cultures don’t change overnight or in two years or even in ten, it’s an ongoing battle. Clark is “still haunted by the culture of complacency that left companies like his stuck in an innovation rut.” If you ever feel comfortable that your model is the right model, you end up where the industry is today,” he says. “It’s always going to be continuous improvement. We will never declare victory.” There are good lessons for young companies in the fall and subsequent rising of 114 year-old Merck and a CEO who was a “low-key executive…from a very unglamorous post…head of manufacturing.” Clark sums it up nicely when he says that finding a comfort zone, whether in your business model or your culture is one of the worst things that can happen to you. Labels: human resource
Work Or Spoon?
The people at Work or Spoon pose this question: "Have you ever had a day where you just thought that gouging your eye out with a spoon would be so much less painful than going to work?" In response, they created a website geared toward helping the average worker deal with things like "useless co-wokers" and "bosses that would better serve as door stops." On the website you will find a collection of articles by various contributors. There are also comics with a work-related bent as well as a "Question of the Week" section which asks things like: "What would you write in a resignation letter if you could write anything you wanted to with no negative consequences?" So what's your decision: go into work, or use that spoon? Check This Site:http://www.workorspoon.com/ Labels: human resource
How To Become Good Boss?
The article starts by stating three of the biggest missteps a manager makes. "I'm right, you're wrong. Obey me" is the first example of the wrong attitude. "I'm higher on the organizational chart. That means I'm better than you" is another common mistake. Thinking that everything an employee lower on the pay scale suggests or produces is wrong is another bad move. Instead, the author suggests ways in which a manager might have the opposite effect on their employees. "When something fails, take responsibility." So if an employee fails to meet a deadline, look at what you as their supervisor did wrong to make that happen. And if the employee is that bad, maybe you need to look at your hiring methods. "Understand employee motivations" is another tip. When you have an eager employee, take the time to listen to them. More importantly, try to understand them. Instead of shrugging and then giving that person menial tasks, listen and use their energy to benefit you. "Reverse the organizational chart" is a crucial idea. Get into the mindset that you work for your employees rather than the other way around. Also realize that employees can, in a sense, fire their bosses. It may take radically altering your way of thinking to get to the point where you are a "good" boss. However, taking the time to understand the ways in which you can change could lead to a working environment that is productive rather than antagonistic. Labels: human resource, stories
Wednesday, August 29, 2007How To Rate Hired Employees?
His latest foray into HR deals with measuring your "hiring batting average." By advocating the direct measurement of hiring quality, he adds even more credibility to counter the "silly" list of arguments that many in recruiting make against measuring quality of hire. His support of using a quality of hire measurement is not unique among CEOs. In fact, Nick Burkholder, founder of Staffing.org, notes how "CEOs are interested in all performance metrics, but especially new hire quality!" After six months on the job, new hires should be rated as being below, meeting or exceeding expectations. Using this simple rating as a guide, the people who recommended the new hire should be given a hiring batting average. An average of .800 means that 80% of the candidates recommended met or exceeded expectations. You can also use this method to measure other factors like: - the sources of the good and bad hires. - the assessment process used - the selling points used Labels: human resource
What Is the Right Way Of Sacking Employees?
We found out later he was on the list, his manager knew (as did my manager about one of the ppl on our team) a couple days before and tried to arrange things so this poor guy wasn't in Chicago the day he was to be laid off. No, said HR: this has to be super-secret and no one can get any hint that there are layoffs or it will be anarchy among the workers. Telling this guy to not go to Chicago on Tuesday might upset the balance of the elemental forces of nature! A@@hats. So, the manager has no choice but to watch Bob pack his things and take a flight to Chicago, knowing he was going to have to call him there to tell him he was out of a job. The best part is they were supposed to coordinate the "involuntary separations" at 10:00, presumably so word would not spread to those affected before their managers got to them. Of course, word spread early in the day and people knew names and everything hours before this damn super-secret plan was to go into action. Poor Bob heard from a stranger that he was "on the list". He called his boss and asked if this was true, was told yes. So he wrote the note on the wall, headed to the nearest open bar (8 am) and proceeded to drink his return ticket." It seems that the managers had reached the decision that large numbers of employees were going to be laid off. It was also decided that letting any of this information out early would create a panic among the staff. Well, one of those workers was a corporate trainer who traveled around the country doing computer training. What could they do about him? According to me, "the manager had no choice but to watch Bob pack his things and take a flight to Chicago, knowing he was going to have to call him there to tell him he was out of a job." So, yes, this employee got to find out he was out of a job while on the road, hundreds of miles from home. Despite all of the planning, word apparently did leak out. All of the people who were about to be sacked were aware of it before hand, including the one who was traveling. So, what did that employee decide to do instead of his training class? "He called his boss and asked if this was true, was told yes. So he wrote the note on the wall, headed to the nearest open bar (8 am) and proceeded to drink his return ticket." Labels: human resource
Managers Vs Employees
Leslie Mann, columnist and blogger for the Washington Post, is looking for stories about those kinds of employees. In this posting on her blog, she asks for your stories. The original article was published last year, but people are still submitting. Leslie herself starts things off by talking about two employees who showed up to work wearing the wrong kind of clothes for an office. It's the responses that she got to this article that really get interesting. One poster relates the story of one employee whose abused of her privileges as a telecommuter and ruined things for everyone else who was doing the same. Another story from an IT department talks about the intern who thought it would be appropriate to bring his Xbox to work and play with it during the day. Then there's the employee who would take every other Monday off to go to a "funeral." Finally, there's the tale of a manager who had someone call in sick only to bump into that person on a plane from Las Vegas. So, yes, there are managers out there who are tough to work with. There are those who seem out of touch. There are even some who seem to be complete idiots. But let's not forget that stupidity can extend well below the bosses and deep into the employee pool as well. Labels: human resource
Monday, August 27, 2007Interview training for managers pays more dividends than just better hiring
Those with highly engaged workers also spend more time in preparing workers for their new jobs - 35 weeks to bring a new hire up to speed as opposed to only 15 weeks for those companies with low engagement. Improvements in employee engagement also result from the simplest technique of explaining to a new employee why they were hired! Fifty-two percent of high financial performers said they were offered such an explanation. Less then 30 percent of low financial performers received the reason. For more Brainstorming:http://www.super-solutions.com/behavioral-interviewing.asp Labels: human resource
Baseball Managment
Beyond baseball when staff assignments aren't working out the way they should, work isn't getting done right or at all, managers are likely to make one, two or three of these mistakes: Holding on too long to the status quo, Changing too quickly without giving the staffer coaching or enough chances to succeed, or Doing enough analysis to reasonably gauge where the shortfall is and how to fix it. Once you've assessed there is a problem and that it's worth addressing, you have act, and I always recommend starting with the resources at hand. I did work not too many years ago at a real estate management operation. I was part of a team working on an electronic document management system (EDMS), a not-universal (but not rare either) technology. There were four of us on the team, each a lead for an area. I was to be the process analyst, escaping for the first time in a long time the need to be the technology point-human. The technology point-human was a woman on loan from the IT department. The fact that I'd implemented EDMS software before was a plus, but not to be a responsibility. But the technology lead, as intelligent as she was, didn't like to learn new things and EDMS was new to her. So we lugged for months while she refused to dig into the new realm and her responsibilities idled. Eventually, I started to try to coach her. No luck. Management whinged but took no action. So I started picking up some of her her responsibilities, and months later other people did, too. The Phase I of the project came in months late and that contributed, I'm almost sure, to a decision to suspend the subsequent Phases, a decision that assured that the sunk investment in the system would not yield net gains. They held on too long to the status quo, and they didn't do enough analysis of the problem to realize and act on the fact that they had resources at hand to address the limitations of the status quo. A pretty common American business failure with a strong foundation of willful ignorance of what each staff member can d that's not within her current job description. This almost never happens in Baseball. Case in point: The Texas Rangers' twiddling of staff assignments in mid-campaign. The Rangers have an excess of left-handed hitting outfielders. So, according to a New York Times three-dot last week: The Rangers plan to platoon Frank Catalanotto and Brad Wilkerson in left field even though each is a left-handed hitter. Wilkerson would start against left-handed pitchers, against whom he is hitting .262 this season (.209 against right-handers) with 6 of his 15 home runs. In his career, Wilkerson has hit .266 against left-handers and .244 against right-handers. In concept a clever ploy, worth an experiment. Now the traditional platoon involves a right-handed batter who hits against left-handed pitchers and a left-handed hitter who bats against right-handed pitchers, because in the general case batters produce better against their opposite-handed pitchers. It's not universal, but a general tendency. For example in 2007 so far, left-handed batters are hitting about 7% better against right-handed pitchers than right handed batters are, while right-handed batters are hitting about 11% better against left-handed pitchers than left-handed batters are. Some call batters who go against that norm, "contrarian". Split PA H 2B 3B HR BB IBB SO BA OBP SLG OPS tOPS+ Split +------------+-------+------+----+----+----+----+----+------++-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+------------+ vs RHP as RH 49605 11592 2354 163 1251 3485 197 8786 .259 .318 .403 .722 92 vs RHP as RH vs RHP as LH 43107 10259 2116 287 1093 4283 492 6859 .270 .346 .427 .774 106 vs RHP as LH vs LHP as RH 26764 6577 1403 109 743 2412 201 4128 .277 .347 .440 .787 109 vs LHP as RH vs LHP as LH 9694 2126 413 45 204 844 28 1993 .249 .321 .379 .700 87 vs LHP as LH stats from Baseball-Reference.ComWhy was this a clever thing to experiment with? Several reasons. The Rangers are in last place and are fairly-well out of the race for a playoff spot. Team W L PCT GB E# L10 Detroit 62 49 .559 - - 2-8 New York 62 50 .554 0.5 51 7-3 Seattle 60 49 .550 1.0 52 6-4 Minnesota 57 54 .514 5.0 47 6-4 Toronto 56 55 .505 6.0 46 5-5 Oakland 54 59 .478 9.0 42 5-5 Baltimore 52 58 .473 9.5 43 6-4 Chicago 52 59 .468 10.0 42 7-3 Kansas City 48 62 .436 13.5 39 5-5 Texas 48 64 .429 14.5 37 2-8 Tampa Bay 42 69 .378 20.0 32 4-6 1. They have less to lose from an experiment that doesn't work out than a team that's in contention. Baseball works with this model all the time -- beyond baseball though, management rarely learns this lesson. The real estate management endeavor had a project that slipped out of meeting deadline, but they still lashed themselves to the ineffectual technical lead and her lassitude like Ahab to the Whale. Trying to use others' talents, job description included or no, would have made perfect sense...and did when it finally, too late, happened. 2. Brad Wilkerson might be able to hit a predominant diet of left-handed pitchers better than right. The evidence is inconclusive. In his peak years before his injury last season, Wilkerson contrarily had equal or better production against left-handed pitchers than right-handed ones (stats again from Baseball-Reference) as often as not. Catalanotto had already proven in his long career that he was unlikely to hit lefties -- in his six peak years, he never once got close to being good against left-handed pitchers. The evidence is "good enough" to experiment with. Beyond baseball, an organization that took the trouble to engage in close assessment of the talent at hand would make a point of knowing who else on staff might be able to complement or fill in for a struggling team member. For the Rangers it meant looking closely at data and then overcoming a standard practice and the assumptions around it, and any organization can do that if it cares about success. 3. Wilkerson certainly isn't hitting right-handed pitchers, so if they're going to get any utility out of his bat, they have every reason to hope it could come against lefties. It's close to impossible to justify Wilkerson's .213/.285/.427 output against the right-handed pitchers The Book says he should hit. In the real estate management outfit case, they should have taken the Rangers' approach and found something the woman holding the technology lead's role could have done to add to the team's progress. She was bright and promising -- they could have taken a chance on finding out what she could contribute. Instead, they just resented her lack of production at what they hoped she would achieve. Baseball teams sometimes do what the real estate management outfit did, but it's a remote exception. Teams are willing to try players in different positions, take multiple training approaches, bring in new coaches, twiddle with their mechanics or mental attitude or the pattern with which management applies them in their work. Who do you have dragging you down who could use a redefined workload or a job swap or a platoon partner? ¿What are you waiting fo Labels: stories
How To Handle Workplace Stress
Productivity is up and so are the number of "bummed out, frazzled and overwhelmed" employees. Combined with the rising cost of health care and health insurance, an aging workforce, and global competitiveness, the U.S. business community is under attack. While economists, politicians, academics and the media debate the intensity of the The Perfect Labor Storm, employers and their profits are being blown away by this skilled worker crisis. What is not debated even iota is the skyrocketing cost of health care. One of the most insidious and overlooked causes of these increases are health conditions caused or worsened by workplace stress. What follows are the hard, cold facts of the devastating effects of stress on workers and the unique unrecoverable costs begin absorbed by employers. Just like the saturated ground after days of torrential rains, bottom lines have absorbed all they can take. To survive The Perfect Labor Storm, employers must first understand that prolonged workplace stress cannot be accepted as "just a fact of life of doing business". Employers have a choice - accept workplace stress as normal and allow the following ravages of stress to overwhelm their workforce or do something about it. Success Performance Solutions offers a solution to workplace stress. Job matching is a proven solution for placing the right people in the right job on the right teams in the right businesses. Job matching also reduces workplace stress by offering the recognition and rewards that employees value, a motivating culture, and energizing jobs. Labels: human resource, stories
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