Harry's Post

HRO vs. PEO: What’s the Difference?

2008-10-08T10:44:00.000-07:00

As contributed By Lea Hartog for HR World

When exploring HR-outsourcing solutions, many companies encounter two unclear and unexplained acronyms: HROs (Human Resources Outsourcers) and PEOs (Professional Employer Organizations). Since these three-letter terms often appear hand-in-hand, it’s easy to assume that they refer to the same thing. But that’s not necessarily the case.

Most people use HRO when they're talking about either breed of service provider, so it’s easy to get confused and assume that HRO is the blanket term for HR outsourcing. While HROs and PEOs do offer similar services, however, fundamental differences exist between the two approaches. And every company — whether it’s a startup just breaking into the market or an enterprise with years of experience — needs to understand these differences before choosing an outsourcing solution for their HR needs.

HROs
An HRO is a third-party provider of common HR services. Depending on its range and scope, an HRO can address all or only a few of businesses’ various HR needs, including payroll, benefits administration, training, risk management and recruitment. Most HRO companies offer services à la carte so that clients can pick and choose which HR responsibilities they want to outsource. For instance, ADP Inc. offers payroll, retirement administration and several other HR-related services. E-Chx Inc., on the other hand, provides only outsourced payroll solutions.

The clearest advantage of HROs as compared to PEOs is flexibility. Companies can choose which services to outsource and which to manage in-house. Many SMBs (small- to medium-size businesses) turn to HRO companies so they can focus on business objectives, save time and cut costs.

PEOs
PEOs, on the other hand, take care of all HR responsibilities for their customers. A PEO handles every HR task — from workers’ compensation to creating an employee handbook. A PEO also assumes all associated liabilities and legal responsibilities for its clients.

In order for this relationship to work, both logistically and legally, a hired PEO becomes a co-employer with a client company. Also known as an “employer-of-record,” a PEO essentially hires a company’s employees directly and then “leases” them back to the company for work. Put another way, the PEO serves as the administrative employer, while the client business acts as the on-site employer.

This might sound fishy, but it actually has a number of benefits for companies. Since the PEO is the employer-of-record, it is responsible for federal and state taxes, as well as workers’ compensation. PEOs can also pool employees from their client companies in order to get reduced rates for health benefits and retirement packages. And PEOs are responsible for tangling with legal regulations, tax laws and insurance.

The drawback of PEOs is, of course, that you surrender all control of your HR department to another company. Many small enterprises, however, view this as a benefit in itself; allocating all HR responsibilities to a PEO allows growing businesses to devote their attention to issues that will make or break them.

Which One’s Right for You
Determining whether an HRO or PEO is right for your company requires a significant amount of consideration and planning. But a few key facts may help direct your decision process.
If your company is fresh on the market, you may be wise to consider a PEO. Startups have a host of issues on their plates — from determining the right number employees to creating an effective marketing strategy — and may not have the budget to hire a dedicated HR professional. A PEO can save you a tremendous amount of time and effort.

In addition, if you have a small company, it’s worth hiring a PEO to be able to offer your employees competitive rates on health insurance or 401(k) plans. If your SMB is going to compete with larger companies for talent, you need to provide benefits that are up to snuff.
If your company has more experience under its belt, however, an HRO might be the better choice. Switching any HR system can be a difficult task for an already established company and has the potential to cause major problems. For instance, integrating an HRO’s system with a company’s legacy payroll system may be cause for consternation. And you might have already hired an HR professional that you trust and value. Outsourcing one of your time-consuming tasks — but not all — may be the best bet.

Retention strategies: Barriers to exit

2008-10-07T05:37:00.000-07:00

-Jennifer Crump
The state of the job market has raised the stakes in the war for talent. An unemployment rate of just 6% makes it easy for your top performers to find another job if they’re unhappy working for you—and hard for you to replace them.

The odds are that many of your employees are restless. A study by Towers Perrin, human resources, risk- and financial-management consultancy, suggests that more than two-thirds of Canadians are open to considering a job offer from another employer or a professional recruiter working for them.

How will your key employees respond if a recruiter comes calling? You’re taking a big risk if you simply hope for the best, because you’ll face a tough slog finding their successors. An international survey by Watson Wyatt Worldwide, an HR, actuarial and finance consultancy, found that 69% of employers are struggling to attract high-performing staff, and replacing those costs up to three times their annual salary.

But HR specialists say you can stop the poachers with an employee-retention plan that addresses the concerns most likely to tempt your people to leave. When you craft the plan, you should have someone well versed in HR strategies, whether in-house or an outside consultant, at the table. Get your managers’ buy-in by having them help create it. And appoint a senior executive to take ownership of and be accountable for the plan. Here are the key elements it should include:
Your first and best line of defence is your line managers. “People don’t quit companies; they quit bosses,” says Bruce Snow, a partner at Robertson Surrette, a Halifax-based recruitment firm. You need to educate your managers that there’s no longer a long lineup of potential hires outside—at least, not of top-tier performers.

Snow says you also need to educate managers in skills such as diversity training, cultural sensitivity and generational training. Other important traits? “Managers who listen, who provide feedback and recognition, and who mentor are the most likely to engage and retain your employees,” says Patrick Hartling, principal of SPL Development Services, a Halifax-based retention consultancy.

Employees who have only a vague sense of their long-term prospects at your firm may be receptive to a recruiter who can put their future into sharper focus. It’s not that you have to spell out every promotion they’ll get until age 65; rather, offer them concrete ideas on where you see them over the next few years.

But beware of making unrealistic promises or failing to follow through. Drew Railton, a Vancouver-based partner with recruitment firm The Caldwell Partners International, says many of the easiest recruits are people whose current employer has promised much and delivered little.

A benefits package that appeals to a 50-plus employee is unlikely to wow a 20-something. So, sticking with a traditional “one size fits all” benefits plan leaves you vulnerable to competitors that offer more flexibility.

Snow recommends that you adopt “flexible benefit dollars,” an idea popular in Europe that’s spreading to Canada. This scheme allows employees to choose how to “spend” a specified dollar total on benefits from a fixed menu. Parents might, for instance, prefer flexible hours to make it easier to drop off and pick up their kids from daycare, while older workers might choose topped-up pension benefits. And, says Snow, “20-somethings might prefer a fridge full of pop and the ability to work at night.”

The Towers Perrin study concluded that the top driver of retention is employee engagement, which is driven above all by senior management’s sincere interest in employee well-being. The co-founders of ParetoLogic, a Victoria-based developer of data-protection software, pride themselves on taking that kind of interest in their staff as individuals. But that became much harder as their workforce ballooned from six to well over 100. They therefore asked their HR director, Priscilla Tumbach, to create a database on employees’ personal lives, such as their skills, hobbies, educational pursuits and details about their families. The goal: to gain a richer understanding of how their staff’s jobs fit into their overall lives.

“We believe our employees come to work as a whole person—as a mother or father, husband or wife, sister or brother, aunt or uncle—and we support them at work in that way,” says Tumbach. Managers draw on the database’s insights into employees’ lives outside the office when conducting, say, a performance review or a career/succession-planning exercise.

ParetoLogic’s HR team gathers the data by interviewing employees or asking them to fill out forms. Tumbach stresses that privacy is paramount and staff aren’t obliged to provide this information. She cites the database as one of the keys to the firm’s 93% staff-retention rate in 2007.

Snow says several of his clients have verbal agreements with rivals not to poach from each other. “These are usually negotiated at the most senior levels, and are more in the nature of business understandings among peers than formal, legally enforceable agreements,” says Toronto-based employment lawyer Michael Fitzgibbon, a partner at Borden Ladner Gervais.

The obvious weakness of an informal non-aggression pact is that you can’t sue the other firm if it breaks the deal. Yet each party’s self-interest in avoiding being poached, and reluctance to break its word, should sustain the truce.

Just Got Promoted? Network! Network! Network!

2008-09-23T08:45:00.000-07:00

Most people aren't naturally networkers. But if you've just been promoted or are about to move into a new job, it's imperative that you start talking to lots of people and make connections right away, so you can acquire crucial information about your new job and succeed early. If you don't, you might lack the facts you need for a proposal, for example, or you might bring up an idea you think is neat but has failed in the past.

I call it "courageous networking" because you are actively determining the people who should be in your network and going out systematically to recruit them. These people should be both inside and outside of the company -- including competing firms. Your old network probably doesn't have all the connections and knowledge you'll need after you arrive in a new division or country. And the first 30 to 60 days are when networking matters most, because that's when people are deciding if they can depend on you or if you're a loser who should never have been hired.

Here are a few things to do right away:

1) Figure out who should be in your network. It shouldn't be just the people who eat lunch at the same time you do. Ask yourself: Who are the people who can help you? Who knows what's going on? Who gets around roadblocks? Who are the critical links on the supply or information chain? Your boss can be a big help in identifying people, setting up meetings, going with you to conventions, and making introductory phone calls. But your boss isn't the only one with helpful information. One of the best contacts I made in an early job was the person who implemented office moves. He always knew who was on the way up.

2) Stick your neck out. Most people will be more receptive than you think. No one turns down a call from someone who starts the conversation with "I'm new in my job and I'm trying to get to know people who...." When a competing firm hires a new chief, I write a congratulatory note and say I'd like to drop in. I've never been turned down. Knowing these CEOs makes it easy to fix problems such as competitors' salespeople spreading false rumors about my company -- I pick up the phone, explain the situation, and it's fixed.

3) Remember that networking is not a one-way street. When you first meet people, reciprocate by sharing information you know will be useful. Many executives spend about an hour a week maintaining their networks, but greater effort yields greater payoff. The marketing manager of one large company claims he spends two hours a day at it. (Later on, after you're established in your job, stay in touch by sending people relevant articles, for example, once a quarter.)

Posted by William C. Byham (the chairman and CEO of Development Dimensions International, a global management-consulting firm based in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania) in the Harvard Business Magazine

The People Problem In Talent Management

2008-09-15T11:44:00.000-07:00

Talent-management processes can't work if managers don't think it's important to develop their people.

Matthew Guthridge, Asmus B. Komm, and Emily Lawson

Increasingly, companies view the ability to manage talent effectively as a strategic priority. Yet our research finds that senior executives largely blame themselves and their business line managers for failing to give the issue enough time and attention. They also believe that insular "silo" thinking and a lack of collaboration across the organization remain considerable handicaps. Moreover, executives who think that their companies' succession-planning efforts are deficient don't, on balance, see talent-management processes and systems as the chief problem.

The results of our research—which included in-depth interviews with 50 CEOs, business unit leaders, and human-resources (HR) professionals from around the world—suggest that the obstacles preventing talent-management programs from delivering business value are all too human. As one leader commented, "Habits of mind are the real barriers to talent management."
Nearly half of the interviewees expressed concern that the senior leadership of their organizations doesn't align talent-management strategies with business strategies. "This is a real blind spot for our leaders—they don't realize the importance and significance of it," commented one HR executive. Furthermore, 54 percent of those interviewed agreed that senior managers don't spend enough time on talent management. "Senior managers aren't managing their time well or don't see the point of managing people and getting the best out of them," lamented one respondent.

Business line managers—the group responsible for a company's day-to-day operations—were found equally culpable. Fifty-two percent of the respondents identified an insufficient commitment to developing talent on the part of line managers as a critical barrier. Moreover, 50 percent observed that line managers were unwilling to categorize their people as top, average, or underperforming, and 45 percent felt that line managers failed to deal with chronic underperformance by employees. As one interviewee noted, "We recognize underperformance, but the challenge is what to do about it. We find it difficult to have the 'hard' conversations."
Silo thinking—focusing on the interests of one part of the organization rather than the whole—not only hinders the mobility of talent within a company but also undermines the sharing of knowledge and the development of interpersonal networks (or "social capital") across the organization. It was singled out as a problem by 51 percent of the interviewees. "People will choose to resign and reapply for another division rather than signal to their manager that they are not committed," complained one European HR director. "Without 'sponsorship,' you're nothing here. You're basically seen as a traitor to your division."

Succession planning and a lack of understanding about the organization's most critical jobs remained significant barriers for 39 percent of respondents, though interviewees blamed an inability to exploit the data they produce rather than corporate succession-management systems. "We do succession planning to an unbelievable degree," said another European HR manager. "But once we do it, we don't use it. Never have we reviewed a senior vacancy and looked at the succession plan. It's almost done as just another tick in the HR box."
The findings show how the debate over talent management has evolved in recent years as demographic changes, deregulation, and the economic shift toward developing markets have intensified. A 1998 study, for example, found that managers were concerned with the ability of their companies to attract talent or to install efficient and robust systems in areas such as performance management, feedback, and recruitment processes.

Our interviews suggest that those concerns are fading. The vast majority of the respondents, for example, disagreed with the suggestion that the value proposition of their companies—whatever distinguishes one organization from another in the eyes of applicants—is an impediment to attracting quality people.

These recent findings, which are consistent with the results of an earlier European study, reflect what we see in our client work: talent management cannot be isolated from business strategy. Companies achieve the best outcomes by actively involving senior leaders in talent development during the early stages of strategy formulation. Those that rely solely on HR to drive their strategy for talent are missing an opportunity to align the behavior and capabilities of the workforce with the priorities of the business. Executives should find ways to make line managers unambiguously responsible for developing the skills and knowledge of their employees—by including people development as an explicit objective in annual evaluations, for example. Without compelling top-team role models, however, this effort would likely prove an uphill struggle.

Organizations should also make bold moves to break down internal silos by moving talent around (through rotations and international assignments, for example) and by creating formal networks to foster the relationships that promote the sharing of knowledge across divisions. As one business unit executive explained, "The top 500 [people] should be owned by the top team and not by the divisional fiefdoms."

Be Motivated

2008-09-12T03:58:00.000-07:00

Introduction
Motivation is a reason or set or reasons for engaging in a particular behavior, especially human behavior as studied in psychology and neuropsychology. The reasons may include basic needs (e.g., food, water, shelter) or an object, goal, state of being, or ideal that is desirable, which may or may not be viewed as "positive," such as seeking a state of being in which pain is absent. The motivation for a behavior may also be attributed to less-apparent reasons such as altruism or morality.

Advantages of Motivation
A positive motivation philosophy and practice should improve "productivity, quality and service." Motivation helps people to:
1.achieve goals
2.gain a positive perspective
3.create the power to change
4.build self-esteem and capability
5.manage their own development and help others with theirs

What is Motivation ?
The word motivation is coined from the Latin word "movere", which means to move. Motivation is defined as an internal drive that activates behavior and gives it direction. The term motivation theory is concerned with the processes that describe why and how human behavior is activated and directed. It is regarded as one of the most important areas of study in the field of organizational behavior. There are two different categories of motivation theories such as content theories, and process theories. Even though there are different motivation theories, none of them are universally accepted.

Motivational Concepts
Reward and Reinforcement
A reward is that which follows an occurrence of a specific behavior with the intention of acknowledging the behavior in a positive way. A reward often has the intent of encouraging the behavior to happen again.
There are two kinds of rewards, extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic rewards are external to, or outside of, the individual; for example, praise or money. Intrinsic rewards are internal to, or within, the individual; for example, satisfaction or accomplishment.
Some authors distinguish between two forms of intrinsic motivation: one based on enjoyment, the other on obligation. In this context, obligation refers to motivation based on what an individual thinks ought to be done. For instance, a feeling of responsibility for a mission may lead to helping others beyond what is easily observable, rewarded, or fun.
A reinforcer is different from reward, in that reinforcement is intended to create a measured increase in the rate of a desirable behavior following the addition of something to the environment.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation
Intrinsic motivation is evident when people engage in an activity for its own sake, without some obvious external incentive present. A hobby is a typical example.
Intrinsic motivation has been intensely studied by educational psychologists since the 1970s, and numerous studies have found it to be associated with high educational achievement and enjoyment by students.
There is currently no "grand unified theory" to explain the origin or elements of intrinsic motivation. Most explanations combine elements of Bernard Weiner's attribution theory, Bandura's work on self-efficacy and other studies relating to locus of control and goal orientation. Thus it is thought that students are more likely to experience intrinsic motivation if they:
1. Attribute their educational results to internal factors that they can control (eg. the amount of effort they put in, not 'fixed ability').
2. Believe they can be effective agents in reaching desired goals (eg. the results are not determined by dumb luck.)
3. Are motivated towards deep 'mastery' of a topic, instead of just rote-learning 'performance' to get good grades.
Note that the idea of reward for achievement is absent from this model of intrinsic motivation, since rewards are an extrinsic factor.
In knowledge-sharing communities and organizations, people often cite altruistic reasons for their participation, including contributing to a common good, a moral obligation to the group, mentorship or 'giving back'. This model of intrinsic motivation has emerged from three decades of research by hundreds of educationalists and is still evolving. (See also Goal Theory.)
In work environments, money is typically viewed as an important goal (having food, clothes etc.) may well be more powerful than the direct motivation provided by an enjoyable workplace.

Coercion
The most obvious form of motivation is coercion, where the avoidance of pain or other negative consequences has an immediate effect. Extreme use of coercion is considered slavery. While coercion is considered morally reprehensible in many philosophies, it is widely practiced on prisoners, students in mandatory schooling, within the nuclear family unit (on children), and in the form of conscription. Critics of modern capitalism charge that without social safety networks, wage slavery is inevitable. However, many capitalists such as Ayn Rand have been very vocal against coercion[citation needed]. Successful coercion sometimes can take priority over other types of motivation. Self-coercion is rarely substantially negative (typically only negative in the sense that it avoids a positive, such as undergoing an expensive dinner or a period of relaxation), however it is interesting in that it illustrates how lower levels of motivation may be sometimes tweaked to satisfy higher ones.

Self control
The self-control of motivation is increasingly understood as a subset of emotional intelligence; a person may be highly intelligent according to a more conservative definition (as measured by many intelligence tests), yet unmotivated to dedicate this intelligence to certain tasks. Yale School of Management professor Victor Vroom's "expectancy theory" provides an account of when people will decide whether to exert self control to pursue a particular goal.
Drives and desires can be described as a deficiency or need that activates behaviour that is aimed at a goal or an incentive. These are thought to originate within the individual and may not require external stimuli to encourage the behaviour. Basic drives could be sparked by deficiencies such as hunger, which motivates a person to seek food; whereas more subtle drives might be the desire for praise and approval, which motivates a person to behave in a manner pleasing to others.
By contrast, the role of extrinsic rewards and stimuli can be seen in the example of training animals by giving them treats when they perform a trick correctly. The treat motivates the animals to perform the trick consistently, even later when the treat is removed from the process.

Theories of Motivation
No single theory can account for all aspects of biological motivation, but each of the major approaches contributes something to our understanding of motivation, so we need to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

Drive Reduction Theories
There are a number of drive theories. The Drive Reduction Theory grows out of the concept that we have certain biological needs, such as hunger. As time passes the strength of the drive increases as it is not satisfied. Then as we satisfy that drive by fulfilling its desire, such as eating, the drive's strength is reduced. It is based on the theories of Freud and the idea of feedback control systems, such as a thermostat.
There are several problems, however, that leave the validity of the Drive Reduction Theory open for debate. The first problem is that it does not explain how Secondary Reinforcers reduce drive. For example, money does not satisfy any biological or psychological need but reduces drive on a regular basis through a pay check second-order conditioning. Secondly, if the drive reduction theory held true we would not be able to explain how a hungry human being can prepare a meal without eating the food before they finished cooking it.
However, when comparing this to a real life situation such as preparing food, one does get hungrier as the food is being made (drive increases), and after the food has been consumed the drive decreases. The only reason the food does not get eaten before is the human element of restraint and has nothing to do with drive theory. Also, the food will either be nicer after it is cooked, or it wont be edible at all before it is cooked.

Cognitive dissonance theory
Suggested by Leon Festinger, this occurs when an individual experiences some degree of mental discomfort resulting from an incompatibility between two cognitions. For example, a consumer may seek to reassure himself regarding a purchase, feeling that another decision may have been, in retrospect, preferable.
Another example of cognitive dissonance is when a belief and a behavior are in conflict. A person may believe smoking is bad for one's health and yet continues to smoke.

Need Achievement Theory
David McClelland’s achievement motivation theory envisages that a person has need for three things but people differ in degree in which the various needs influence their behavior: Need for achievement, Need for power, and Need for affiliation

Interests Theory
Holland Codes are used in the assessment of interests as in Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI; Holland, 1985). One way to look at interests is that if a person has a very strong interest in one of the 6 Holland areas, then obtaining outcomes in that area will be very strongly reinforcing relative to obtaining outcomes in areas of weak interest.

Abraham Maslow’s “Need Hierarchy Theory” :
One of the most widely mentioned theories of motivation is the hierarchy of needs theory put forth by psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow saw human needs in the form of a hierarchy, ascending from the lowest to the highest, and he concluded that when one set of needs is satisfied, this kind of need ceases to be a motivator.
As per his theory this needs are :

(i) Physiological needs :
These are important needs for sustaining the human life. Food, water, warmth, shelter, sleep, medicine and education are the basic physiological needs which fall in the primary list of need satisfaction. Maslow was of an opinion that until these needs were satisfied to a degree to maintain life, no other motivating factors can work.

(ii) Security or Safety needs :
These are the needs to be free of physical danger and of the fear of losing a job, property, food or shelter. It also includes protection against any emotional har

m.
(iii) Social needs :
Since people are social beings, they need to belong and be accepted by others. People try to satisfy their need for affection, acceptance and friendship.

(iv) Esteem needs :
According to Maslow, once people begin to satisfy their need to belong, they tend to want to be held in esteem both by themselves and by others. This kind of need produces such satisfaction as power, prestige status and self-confidence. It includes both internal esteem factors like self-respect, autonomy and achievements and external esteem factors such as states, recognition and attention.

(v) Need for self-actualization :
Maslow regards this as the highest need in his hierarchy. It is the drive to become what one is capable of becoming, it includes growth, achieving one’s potential and self-fulfillment. It is to maximize one’s potential and to accomplish something.

As each of these needs are substantially satisfied, the next need becomes dominant. From the standpoint of motivation, the theory would say that although no need is ever fully gratified, a substantially satisfied need no longer motivates. So if you want to motivate someone, you need to understand what level of the hierarchy that person is on and focus on satisfying those needs or needs above that level.
Maslow’s need theory has received wide recognition, particularly among practicing managers. This can be attributed to the theory’s intuitive logic and ease of understanding. However, research does not validate these theory. Maslow provided no empirical evidence and other several studies that sought to validate the theory found no support for it.

“Theory X and Theory Y” of Douglas McGregor :
McGregor, in his book “The Human side of Enterprise” states that people inside the organization can be managed in two ways. The first is basically negative, which falls under the category X and the other is basically positive, which falls under the category Y. After viewing the way in which the manager dealt with employees, McGregor concluded that a manager’s view of the nature of human beings is based on a certain grouping of assumptions and that he or she tends to mold his or her behavior towards subordinates according to these assumptions.

Under the assumptions of theory X :
· Employees inherently do not like work and whenever possible, will attempt to avoid it.
· Because employees dislike work, they have to be forced, coerced or threatened with punishment to achieve goals.
· Employees avoid responsibilities and do not work fill formal directions are issued.
· Most workers place a greater importance on security over all other factors and display little ambition.

In contrast under the assumptions of theory Y :
· Physical and mental effort at work is as natural as rest or play.
· People do exercise self-control and self-direction and if they are committed to those goals.
· Average human beings are willing to take responsibility and exercise imagination, ingenuity and creativity in solving the problems of the organization.
· That the way the things are organized, the average human being’s brainpower is only partly used.

On analysis of the assumptions it can be detected that theory X assumes that lower-order needs dominate individuals and theory Y assumes that higher-order needs dominate individuals. An organization that is run on Theory X lines tends to be authoritarian in nature, the word “authoritarian” suggests such ideas as the “power to enforce obedience” and the “right to command.” In contrast Theory Y organizations can be described as “participative”, where the aims of the organization and of the individuals in it are integrated; individuals can achieve their own goals best by directing their efforts towards the success of the organization.
However, this theory has been criticized widely for generalization of work and human behavior.

Frederick Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory
Frederick has tried to modify Maslow’s need Hierarchy theory. His theory is also known as two-factor theory or Hygiene theory. He stated that there are certain satisfiers and dissatisfiers for employees at work. In- trinsic factors are related to job satisfaction, while extrinsic factors are associated with dissatisfaction. He devised his theory on the question : “What do people want from their jobs ?” He asked people to describe in detail, such situations when they felt exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. From the responses that he received, he concluded that opposite of satisfaction is not dissatisfaction. Removing dissatisfying characteristics from a job does not necessarily make the job satisfying. He states that presence of certain factors in the organization is natural and the presence of the same does not lead to motivation. However, their nonpresence leads to demotivation. In similar manner there are certain factors, the absence of which causes no dissatisfaction, but their presence has motivational impact.
Examples of Hygiene factors are :
Security, status, relationship with subordinates, personal life, salary, work conditions, relationship with supervisor and company policy and administration.
Examples of Motivational factors are :
Growth prospectus job advancement, responsibility, challenges, recognition and achievements.

Vroom’s Valence x Expectancy theory
The most widely accepted explanations of motivation has been propounded by Victor Vroom. His theory is commonly known as expectancy theory. The theory argues that the strength of a tendency to act in a specific way depends on the strength of an expectation that the act will be followed by a given outcome and on the attractiveness of that outcome to the individual to make this simple, expectancy theory says that an employee can be motivated to perform better when their is a belief that the better performance will lead to good performance appraisal and that this shall result into realization of personal goal in form of some reward.

Therefore an employee is : Motivation = Valence x Expectancy.
The theory focuses on three things :
· Efforts and performance relationship
· Performance and reward relationship
· Rewards and personal goal relationship

This leads us to a conclusion that :

Clayton Alderfer’s ERG Theory :
Alderfer has tried to rebuild the hierarchy of needs of Maslow into another model named ERG i.e. Existence – Relatedness – Growth. According to him there are 3 groups of core needs as mentioned above. The existence group is concerned mainly with providing basic material existence. The second group is the individuals need to maintain interpersonal relationship with other members in the group. The final group is the intrinsic desire to grow and develop personally. The major conclusions of this theory are :
1. In an individual, more than one need may be operative at the same time.
2. If a higher need goes unsatisfied than the desire to satisfy a lower need intensifies.
3. It also contains the frustration-regression dimension.

Self-determination theory
Self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, focuses on the importance of intrinsic motivation in driving human behavior. Like Maslow's hierarchical theory and others that built on it, SDT posits a natural tendency toward growth and development. Unlike these other theories, however, SDT does not include any sort of "autopilot" for achievement, but instead requires active encouragement from the environment. The primary factors that encourage motivation and development are autonomy, competence feedback, and relatedness.

McClelland’s Theory of Needs
David McClelland has developed a theory on three types of motivating needs :
1. Need for Power
2. Need for Affiliation
3. Need for Achievement
Basically people for high need for power are inclined towards influence and control. They like to be at the center and are good orators. They are demanding in nature, forceful in manners and ambitious in life. They can be motivated to perform if they are given key positions or power positions.
In the second category are the people who are social in nature. They try to affiliate themselves with individuals and groups. They are driven by love and faith. They like to build a friendly environment around themselves. Social recognition and affiliation with others provides them motivation.
People in the third area are driven by the challenge of success and the fear of failure. Their need for achievement is moderate and they set for themselves moderately difficult tasks. They are analytical in nature and take calculated risks. Such people are motivated to perform when they see atleast some chances of success.
McClelland observed that with the advancement in hierarchy the need for power and achievement increased rather than Affiliation. He also observed that people who were at the top, later ceased to be motivated by this drives.

Equity Theory
As per the equity theory of J. Stacey Adams, people are motivated by their beliefs about the reward structure as being fair or unfair, relative to the inputs. People have a tendency to use subjective judgment to balance the outcomes and inputs in the relationship for comparisons between different individuals. Accordingly :
If people feel that they are not equally rewarded they either reduce the quantity or quality of work or migrate to some other organization. However, if people perceive that they are rewarded higher, they may be motivated to work harder.

Reinforcement Theory
B.F. Skinner, who propounded the reinforcement theory, holds that by designing the environment properly, individuals can be motivated. Instead of considering internal factors like impressions, feelings, attitudes and other cognitive behavior, individuals are directed by what happens in the environment external to them. Skinner states that work environment should be made suitable to the individuals and that punishments actually leads to frustration and de-motivation. Hence, the only way to motivate is to keep on making positive changes in the external environment of the organization.

Goal Setting Theory of Edwin Locke
Instead of giving vague tasks to people, specific and pronounced objectives, help in achieving them faster. As the clearity is high, a goal orientation also avoids any misunderstandings in the work of the employees. The goal setting theory states that when the goals to be achieved are set at a higher standard than in that case employees are motivated to perform better and put in maximum effort. It revolves around the concept of “Self-efficacy” i.e. individual’s belief that he or she is capable of performing a hard task.

Cognitive Evaluation Theory
As per these theory a shift from external rewards to internal rewards results into motivation. It believes that even after the stoppage of external stimulus, internal stimulus survives. It relates to the pay structure in the organization. Instead of treating external factors like pay, incentives, promotion etc and internal factors like interests, drives, responsibility etc, separately, they should be treated as contemporary to each other. The cognition is to be such that even when external motivators are not there the internal motivation continues. However, practically extrinsic rewards are given much more weightage.
Controlling motivation
The control of motivation is only understood to a limited extent. There are many different approaches of motivation training, but many of these are considered pseudoscientific by critics. To understand how to control motivation it is first necessary to understand why many people lack motivation.

Early programming

Data by Harold Chugani on brain activity, (click image for source details). The red dots show activity in the frontal cortex, the "youngest" region in the human brain from an evolutionary perspective. It is important for analysis and creativity. The blue curve, copied from another diagram of the same source, shows the development of brain volume through childhood. As can be seen from the data, brain activity in children is much higher than in adults, making early influences critical for motivation in later life.
Modern imaging has provided solid empirical support for the psychological theory that emotional programming is largely defined in childhood. Harold Chugani, Medical Director of the PET Clinic at the Children's Hospital of Michigan and professor of pediatrics, neurology and radiology at Wayne State University School of Medicine, has found that children's brains are much more capable of consuming new information (linked to emotions) than those of adults. Brain activity in cortical regions is about twice as high in children as in adults from the third to the ninth year of life. After that period, it declines constantly to the low levels of adulthood. Brain volume, on the other hand, is already at about 95% of adult levels in the ninth year of life.

Organization
Besides the very direct approaches to motivation, beginning in early life, there are solutions which are more abstract but perhaps nevertheless more practical for self-motivation. Virtually every motivation guidebook includes at least one chapter about the proper organization of one's tasks and goals. It is usually suggested that it is critical to maintain a list of tasks, with a distinction between those which are completed and those which are not, thereby moving some of the required motivation for their completion from the tasks themselves into a "meta-task", namely the processing of the tasks in the task list, which can become a routine. The viewing of the list of completed tasks may also be considered motivating, as it can create a satisfying sense of accomplishment.
Most electronic to-do lists have this basic functionality, although the distinction between completed and non-completed tasks is not always clear (completed tasks are sometimes simply deleted, instead of kept in a separate list).
Other forms of information organization may also be motivational, such as the use of mind maps to organize one's ideas, and thereby "train" the neural network that is the human brain to focus on the given task. Simpler forms of idea notation such as simple bullet-point style lists may also be sufficient, or even more useful to less visually oriented persons.

Drugs
Some authors, especially in the transhumanist movement, have suggested the use of "smart drugs", also known as nootropics, as "motivation-enhancers". The effects of many of these drugs on the brain are not well understood, and their legal status often makes open experimentation difficult. It is a fact that some of history's most productive artists have also been drug users, although it is not clear whether this correlation is also of a causative nature, or if so, which is the direction of causation.
Converging neurobiological evidence also supports the idea that addictive drugs such as cocaine, nicotine, alcohol, and heroin act on brain systems underlying motivation for natural rewards, such as the mesolimbic dopamine system. Normally, these brain systems serve to guide us toward fitness-enhancing rewards (food, water, sex, etc.), but they can be co-opted by repeated use of drugs of abuse, causing addicts to excessively pursue drug rewards. Therefore, drugs can hijack brain systems underlying other motivations, causing the almost singular pursuit of drugs characteristic of addiction.

Applications of Motivation
Education
Motivation is of particular interest to Educational psychologists because of the crucial role it plays in student learning. However, the specific kind of motivation that is studied in the specialized setting of education differs qualitatively from the more general forms of motivation studied by psychologists in other fields.
Motivation in education can have several effects on how students learn and their behavior towards subject matter (Ormrod, 2003). It can:
1. Direct behavior toward particular goals
2. Lead to increased effort and energy
3. Increase initiation of, and persistence in, activities
4. Enhance cognitive processing
5. Determine what consequences are reinforcing
6. Lead to improved performance.
Because students are not always internally motivated, they sometimes need situated motivation, which is found in environmental conditions that the teacher creates.

Business
At lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, such as Physiological needs, money is a motivator, however it tends to have a motivating effect on staff that lasts only for a short period (in accordance with Herzberg's two-factor model of motivation). At higher levels of the hierarchy, praise, respect, recognition, empowerment and a sense of belonging are far more powerful motivators than money, as both Abraham Maslow's theory of motivation and Douglas McGregor's Theory X and theory Y (pertaining to the theory of leadership) demonstrate.
Maslow has money at the lowest level of the hierarchy and shows other needs are better motivators to staff. McGregor places money in his Theory X category and feels it is a poor motivator. Praise and recognition are placed in the Theory Y category and are considered stronger motivators than money.
1. Motivated employees always look for better ways to do a job.
2. Motivated employees are more quality oriented.
3. Motivated workers are more productive.
The average workplace is about midway between the extremes of high threat and high opportunity. Motivation by threat is a dead-end strategy, and naturally staff are more attracted to the opportunity side of the motivation curve than the threat side.
Managers need to understand how company employees see them in order to manage the impression they make, not just their intentions. Don Sheelen notes that "If a business wants its people to make a lot of money for them, then it must set high standards and give employees something they can get excited about."

Scientific management
Scientific management is a philosophy and set of methods that stresses the scientific study and organization of work at an operational level for improving efficiency. It is associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor, who is called the “father of Scientific Management.”
Scientific Management has contributed the following techniques that are used even today:
1. Scientific method of doing work
2. Planning tasks
3. Standardization
4. Specialization and division of labour
David McClelland believed that workers could not be motivated by the mere need for money-- in fact, extrinsic motivation (e.g., money) could extinguish intrinsic motivation such as Achievement motivation, though money could be used as an indicator of success for various motives, e.g., keeping score. Some criticized Mcclelland's approach, arguing that he dehumanized workers by treating them as mere factors of production. This is not an accurate understanding of McClelland's work, which consistently aimed at finding how all people could be treated fairly. Indeed, his consulting firm, McBer & Company, had as its first motto "To make everyone productive, happy, and free." For McClelland, satisfaction lay in aligning your life with your emotional drives. On the job, that varies sharply according to which motives predominate in you.

Human relations model
Elton Mayo found out that the social contacts a worker has at the workplace are very important and that boredom and repetitiveness of tasks lead to reduced motivation. Mayo believed that workers could be motivated by acknowledging their social needs and making them feel important. As a result, employees were given freedom to make decisions on the job and greater attention was paid to informal work groups. Mayo named the model the Hawthorne effect. The problem with his model is undue reliance on social contacts at work situations for motivating employees.

Different ways of motivation
1. Intrinsic process — motivated by FUN
2. Instrumental — motivated by REWARDS
3. Self-Concept-External — motivated by REPUTATION
4. Self-Concept-Internal — motivated by CHALLENGE
5. Goal Internalization — motivated by the cause or PURPOSE

Motivation by FUN
Here are some things managers can do to make the workplace and the experience of working more enjoyable:
1. To find out which tasks are each of your employee’s favorites.
2. Do something interesting with the lunchroom or break room to give it more personality.
3. Have company-wide events that are intended to let everyone have fun.

Motivation by REWARDS
1. Create incentive-laden pay scales (less output = less pay, more output = more pay).
2. Create a sales contest (if applicable) with several prizes to go to the top performers.
3. Create clear work objectives and goals for workers to pursue in order to earn salary increments (no performance= no raise).
4. If workers know they must perform to achieve good salary increases, this will motivate them to work hard.
5. Remind workers of what they will get for their efforts.
6. Create incentives attached to predetermined objectives and tasks.
7. Create a generous bonus structure with a benchmark that may seem unreachable, then watch them reach it.
8. Give special rewards to top performers on a regular basis.
9. If workers don’t perform to expectations, hold them accountable by giving them no raise, no bonus, or no promotion.
10. Offer extra holiday time for outstanding performers (make sure that workers know about the incentive well in advance).
11. Don’t pass out rewards evenly to all employees in an effort to include everyone. This demotivates the instrumentally motivated person.
12. Be fair! These workers will watch closely to see what the consequences are of everyone’s actions.
13. Follow through on all of your promises.
14. Remind workers which tasks will be most important for their performance evaluations.

Motivation by REPUTATION
1. Give workers lots of feedback about the way they are performing.
2. Give praise in front of other people (the more people that know they did well the better!).
3. Criticize these individuals only in private (never in front of others).
4. Give unsolicited compliments and positive reinforcement to workers for jobs with which you are satisfied.
5. Tell your workers that you appreciate the work they do.
6. Make sure that you give credit to everyone that contributes (never leave people out when they make an impact).
7. Give out certificates of appreciation to anyone who does extraordinarily well for the company.
8. Recognize the outstanding performers in the group at every staff meeting.
9. Consider starting an employee recognition system (employee of the month, department employee of the month).
10. Put up pictures and biographies of all your employees in a central place.
11. Include unique pieces of information about each employee and change these items from week to week (example: favorite ice cream flavor, worst day ever, thing that I’m most proud of, etc.).
12. At companywide meetings, create and announce serious and fun “superlatives” (example: hardest worker, cleanest car, spiffiest dressed, most versatile, cleanest shoes, most athletic, most reliable).

Motivation by CHALLENGE
1. Stay out of their way and let them do the work if they know how to do it.
2. Assign tasks that require their skills and talents.
3. Find out what they think is their best skill and encourage them to use this with the tasks you assign.
4. Find out what area this person wants to most improve in and find ways for them to work on this skill.
5. Find ways to help them to continually develop their abilities.
6. Avoid assigning mundane tasks to these workers.
7. Play devil’s advocate and challenge them by saying, “I’m not sure if you are up to this challenge, but…”
8. Give them a challenge, then get out of their way.
9. Give them autonomy to structure and perform their job as they see best.
10. Don’t insult them by asking them to do something that just about anybody could do (they need to know that they are uniquely qualified to do it).

Motivation by PURPOSE
1. Communicate the purpose of tasks that are being assigned.
2. Make sure the company has a vision and mission that it is pursuing.
3. Communicate the organization’s vision and purpose on a daily basis.
4. Refer to the purpose of the organization and “why we exist” when outlining strategies and goals.
5. Remind employees who depends on this organization to succeed (families, communities, industry, producers).
6. Discuss why (in terms of contributing to the mission) things need to occur.
7. Remind workers how their efforts make a difference for the company in its pursuit of it vision.
8. Make links between their work and the company vision so that they can see how they fit into the bigger picture.
9. Include workers in the visioning and strategic planning process so that they feel they have a stake in the organizational outcomes.

Conclusion
All human beings have the same types of needs. Just remember that people experience these needs at different times and to different degrees. Further, other cultures provide differing contexts for the satisfaction of these needs. As a supervisor it is vital to be prepared to deal with these truths in order to create and maintain a satisfied and productive workforce.

Some Very Interesting Statistics For You

2008-09-10T12:38:00.000-07:00

Courtesy: Business Week

Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams

2008-09-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

by Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson

To maximize your complex teams' effectiveness, construct a basis for collaboration in your company.

To execute major initiatives in your organization—integrating a newly acquired firm, overhauling an IT system—you need complex teams. Such teams' defining characteristics—large, virtual, diverse, and specialized—are crucial for handling daunting projects. Yet these very characteristics can also destroy team members' ability to work together, say Gratton and Erickson. For instance, as team size grows, collaboration diminishes. To maximize your complex teams' effectiveness, construct a basis for collaboration in your company. Eight practices hinging on relationship building and cultural change can help. For example, create a strong sense of community by sponsoring events and activities that bring people together and help them get to know one another. And use informal mentoring and coaching to encourage employees to view interaction with leaders and colleagues as valuable. When executives, HR professionals, and team leaders all pitch in to apply these practices, complex teams hit the ground running—the day they're formed. The Idea in Practice The authors recommend these practices for encouraging collaboration in complex teams:

What Executives Can Do
Invest in building and maintaining social relationships throughout your organization.

Example:

Royal Bank of Scotland's CEO commissioned new headquarters built around an indoor atrium and featuring a "Main Street" with shops, picnic spaces, and a leisure club. The design encourages employees to rub shoulders daily, which fuels collaboration in RBS's complex teams.

Model collaborative behavior.

Example:

At Standard Chartered Bank, top executives frequently fill in for one another, whether leading regional celebrations, representing SCB at key external events, or initiating internal dialogues with employees. They make their collaborative behavior visible through extensive travel and photos of leaders from varied sites working together.
Use coaching to reinforce a collaborative culture.

Example:

At Nokia, each new hire's manager lists everyone in the organization the newcomer should meet, suggests topics he or she should discuss with each person on the list, and explains why establishing each of these relationships is important.

What HR Can Do
Train employees in the specific skills required for collaboration: appreciating others, engaging in purposeful conversation, productively and creatively resolving conflicts, and managing programs.
Support a sense of community by sponsoring events and activities such as networking groups, cooking weekends, or tennis coaching. Spontaneous, unannounced activities can further foster community spirit.

Example:

Marriott has recognized the anniversary of the company's first hotel opening by rolling back the cafeteria to the 1950s and sponsoring a team twist dance contest.

What Team Leaders Can Do
Ensure that at least 20%–40% of a new team's members already know one another.

Example:

When Nokia needs to transfer skills across business functions or units, it moves entire small teams intact instead of reshuffling individual people into new positions.
Change your leadership style as your team develops. At early stages in the project, be task-oriented: articulate the team's goal and accountabilities. As inevitable conflicts start emerging, switch to relationship building.
Assign distinct roles so team members can do their work independently. They'll spend less time negotiating responsibilities or protecting turf. But leave the path to achieving the team's goal somewhat ambiguous. Lacking well-defined tasks, members are more likely to invest time and energy collaborating.

Ready For Your Closeup? Here’s A Quick Guide To Job Board Video Production

2008-09-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

John Zappe

You’ve done your homework and sold the boss on getting a company video made. In fact, you did such a good job the CEO is hinting around about having a starring role, and since it was your idea, you’re in charge of the project.

Now what do you do?

Lucky for you, there’s no shortage of good choices. (Alas, there’s also plenty of bad ones, too, not to mention the CEO’s wedding videographer neighbor.). Large employers with big budgets that work with a full service recruitment advertising firm can simply turn the job over to the professionals there. But when that’s not an option, consider the job boards. In the last year, CareerBuilder , Monster and others have joined Jobing.com in offering video branding services.

“Our clients told us they want video, but they needed help getting them done,” says Jason Ferrara, vice president of corporate marketing for CareerBuilder.com, explaining the company’s decision to launch a video service last year.

When it launched Video BrandBuilder in September 2006, CareerBuilder became the first major national job board to offer employers a complete video production service. But it certainly wasn’t the first job board to offer the service. To whom that distinction belongs is not clear; however, Jobing.com certainly has a strong claim to the distinction. The fast-growing regional job site began creating employer videos back in 2001 when they were produced by whoever on the (then) 10-person staff could work the handheld camera, including CEO and founder Aaron Matos.

Today, Jobing has what may be the largest library of employment videos of any job board in the world. Joe Cockrell, director of public relations, told us Jobing has 10,000 employer videos online plus another 15,000 community videos covering topics from “How To Tie A Necktie” to a feature on the Denver Urban League that was a finalist for a Webby in the online video category.

The employer videos are just what they sound like — employer branding videos that are part of Jobing’s subscription package. The community videos are produced by staff videographers in every one of Jobing’s 18 offices.

“Video,” says Cockrell, “is a very powerful tool.”

You can’t go to a recruitment conference these days or read a recruitment site without hearing about the importance of employer branding videos. Monster’s Eva Bitteker, video product manager, said there are four main reasons for having an employer video: to attract quality candidates; to surmount or promote geography and facilities; to convey a company’s value and culture; and to reduce turnover by offering a preview of the job.

“Some companies,” she explained, “do videos to get fewer applicants. They are looking for fewer, but higher quality candidates. By giving them a realistic feel for the job they can eliminate (the unqualified and the less than committed) jobseekers.”

Monster’s service is the newest and priciest of the three job boards, starting around $20,000. Jobing’s service is the least expensive: About $1,000 for an employer not on a subscription plan. CareerBuilder, starting at $5,000, falls in the middle.

Here’s a look at the service offered by the three job boards:

CareerBuilder

CareerBuilder’s pricing starts at $5,000, but that’s a rock bottom cost and it’s easy to spend more. Larger employers may want two or more videos to use for different purposes.

For your money you get a production team that will meet with key stakeholders to gather information, write a script, scout the locations, shoot the video, and edit it to 60 or 90 seconds. The turn around time ranges upwards of two weeks. For companies with multilingual needs, videos can be produced in almost any language.

Jason Ferrara, corporate marketing VP, called the production “a real collaboration.” Involve the C-level people, Ferrara says (as if you could keep them away!). “We counsel them to be successful,” he tactfully explained, answering a question about those awful situations when the boss wants to do all the talking. “We try to educate the employer on what makes a good branding video,” Ferrara says. “Reflect on what the company’s goals are; what impression they want to make on jobseekers and to look at things from that perspective.”

But if the CEO decides wisely or not to be in the video, Ferrara adds, “it’s not up to us to be the police.”

The completed video is owned by the company, which can use it however it sees fit, including embedding it on the corporate career site and linking it to CareerBuilder job postings. CareerBuilder hosts the video and handles the technical details.

Jobing

The first of the job boards to offer a turnkey video branding solution, Jobing is the only one to have videographers and editors on staff. The company prefers photographers with TV news experience, because they are accustomed to sizing up a situation and working under deadline. That’s why, says Jobing’s PR director Joe Cockrell, an employer can have a video produced in under 48 hours. (He told us of an auto dealer who ordered a video in the morning and it was up and online, fully edited and approved, by the end of the day.)

The Jobing process begins with an outside sales rep who gathers all the basic employer information, including the goals and those ’special’ requirements, like who gets to go on camera and who doesn’t. The sales rep briefs the videographer who formulates a plan, then goes on site. By then, a story line is developed, the video shot, and the edited work submitted for approval.

“As an employer, you’re giving jobseekers a look inside your doors,” Cockrell says. “That’s what our production teams work with an employer to accomplish.”

For employers with regular hiring needs who have or become Jobing subscribers, the video is included in the price of the subscription, which is as low as $500 a month. Employers with casual hiring needs can buy a video at the $200 hourly rate. Cockrell says that even with a team on site and the post-production work, the cost can come in under $1,000 for a 60-90 second video. At that price, even small employers can afford to have a video made and many do. One look at a Jobing site and you’ll see veterinary hospitals, trucking firms, municipalities, and security firms among such national firms as Wells Fargo and Citibank.

Employers own the video and can embed it on their career site and link to it from job postings, regardless of where they may run. Cockrell told us that some employers burn CDs of their video to use at job fairs and other events.

Monster

With a price tag of $20,000 or more, Monster’s video service is for the bigger employer with competitive or special needs. Monster partners with MadDash E-Media for video production and hosting services. Its teams are trained not only in videography, but are also knowledgeable about privacy and, of special concern to hospitals, patient confidentiality.

The MadDash teams can spend up to a couple of days at an employer site on a shoot, getting footage that can be edited to create multiple videos or to freshen an aging one. A producer meets with the client and stakeholders to scope out the location, participants, and the story the video will tell. The video team, which can number two, three, or more depending on the situation, put together the final edit.

Unlike the CareerBuilder and Jobing videos, those produced by MadDash are not completely owned by the employer. The employer has unlimited use of the video for two years, after which it’s taken down from the MadDash servers where the video is hosted.

Perhaps because of the cost and the time limit, videos on Monster tend to be more limited in number and dominated by the largest companies like AstraZeneca, Home Depot, and UPS. Of course a company doesn’t have to use Monster’s production service; independently produced videos can be used.

Bitteker, Monster’s video product manager, suggested that HR departments seek to have other departments share the cost of video production. “Videos can be used in a bigger campaign by the company. It’s not just an HR function, but a marketing function for the whole company,” she says.

The Mobile Phone: The Most Effective Recruiting Communications Platform

2008-09-04T12:09:00.000-07:00

Dr. John Sullivan

The basic foundation for all recruiting is the ability to communicate and share information with potential candidates directly. In our modern, high-tech world, corporate recruiters have numerous channels they can use to communicate directly with candidates ranging from face-to-face visits to video chat.

However, there is only one tool that provides a “single point of contact” allowing the use of every form of messaging in use today at any time during the day and from any location. This tool, of course, is the immensely versatile smart phone.

Today’s modern smart phones pack more computing power than most computers did just a few short years ago. They can not only handle your basic person-to-person and conference voice calls, they can also interact with websites, publish blog posts, aggregate RSS feeds, send text messages, send multimedia messages, record/transmit video, record/transmit audio, send email from multiple accounts, take/send pictures, send and receive faxes, edit office documents, and interact with social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.

While many organizations empower their recruiters with smart phones, few build a corporate-wide recruiting strategy that leverages the phone as the hub of recruiter activity. Aggressively using smart phones requires forward thinking, something many recruiting managers who came up through the ranks as a transactional recruiter dedicate little time to. In organizations where technology isn’t pervasive and doesn’t permeate every process, the smart phone is seen as just a phone that happens to be mobile, despite its potential to be so much more.

With technology advancing at its current pace, there truly are few limits as to how the smart phone can be used to power a modern strategic recruiting function. Advantages as the primary recruiting platform include:

The single source communications platform. Obviously, any tool that increases your opportunities to communicate with candidates via a channel they will actually pay attention to and respond to must be considered a valuable recruiting tool. However, so many tools exist that the average recruiter can easily become overwhelmed. Nearly all tools require consistent utilization to be effective; unfortunately, staying on top of blogs, email, voicemail, social network profiles, and the like can consume more time than most recruiters have. Because nearly all of the tools have their own interface, the recruiter’s time can become so fractured that it seems like headway never gets made. However, the smart phone can alleviate many of those frustrations by providing a unified interface to nearly every form of candidate communication. Rather than having to get multiple phone numbers, multiple email addresses, fax numbers, etc. from each candidate, the recruiter can send all forms of your messages to the candidate’s mobile phone. On the flip side, the candidate would also be able to use a single number to communicate with the recruiter.
Access during idle times. Traditional messaging platforms like paper letters, phone calls to the office phone, and even emails have a low direct-response rate because they can only be received and read when someone is sitting at their desk or when they are on their computer. When you are in a meeting, you can’t answer the phone, check the mail, etc., despite the fact that the meeting maybe boring as hell and have nothing to do with you! Smart phones, on the other hand, enable you to receive and respond to messages pretty much anytime, anywhere. While I don’t advocate text messaging candidates about interviews while driving down the interstate, you could certainly do so if needed. In high-tech organizations, it is not uncommon to see BlackBerry’s messaging away during meetings and conference calls.
Opportunity to communicate while the iron is hot. Many times your mind will process things while you are doing something else. You could be on a hike when you recall meeting the perfect candidate for a hot requisition several weeks back. Historically you would have to have waited till you finished your hike and made it into the office, but today you can whip out your smart phone, look him/her up on Facebook or in your CRM powered applicant database, and fire off a message in seconds. Not only does it make you more productive, it makes you more genuine. Potential candidates often put off visiting the corporate website because it’s simply not a viable thing to do when the mood hits. However, smart phones are accessible most of the time, in part because few would even consider venturing out to the grocery store, the gym, or to lunch without their mobile phone. A Web link or a message sent to a mobile phone has a much higher likelihood of being read and responded to because potential candidates can read and answer them when they are away from her desk and during “idle” times. Mobile phone users (as many spouses will attest) will respond to messages at night, on weekends, and during vacations. If you add up the number of hours where we can answer our mobile phone versus the number of hours when we can access our computer, the mobile phone wins by a 2 to 5 margin.
A remarkably fast response rate. For some reason, mobile phone owners respond almost instantly to messages they receive. If you have been out to the movies lately on a Friday or Saturday night, it’s hard to miss the bright phone screen flips every few seconds when the theater is dark, regardless whether the movie is entertaining. It seems those from younger generations can’t even finish reading a message before they start responding. This lack of a “delay” in responding to messages is critical, because any time a candidate postpones responding directly, it lowers the probability that they will ever get back to you. As the pace of messaging accelerates both inside and outside the work environment, expectations for a quick response increases. Failure to keep pace with expectations will influence a candidate’s perception of your organization as a modern organization.
Accommodating personal communication preferences. The next advantage of using smart phones as the primary communication platform for recruiting is its broad capability. It is no secret that some people prefer short text messages, others encyclopedia-length emails. Increasingly, video seems to be the communication method of choice for millions around the globe. Smart phones provide recruiters with a means to communicate with candidates via a channel the candidate most prefers. The fact is, if you want a message to be received “live” and responded to immediately, it helps to send it in a format that resonates with the recipient.

Additional Advantages of the Smart Phone as a Recruiting Platform

The cool factor. Sending text messages, videos, etc., is viewed by many as “cool,” as opposed to traditional emails and voicemails. Utilizing texting jargon like LOL (laughing out loud) can also send a message that you “get it.”
Global capability. modern 3G phones allow you to communicate wherever you are in the world. Candidates in Asia and Europe are extremely text-savvy, and using text messaging saves them money.
The generation factor. Some generations, including my current crop of college students, refuse to use email and in many cases, even voicemail, but they love texting.
Not blocked by corporate. The ability to use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is critical for successful recruiting. However, many corporate CIOs foolishly block recruiter access to some Web and social network sites on their computer systems. Fortunately, they seldom block access through mobile phones, so access away!
Brevity. The fact that mobile phones are utilized “on the run” forces everyone to be brief in their messages. This brevity makes both reading messages and responding to them easier and quicker. It also forces recruiters to be more concise in their messages.
Lower cost. As mobile phone services get cheaper, there is less resistance to using “my minutes” on a job search than there was in the past. In addition, you save money because you can send the same text message to a large number of people at essentially no cost. In contrast, making the same number of individual phone calls would cost a great deal because of the staff time involved in making the calls.
Differentiation. Because few firms currently use text messages and take advantage of the entire smart phone platform, it provides you with an opportunity to differentiate your firm from others.
Less spam. At least at the present time, the volume of spam that drives users away from email has not inundated smart phone applications. As a result, they are more willing to open and read your messages.

Potential Uses in Recruiting

As you have probably already discerned, the smart phone has a broad range of potential uses in recruiting. Some of the uses you should consider include:

Text messaging (SMS or simple message service). Sending simple text messages for a variety of purposes is a great way to communicate and service candidates. Many leading-edge organizations are using text messaging to introduce recruiters to candidates, set up interview times, answer simple questions, and direct new hires through orientation activities.
Job opening alerts. You can proactively “push” targeted job openings to candidates.
Event alerts. You can notify potential candidates about opportunities to meet with your recruiters at trade shows, seminars, and career fairs. Calendar requests are a great way to make sure the event is added to their calendars.
Social networking. Nearly all of the major social networks have applications available for smart phones that let users send messages or check out what people are up to. As many social network users periodically micro-blog, using such applications to track candidates could be a great way of refining when and how you approach candidates.
Text and reply information requests. You have probably seen advertisements on TV that allow you to text a single word to a five digit number to get more information about a product or service sent to you. Such systems can also be used to support applicants, candidates, new hires, and employees. For example, college students could text “internships” to 7XXXX to receive more information from your organization on current internship opportunities and instructions for applying. One popular provider of text and reply services is qtag.
Physical world hyperlinks. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard about these yet, you will in coming months! Physical world hyperlinks are 2-D barcodes (similar to those printed on a self-service check-in boarding pass) that can be added to nearly anything in the physical world. What is different about these barcodes is that smart phone users can snap a picture of the barcode and an application on the phone will decode the barcode and take the user to the website encoded in the image using the browser on the phone. College students attending a career fair could snap a pic to be transported to a special page on your website to download free toys. Because each barcode can be encoded to pass on specific data, physical world hyperlinks can be used to more accurately track source of hire for candidates met in the field.
Blog feeds. Keeping up with the vast array of content being added to the Internet daily is nearly impossible. Luckily, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs and have the new posts retrieved for you on your smart phone!
Video messaging (MMS or multimedia message service). You can send short recruiting videos to excite and to show the “passion” at your firm.
Podcasts. You can make recruiting podcasts available for download.
Web links. You can send potential candidates recruiting links or Web links relevant to their profession.
Temporary jobs. Filling temporary and contract jobs where you have a “sudden” need is easy when you can instantly send out messages to pre-identified individuals.
Friends e-newsletter. Companies can put together a “friends” newsletter at virtually no cost. This newsletter can be used to build relationships with potential candidates by providing them with information about happenings at the company, its new products, and any best practices and innovations.
Text message options on the website. Your corporate website should provide candidates with the option to receive text messages and all other communications on their mobile phone.
CRM touch points. Mobile phones are an ideal way to keep in touch with candidates over time. Potential uses include sending birthday greetings, congratulations on an accomplishment, wishing students luck on their exams, or just sending periodic “hellos” to build relationships.
Surveys/polling. You can send short surveys that cover a candidate’s interests or their job acceptance decision criteria. Mobile phones can also be used to vote (i.e., American Idol) or to get opinions from candidates or even from your recruiters. This polling process can also be used to update your database by periodically asking candidates if they’re still “in the job market?”
Mini interviews. The mobile phone can, of course, be used for short telephone interviews and even short text interview questionnaires.
GPS. Creative recruiters could even develop mechanisms to alert individuals when they are within close proximity of a recruiter, a job event, or even the location of a facility with a current job opening.
Miscellaneous. Mobile phones can be used as platforms for recruiting video games, music, recruitment ads, trivia games, or best-practice sharing.

Best Practice Firms

Using smart phones and text messaging is quite common in marketing. It has widespread use in college sports recruiting and on large job boards, but in the corporate world, most firms have failed to develop a comprehensive smart phone recruiting strategy.

There are a handful of firms that have taken the lead, including Verizon, Fidelity, HCA, the U.S. Army, and Microsoft. Other users include Toyota, Shell, American Express, Accenture, Dell, NYPD, Wyndham Hotels, and RehabCare.

There are also several recruitment advertising agencies, text messaging services, RMS providers, and product marketing vendors which provide services and advice in this area, including but certainly not limited to NAS, qtags.com, Blast Companies, and CollegeRecruiter.com.

Final Thoughts

It’s hard to deny the fact that almost every individual you may want to recruit constantly carries a mobile phone. It’s also true that the capabilities of these phones have grown to the point where they can be used as a platform to send nearly every recruiting message, no matter what form it’s in.

What is needed now is for the directors of corporate recruiting to take a step back and develop a comprehensive strategy that takes advantage of the mobile phone’s capability as the prime recruiting communications tool. In my opinion, everyone will eventually reach that point, but the smart ones will do it sooner and with a more comprehensive and planned approach.

In a Downturn, Please Put Aside Pathetic Platitudes

2008-08-25T11:07:00.000-07:00

John Baldoni - Leadership at Work

"Our people are our most important resource!" That statement or some variant of it can be found in nearly every corporate mission or values statement. Sometimes employees file past posters emblazoned with the statement on their way to all-employee meetings where headcount reductions are announced.

Please, enough already. If senior managers truly valued their employees, then Scott Adams would still be working for the phone company instead of drawing Dilbert, and The Office would have been canceled after the first episode. And hundreds of thousands of people recently laid off in the automotive, financial services, pharmaceutical, and real estate industries would be gainfully employed.

Headcount reductions are among the first-trigger moves that companies employ when the economy softens, which is why repeating that hollow mantra that employees matter most during an economic downturn is pure poppycock. Repeating it to employees, as many senior managers do, is as disingenuous as it is de-motivating to the people who remain with the company. (For how long is anyone's guess).

So instead of saying people matter during a downturn, prove it. Here are three ways:

Stop pretending. Economic downturns produce anxiety in the workforce. Daily newscasts or hourly web updates chart the downward effect on markets, industries and companies. Pretending that bad news will stay away is a losing strategy, yet many corporate managers do try to avoid the subject. Be straight with people; explain what the downturn means and the implications on your business. And if you don't know something, admit it, but try and find out. Sooner than later.

Encourage personal decision-making. Give employees more say in how they do their jobs. Managers determine the "what do to"; but when employees have a say in how they do the job, they feel more engaged. Loss of control over one's fate is vexing in a downturn, but if employees feel they have some say over how they do their work, they feel more in control.

Invest in employees. Training and development are typically cut during down economies. That's too bad because often the acquisition of new skills and the development of untapped talents are the factors that will help the company survive the downturn. Sometimes downturns bring lulls in the work flow. Use such time wisely by grooming your talent base.

When times are tough, employees want to know their bosses are down on the floor with them, not perched high in an office tower. In a study by the Center for Creative Leadership (October 2007), nearly 100% of managers surveyed said that collaboration was essential. Yet less than half of respondents said collaboration occurred.

That's too bad because collaboration might produce one thing that senior leaders really need right now -- commitment. When employees know the facts, and believe that senior leaders are being straight with them, they may pay more attention to their jobs. They may be more willing to commit to their work instead of worrying (too much) about when the ax will fall on them.

The 21st-century organization Big corporations must make sweeping organizational changes to get the best from their professionals

2008-03-18T10:12:00.000-07:00

About half a century ago, Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" to describe a new class of employee whose basic means of production was no longer capital, land, or labor but, rather, the productive use of knowledge. Today, these knowledge workers, who might better be called professionals, represent a large and growing percentage of the employees of the world's biggest corporations. In industries such as financial services, health care, high tech, pharmaceuticals, and media and entertainment, professionals now account for 25 percent or more of the workforce and, in some cases, undertake most typical key line activities. These talented people are the innovators of new business ideas. They make it possible for companies to deal with today's rapidly changing and uncertain business environment, and they produce and manage the intangible assets that are the primary way companies in a wide array of industries create value.

Productive professionals make big enterprises competitive, yet these employees now increasingly find their work obstructed. Creating and exchanging knowledge and intangibles through interaction with their professional peers is the very heart of what they do. Yet most of them squander endless hours searching for the knowledge they need—even if it resides in their own companies—and coordinating their work with others.

The inefficiency of these professionals has increased along with their prominence. Consider the act of collaboration. Each upsurge in the number of professionals who work in a company leads to an almost exponential—not linear—increase in the number of potential collaborators and unproductive interactions. Many leading companies now employ 10,000 or more professionals, who have some 50 million potential bilateral relationships. The same holds true for knowledge: searching for it means trying to find the person in whose head it resides, because most companies lack working "knowledge markets." One measure of the difficulty of this quest is the volume of global corporate e-mail, up from about 1.8 billion a day in 1998 to more than 17 billion a day in 2004. As finding people and knowledge becomes more difficult, social cohesion and trust among professional colleagues declines, further reducing productivity.

A flawed organizational design

Today's big companies do very little to enhance the productivity of their professionals. In fact, their vertically oriented organizational structures, retrofitted with ad hoc and matrix overlays, nearly always make professional work more complex and inefficient. These vertical structures—relics of the industrial age—are singularly ill suited to the professional work process. Professionals cooperate horizontally with one another throughout a company, yet vertical structures force such men and women to search across poorly connected organizational silos to find knowledge and collaborators and to gain their cooperation once they have been found.

Worse yet, matrix structures, designed to accommodate the "secondary" management axes that cut across vertical silos, frequently burden professionals with two bosses—one responsible for the sales force, say, and another for a product line. Professionals seeking to collaborate thus need to go up the organization before they can go across it. Effective collaboration often takes place only when the would-be collaborators enlist hierarchical line managers to resolve conflicts between competing organizational silos. Much time is lost reconciling divergent agendas and finding common solutions.

Other ad hoc organizational devices, such as internal joint ventures, co-heads of units, and proliferating task forces and study groups, serve only to complicate the organization further and to increase the amount of time required to coordinate work internally. The result is endless meetings, phone calls, and e-mail exchanges as talented professionals—line managers or members of shared utilities—waste valuable time grappling with the complexity of a deeply flawed organizational structure.

A new organizational model

To raise the productivity of professionals, big corporations must change their organizational structures dramatically, retaining the best of the traditional hierarchy while acknowledging the heightened value of the people who hatch ideas, innovate, and collaborate with peers to generate revenues and create value through intangible assets such as brands and networks. Companies can achieve these goals by modifying their vertical structures to let different groups of professionals focus on clearly defined tasks—line managers on earnings, for instance, and off-line teams on longer-term growth initiatives—with clear accountability. Then these companies should create new, overlaid networks and marketplaces that make it easier for professionals to interact collaboratively and to find the knowledge they need.

Companies can not only build this new kind of organization but also reduce the complexity of their interactions and improve the quality of internal collaboration by implementing four interrelated organizational-design principles:

1. Streamlining and simplifying vertical and line-management structures by discarding failed matrix and ad hoc approaches and narrowing the scope of the line manager's role to the creation of current earnings

2. Deploying off-line teams to discover new wealth-creating opportunities while using a dynamic management process to resolve short- and long-term trade-offs

3. Developing knowledge marketplaces, talent marketplaces, and formal networks to stimulate the creation and exchange of intangibles

4. Relying on measurements of performance rather than supervision to get the most from self-directed professionals The ideas underlying each of these policies may not be entirely new, but we don't know of any company that applies all of them holistically—and this failure limits the ability to perform up to potential. A company that tries to simplify its vertical organizational structure without helping large numbers of self-directed professionals to collaborate more easily might increase its efficiency, for example. But that would be more than offset by a decrease in its effectiveness.

Simplify the line structure

The first design principle is to clarify the reporting relationships, accountability, and responsibilities of the line managers, who make good on a company's earnings targets, for all other considerations will get short shrift until short-term expectations are met. To achieve this goal, a company must establish a clearly dominant axis of management—product, functional, geographic, or customer—and eliminate the matrix and ad hoc organizational structures that often muddle decision-making authority and accountability. Dynamic management and improved collaboration, as we show later, are better ways of accomplishing the purposes of these ad hoc structures.

A company that aims to streamline its line-management structures should create an effective enterprise-wide governance mechanism for decisions that cross them, such as the choices involved in managing shared IT costs. These mechanisms are typically created by defining and clarifying the decision-making authority of each member of the senior leadership team and establishing enterprise-wide governance committees as required. It may also be necessary to take important support functions, which demand focused management, out of the line structure, so that specialized professionals (rather than line managers, who are often, at best, gifted amateurs) can run these functions as shared utilities.

Finally, to promote the creation of enterprise-wide formal networks, parallel structures and parallel roles should be established across the whole extent of the company. Defining the role of the comptroller or the country manager consistently throughout it, for example, helps the people in those roles to interact and collaborate.

Manage dynamically

Once the newly simplified vertical structure allows line managers to limit their attention to meeting the near-term earnings expectations of the company, it has the luxury of focusing other professionals on the long-term creation of wealth. The advantages of such a separation are obvious. As one executive we know put it, you don't want people who are engaged in hand-to-hand combat to design a long-term weapons program.

Ongoing multiyear tasks such as launching new products, building new businesses, or fundamentally redesigning a company's technology platform usually call for small groups of full-time, focused professionals with the freedom "to wander in the woods," discovering new, winning value propositions by trial and error and deductive tinkering. Few down-the-line managers, who must live day to day in an intensely competitive marketplace, have the time or resources for such a discovery process.

Not that companies should forgo discipline while undertaking such a project. In fact, the portfolio-of-initiatives approach to strategy enables them to "plan on being lucky" by using the staged-investment processes of venture capital and principal investing firms, as well as the R&D processes of leading industrial corporations. 1 Companies that take this approach devote a fixed part of their budgets (say, 2 to 4 percent of all spending) and some of their best talent to finding and developing longer-term strategic initiatives. Each major one usually has a senior manager as its sponsor to ensure that resources are well invested. Once an initiative is ready to be scaled up—when revenues and cost projections become clear enough to appear in the budget—it can be placed in the line structure.

How can managers translate the concept of corporate performance into an operational reality? See "Managing for improved corporate performance."

Of course, at the enterprise level, companies must manage their short- and long-term earnings in a way that integrates their spending on strategic initiatives with the overall budget, so they will need to adopt a systemic, effective way of making the necessary trade-offs. What we call dynamic management can help: a combination of disciplined processes, decision-making protocols, rolling budgets, and calendar-management procedures makes it possible for companies to manage the portfolio of initiatives as part of an integrated senior-management approach to running the entire enterprise. Dynamic management forces companies to make resource allocation trade-offs, explicitly, at the top of the house rather than allowing them to be made, implicitly, by down-the-line managers struggling to make their budgets. This change further simplifies the line managers' role.

Develop organizational overlays

Having stripped away unproductive matrix and ad hoc structures from the vertical organization and clarified the line structure, a company must develop organizational overlays in the form of markets and networks that help its professionals work horizontally across its whole extent. These overlays make it easier for them to exchange knowledge, to find and collaborate with other professionals, and to develop communities that create intangible assets.

Because these market and network overlays help professionals to interact horizontally across the organization without having to go up or down the vertical chain of command, they boost rather than hinder productivity. Companies that establish such overlays are making investments not only to minimize the search and coordination costs of professionals who exchange knowledge and other valuable intangibles among themselves but also to maximize the opportunities for all sorts of cost-effective, productive interactions among them.

We believe that moving simultaneously into knowledge marketplaces, talent marketplaces, and formal networks will make all three more effective. A knowledge marketplace, for example, helps members of a formal network to exchange knowledge, which in turn helps to strengthen the network. A talent marketplace works better if the people who offer and seek jobs in it belong to the same formally networked community. In combination, these techniques can make it possible for companies to work horizontally in a far more cost-effective way.

Knowledge marketplaces. For the better part of the past 15 years, knowledge management has generated a good deal of buzz. Despite heavy investment, the benefits have been limited. Real value comes less from managing knowledge and more—a lot more—from creating and exchanging it. And the key to meeting this goal is understanding that the most valuable knowledge of a company resides largely in the heads of its most talented employees: its professionals. Exchanging knowledge on a company-wide basis in an effective way is much less a technological problem than an organizational one. As we have argued, to promote the exchange of knowledge, companies must remove structural barriers to the interaction of their professionals. These companies must also learn how to encourage people who may not know each other—after all, big corporations usually have large numbers of professionals—to work together for their mutual self-interest. What's the best way of encouraging strangers to exchange valuable things? The well-tested solution, of course, is markets, which the economy uses for just this purpose. The trick is to take the market inside the company. How can companies create effective internal markets when the product is inherently intangible? Among other things, working markets need objects of value for trading, to say nothing of prices, exchange mechanisms, and competition among suppliers. In addition, standards, protocols, regulations, and market facilitators often help markets to work better. These conditions don't exist naturally—a knowledge marketplace is an artificial, managed one—so companies must put them in place. 2 In particular, the suppliers of knowledge must have the incentives and support to codify it (that is, to produce high-quality "knowledge objects"). "Buyers" must be able to gain access to content that is more insightful and relevant, as well as easier to find and assimilate, than alternative sources are. Knowledge marketplaces are a relatively new concept, so they are rare. We have found that building an effective one in a large company requires significant investments to get the conditions in place—but that such a marketplace can indeed be built. A successful mechanism of this kind substantially improves the ability to create and exchange knowledge and dramatically cuts search and coordination costs.

Talent marketplaces. A company can create similar efficiencies by developing a talent marketplace that helps employees in a talent pool, either within a single organizational unit or across the enterprise, to explore alternative assignments varying from short-term projects to longer-term operating roles. Simultaneously, anyone with assignments to offer can review all of the people looking for new opportunities. As with marketplaces for knowledge, companies must invest in their talent markets to ensure that gifted men and women looking for new jobs hook up with managers seeking talent.

Companies must define the talent marketplace by specifying standardized roles, validating the qualifications of candidates, determining how managers receive the job seekers' performance evaluations, and so forth. The other requirements include pricing (the compensation for a particular role or assignment), an exchange mechanism to facilitate staffing transactions, and protocols and standards (how long assignments run, the mechanics of reassignment, the process of conveying decisions to reassign employees). Talent marketplaces do exist—particularly in professional organizations—but like knowledge marketplaces they are at an early stage of development.

Formal networks. People with common interests—such as similar work (industrial engineers, say), the same clientele (the automotive industry), or the same geography (China)—naturally form social networks. These networks lower the cost of interaction while increasing its value to all participants. A network often provides them with increasing returns to scale: the larger it is, the more chances they have to find opportunities for collaboration.

Social networks do face problems. They often have limited reach (for example, because they don't extend to many potential members in far-flung units and geographies). What's more, they sometimes operate inefficiently (several conversations might be required to reach the right person), may rely too much on the participants' goodwill, and, most particularly, can fail to attract enough investment to serve the common good of all members effectively.

The solution, for a company, is to boost the value of the network by investing in it and formalizing its role within the organization. One such move is the designation of a network "owner" to build common capabilities (for instance, by making investments to generate knowledge). Others include developing incentives for membership, defining separate territories (the existence of more than one social network may confuse would-be members), establishing standards and protocols, and providing for a shared infrastructure (say, a technology platform supporting the network's activities).

In fact, a formal network with specific areas of economic accountability can undertake many of the activities that have inspired companies to use matrix management structures. A formal network relies on self-directed people who work together out of self-interest, while a matrix uses a hierarchy to compel people to work together. In addition, a formal network enables people who share common interests to collaborate with relatively little ambiguity about decision-making authority—ambiguity that generates internal organizational complications and tension in matrixed structures.

Although social networks flourish at many companies, only a few have formalized them. That next step, though, is one of the most important things a company can do, because it removes unnecessary complexity from horizontal interactions among talented people across organizational silos.

Measure performance

The final set of ideas rounding out this new organizational model involves relinquishing some level of supervisory control and letting people direct themselves, guided by performance metrics, protocols, standards, values, and consequence-management systems.

To be sure, accountable leaders must control large companies even as many of their workers become more and more self-directed. But what's needed is inspired leadership, not more intrusive management. Of course, management will continue to be vital—particularly to get value from the many employees who will go on laboring in "industrially engineered" processes and to hold all of a company's workers and managers accountable for their performance. But as the workforce increasingly comes to consist of self-directed professionals, leaders will have to manage them by setting aspirations and using performance metrics that motivate them to organize their work, both individual and collective, to meet those aspirations. One successful CEO once told us that to motivate behavior, measuring performance is more important than providing financial incentives to reward it. The challenge is that to measure it effectively, the metrics must be tailored to individual roles and people. Get the metrics wrong and unintended behavior is the result.

To motivate the collaborative behavior that makes this new organizational model work, companies must create metrics that hold employees individually accountable for their contribution to collective success—an idea we call holding people "mutually accountable." Such metrics are particularly important for senior and top managers but are required, more broadly, for all self-directed workers. People who are great at developing the abilities of other talented people or at contributing distinctive knowledge, for example, should be more highly valued than those who are equally good at doing their own work but not at developing talent or contributing knowledge.

A new organizational model for today's big corporations will not emerge spontaneously from the obsolete legacy structures of the industrial age. Rather, companies must design a new model holistically, using new principles that take into account the way professionals create value. Big companies that follow these principles will get more value, at less cost, from the managers and the professionals they employ. In the process, they can become fundamentally better at overcoming the challenges—and capturing the opportunities— of today's economy.

Thoughts Have Consequences

2008-03-17T13:21:00.000-07:00

By Robert Ringer

Because I have extolled the virtues of action for so long, I have often been asked if thinking can be considered to be a form of action. The short answer is "yes." To employ Aristotelian logic, since thoughts have consequences, we can reasonably conclude that thoughts are actions.

But the whole notion of thinking as a form of action puts us on that proverbial slippery slope. Like physical action, not all thought action is constructive. For example, pointless daydreaming (akin to a trance), dispersed attention (where your mind resembles a pinball machine), and "group thinking" (a way of life in meeting-addicted corporate America ) are three kinds of thinking that are unlikely to add value to your life.

Since thoughts are actions, and actions have consequences, you become a product of your thoughts. Which is why it's so important to be careful about the company you keep.

If you allow yourself to be in the presence of negative people too often, it's virtually an impossibility to think positive thoughts. And since most of the people roaming our planet tend to be negative, it takes a great deal of vigilance to keep them at bay.

It's also important to recognize that just as all physical action is not necessarily constructive, neither is all thought action. Hateful thoughts bring about hateful consequences. Negative thoughts bring about negative consequences. And so on.

With all of the above in mind, let's take a look at four of the more important kinds of thinking:

1. Immediate-Solution Thinking This is the most common type of thinking - and the most dangerous. When you have a problem you need resolved - which means pretty much every day in a normal person's life - it's quite natural to think a lot about problem solving.

This kind of thinking, however, can bury you alive if you allow it to guide you rather than the other way around. I find that the more I pressure-cook my perceived problems, the less likely I am to solve them.

I use the adjective perceived , because, in truth, there really is no such thing as a problem. "Problem" is just a word we use to describe a fact or set of facts. And it's a word that carries with it a negative connotation.

I would therefore suggest that you stop thinking of every obstacle you encounter as a problem. Instead, posit it as a fact that you simply need to find a way to deal with. And by far the best way to deal with an unpleasant fact - and I'm speaking here from extensive firsthand experience - is to turn it over to your subconscious mind with instructions to resolve it in a positive manner. The power of the subconscious mind is still a great mystery to the scientific world. But the one thing that is pretty well accepted by experts in all fields related to the study of the subconscious mind is that it tends to produce that which the conscious mind requires of it.

2. Opportunity Thinking Once you've offloaded your perceived problems to your subconscious mind, your conscious mind is free to focus on opportunities. Opportunities provide the means to move forward with your life. It's good to be a problem solver, but problem-solving is analogous to treading water

It's instructive to concentrate daily on how much time you spend thinking about problems and how much time you spend thinking about opportunities. If you keep your ratio at 10:1 or better in favour of opportunity thinking, you are virtually guaranteed to succeed at just about anything you try.

The ultimate triumph of opportunity thinking is when you become adept at dissecting your perceived problems and discover hidden opportunities in them. This is a true art form, a skill that is all too absent in most of the human race.

3. Free-Flow Thinking Free-flow thinking is not the same as daydreaming, which can be likened to being adrift at sea. I've found that allowing my mind to "float" can be very productive, so long as I keep it within the general framework of where I am in life, where I want to go, and how I can best get there.

I'm talking about questions such as: What do I enjoy? What am I good at? What do I want out of life? What's the price? Am I willing to pay it?

These are questions that require ongoing maintenance if you want to avoid becoming locked into a way of life that is neither profitable nor fulfilling. Monitoring the answers to these questions is a great preventative to homeostasis (the tendency to live with existing conditions and avoid change). And the more things change, the more often you should revisit the questions.

4. Thinking About the "Unknowables" Pondering the unknowables is the equivalent of health food for the brain. We get so bogged down in our secular problems that it drives some of us to drink, others to take drugs, and still others to make the decision to end it all. My conclusion is that such stewing and fretting over day-to-day "problems" stems from a false sense of self-importance.

That's why it's healthy to periodically step back and think about the larger issues of life - questions such as:

Where did we come from?

Where are we going?

What is our purpose?

If we evolved from inanimate matter, what caused it to happen?

Do we really have free will, or is everything in our lives predestined?

Who or what created the universe, or did it create itself?

What existed before the universe?

How can science explain infinity ... time ... space?

One last note on the subject of thinking as a form of action: In the name of efficiency, you should develop a means to capture your thoughts, record and catalog them, and access them quickly. This is one of the best-kept secrets of being a good writer.

The first and simplest step in this process is to make sure that you are within reach of a pad and pencil at all times. Don't count on remembering a great thought, because you probably won't. At last count, I have forever lost track of 6,822 of my best ideas - ideas that I was certain I would remember.

Also, don't be a lazy note-taker. Date your notes (date everything!) and make them more detailed rather than less.

If you're an action-oriented person, make it a point to consciously use thinking as a regular and constructive form of action. Your first priority should be opportunity thinking; second, free-flow thinking; third, thinking about the unknowables.

Spend as little time as possible thinking about "problems," because problems tend to evaporate when you spend a lot of time on the other three categories - especially opportunity thinking.

Always remember: Thinking is action, and actions have consequences.

A last word of caution: Don't make the mistake of allowing thinking action to become a replacement for physical action. Notwithstanding anything else I have said in this article, the fact remains that there is nothing on this earth as powerful as consistent, bold, physical action.

Personal Courage and Conflict Resolution at Work

2008-03-17T10:39:00.000-07:00

by Susan M. Heathfield [About Human Resources Vol. 8 No. 112 - ISSN: 1533-3698 September 18, 2007]

Practicing personal courage is necessary if you want to really resolve conflicts at work. It is much easier and much safer to ignore the necessary conflict and play ostrich.

Unfortunately, unresolved conflict tends to escalate. It never really disappears because it simmers just below the surface. Think of water that is coming to a boil. It burbles up in the pot sporadically and then finally reaches the boiling temperature. At that point, a full blown rolling, constant boiling is seen on the surface of the water.

Conflict behaves similarly. The water may seem calm, but every once in awhile, usually at the worst possible times, the conflict burbles up to the surface once again. Unresolved conflict does not go away; unresolved conflict can turn into a full boil at any time.

Many people are afraid of conflict resolution. They feel threatened by conflict resolution because they may not get what they want if the other party gets what they want. Even in the best circumstances, conflict resolution is uncomfortable because people are usually unskilled at conflict resolution. Finally, people can get hurt in a conflict and, at work, they are still expected to work together effectively every day.

The Benefits of Conflict Resolution

This century's workplace makes conflict resolution more important, but also, more difficult. Team or work cell environments create more conflict as people with different opinions must choose to work together, often in close quarters.

Empowering work environments, in which the traditional reliance on a manager to solve conflicts and make decisions, bring coworkers into more frequent conflict, as they must work issues out for themselves. Conflict resolution also:

a) Causes people to listen to and consider different ideas.

b) Enables people to increase their alternatives and potential paths.

c) Results in increased participation and more ownership of and commitment to the decisions and goals of the group or person.

The goal of the people or the team is not to eliminate conflict but to learn how to manage conflict constructively.

These conflict resolution steps will help you reach this goal.

You've decided resolving the conflict is more important than all of the reasons why people avoid conflict. Here are tips to help you practice less scary, less intimidating, more effective and successful conflict resolution, with an individual or a team.

1. Create an environment that is conducive to successful conflict resolution. Quiet, private settings work the best. Agree prior to sitting down together that the purpose of the meeting is to resolve the conflict. When you make this agreement, all parties arrive prepared.

2. Determine what outcomes you'd like to see as a result of the discussion. A better working relationship? A better solution to the problem? Increased alternatives for successful projects? A broadened understanding of each person's needs and wants? Thoughtful solutions and outcomes are infinite if you are creative.

3. Begin by allowing each party to express their point of view. The purpose of the exchange is to make sure both parties clearly understand the viewpoint of the other. Make sure each party ties their opinions to real performance data and other facts, where possible. This is not the time to discuss; it is the time to ask questions, clarify points for better understanding and truly hear the other's viewpoint.

4. Agree on the difference in the points of view. You must agree on the problem together to begin to search for a solution. Often problems are simply misunderstandings. Clarification can end the need for conflict resolution. Try to focus on the issues, not the personalities of the participants. Don't "you" each other as in, "You always ..."

5. Explore and discuss potential solutions and alternatives. Try to focus on both your individual needs and wants and those of the other party. After all, if one party "wins," that means the other party "loses." People who feel as if they have lost, are not effective coworkers. They harbor resentment and may even sabotage your project or relationship. Make sure you discuss the positive and negative possibilities of each suggestion, before you reject any suggested solutions. Build a discussion that is positive and powerful for all parties.

6. Agree on a plan that meets the needs of all parties and the organization. Agree on followup steps, as necessary, to make the plan work. Agree on what each person will do to solve the conflict. Set clear goals and know how you will measure success.

7. Do what you agreed to do.

With more experience in conflict resolution, you will grow more comfortable with conflict resolution. That's a positive outcome for the workplace. It will foster idea generation, help people get along, minimize negative behaviors and promote the success of all in placing their attention where it belongs - on the customer.

The Two Most Important Management Secrets: The Pygmalion and Galatea Effects

2008-03-17T10:32:00.000-07:00

by Susan M. Heathfield [About Human Resources: Vol. 9 No. 16 - ISSN: 1533-3698 February 5, 2008]

The Pygmalion Effect: The Power of the Supervisor's Expectations Your expectations of people and their expectations of themselves are the key factors in how well people perform at work. Known as the Pygmalion effect and the Galatea effect, respectively, the power of expectations cannot be overestimated. These are the fundamental principles you can apply to performance expectations and potential performance improvement at work. You can summarize the Pygmalion effect, often known as the power of expectations, by considering:

a) Every supervisor has expectations of the people who report to him.

b) Supervisors communicate these expectations consciously or unconsciously.

c) People pick up on, or consciously or unconsciously read, these expectations from their supervisor.

d) People perform in ways that are consistent with the expectations they have picked up on from the supervisor.

The Pygmalion effect was described by J. Sterling Livingston in the September/October, 1988 Harvard Business Review. "The way managers treat their subordinates is subtly influenced by what they expect of them," Livingston said in his article, Pygmalion in Management.

The Pygmalion effect enables staff to excel in response to the manager's message that they are capable of success and expected to succeed. The Pygmalion effect can also undermine staff performance when the subtle communication from the manager tells them the opposite. These cues are often subtle. As an example, the supervisor fails to praise a staff person's performance as frequently as he praises others. The supervisor talks less to a particular employee.

Livingston went on to say about the supervisor, "If he is unskilled, he leaves scars on the careers of the young men (and women), cuts deeply into their self-esteem and distorts their image of themselves as human beings. But if he is skillful and has high expectations of his subordinates, their self-confidence will grow, their capabilities will develop and their productivity will be high. More often than he realizes, the manager is Pygmalion."

Can you imagine how performance will improve if your supervisors communicate positive thoughts about people to people? If the supervisor actually believes that every employee has the ability to make a positive contribution at work, the telegraphing of that message, either consciously or unconsciously, will positively affect employee performance.

And, the effect of the supervisor gets even better than this. When the supervisor holds positive expectations about people, she helps individuals improve their self-concept and thus, self-esteem. People believe they can succeed and contribute and their performance rises to the level of their own expectations.

Take a look at the Galatea effect to learn more.

The Galatea Effect: The Power of Self-expectations Even more powerful than the Pygmalion effect, the Galatea effect is a compelling factor in employee performance. The manager who can assist employees to believe in themselves and in their efficacy, has harnessed a powerful performance improvement tool.

I'm sure you've heard of the words, "self-fulfilling prophecy." Applied as the Galatea effect, these words mean that the individual's opinion about his ability and his self-expectations about his performance largely determine his performance. If an employee thinks she can succeed, she will likely succeed. Consequently, any actions the supervisor can take that increase the employee's feelings of positive self-worth, will help the employee's performance improve.

I don't mean to over-simplify this concept. Many other factors also contribute to the level of an employee's performance including your company culture, the employee's life experiences, education, family support and relationships with coworkers. However, positive supervision is one of the key factors that keeps good employees on the job.

These are ways in which you can encourage positive, powerful self-expectations in employees.

a) Provide opportunities for the employee to experience increasingly challenging assignments. Make sure she succeeds at each level before moving forward.

b) Enable the employee to participate in potentially successful projects that bring continuous improvement to the workplace.

c) Provide one-to-one coaching with the employee. This coaching should emphasize improving what the employee does well rather than focusing on the employee's weaknesses.

d) Provide developmental opportunities that reflect what the employee is interested in learning. e) Assign a successful senior employee to play a developmental mentoring role with the employee.

f) Hold frequent, positive verbal interactions with the employee and communicate consistently your firm belief in the employee's ability to perform the job. Keep feedback positive and developmental where possible.

g) Make sure the employee is receiving consistent messages from other supervisory personnel. How you speak to others about employees powerfully molds their opinions.

h) Project your sincere commitment to the employee's success and ongoing development.

Harness the power of the employee's self-expectations to ensure powerful, productive, improving, successful work performance.

"Teams At Work: 7 Keys to Success"

2008-03-14T13:23:00.000-07:00

Below is the excerpt from Suzanne Willis Zoglio's book, "Teams At Work: 7 Keys to Success"

Fostering teamwork is a top priority for many leaders. The benefits are clear: increased productivity, improved customer service, more flexible systems, employee empowerment. But is the vision clear? To effectively implement teams, leaders need a clear picture of the seven elements high-performance teams have in common

1. COMMITMENT Commitment to the purpose and values of an organization provides a clear sense of direction. Team members understand how their work fits into corporate objectives and they agree that their team's goals are achievable and aligned with corporate mission and values. Commitment is the foundation for synergy in groups. Individuals are willing to put aside personal needs for the benefit of the work team or the company. When there is a meeting of the minds on the big picture this shared purpose provides a backdrop against which all team decisions can be viewed. Goals are developed with corporate priorities in mind. Team ground rules are set with consideration for both company and individual values. When conflict arises, the team uses alignment with purpose, values, and goals as important criteria for acceptable solutions.

To enhance team commitment leaders might consider inviting each work team to develop team mission, vision, and values statements that are in alignment with those of the corporation but reflect the individuality of each team. These statements should be visible and "walked" every day. Once a shared purpose is agreed upon, each team can develop goals and measures, focus on continuous improvement, and celebrate team success at important milestones. The time spent up front getting all team members on the same track will greatly reduce the number of derailments or emergency rerouting later.

2. CONTRIBUTION The power of an effective team is in direct proportion to the skills members possess and the initiative members expend. Work teams need people who have strong technical and interpersonal skills and are willing to learn. Teams also need self-leaders who take responsibility for getting things done. But if a few team members shoulder most of the burden, the team runs the risk of member burnout, or worse -- member turn-off.

To enhance balanced participation on a work team, leaders should consider three factors that affect the level of individual contribution: inclusion, confidence, and empowerment. The more individuals feel like part of a team, the more they contribute; and, the more members contribute, the more they feel like part of the team. To enhance feelings of inclusion, leaders need to keep work team members informed, solicit their input, and support an atmosphere of collegiality. If employees are not offering suggestions at meetings, invite them to do so. If team members miss meetings, let them know they were missed. When ideas -- even wild ideas -- are offered, show appreciation for the initiative.

Confidence in self and team affects the amount of energy a team member invests in an endeavor. If it appears that the investment of hard work is likely to end in success employees are more likely to contribute. If, on the other hand, success seems unlikely, investment of energy will wane. To breed confidence on a work team, leaders can highlight the talent, experience, and accomplishments represented on the team, as well as keep past team successes visible. The confidence of team members can be bolstered by providing feedback, coaching, assessment and professional development opportunities. Another way to balance contribution on a work team is to enhance employee empowerment. When workers are involved in decisions, given the right training, and respected for their experience, they feel enabled and invest more. It is also important to have team members evaluate how well they support the contribution of others.

3. COMMUNICATION For a work group to reach its full potential, members must be able to say what they think , ask for help, share new or unpopular ideas, and risk making mistakes. This can only happen in an atmosphere where team members show concern, trust one another, and focus on solutions, not problems. Communication --when it is friendly, open, and positive --plays a vital role in creating such cohesiveness.

Friendly communications are more likely when individuals know and respect one another. Team members show caring by asking about each other's lives outside of work, respecting individual differences, joking, and generally making all feel welcome.

Open communication is equally important to a team's success. To assess work performance, members must provide honest feedback, accept constructive criticism, and address issues head-on. To do so requires a trust level supported by direct, honest communication.

Positive communication impacts the energy of a work team. When members talk about what they like, need, or want, it is quite different from wailing about what annoys or frustrates them. The former energizes; the latter demoralizes.

To enhance team communication, leaders can provide skill training in listening, responding, and the use of language as well as in meeting management, feedback and consensus building.

4. COOPERATION Most challenges in the workplace today require much more than good solo performance. In increasingly complex organizations, success depends upon the degree of interdependence recognized within the team. Leaders can facilitate cooperation by highlighting the impact of individual members on team productivity and clarifying valued team member behaviors. The following F.A.C.T.S. model of effective team member behaviors (follow-through, accuracy, timeliness, creativity, and spirit) may serve as a guide for helping teams identify behaviors that support synergy within the work team.

Follow-through One of the most common phrases heard in groups that work well together is "You can count on it." Members trust that when a colleague agrees to return a telephone call, read a report, talk to a customer, attend a meeting, or change a behavior, the job will be done. There will be follow-through. Team members are keenly aware that as part of a team, everything that they do --or don't do---impacts someone else.

Accuracy Another common phrase heard in effective work groups is "We do it right the first time." Accuracy, clearly a reflection of personal pride, also demonstrates a commitment to uphold the standards of the team, thus generating team pride.

Creativity Innovation flourishes on a team when individuals feel supported by colleagues. Although taking the lead in a new order of things is risky business, such risk is greatly reduced in a cooperative environment where members forgive mistakes, respect individual differences, and shift their thinking from a point of view to a viewing point.

Timeliness When work team members are truly cooperating they respect the time of others by turning team priorities into personal priorities, arriving for meetings on time, sharing information promptly, clustering questions for people, communicating succinctly, and asking "Is this a good time?" before initiating interactions.

Spirit Being on a work team is a bit like being part of a family. You can't have your way all of the time, and - to add value - you must develop a generous spirit. Leaders can help work teams by addressing these "rules" of team spirit: value the individual; develop team trust; communicate openly; manage differences; share successes; welcome new members.

5. CONFLICT MANAGEMENT It is inevitable that teams of bright, diverse thinkers will experience conflict from time to time. The problem is not that differences exist, but in how they are managed. If people believe that conflict never occurs in "good" groups, they may sweep conflict under the rug. Of course, no rug is large enough to cover misperception, ill feelings, old hurts, and misunderstandings for very long. Soon the differences reappear. They take on the form of tension, hidden agendas, and stubborn positions. On the other hand, if leaders help work teams to manage conflict effectively, the team will be able to maintain trust and tap the collective power of the team. Work teams manage conflict better when members learn to shift their paradigms (mindsets) about conflict in general, about other parties involved, and about their own ability to manage conflict. Three techniques that help members shift obstructing paradigms are reframing, shifting shoes, and affirmations.

Reframing is looking at the glass half-full, instead of half-empty. Instead of thinking "If I address this issue, it'll slow down the meeting," consider this thought: "If we negotiate this difference, trust and creativity will all increase."

Shifting Shoes is a technique used to practice empathy by mentally "walking in the shoes" of another person. You answer questions such as "How would I feel if I were that person being criticized in front of the group?" "What would motivate me to say what that person just said?" Affirmations are positive statements about something you want to be true. For example, instead of saying to yourself right before a negotiating session, " I know I'm going to blow up", force yourself to say, "I am calm, comfortable, and prepared." If team members can learn to shift any negative mental tapes to more positive ones, they will be able to shift obstructing paradigms and manage conflict more effectively.

6. CHANGE MANAGEMENT Tom Peters, in Thriving On Chaos, writes "The surviving companies will, above all, be flexible responders that create market initiatives. This has to happen through people." It is no longer a luxury to have work teams that can perform effectively within a turbulent environment. It is a necessity. Teams must not only respond to change, but actually initiate it. To assist teams in the management of change, leaders should acknowledge any perceived danger in the change and then help teams to see any inherent opportunities. They can provide the security necessary for teams to take risks and the tools for them to innovate; they can also reduce resistance to change by providing vision and information, and by modeling a positive attitude themselves.

7. CONNECTIONS A cohesive work team can only add value if it pays attention to the ongoing development of three important connections: to the larger work organization, to team members, and to other work teams.

When a work team is connected to the organization, members discuss team performance in relationship to corporate priorities, customer feedback, and quality measures. They consider team needs in light of what's good for the whole organization and what will best serve joint objectives. Leaders can encourage such connection by keeping communication lines open. Management priorities, successes, and headaches should flow one way; team needs, successes, and questions should flow in the other direction. When a work team has developed strong connections among its own members, peer support manifests itself in many ways. Colleagues volunteer to help without being asked, cover for each other in a pinch, congratulate each other publicly, share resources, offer suggestions for improvement, and find ways to celebrate together. A few ideas for developing and maintaining such connections are: allow time before and after meetings for brief socialization, schedule team lunches, create occasional team projects outside of work, circulate member profiles, take training together, and provide feedback to one another on development.

Teams that connect well with other work groups typically think of those groups as "internal customers". They treat requests from these colleagues with the same respect shown to external customers. They ask for feedback on how they can better serve them. They engage in win/win negotiating to resolve differences, and they share resources such as training materials, videos, books, equipment, or even improvement ideas. To build stronger connections with other groups, work teams might consider: scheduling monthly cross-departmental meetings, inviting representatives to their own team meeting, "lending" personnel during flu season, and combining efforts on a corporate or community project.

To compete effectively, leaders must fashion a network of skilled employees who support each other in the achievement of corporate goals and the delivery of seamless service.

Great Service Is A Choice

2008-01-11T10:12:00.000-08:00

(Excerpt from The Simple Truths of Service)

No one can make you serve customers well. That's because great service is a choice. Years ago, my friend, Harvey Mackay, told me a wonderful story about a cab driver that proved this point.
He was waiting in line for a ride at the airport. When a cab pulled up, the first thing Harvey noticed was that the taxi was polished to a bright shine. Smartly dressed in a white shirt, black tie, and freshly pressed black slacks, the cab driver jumped out and rounded the car to open the back passenger door for Harvey.

He handed my friend a laminated card and said:

"I'm Wally, your driver. While I'm loading your bags in the trunk I'd like you to read my mission statement."
Taken aback, Harvey read the card. It said:

Wally's Mission Statement:
To get my customers to their destination in the quickest,
safest and cheapest way possible in a friendly environment.

This blew Harvey away. Especially when he noticed that the inside of the cab matched the outside. Spotlessly clean!

As he slid behind the wheel, Wally said, "Would you like a cup of coffee? I have a thermos of regular and one of decaf."

My friend said jokingly, "No, I'd prefer a soft drink."

Wally smiled and said, "No problem. I have a cooler up front with regular and Diet Coke, water and orange juice."

Almost stuttering, Harvey said, "I'll take a Diet Coke."

Handing him his drink, Wally said, "If you'd like something to read, I have The Wall Street Journal, Time, Sports Illustratedand USA Today."

As they were pulling away, Wally handed my friend another laminated card. "These are the stations I get and the music they play, if you'd like to listen to the radio."

And as if that weren't enough, Wally told Harvey that he had the air conditioning on and asked if the temperature was comfortable for him. Then he advised Harvey of the best route to his destination for that time of day. He also let him know that he'd be happy to chat and tell him about some of the sights or, if Harvey preferred, to leave him with his own thoughts.

"Tell me, Wally," my amazed friend asked the driver, "have you always served customers like this?"

Wally smiled into the rearview mirror. "No, not always. In fact, it's only been in the last two years. My first five years driving, I spent most of my time complaining like all the rest of the cabbies do. Then I heard the personal growth guru, Wayne Dyer, on the radio one day.

He had just written a book called You'll See It When You Believe It. Dyer said that if you get up in the morning expecting to have a bad day, you'll rarely disappoint yourself. He said, 'Stop complaining! Differentiate yourself from your competition. Don't be a duck. Be an eagle. Ducks quack and complain. Eagles soar above the crowd.'"

"That hit me right between the eyes," said Wally. "Dyer was really talking about me. I was always quacking and complaining, so I decided to change my attitude and become an eagle. I looked around at the other cabs and their drivers. The cabs were dirty, the drivers were unfriendly, and the customers were unhappy. So I decided to make some changes. I put in a few at a time. When my customers responded well, I did more."

"I take it that has paid off for you," Harvey said.

"It sure has," Wally replied. "My first year as an eagle, I doubled my income from the previous year. This year I'll probably quadruple it. You were lucky to get me today. I don't sit at cabstands anymore. My customers call me for appointments on my cell phone or leave a message on my answering machine. If I can't pick them up myself, I get a reliable cabbie friend to do it and I take a piece of the action."

Wally was phenomenal. He was running a limo service out of a Yellow Cab. I've probably told that story to more than fifty cab drivers over the years, and only two took the idea and ran with it. Whenever I go to their cities, I give them a call. The rest of the drivers quacked like ducks and told me all the reasons they couldn't do any of what I was suggesting.

Wally the Cab Driver made a different choice. He decided to stop quacking like ducks and start soaring like eagles.

How about you???

When Words Hurt

2008-01-05T21:06:00.000-08:00

Human Resources Feature
by Trilby McGaw

Search for �workplace bullying� on the Internet and you will find a plethora of websites, articles and books devoted to describing, analyzing and eliminating the behaviour. Bullying is a widespread and enormous problem that seriously affects productivity and the emotional well-being of those who are bullied. Luckily, interest in the topic is booming while tolerance for the behaviour is waning.

Workplace bullying is an insidious problem that can be difficult to identify and to challenge, largely because bullies create a culture of fear and intimidation that discourages employees from asserting themselves. Bullying erodes self-worth, self-esteem and self-confidence. This in turn disempowers employees and alienates them from one another making them less likely to unite against a bully.

Jacinta Kitt, in an article for Mandate Trade Union, says �Bullying is progressive and escalating. It is coercive, insensitive and cruel. It communicates disrespect through words and actions. It takes laughter and fun out of lives and work and it diminishes the 'feel good factors' in the workplace."

Examples of bullying include, but are by no means limited to:

Intimidating a person,
Yelling or using profanity,
Persistently criticizing a person, and
Belittling a person's opinions.

Most of us don't like conflict and we value our jobs. So when bullies are in management positions with the power to affect our working life, we tend to fear retribution, marginalization or worse being sacked. When you have a mortgage to pay or a family to support, standing up to a bully can feel like financial suicide. Putting up with abuse can seem like the safer option but this comes with a price.

Continuous aggressive behaviour intended to intimidate, offend, degrade or humiliate a person affects the emotional and physical health of employees. Research suggests that employees who have been bullied in the workplace typically present with headaches, gastrointestinal problems, exhaustion, insomnia, anxiety, depression, burn-out, panic attacks, palpitations or dermatological disorders. Jacinta Kitt says that employees who have been bullied invariably exhibit great unhappiness and desperation. They are also frequently tearful, irritable, confused, sad or angry.

So why do organizations allow bullying to persist? Many managers are reluctant to address bullying for the same reasons that employees are. They lack the skills to confront bullies, they fear how the bully will retaliate and they hope the problem will just go away. This makes it unsurprising that studies show 1 in 5 people are bullied at work.

Impact on productivity

Research suggests that bullied employees waste between 10 and 52 per cent of their time at work. Instead of working, they spend time defending themselves and networking for support, thinking about the situation, being unmotivated and stressed, not to mention taking sick leave due to stress-related illnesses. Organizations who manage people well outperform those who don't by 30 to 40 per cent.

There is general consensus that workplace bullying results in negative and destructive organizational effects, including:

Reduced Commitment,
Higher Absenteeism,
High Personnel Turnover,
Lack Of Employee Motivation,
Less Creativity And Vision,
Poor Morale, and
Adverse Publicity and Poor Public Image.

Employees who are psychologically abused in the workplace have little time or mental energy for productivity. Abuse makes them disillusioned, exhausted, and burnt-out, unable to perform their jobs effectively or efficiently.

Profile of a bully boss

Research suggests that over 80 per cent of bullies are bosses and that a bully is equally likely to be a man or a woman. Jacinta Kitt�s research indicates that the key characteristics of workplace bullies are selfishness, self-obsession, inadequacy, insecurity and total insensitivity toward others. They are extremely autocratic, exhibiting an unrelenting need to be fully in control. They dictate how and what decisions are made, allowing no real debate.

She says that bully bosses exaggerate their own contribution and are reluctant to acknowledge the contributions of others. They adopt a territorial approach to running their workplaces and often use loud voiced aggressive tactics to dominate decision making and day-to-day operations. An important feature of the bully is their compulsion to have their own needs met at all costs. This compulsion is also highlighted in the bully's constant demands for respect and consideration while persistently denying similar treatment to others.

Bully bosses, by their self-centered, selfish behaviour, effectively treat their subordinates as non-persons. They frighten and belittle their victims in a vain attempt to conceal their own fears and to make themselves look big. They diminish the confidence and integrity of others in order to deflect attention from their own inadequacies. They use their power to disempower others.

Addressing workplace bullying

Bullying only survives in a workplace if management allows it, either through lack of understanding of the problem, inadequate measures to deal with it and a tolerance of disrespectful, inappropriate behaviour.

There are many options available for employers to use when confronted with workplace bullying.

Don't blame the victim. You will often hear managers tell employees not to take it personally. This kind of statement shifts responsibility away from the bully. It implies that the employee is at fault and that there wouldn�t be a problem if the employee was thicker skinned. It reinforces the bullying culture and isolates those who find the behaviour unacceptable.

Since bullying is a form of violence in the workplace, employers may wish to write a comprehensive policy that covers a range of incidents (from bullying and harassment to physical violence). They should make bullies aware of the consequences of their behaviour. A climate of unacceptability must be created in relation to bullying and all employees must be made aware that it is neither condoned nor tolerated.

Employers can provide a confidential counseling program to help employees manage the emotional consequences of bullying. Such programs can also be offered to bullies to assist them with managing their behaviour and in dealing with the mental health issues that cause it.

Employers may wish to consider sending managers and other interested staff to training courses in how to address and prevent workplace bullying to develop skills sets across organizations.

Employers can also use performance management processes to address bullying and initiate underperformance if bullying persists. To facilitate this process, employees should be encouraged to keep records of all bullying incidents which can be used as evidence when addressing behaviour with a bully.

If you feel that you are being bullied, discriminated against, victimized or subjected to any form of harassment, the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety recommends the following.

Firmly tell the person that his or her behaviour is not acceptable and ask them to stop. You can ask a supervisor or union member to be with you when you approach the person.

Keep a factual journal or diary of daily events. Record the date, time and what happened in as much detail as possible, the names of witnesses and the outcome of the event. Remember, it is not just the character of the incidents, but the number, frequency, and especially the pattern that can reveal the bullying or harassment.

Keep copies of any letters, memos, e-mails, faxes, etc., received from the person.

Report the harassment to the person identified in your workplace policy, your supervisor, or a delegated manager. If your concerns are minimized, proceed to the next level of management.

Legal Implications

Employers, managers, supervisors and employees are facing new obligations and responsibilities in connection with the quality of work environments and workplace interactions. Behaviour such as yelling, loss of temper over minor issues, expressions of opinion in an obscene manner, offensive, foul and obscene language, belittling and demeaning remarks or behaviour is being legally characterized as personal and psychological harassment and as creating an unacceptable offensive environment. Such behaviour is construed as falling below standards of legally acceptable workplace interactions and conduct.

Many nations and jurisdictions have already adopted legislation to prevent workplace bullying and it is likely that others will follow suit. Some examples are included below.

On June 1, 2004, Quebec became the first North American jurisdiction to include protection against psychological harassment of employees in its Act Respecting Labour Standards. The Quebec legislation signals a changing legislative and judicial attitude to abuse in the workplace that is likely to be mirrored across Canada.

From 15 August 2005, employers in South Australia can be fined up to $100,000 for failing to "adequately manage" bullying behaviour. Other Australian states are currently considering adopting similar legislation to combat workplace bullying.

In the United Kingdom, there are means to obtain legal redress for bullying, most notably through the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. In one notable case, Green v DB Group Services (UK) Ltd, a bullied worker was awarded over 800,000 in damages.

Twenty Steps To Manage Yourself

2008-01-05T04:23:00.000-08:00

1. Clarify your objectives. Put them in writing. Then set your priorities. Make sure you're getting what you really want out of life.

2. Focus on objectives, not on activities. Your most important activities are those that help you accomplish your objectives.

3. Set at least one major objective each day and achieve it.

4. Record a time log periodically to analyze how you use your time, and keep bad time habits out of your life.

5. Analyze everything you do in terms of your objectives. Find out what you do, when you do it, why you do it. Ask yourself what would happen if you didn't do it. If the answer is nothing, then stop doing it.

6. Eliminate at least one time-waster from your life each week.

7. Plan your time. Write out a plan for each week. Ask yourself what you hope to accomplish by the end of the week and what you will need to do to achieve those results.

8. Make a to-do list every day. Be sure it includes your daily objectives, priorities, and time estimates, not just random activities.

9. Schedule your time every day to make sure you accomplish the most important things first. Be sure to leave room for the unexpected and for interruptions. But remember that things that are scheduled have a better chance of working out than things that are unscheduled.

10. Make sure that the first hour of your workday is productive.

11. Set time limits for every task you undertake.

12. Take the time to do it right the first time. You won’t have to waste time doing it over.

13. Eliminate recurring crises from your life. Find out why things keep going wrong. Learn to proact instead of react.

14. Institute a quiet hour in your day - A block of uninterrupted time for your most important tasks.

15. Develop the habit of finishing what you start. Don't jump from one thing to another, leaving a string of unfinished tasks behind you.

16. Conquer procrastination. Learn to do it now.

17. Make better time management a daily habit. Set your objectives, clarify your priorities, plan and schedule your time. Do first things first. Resist your impulses to do unscheduled tasks. Review your activities.

18. Never spend time on less important things when you could be spending it on more important things.

19. Take time for yourself - time to dream, time to relax, time to live.

20. Develop a personal philosophy of time? What time means to you and how time relates to your life?

The Art of Recruiting

2007-11-28T09:07:00.000-08:00

Written by *Guy Kawasaki *

The art of recruiting is the purest form of evangelism because you're not simply asking people to try your product, buy your product, or partner with you. Instead, you are asking them to bet their lives on your organization. Can it get any scarier for them, and tougher for you, than this?

*1. Hire Better Than Yourself.*

In the Macintosh Division, we had a saying, "A players hire A players; B players hire C players"--meaning that great people hire great people. On the other hand, mediocre people hire candidates who are not as good as they are, so they can feel superior to them. (If you start down this slippery slope, you'll soon end up with Z players; this is called The Bozo Explosion. It is followed by The Layoff.) I have come to believe that we were wrong--A players hire A+ players, not merely A players. It takes self-confidence and self-awarness, but it's the only way to build a great team.

*2. Hire Infected People.*

Classically, organizations look for the "right" educational and professional backgrounds. I would add a third quality: Is the candidate infected with alove of your product? Because all the education and work experience in the world doesn't matter if the candidate doesn't "get it" and love it. On the other hand, an ex-jewelry schlepper like me can make it in technology if you're infected with a love of the product.

*3. Ignore The Irrelevant.*

This is somewhat redundant with the prior point, but it merits repetition. Often a candidate's educational and work experience is relevant on paper but irrelevant in the real world. Would a senior vice-president from Microsoft with a PhD in computer science be an ideal employee of a startup? Not necessarily- -this poor guy has been working for a company with $60 billion in cash and 95% market share, and he woke up every day not worried about the competition or customers but the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. The flip side is also true: the candidate--using a jewelry analogy-- without the "perfect" background could be the diamond in the rough.

*4. Double Check Your Intuition.*

Everyone has stories about the candidate that they "knew" wouldn't work out who turned out to be a nightmare employee. Or the employee they "knew" would work out despite a lack of qualifications who turned out to be the employee of the decade. The problem with intuition is that people only remember when their intuition was right--truth be told, their intuition was probably wrong as often as right. My recommendation is that you ask every candidate the same questions and take extensive notes. You might even conduct the first interview by telephone so you cannot judge the candidates by their appearance. In particular, startup founders believe they have a good "gutfeel" for candidates, so they conduct unstructured interviews that are way too subjective, and they end up with lousy hires.

*5. Check Independent References.*

How many of us have limited reference checking to only those provided by the candidate? I know I have. Can we be more stupid than this? This often happens because we don't double check our intuition: we like the gal, so we only call the references she's provided because we don't want to hear thatwe like a bozo. Do as I say, not as I did: check independent references-- preferably at least one person that she worked for and one person that worked for her.

*6. Apply The Shopping Center Test.*

As the last step in the recruiting process, apply the Shopping Center Test.It works like this: Suppose you're at a shopping center, and you see the candidate. He is fifty feet away and has not seen you.

You have three choices:

(1) beeline it over to him and say hello;

(2) say to yourself,"This shopping center isn't that big; if I bump into him, then I'll say hello, if not, that's okay too;"

(3) get in your car and go to another shopping center. My contention is that unless the candidate elicits the first response, you shouldn't hire him.

*7. Use All Your Weapons.*

Once you've found the perfect candidate, use all the weapons at your disposal to land her--not just salary and options. More important--and more telling--is the attractiveness of your vision for how you'll change theworld and the other employees (who doesn't like to work with smart people who are kicking butt?). To this armory, add your board of directors and advisors who should use their sway to sign her up. And finally, throw in the resume-building potential of working for a great organization like yours(let's not be naive, here). Once you decide you want a person, pull out allstops and go with shock and awe to land her.

*8. Sell All The Decision Makers.*

A candidate seldom makes a decision all by herself. There can be several other people contributing to the decision. The obvious ones are spouses and significant others, but it can also be kids, colleagues, and friends. WithAsian Americans, it can even be parents because Asian Americans are perpetually trying to make their parents happy. In the interviews, simply ask, "Who is helping you make this decision?" And then see if you can make them happy too.

*9. Wait To Compensate.*

A common mistake that many organizations make is using an offer letter as the starting point for negotiation. This is very risky because you don't know what reaction this first data point is going to have. If the candidateis Asian American, for example, she might show it to her mother; her mother might be offended by your low ball offer and then tell the candidate to forget your organization because it's dishonored your family. A offer letter confirms what everyone has agreed upon. It is the last step in negotiations,not the first one.

*10. Don't Assume You're Done.*

Garage once recruited an investment banker (mea culpa #1) from a large (meaculpa #2) firm. After weeks of wooing and several offers and counter offers,he accepted a position with us. He even worked for us for a few days, and then he called in sick. Late the next night, he sent me an email saying that he had accepted an offer from a former client of his old investment bank. I learned a valuable lesson: never assume that your recruiting is done. Frankly, you should recruit every employee every day because when they go home at night, you might never see them again if you don't keep the lovin'going.

Top 10 HR tips

2007-10-30T12:14:00.000-07:00

For many businesses, people are the most important asset; smallbusiness.co.uk's Top Ten HR Tips provide advice on how to find and keep the best employees and offer hints on helping them develop.

1. Draw up a job description, no matter how simple or low-level the job The more information you put down, the better your chances are of getting the right person for the right job. Cover areas such as the level of skill needed, whether training is necessary, and how much experience or responsibility the job requires.

2. Use specialist or trade publications to target your ads If you are looking to fill a particular position, consider advertising in specialist or trade publications. Find out from people who work in that area what publications they read. If the job is not that specialised, consider advertising in a local newspaper, which will be cheaper. Word-of-mouth can also be useful and cost-effective.

3. Always take up references Before someone joins your company, ensure you get references. It can be a good idea to contact a referee direct on the phone as they are often more responsive than in a letter. Ask questions such as: "Would you re-employ this person?"

4. Get help from your friends and family Recruiting employees is a costly exercise, both in terms of time and money. Think about whether you need someone full time. Help from your friends and family is also an option, and it won't cost you a penny to advertise. If you need someone specialised for the short-term, it's worth paying that bit extra for contract or temporary staff.

5. Make your employees feel welcome First impressions count and the first three months of employment with a new company are important. Make your new employees feel welcome. Consider setting up an induction into the company with on-the-job training and a buddy system to help a new recruit with any questions.

6. A business is only as good as the people who work for it As a small business, you can be closer to your staff, suppliers and customers than larger ones. Involve your employees in the work culture from day one and keep them up to date with the progress of the company and any developments that may take place in the near future.

7. Use incentives other than money A competitive package need not only be about money "flexible working such as job-share and flexi-hours can give you the opportunity to tailor benefits more suited to the individual. Look carefully at what motivates each employees" some may be driven by security, others by ambition. Group days out, or brainstorming sessions combined with a fun activity can also work well.

8. Appraise your staff regularly An effective appraisal system should allow for realistic, but challenging objectives. There should also be interim reviews to ensure objectives have not changed and to give an opportunity to identify training and development. Consider who is best placed to carry out the reviews - in some cases it may be more appropriate to use a middle manager.

9. Enforce strict "Absence"procedures In order to deal effectively with absenteeism, staff should be very clear about the company policy. A staff handbook is an ideal way to state policies clearly. Areas such as holidays, sickness and absenteeism should be included and clearly outlined.

10. Create a culture of good leavers Hold exit interviews, particularly for key staff, which will help you identify any problems going forward. The aim is to create a culture of "good leavers": this is the type of person who will flag up any problems beforehand, tell you about concerns with work, and once they've left, will not say negative things about the company.

Practical Aspects Of Leadership

2007-10-30T11:45:00.000-07:00

Becoming A Leader

A leader may not always be a manager, and one day you may see an opportunity to lead a project or team within your group, but when do decide the time is right and how do you go about becoming the leader?

Steps to Leading

Look at the context of the situation and decide if your leadership is required and if you can feasibly lead the team. Perhaps another group member would be better or, even worse, the group would not accept your influence. If this is the case your attempt to lead will be a failure.

1. Identify team members and resources willing to support your leadership. Clearly, change may be resisted by some people or organisations, but if you can find enough support this resistance can be overcome. Note that the support of your team may not be enough if you do not have the support of authority (the boss for example) or the physical/financial resources to accomplish your goals.

2. A crucial step is to empathise with others and assess their understanding of the situation. This will help you understand how to influence these people. Many ways of doing this are available: memos, phone calls and informal chats are a few examples.

3. Now you should open a discussion which the members. Clearly, without open discussion some people may feel neglected or excluded. By getting everyone's views it is more likely that you will be able to alter them and get what you want. Now you must convince the others that your view is the one most likely to achieve a favourable outcome for everyone. This may be easy if everyone shares the same goals, or it may be difficult. In the end some form of 'payment' may be required, such as a promise of a favour, to convince certain members. This is easy if you are in a position of power, if not, make sure the cost to yourself is not too high.

4. Having convinced the team of your leadership, encourage team communication to build a team identity. You should also try to motivate the team appropriately.

5. Plan and organise the team by setting realistic goals. However do not give too much or too little guidance, experienced workers may resent you treating them like new-recruits, and this can undermine your leadership.

6. When goals are achieved recognise and reward the team. Do not expect the team to exceed them - this will undermine your leadership and the team will lose trust in you. Of course you may decide that the goals are unachievable or insufficient, but any re-definition of these goals should be done carefully and with team co-operation.

Ready to lead?

A key aspect of leadership is delegation. Unless you delegate tasks to your subordinates, your team will become inefficient and demoralised. And as Woodrow Wilson rightly put it "I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow."

Understanding Delagation

1.Poor Delegation

2.Advantages of Delegation

3.How to Delegate

4.Responsibility

5.Authority

6.Tasks you should not delegate

7.Your Task after Delegating

1.Poor Delegation Signs that you are not borrowing enough brains or that your delegation is failing include:

•Team Motivation / Morale is down

•You are always working late

•Your team is confused / conflicting / tense

•You get questions about delegated tasks too often

Not delegating a task because you think that you would do it better than anyone else is a poor excuse. Doing this will just make life difficult for yourself.

2.Positive Aspects Of Delegation Include

• Higher efficiency • Increased motivation

• Develops the skills of your team

• Better distribution of work through the group

3.How to Delegate

1. Identify a suitable person for the task.

2. Prepare the person. Explain the task clearly. Make sure that you are understood. Leave room in the task description for ingenuity / initiative.

3. Make sure the person has the necessary authority to do the job properly.

4. Keep in touch with the person for support and monitoring progress. Do not get to close. Accept alternative approaches.

5. Praise / Acknowledge a job well done.

4.Responsibility

Even though you have delegated a task to someone else, you are still responsible for making sure the task is done on time and correctly. If the task fails, you can not point the finger. You delegated. It is your fault. You may have picked the wrong person for the job.

5.Authority

The amount of authority you delegate is up to you, although it should be enough to complete the task. It is no good giving Bob the task of opening the safe every morning at 10am if you do not give him the authority required to do it. Bob needs the key to open the safe with.

6.Tasks You Should Not Delegate

Obviously some aspects of leadership are sensitive and should not be delegated. For example:

• Hiring

• Firing

• Pay issues

• Policy

7.Your Task After Delegating

• Plan - goals, meeting, tasks

• Direct - your team, keep them on track

• Encourage - boost morale

Practical Aspects of Directing Teams

When directing a small team it is important to structure the tasks to be performed. Goals should be easily understood by everyone and tasks broken down so that they appear achievable.

Break down the task. Nothing will be more demoralising for your team than setting them a task which seems impossible (the brick wall approach). Therefore it is important to define a task as a series of small but significant steps which seem realistic. As the person performs these broken-down steps he/she will still feel that something tangible has been accomplished, and the next step toward finishing will become clear. The brick wall approach will usually result in the task not being accomplished.

Goal analysis It is probable that as a team leader you will want to set goals for your team or project. One such goal may be "to improve communications amongst the team". Clearly there will be many different interpretations of this goal by different team members. Goal analysis seeks to remove this ambiguity. Goal analysis should define an abstract goal in terms of concrete criteria, which when met will clearly demonstrate that the goal has been achieved. The criteria should be expressed in terms of actions or results rather than abstractions (which may be ambiguous).

There are 5 steps:

1) Write down the goal. At this stage the goal is an abstract thing, and it is important not to worry too much about how the goal is written down - a rough definition or idea will suffice.

2) Without editing or judging - describe the goal. Get team members to quickly describe what they understand by the goal. At this stage all suggestions should be noted down - no ideas are wrong or stupid. This is similar to the technique of brainstorming.

3) Sort. Sort out the ideas generated by 2 into an ordered or prioritised list which defines the goal. At this stage it may become apparent that some ideas are abstractions but are still important. If this is the case use steps 1 and 2 to clearly define these.

4) State each action or result obtained from 3. Make the team read and try to understand the list from step 3.

5) Test the statements. Ask the question - "When these all statements have been demonstrated to be true, will the goal have been achieved?" Test each statement in turn for relevance. If the answer is yes then the goal has been defined.

Keeping The Team Together

One function that a leader of a team must perform is holding the team together. A leader is responsible for:

• ensuring project goals are met

• ensuring a full team effort

• keeping the team happy

How Does the Leader Motivate

The key to holding the team together is motivation. To motivate is to: "cause (person) to act in a particular way; stimulate interest of (person in activity)." In simple terms, motivation can be considered as the amount of effort an individual is willing to put into their work. Therefore, it is important to ensure that any team is highly motivated towards their work. A lack of motivation in any member of a team can have a negative affect, reducing the group's effectiveness and possibly leading to the demotivation of others. Given the fact that different people are motivated in different ways, the problem facing someone in the role of leader is to create an environment in which each individual fulfils their potential. It is important to highlight the major influences in the motivation of people. According to the influential motivator-hygiene theory, motivation occurs when people have job satisfaction. Job satisfaction can be improved by increasing opportunities for:

• Achievement

• Recognition

• Responsibility

• Career Advancement

While not increasing job satisfaction, improvements in the following areas can lessen job dissatisfaction:

• Supervision

• Salary

• Working conditions

6 Steps to Motivation

The following steps can be taken to help achieve and maintain group motivation:

• Provide opportunities for group members to become acquainted.

• Indicate the importance/value of the group.

• Make people feel they are important.

• Clarify goals.

• Identify progress.

• Acknowledge achievements.

How Does the Leader Tackle Disputes

Inevitably, disputes ranging from minor differences in opinion, to fundamental differences in ideology, will arise. The role of the team leader is to handle such disagreements constructively, ensuring that the team remains focused on achieving its goal. The leader must encourage team members to stand back from any disagreements and look at things objectively. By doing this, any differences between group members will be resolved and possible conflicts avoided.

In Conclusion

The most important point for a team leader to remember is that each individual needs to think that they are working with the best people - to feel proud to be part of the team. By getting people into this state of mind a leader will instill a high level of group morale; people will work harder and achieve more.

Achieving Goals In 5 Disciplined Steps

2007-10-30T11:05:00.000-07:00

Do you believe in destiny? Do you believe that you were born to either fail or succeed? Do you always blame your fate for failures? Do you pray for success more than actually working on it? Do you put your 100% in achieving your goals? Too many questions! Don’t worry; this article will help you with steps on how to set goals.

For many years people have been blaming their fate or destiny for their failures. Many people believe that success is derived out of your past life karma. I honestly don't know much about karma and being born with a fate but I surely do know and believe that we humans have the power to change our fate and destiny. For those, who still disagree with me will soon change their thinking.

Many of use see an aero plane flying in the sky each day and we all know the science behind the plane flying and we still feel amazed to imagine a heavy piece of equipment flying. Well, this invention just did not happen. We all know that the Wright Brothers had to go through numerous failures and embarrassment before they could create a plane that could fly. Were they destined to create a plane? Was it their fate that got them to create a plane?

I doubt. Read on...

It was their observation of the birds and the desire to fly which made them create the machine which we today call Plane. It was their burning desire which was so strong that made them work for years and hours each day before they met with success. All the failures, taunts, embarrassment and frustration were small compared to their burning desire to fly. It is only through a Burning Desire can a man achieve the impossible.

Look at all the scientific advancements. The very advancement of a computer in front of you on which you read this article and the Internet on which you downloaded this article are all proofs of Burning Desire of man to create something.

Obstacles come and it is up to us how we deal with them. Failures will come for a long time, before we can achieve something. It is the manner in which the Universe functions. To reap fruits from a tree, you must first plant the seeds and nurture the tree well.

Achieving anything is possible as long as you have the Burning Desire to achieve it, i.e. creating the next scientific experiment, topping your exams, receiving the next promotion, losing your weight, learning a new art… Anything is possible. The recent slogan of Nike Shoes says it all "Impossible is nothing".

If you have a Burning Desire and sow the seeds of intention, the universe conspires to help you. This happens only if your intentions are true and pure.

If you dream of achieving something then sow the seeds of intention in the universe by always being positive about that dream and always thinking of that dream, the universe will conspire to help you. You might dream to work at Microsoft and if you sow your intentions right, somewhere some how you might just bump into a person who could help you.

Therefore, keep dreaming, always have the burning desire to succeed and read the following steps to achieve your goals. But remember, it requires a disciplined approach while following it.

5 Disciplined steps to achieve your goals Please note that the steps mentioned below require a disciplined approach. By discipline I mean that no matter what difficulty you face in achieving your goals, you must stick to your desire to achieving your goals.

1. Define a goal for yourself

The first step towards achieving your goal is to be able to define it. While defining your goal you should keep in mind the SMART principle i.e.

S = Specific

M = Measurable

A = Attainable

R = Realistic

T = Timely

Specific Be very specific of what you want. If you want to buy a car, just don't say my goal is to buy a car. You should rather say, I want to buy a Mercedes and the model number.

Measurable You should be in a position to measure your success towards the goal only then will you be in a position to alter plans or make new ones if you are not heading anywhere. Attainable The goals that you make for yourself should be attainable as per your skills, attitudes, abilities, etc. Making an unrealistic goal will not only make you frustrated, but will also play on your mind and make you lose your self-esteem.

Realistic Like I mentioned earlier, your goals should be realistic. Your goal is probably realistic if you truly believe that it can be accomplished. Additional ways to know if your goal is realistic is to determine if you have accomplished anything similar in the past or ask yourself what conditions would have to exist to accomplish this goal.

It is only if a man believes in something does he accumulate the will to give all that he has towards his goal. Always remember, where there is a will there is a way.

Timely While defining your goal you should always attach a time frame to achieve it. If you decide to lose weight, you should have a goal with a time frame in mind. E.g.: "I wish to lose 10 KGs by the end of 2007".

Once you have created a SMART goal, the next step is to write it down in big bold letters and stick it at a place where you won't miss reading it every day. Read your goal statement each day and night and work towards it.

2. Work towards it

Now that you have created a goal for yourself, the next step is to initiate action and work towards it by giving all efforts possible. This is the most difficult part in achieving a goal. Many of my friends have taken this advice by defining their goals and writing it down, but they fail at the most critical step i.e. to initiate action.

After your goals are clear, the time to take action is NOW. Just start working towards it. Ask yourself if you'd be happy to achieve your goals? If yes, then why not start working towards it once you have a clear vision of your goal. If your goal is to lose weigh! t, then the next logical step is to find out how you could achieve it. Join a gym, consult a doctor, etc. Just do everything possible towards achieving your goal.

3. Manage your problems well

Yes, problems will come. It's the way in which the Universe works. It will test you endlessly till that time you don't attain your goal. Nothing comes easy. Even a diamond has to go through endless pressure and heat to reach its final form. It's how we react to problems that makes all the difference. Many things will come your way and distract your mind and that's the time to keep your cool and keep driving on.

4. Monitor your progress.

Now that you have defined your goal, have started working towards it and are battling your way through problems which come through; its time to monitor your progress. The reason why you should monitor your progress is to know if the action that you have initiated is helping you to near your goals or not. If you feel that the action is not helping you much, then you should try to alter your path of working. May be you were doing it all wrong. Don't panic at this stage. Appreciate the knowledge that you have gained of how not to achieve your goal. That's experience.

5. Ask someone to mentor you

Very few people have the privilege of being guided by a mentor. If you wish to become a singer or a dancer, then seek the help of a mentor. The experience of a mentor will not only lead you through a correct path, ! but will also help you become the best in a commendable time frame.

As my closing remarks, Thomas Edison had to go through thousands of failed experiments to achieve the goal of inventing the perfect light bulb that we use today. At a press conference when he was asked about his failures, he quickly responded saying "I have successfully discovered 1000 ways to NOT make a light bulb". This shows that he had a goal and a burning desire to build an electrical bulb. This proves that despite facing so many problems and failed attempts at altered paths his vision never shook to achieve creating the first electrical bulb ever witnessed by mankind.

What is PCMM?

2007-10-30T10:43:00.000-07:00

PCMM is People Capability Maturity Model or People CMM, a maturity framework that focuses on continuously improving the management and development of the human assets of an organization. It describes an evolutionary improvement path from ad hoc, inconsistently performed practices, to a mature, disciplined, and continuously improving development of the knowledge, skills, and motivation of the workforce that enhances strategic business performance. The People CMM provides guidance to organizations in selecting immediate improvement actions that help organizations

* characterize the maturity of their workforce practices

* set priorities for immediate action

* integrate workforce development with process improvement

* become an employer of choice

With the help of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and Capability Maturity Model for Software (SW-CMM), many organizations have made valuable improvements in their software and systems processes and practices. These organizations have also discovered that their continued improvement requires significant changes in the way they manage and develop their people. The People CMM can be coupled with CMM-based software process improvement programs or used on its own to guide improvements in workforce practices or to address strategic human capital objective

Combating Interview Anxiety

2007-10-30T10:36:00.000-07:00

It's an hour before your big job interview, and you've come down with a serious case of butterflies. Your palms are clammy, your hands are shaking, your voice is trembling, and you're even starting to feel a bit queasy.

Job search experts say it's perfectly normal to experience this kind of anxiety in the lead-up to any significant event. Mentally and physiologically, we still bear a close resemblance our prehistoric forebears. When faced with a challenge, we often experience the same rush of adrenaline that helped our distant ancestors outrun hungry predators.

In modern life, though, the challenges that can provoke this fight-or-flight response are usually a bit more sedate, so instead of burning off this burst of fuel in a life-or-death sprint, we're forced to go through stressful events like job interviews, traffic court, or final exams with all of the jittery symptoms of anxiety.

In a way, job search specialists say, it can be a good thing if you're nervous before an interview; it shows that you understand the significance of the opportunity and its potential impact on your life and livelihood. That being said, though, will you still be able to pull off a first-class interview performance in this state?

According to the experts, probably so -- as long as you take the steps necessary to harness and channel your nervousness. Left unchecked, though, your pre-interview anxiety could derail your interview hopes. Here are some hints to help you take control of your anxious energy and make the most of it.

1. Prepare, Prepare, Prepare.

Essentially, the anxiety you experience before an interview is really nothing more than a variation of the basic human fear of the unknown. In order to reduce your anxiety, you have to work hard to alleviate the "unknown" part of the equation. Take advantage of the days before the interview to learn anything and everything you can about the company, the role, and the hiring manager. Brush up on basic interviewing techniques and common interview questions. The more prepared you feel, the less nervous you'll be. Plus, it's always a bonus to be able to demonstrate a thoughtful understanding of the company during an interview.

2. Practice Your Interview Script.

Although it's important to know as much as you can before the interview, all of the research in the world can't prepare you for the elements of your performance -- the dialogue, the back-and-forth, the conversation, the banter -- that can make or break the interview. To do that successfully, you have to engage in a little role-playing and actually talk your way through your resume, your prepared answers, your "pitch," and anything else you think might help your chances. Interview yourself in the mirror, or have a friend lead you through several dry runs. Actually speaking the words out loud prepares you in a way that mere mental exercises can't match.

3. Think About Money Beforehand.

The prospect of engaging in salary negotiations fuels the pre-interview anxiety of many job seekers. Be sure to do market research and prepare a realistic ballpark figure well before you step into the interviewing room. Having this number in mind can eliminate a lot of needless anxiety.

4. Take a Deep Breath.

It may sound cliche, but many job seekers say it helps to rely on tried-and-true methods of stress relief in the hours and minutes before an interview. Whether your preferred anxiety relief method is jogging, deep breathing exercises, yoga, meditation, or anything else, try to devote some time for decompression before your interview. On the drive to the interview site, take deep, measured breaths and remain poised and focused.

5. Take Care.

Last but not least, don't forget to take care of yourself. Avoid spending too much time on last-minute preparations in the 24 hours before the interview. Get a good night's sleep, eat a light, nutritious meal, and take it easy in the last few hours before your scheduled meeting. By carving out as much time as possible to relax and focus just before your interview, you'll be much more likely to tame -- and to conquer -- the inevitable pre-interview jitters.

How Do You Attract And Retain The Best People?

2007-10-20T20:07:00.000-07:00

by Anne Riches

"At the end of the day, we bet on people, not strategies."

That's what Allied Signal CEO Larry Bossidy says and it's as true for Small Agencies as it is for any other employer - public sector or corporate.

So how do we attract and retain the right people to bet on? Arguably this is the highest priority for employers right now. The current work environment is characterized by constant change, increasing pressure, cost-cutting, restructuring and tougher performance measures. Without the best people, we know it is even harder to deliver the demanded outcomes.

Getting and keeping the best is becoming harder than ever. Increased competition amongst employers for the talent, growing job mobility, better career development opportunities, the attractiveness of small business options, lifestyle choices, a spouse's career decision, the impact of stress - these are just some of the factors playing a role in the decision to join or leave an employer.

How can your Agency become the employer of choice?

The answer does not lie in strong recruitment practices and appropriate reward strategies alone - though these are vital. The real response is holistic or systemic. Getting every part of your organization in sync with this goal.

At the employee level it covers the "cradle to grave" of employment. How do we:

*	recruit them - including how we treat the unsuccessful applicants
*	induct them
*	manage them, daily, monthly, yearly
*	motivate them
*	educate, coach and mentor them
*	develop their careers
*	pay them
*	promote them
*	recognize and value their contribution
*	find out and deal with their professional concerns
*	encourage a healthy working lifestyle
*	assist them develop professional networks
*	support them in times of personal challenges
*	handle the way they leave - for whatever reason?

At the organizational level, it includes looking at all of our HR, HRD and OD systems and strategies to make sure they are working together to create an environment in which our best people not only survive, but thrive.

We also need to ensure that these strategies are tightly aligned and linked to the overall corporate plan and strategic priorities of the Agency. Apart from the obvious reasons for this, it enables us to show our people how what they do impacts and affects the work of the Agency and its success.

It also includes stepping back and looking at the less obvious organizational "messages". Is there congruence between what it says (the values posted on the wall) and what it actually does? Is the real culture different from the espoused one? Does management walk that talk? Does it deliver on its promises? Is there a high level of trust in the organization?

This looks like a huge agenda. It is and much more has to be done at the organizational level than has been mentioned here. But there are tremendous opportunities to tackle many of these issues as new demands and changes are imposed on us.

Here are some ideas to start implementing today:

Create strategic awareness - make sure that managers and supervisors understand that becoming an employer of choice is a key success factor for your Agency. Build a measurement of attraction and retention of key people into their performance criteria.

Identify your Agency's `attractiveness' - do this through `entry' interviews and 3 months follow up discussions; use existing staff climate surveys; emphasis these advantages in all recruitment activities.

Identify why people choose to leave - be rigorous about exit interviews and use the information obtained. Feed it back to management and into the preparation of your strategy to attract and keep talent. Address the issues causing good people to leave.

Develop your talent - today most talented employees are increasingly more loyal to their own careers, not to their employer. They will go where the best job opportunities are and the best potential for training and development. Don't give them these reasons to leave - develop them continuously. Help them manage their careers; coach them, mentor them.

Motivate them – Everyone is motivated by different things. Many are primarily motivated by the opportunity to do a good job and be recognized for it. Are your best people in the best jobs for them? Are you sure? Are they being stretched? Do they have the necessary resources to do what is expected of them? Are they recognized and rewarded for their successes? Are they being managed through their difficult times?

Use what you know - employers usually gather a wealth of information about new employees through the psychological testing component of the recruitment process. About what is their work-style preference, what are their personal motivators etc.

But what happens to this information when the recruitment phase ends? It often goes into a personnel file and filed away. Imagine instead that the new recruit and their manager use it to talk about what strategies they can both use to maximize performance and satisfaction. Do your managers do that?

Recruit for `fit' - Technical competence is only part of the story when it comes to recruitment and retention. Cultural fit is most of it. Identify the strong performers in your Agency. Find out what makes them so effective from their peers, their customers, and their managers. Build a profile and recruit new people with that profile in mind.

The costs of not attracting and retaining the best people are not simply financial. Loss of intellectual capital, decreased productivity and performance, and lower morale are all likely if turnover is high.

But don't leave this to the HR people alone. This is a major line management responsibility. It is a strategic organizational challenge - to be taken on by everyone.

Altering Language to Avoid Dishonesty in Performance Management

2007-10-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

by Ben Warden [Talent Management Magazine]

In the science fiction novel "Babel-17," the heroine has an epiphany about her own language as she discovers an alien one: "Until something is named, it doesn't exist."

This is a fitting sentiment when talking about performance management, especially when managers are forced to rate employees based on a few predetermined, rigid categories such as "Achieves Expectations" or "Exceeds Expectations" - often, it's more than that.

But without the language to articulate performance management, no other options exist. Consultants are finding themselves beyond the point of doing or not doing performance management but angling for a fundamental change in the language and philosophy thereof. Such as fundamental change can be daunting to an organization that wants to rate all employees, regardless of their personal expectations, with the same standards.

Diane Gerard, Capital H Group principal and leader of the company's compensation practice, has been working to implement such changes when doing consulting for her clients on their performance management practices. And even though she still has yet to overtly put into practice consulting for the total change, Gerard has had enough experience to recognize the difficulty in trying to get leaders to make the change. "It's very difficult - the organization must go through a difficult time trying to make organizational change until they are even willing to entertain it," she said. "Regardless of whether it's HR or the CEO, it has to be somebody who really wants to improve performance and not just complete an exercise. It's about performance improvement, not about performance measurement.

"The other thing about the current 'Achieves Expectations, Exceeds Expectations' model is that I've heard managers say so many times, across the board, and even within departments, that expectations are just different."

As a consultant, Gerard has run into situations in which the lack of flexibility has forced her clients into a position of potential intellectual dishonesty - if you have great confidence in employees and assign them a very difficult task that they complete, they just have "achieved expectation," but if employees with lower expectations go above and beyond the aforementioned employees, they've exceeded them.

"You're forced into a situation of either staying intellectually honest with the wording, setting goals and so on and arriving at the wrong outcome, or ignoring the language and going to the right income, when both of us know, even the overachiever knows, that they've met their goals," Gerard said. "I can work toward the outcome or ignore the words or the language, or I can stick to the language and come up with the wrong outcome. In either of those cases, I'm being intellectually dishonest."

Gerard said she knows remedying this situation isn't going to happen overnight, but her conviction in the importance of language in performance management grows the more people mention this issue during consultation.

"If enough people are feeling uncomfortable with the system, and they're using the same kinds of examples over and over again, there's some underlying truth to it, and we as HR professionals owe it to organizations to think about ways of modifying what has become the fabric of corporate America, the fabric of how people are managing performance or trying to manage performance," she said. "Words do matter to people.

What is SWOT Analysis?

2007-10-17T10:59:00.000-07:00

What makes SWOT particularly powerful is that, with a little thought, it can help you uncover opportunities that you are well placed to take advantage of. And by understanding the weaknesses of your business, you can manage and eliminate threats that would otherwise catch you unawares.

More than this, by looking at yourself and your competitors using the SWOT framework, you can start to craft a strategy that helps you distinguish yourself from your competitors, so that you can compete successfully in your market.

In SWOT, strengths and weaknesses are internal factors.

Strength Could Be:

• your specialist marketing expertise.

• a new, innovative product or service

• location of your business

• quality processes and procedures

• any other aspect of your business that adds value to your product or service.

Weakness Could Be:

• lack of marketing expertise

• undifferentiated products or services (i.e. in relation to your competitors)

• location of your business

• poor quality goods or services

• damaged reputation

In SWOT, opportunities and threats are external factors.

Opportunity Could Be:

• a developing market such as the Internet.

• mergers, joint ventures or strategic alliances

• moving into new market segments that offer improved profits

• a new international market

• a market vacated by an ineffective competitor

Threat could be:

• a new competitor in the market

• price wars with competitors

• a competitor has a new, innovative product or service

• competitors have superior access to channels of distribution

• taxation is introduced on your product or service

Strengths and weaknesses are internal to your organization. Opportunities and threats relate to external factors. For this reason the SWOT Analysis is sometimes called Internal-External Analysis and the SWOT Matrix is sometimes called an IE Matrix Analysis Tool.

An interesting article by Dr.Gopalkrisnan, Chairman, Tata Sons on JOB HOPPING

2007-10-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

Food for thought definitely for those looking for a change or those who change jobs very frequently. Why are so many people leaving one job for another? Is it passe now to work with just one company for a sufficiently long period? Whenever I ask this question to people who leave a company, the answers I get are: "Oh, I am getting a 200% hike in salary"; "Well, I am jumping three levels in my designation"; "Well, they are going to send me abroad in six months".

Then, I look around at all the people who are considered successful today and who have reached the top - be it a media agency, an advertising agency or a company. I find that most of these people are the ones who have stuck to the company, ground their heels and worked their way to the top. And, as I look around for people who changed their jobs constantly, I find they have stagnated at some level, in obscurity! In this absolutely ruthless, dynamic and competitive environment, there are still no short-cuts to success or to making money. The only thing that continues to pay, as earlier, is loyalty and hard work. Yes, it pays! Sometimes, immediately, sometimes after a lot of time. But, it does pay. Does this mean that one should stick to an organization and wait for that golden moment? Of course not.

After a long stint, there always comes a time for moving in most organizations, but it is important to move for the right reasons, rather than superficial ones, like money, designation or an overseas trip. Remember, no company recruits for charity. More often than not, when you are offered an unseemly hike in salary or designation that is disproportionate to what that company offers it current employees, there is always an unseen bait attached. The result? You will, in the long-term, have reached exactly the same levels or maybe lower levels than what you would have in your current company.

A lot of people leave an organization because they are "unhappy". What is this so-called-unhappiness? I have been working for donkey's years and there has never been a day when I am not unhappy about something in my work environment - boss, rude colleague, fussy clients etc. Unhappiness in a workplace, to a large extent, is transient. If you look hard enough, there is always something to be unhappy about. But, more importantly, do I come to work to be "happy" in the truest sense? If I think hard, the answer is "No". Happiness is something you find with family, friends, may be a close circle of colleagues who have become friends. What you come to work for is to earn, build a reputation, satisfy your ambitions, be appreciated for your work ethics, face challenges and get the job done. So, the next time you are tempted to move, ask yourself why are you moving and what are you moving into? Some questions are: Am I ready and capable of handling the new responsibility? If yes, what could be the possible reasons my current company has not offered me the same responsibility? Who are the people who currently handle this responsibility in the current and new company? Am I as good as the best among them? As the new job offer has a different profile, why have I not given the current company the option to offer me this profile? Why is the new company offering me the job? Do they want me for my skills, or is there an ulterior motive? An honest answer to these will eventually decide where you go in your career - to the top of the pile in the long term (at the cost of short-term blips) or to become another average employee who gets lost with time in the wilderness?

"DESERVE BEFORE YOU DESIRE" - Dr. Gopalkrishnan, Chairman TATA Sons

Honesty, Frequency Might be Key to Doing Performance Reviews Right

2007-10-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

by Kellye Whitney [Talent Management Magazine October 9, 2007 Volume 3, Issue 39]

Performance appraisals are nothing new in HR. Yet, managers are often uncomfortable with the process because it means they must assess an individual against established objectives and measures of success and say that all-important "yea" or "nay" to demonstrable behaviors the organization desires.

Whatever feelings of angst surround the process, it is still very important to execute performance reviews and on a regular basis. Without them, an employee is left to flounder, which can lead to low morale, low performance and, potentially, high turnover.

In addition to that feeling of discomfort performance reviews bring, there also has been some debate about how often to have them. Most organizations appraise talent at least once a year because reviews offer the perfect setting in which to discuss salary increases and bonuses or even identify candidates for potential succession opportunities.

Jacques Gaumond, Technomedia Training Inc. vice president, said semiannually can be a better option, however. "If it's not at least once a year, employees may wonder, 'What am I doing here? What am I contributing to this organization for? Will I get some recognition for my contribution to your yearly business cycle?' Once-a-year reviews can be loaded with emotion," he said. "Ideally, it should be twice a year. Midyear gives at least one opportunity to say, 'This is what we together agree that you've achieved so far.' You can assess whether the person is on the right track, exceeding objectives, is under them and, if so, what can be done to get back on track and correct the situation, if possible. More than two a year depends on the job, the culture, the systems and tools in place, etc."

To desensitize and facilitate the review process, Gaumond said managers should do their best to be honest and provide adequate feedback. These are important moments for the employee and for the employer, therefore, they should be as transparent as possible. Assuming performance objectives and criteria have been set at the beginning of the review period and that employees have been challenged and can be assessed in a fair and measurable way, if the objectives are not realistic, Gaumond said the rest of the period could be pretty difficult.

"Don't wait for the formal appraisal period to provide feedback, whether it's praise or criticism," he said. "Ideally, communication should take place on as regular a basis as possible, especially if something happened - either a great accomplishment or a situation where the employee has not behaved as expected. Immediate feedback is the best way to seize the moment, to get the desired end result. Employee and employer should be able to refer to recent situations that are fresh to memory."

The appraisal should be factual, and it should contain concrete examples of various situations that describe the context, what was supposed to happen, what actually happened and why those behaviors were or were not acceptable. Concrete examples can drive home lessons or emphasize behaviors that the organization holds in high regard and seeks to foster.

But the manager is not the only one who should be gathering these examples - Gaumond said employees should encouraged to take responsibility for their own career. Otherwise, managers with many direct reports might be overburdened or unable to devote adequate time to completely assess each employee.

"Hopefully, (talent management) systems allow easy capture of important situations, and employees can describe briefly the context, where it was done, etc., and then request feedback from the manager upon completion of that little story that is put into the automated system and done," he said. "I would invite the employees - say, 'This is for your own benefit. Make the effort to fill in those key notes throughout the year. Come back to me, and we'll arrive at some consensus.' At the end of the discussion, it's their career, their performance and, hopefully, their rewards."

It's also important to offer training to affect performance or correct some weakness discussed during the review process. A manager might want to highlight internal development opportunities, such as coaching, that go beyond standard training offerings. Providing a variety of development options makes it easier to accommodate employees' needs, requirements and work preferences.

"Performance appraisals are obviously important to assess 'the what' and 'the how' that was achieved," Gaumond said. "That's what employees expect. That's what employee managers should take advantage of, but inquire beyond accomplishments. Ask, 'Where are you, from your own perspective, in your career? What are your career aspirations? What are your mobility desires? What do you feel you require in terms of development?' Seize those critical moments to not just end up with marks on the page but to end up with some sort of powerful conversation."

Empowerment - The Rewards Are Greater Than The Risk

2007-10-16T10:47:00.000-07:00

Dr. Rick Johnson [Daily Hotel Industry News 2007-10-09]

Empowerment is a common trait used by most effective leaders. The rewards of empowering your employees are far greater than the risk. Give them some independence in choosing their work schedules or other factors that won't affect overall objectives. Empowering employees allows them to use their own initiative and creativity to accomplish things you never imagined they could.

Allow your employees to take risks and demonstrate initiative.

Employees must take ownership in the success of the organization. This means they must become part of the strategy employed by the company. Acknowledge their presence and contributions, and praise them at every opportunity. But, be sincere. Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, had a favorite method of sending personal handwritten notes to employees who demonstrated some form of success. This is an employee issue that cannot be emphasized enough. Employees want to know how they are doing and they want to be held accountable.

Winning organizations continuously build leaders at every level in their organization. Leaders, who actively attempt to mentor, coach and build other leaders gain respect throughout the organization and transfer knowledge, ideas, values and an attitude about success. They...

1. Create a sense of urgency

2. Project and articulate the vision

3. Create stretch goals

4. Develop trust and a spirit of teamwork

5. Develop realistic expectations for success

6. Promote an environment of success, trust and belief

7. Demonstrate honesty-to tell the truth-to do the right thing- with no hidden agendas

8. Lead with Integrity and respect-responsiveness -recognizing employee value- empowerment 9. Show passion and commitment

10. Motivate and inspire

Effective leaders must have an edge. They must be courageous enough to take risk and have an unrelenting readiness to act. Popularity is not a requirement, but the ability to generate respect from the employees is, without a doubt, one of the most critical attributes. They must be relentless in their efforts, unconcerned about personal sacrifice of their time, and willing to go beyond normal expectations. Tough decisions are commonplace, uncharted territories will be the norm. Honesty and impeccable character are musts.

Leadership is often described as the art of getting people to accomplish specific objectives. However, organizations are complex social entities with widely distributed responsibilities and assets. Unilateral action toward specific objectives is seldom sufficient in itself to create the kind of success expected for a company seeking growth and increased market share. Leadership is key to harmonizing diverse group interest into a focus-specific mode that supports the mechanics of execution. Those mechanics must include empowerment. The focus is on the way managers orchestrate activities and events and engage others in tasks, empowering them so that the desired results are realized. Action is essential and is implicitly equated to professional leadership. This skill is subjective and often artistic. It varies with every situation and every individual. Leadership skills can be enhanced and fine- tuned but a basic ingredient of humanistic understanding must exist to create a platform for leadership development.

Leaders get results. They make things happen. They continually advance a clear agenda, get others to buy in and move the organization to accomplish specific objectives. They are explicit, consistent, concise and sincere. They generally have an abundance of charisma although some leaders gain success with a quieter influence. Leaders take charge and are not afraid of responsibility or risk. Most people want to follow them. A good leader develops openness, honesty, clarity of purpose and a sincere caring for the people they lead. They gain commitment and trust by demonstrating respect for the individual. They have a keen sense of understanding. They believe in their task, they understand the objectives, they communicate clearly and they honestly project the understanding that they need the efforts of everyone to succeed.

Allow room for a few Mavericks to exits in your organization. Empower your employees so they will take calculated risks. The worst thing you can have happen in your organization is for all your employees to do exactly what they are told to do - exactly how they are told to do it. Release the initiative and creativity in your employees by empowering them.

[About the Author: Rick Johnson, expert speaker, wholesale distribution's 'Leadership Strategist', founder of CEO Strategist]

Qualities Of A Project Manager

2007-10-16T10:41:00.000-07:00

Inspires a Shared Vision
An effective project leader is often described as having a vision of where to go and the ability to articulate it. Visionaries thrive on change and being able to draw new boundaries. It was once said that a leader is someone who "lifts us up, gives us a reason for being and gives the vision and spirit to change." Visionary leaders enable people to feel they have a real stake in the project. They empower people to experience the vision on their own. According to Bennis "They offer people opportunities to create their own vision, to explore what the vision will mean to their jobs and lives, and to envision their future as part of the vision for the organisation."

Good Communicator
The ability to communicate with people at all levels is almost always named as the second most important skill by project managers and team members. Project leadership calls for clear communication about goals, responsibility, performance, expectations and feedback. There is a great deal of value placed on openness and directness. The project leader is also the team's link to the larger organisation. The leader must have the ability to effectively negotiate and use persuasion when necessary to ensure the success of the team and project. Through effective communication, project leaders support individual and team achievements by creating explicit guidelines for accomplishing results and for the career advancement of team members.

Integrity
One of the most important things a project leader must remember is that his or her actions, and not words, set the modus operandi for the team. Good leadership demands commitment to, and demonstration of, ethical practices. Creating standards for ethical behaviour for oneself and living by these standards, as well as rewarding those who exemplify these practices, are responsibilities of project leaders. Leadership motivated by self-interest does not serve the well being of the team. Leadership based on integrity represents nothing less than a set of values others share, behaviour consistent with values and dedication to honesty with self and team members. In other words the leader "walks the talk" and in the process earns trust.

Enthusiasm

Plain and simple, we don't like leaders who are negative - they bring us down. We want leaders with enthusiasm, with a bounce in their step, with a can-do attitude. We want to believe that we are part of an invigorating journey - we want to feel alive. We tend to follow people with a can-do attitude, not those who give us 200 reasons why something can't be done. Enthusiastic leaders are committed to their goals and express this commitment through optimism. Leadership emerges as someone expresses such confident commitment to a project that others want to share his or her optimistic expectations. Enthusiasm is contagious and effective leaders know it.

Empathy

What is the difference between empathy and sympathy? Although the words are similar, they are, in fact, mutually exclusive. According to Norman Paul, in sympathy the subject is principally absorbed in his or her own feelings as they are projected into the object and has little concern for the reality and validity of the object's special experience. Empathy, on the other hand, presupposes the existence of the object as a separate individual, entitled to his or her own feelings, ideas and emotional history (Paul, 1970). As one student so eloquently put it, "It's nice when a project leader acknowledges that we all have a life outside of work."

Competence

Simply put, to enlist in another's cause, we must believe that that person knows what he or she is doing. Leadership competence does not however necessarily refer to the project leader's technical abilities in the core technology of the business. As project management continues to be recognised as a field in and of itself, project leaders will be chosen based on their ability to successfully lead others rather than on technical expertise, as in the past. Having a winning track record is the surest way to be considered competent. Expertise in leadership skills is another dimension in competence. The ability to challenge, inspire, enable, model and encourage must be demonstrated if leaders are to be seen as capable and competent.

Ability to Delegate Tasks

Trust is an essential element in the relationship of a project leader and his or her team. You demonstrate your trust in others through your actions - how much you check and control their work, how much you delegate and how much you allow people to participate. Individuals who are unable to trust other people often fail as leaders and forever remain little more that micro-managers, or end up doing all of the work themselves. As one project management student put it, "A good leader is a little lazy." An interesting perspective!

Cool Under Pressure

In a perfect world, projects would be delivered on time, under budget and with no major problems or obstacles to overcome. But we don't live in a perfect world - projects have problems. A leader with a hardy attitude will take these problems in stride. When leaders encounter a stressful event, they consider it interesting, they feel they can influence the outcome and they see it as an opportunity. "Out of the uncertainty and chaos of change, leaders rise up and articulate a new image of the future that pulls the project together." (Bennis 1997) And remember - never let them see you sweat.

Team-Building Skills

A team builder can best be defined as a strong person who provides the substance that holds the team together in common purpose toward the right objective. In order for a team to progress from a group of strangers to a single cohesive unit, the leader must understand the process and dynamics required for this transformation. He or she must also know the appropriate leadership style to use during each stage of team development. The leader must also have an understanding of the different team players styles and how to capitalise on each at the proper time, for the problem at hand.

Problem Solving Skills

Although an effective leader is said to share problem-solving responsibilities with the team, we expect our project leaders to have excellent problem-solving skills themselves. They have a "fresh, creative response to here-and-now opportunities," and not much concern with how others have performed them.

Are Workers Ready to Jump Ship For More Money?

2007-10-16T10:34:00.000-07:00

In Randstad's most recent "World of Work" survey, more than half of the respondents (54 percent) said this is a good time for them to seek a better-paying job, the highest figure in the past five years of the study. Further, more people said they were willing to work longer hours in exchange for more income than any other incentive, monetary or non monetary.

Do these statistics portend a new emphasis on income by workers, who supposedly value things such as work-life balance, development opportunities and recognition much more than pay?

Perhaps not. The figures around compensation trends say a lot about employees' motivations but don't really tell the whole story, said Genia Spencer, Ranstad U.S. managing director of human resources and operations.

"The industry experts who talk about compensation declining in importance are counting on engagement and great relationships with the boss," she explained. "Compensation is still in the middle of the pack of reasons to leave an employer. But when other components aren't there - opportunities to learn, connection to the team, engagement and so on - the compensation becomes much more important."

Spencer pointed to the fact that an equal percentage of respondents said they wanted to look for a new job that involved more interesting or more fulfilling work. Additionally, both phenomena increased the same amount from last year's survey, from 47 percent to 54 percent.

The main reason so many people are looking for new jobs is that employers aren't adequately meeting any of their requirements, Spencer said. "Why do I go to work? I go to work for experience, future career earnings and current earnings," she said. "If I'm not seeing the opportunity for increased earnings where I am, then I need to feel like I'm getting developed and can use that experience and development for future wage improvement. In the absence of either wage satisfaction or development, people are going to leave."

Although it doesn't involve compensation, organizations can retain their employees by having strong development programs and by offering them chances to take on new tasks and challenges.

"That statistic says that people are looking for another job," Spencer said. "It doesn't mean they're looking for another company - internal movement to increase income and experience can be a possibility.

"Companies have gotten kind of confident with that 'pay is not the reason people leave' mentality, but if that's your outlook, you need to feel very secure on the development opportunities and the variety of work you provide."

Still, even if those offerings are strong, it's good to maintain a competitive compensation strategy, and there are a couple of very easy and cost-effective ways to do this. The first is by simply asking employees what kinds of compensation matter most to them through surveys or interviews.

"Compensation can take on a variety of forms," Spencer said. "As a mother of two, what's important in my compensation package is completely different from that of a 22-year-old college grad. If I don't seek that feedback, then our HR team is just going to make that decision. Are they people who know what our target employees think is important, or are they going to make that decision based on what's important to us?"

Also, an annual total rewards statement can be very enlightening - when people see on paper how much the employer paid on their behalf in a year not only in terms of income but also training programs, 401(k) matches and other non-income expenses, they can get a better sense of what they're really worth to the organization.

"Particularly, new entrants to the workforce might not be aware of that total value," Spencer said.

Source: Brian Summerfield [Talent Management Magazine September 21, 2007 Volume 3, Issue 8]

Combatting Competition in the Retail Industry

2007-10-16T10:15:00.000-07:00

As Indian retail gets more organized and more stores open up to tap the still unrealized potential of the huge market that is Indian retail, it will become imperative for the retailers to develop specific strategies to protect their market share. The competition is coming from the ever increasing number of retailers who are also trying to win the share of the Indian retail pie.

The key to sustaining a competitive edge and winning over the customers, while retaining the existing customers would determine the survival of the retailer in this competitive world.

As we see the continued entry of global giants in India, the existing retailers will have to innovate, experiment & take risks to stop the erosion of their market share to these MNC’s. Most of the retailers are thus gearing up to meet this challenge by investing hugely in their supply chain management & developing a competitive & compatible relationship with their vendors & suppliers. The key for the retailer here is not only to avoid the erosion of its customer base, but also to generate more customers for its products & services so as to maximize the business & survive in the market by achieving economies of scale.

As the business will grow, organizations will become stronger and would be in a better position to insulate themselves from the competitive onslaught of these new entrants as well as the existing ones. A retail chain which could successfully withstand this competitive pressure would see itself growing in stature & would be able to fortify its business in the years to come.

In order to remain competitive & customer friendly a retailer has to develop strategies which are in sync with its organizational objectives. An organization can achieve & maintain the competitive advantage by developing certain success factors. Once these success factors are identified, the retailer needs to assess itself and the competition on these factors & see where it stands against the competition. If the retailer stands fairly strong on these success factors compared to the competition than its good, otherwise the retailer will have to prepare a comprehensive strategy to put itself on the top on these success factors to remain competitive and thrive in the market. Once the assessment is done, the retailer will also become aware of the areas where it has an edge over the competition & areas where it need to improve to remain competitive.

Some of these key factors are;

1. Customer Loyalty : It sound very cliché, however it still is & may remain an area where every retailer have continuously found themselves lacking. Whatever is the strategy adopted by the retailer, they should be aligned with an aim to gain customer loyalty. Customer loyalty happens when a customer patronize a particular store even though there is not much to differentiate between that store & its competitor. E.g. When a customer has to visit a departmental store and say both Lifestyle & Shoppers Stop are located within the same distance from his home. Here, the choice of the store by the customer will totally depend upon which store the customer is more loyal to. There are other things like a friend forcing to choose a particular store are also possible, however, majority of the decisions will be based on the strength of loyalty that a customer exhibits for a particular store.

Customer loyalty is difficult to achieve, however it’s not an impossible task to accomplish. Tending to the small requests of the customer, treating every customer as an individual & trying to anticipate the unique needs of the customer even before the customer realizes it, helps in creating customer loyalty.

When a retailer can create an emotional bond with the customer & the customer feel attached to the brand, customer loyalty is created. At times loyalty is also created by default. E.g. Suppose a young boy gets a wrist watch of a particular brand on his 7th birthday as a gift by his father, the child will become emotionally attached to that brand and might become a loyal customer of the brand when he grows up and have enough money to buy that product on his own. A customer entering a store with young kids, expects his kids to be pampered or given attention. Even if you do not give proper attention to the customer, but could make his children happy, you would be able to create customer loyalty. However, it doesn’t mean to stop listening to the customers and just pouncing on their children’s, the moment they enter the store! However, creating an emotional attachment with the customer helps in gaining their lifelong loyalty.

Here one thing more needs a bit of attention. A retailer needs to understand what kind of image it wishes to create in the customer’s mind & whether that image is consistent with the image that the customers have in their mind. If the image is consistent, the retailer has been able to position itself properly in the customer’s mind, however, if there is a deviation in the image, the retailer has to bring about changes in the way he reaches out to its customer. A change in the marketing strategy, training the staff or rationally looking at the store’s location will help in understanding the weak areas and preparing an action plan to plug the loopholes.

2. Managing the People : Effective management of human resources is and will always remain the most critical success factor for any retailer irrespective of the place it is located in. To manage people effectively, it is very important that we keep them busy. Employees who do not find anything to do will be the first to get de-motivated and think negatively of their jobs. The employees need to clear about their goals. The management should also prepare a plan as to how the employee can go about achieving those goals. To reach a destination, we have to walk or drive in a particular direction, if we are unaware of the direction, we can never reach the destination. Thus, it becomes very important that we give specific individual as well as team goals to the employees which can help the organization in keeping employees motivated and inspired towards their jobs.

Most of the people who are working in the retail industry are youngsters, especially those who are working as frontliners. To motivate these young minds and keep them excited about their job is something which has been a big challenge for the retailers. As most of these people are also studying in addition to working, it becomes very important that the retailer understand their needs and schedule their rosters accordingly. This might not be possible in all the cases and thus its important to create an environment where they feel that there needs are also kept in mind by the superiors while formulating store’s policies will act as a positive reinforcer while they perform on their jobs.

As most of these people treat their job in the retail industry as a stop gap arrangement, if the retailer can chart a career path for them in the organization and make them feel that they can make a career in the organization they have started working in, they would be much more positive and enthusiastic about their job and would put in their cent percent effort to achieve the organization’s objectives.

Employees who are involved in a continuous training programme are more motivated and committed to their jobs. The organization should continuously try to improve the skills & competencies of its employees by involving them in training. The training will act as an incentive for the employees who are seeking more responsibilities or want to move up the organization ladder. They would feel that the organization wants them to improve and promote and that is why they are being trained. With the help of training the retailer will also have multi-skilled people and thus everyone would become a replacement for each other.

As, the growing retail industry faces manpower crunch retaining and attracting the right manpower will become a key competitive advantage for the retailers that would be very hard to dent by the competitors.

3. Location : Where the retail store is located goes a long way in deciding the success or failure of the store. A store with good location gives competitive advantage to the retailer which is difficult to duplicate. The right location can be the deciding factor in the success or failure of a store. As the space becomes a premium commodity, more & more retailers are realizing its strategic importance & are on the lookout to get more of it not only in metros & but even in class II & III cities. As more and more retailers decide to open more stores, the place where they will be located will also assume significance.

As retailers open new stores to add on to their existing base of stores, they will act as an advertisement of their retail brand. E.g. Café Coffee Day in India doesn’t spend on advertising, instead they are dependent on the number of stores that they have opened and customers coming to their stores for advertisement of their brand. As more and more store are opened people become exposed to the brand’s name & its peculiar logo thus reducing the spending on advertisement. Café Coffee Day’s concept is similar to the strategy adopted by Starbucks wherein they keep opening stores in a particular location, till that market become saturated at times even going in for kiosks, to expose the brand to a large number of customers. The large number of stores give the brand necessary exposure and publicity which in turn helps in attracting more customers. E.g. On Brigade Road in Bangalore the Café Coffee Day stores are located on both the sides of the street, thus when a customer finds it as an easily available option to hang out and have coffee, they choose it and gradually become frequent customers. As the number of stores are so large in numbers & present in almost locality the customer inadvertently starts frequenting them and become loyal customers.

Multiple location presence of stores also helps the retailer in frequent deliveries, which helps in retaining the freshness of the merchandise. Also, as the retailer opens store in multiple locations, products not selling well in one store can be sent to other store where the demand is good for that particular line of merchandise. This will ultimately help the retailer in achieving the overall growth of the retail chain.

The location selected also contributes towards the image of the store. If a high end store opens its store in a mall where mostly discount retailers are present, then the image of the retailer gets diluted in the customer’s mind. The location of a store not only determines the success or failure of that store but also affects the overall brand image of the company in the customer’s mind in the short as well as long run.

4. Unique Merchandise : The organised retail industry is witnessing a huge influx of imported as well as further developed indigenous products, this has made it difficult for the customers to distinguish between any two retailers on the basis of products that they are carrying. In fact every retailer is seems to become a substitute for one another. So, how does retailers offer the right product to the customer and at the same time also be able to distinguish itself from others? As brands become difficult to distinguish, retailers are now developing in-house or “private labels”. Private labels helps the retailer in presenting a product to the customer which will not be available anywhere else. As customer become loyal to the brands, they will also become loyal store customers, thus increasing loyalty for the retail chain.

Many of the big Indian retailers like Globus, Shoppers Stop, Lifestyle and also supermarket chains like Food Bazaar, Sabka Bazaar etc have developed private labels to be sold exclusively in their own stores. These labels are quite successful and contributing a major part of their overall sales. Encouraged by the success of private labels, the retailers are now working vigorously on their further development to establish the uniqueness of their brand.

One more way of offering unique merchandise would be to enter into a strategic tie-up with few leading designers who can be asked to design only for their retail chain. This will not only reinforce the image of the retailer as fashion forward but will also provide the designers with an easy platform to reach a vast number of customers. The customer who are designer patrons will also start patronizing the store. Besides, this anticipating customer’s expectations and assessing their needs will also help in developing labels which cater to specific needs of the customer. This will help not only in gaining their loyalty but also the loyalty of their family and peers.

5. Technology : The world today moves on technology. What is new today would be obsolete tomorrow. Thus to remain competitive, it’s imperative to keep oneself updated with the latest technology & innovations. Whichever company has first embraced technology for further development of its operations has been able to develop & gain competitive advantage in the long run. Wal-mart in the retailing industry was a pioneer in implementation of the latest available technology. Wal-mart used technology not only to optimize its inventory but also to maintain and sustain its workforce.

Latest technology in terms of billing softwares, lighting, maintaining an efficient supply chain, logistics etc help the retailer to gain competitive advantage over its rivals who are still continuing with the old technology. The technological supremacy helps the retailer to remain ahead of the competitors and also helps in attracting more customers towards the brand. In India e.g. there are few retailers like Reliance & Future Group which are contemplating the implementation of RFID’s. This once done will give them a competitive advantage in various functions of retail operations like merchandising, shrinkage control, costs as well as time by reducing the manual operations.

Thus, it is quite important for the retailer to remain technologically updated to avoid giving away the initiative which might have been developed because of early entry in the market.

6. Relationship with the vendors : Relationships with the vendors will be critical for any retailer to remain successful in the business. By developing good & strong relation with the vendors, the retailer can derive various advantages which won’t be available to the competitor, thus developing a competitive advantage over them. The retailer can get the exclusive rights to sell the merchandise in a particular region, or gain merchandise at a special price or terms. The retailer can also work in a better way to reduce the lead time and moreover get merchandise which is moving fast even at a short notice.

The retailer can either pass on these benefits to the customers or add more value to its offering to attract more customers. However, to establish strong relations with the vendors, the retailer has to work out a relationship which is mutually beneficial for both. Thus instead of thinking only about one’s profits, both have to work towards maximizing the profits of each other. The negotiations should be based on a win-win approach where nobody feels lost when the deal is finalized.

Establishing good relations with the vendor goes a long way for a retailer to establish supremacy in the industry. Moreover, when a reputation is established that the retailer is interested not only about his but also his vendor’s profitability, you will have people who will be willing to work with you in the long term and tend to your requests in case you wish to buy more or return merchandise when it is not selling well. Getting the vendor’s approval in this case will help the retailer to buy merchandise which is selling well and thus realise the necessary cash to further the business.

Thus, good vendor relations act as a source of strategic competitive advantage which are very tough to be replicated by the competitors and provide the retailer with long term competitive advantage.

7. Customer Service : Successful retail business is built on the foundations of good customer service. There is no substitute to good customer service and the sooner retailer realizes the better. There has been so much written about the importance of providing good customer service, that retailer just think of conducting a short training programme in customer service for their employees and feel that they have discharged their responsibility. However, customer service is not only about providing good service as also about accepting the mistake when the customer is not provided with one. A retailer can train its entire workforce in providing good customer service and still fails to tend to small requests of the customer like exchanges or returns is not doing any favor to him or his business.

Tending to the small requests of the customer and understanding their needs are few basics that retail business should be working upon. Also, whenever any mistake is committed which make the customer unhappy, it is important to take the responsibility and taking an action to avoid a similar happening in the future. E.g. even if you have sold say a pair of shoes to the customer, the heel of which has broken off the next day and when the customer comes in, instead of apologizing straightaway, you assume the role of a investigating officer and spew a barrage of questions towards the customer, he is bound to get annoyed and angry. No, matter what wrong has been committed, if a sincere effort is made by the retailer to make things right, customer appreciated and is even willing to forgive for him for the past incidents.

Customer service is all about active listening and making appreciative inquiries. Appreciative inquiries are those which focus on the positive side of even the most pessimist situations.

Training people to be good listeners and action oriented will help in gaining the loyalty of the customers in the long run. Also, sensitizing the employees towards the customer needs will be automatically reflected in their behavior on the shop floor.

Here, it is also important that the top management also participates actively in these activities and create an example in from of the whole team to encourage them to provide the best of service to their customers.

8. Price : The price is not the only factor in the success or failure of a retail business, though it’s quite important. It’s important not to mimic the competition and try to beat the price with even a lower as it is not a feasible solution in the long run and would dilute the brand image of the retailer. The competition on the price front can be beaten by providing the customer with value for money and an experience which is unique to the brand. However, it does not mean that the price in your stores is un-necessarily higher than those of similar competitors providing a similar level of service, as that will also affect the image of the store in a negative way.

As far as the price is concerned, the customer needs to be sensitized towards the value that he will be getting when he is doing business with you than the competitor. Like, you can have more liberal return policies, in house tailoring facilities, sending gifts and cards on birthdays, keeping a record of the important dates in the customer’s life and reminding them of the occasion even before they realize it will help in earning their loyalty which will be difficult for the competitor to match.

9. Advertising & Promotions : The important thing is to make the store an exciting place to visit & shop. This can be done by running good quality & unusual promotions which are pre-planned with marketing tools to be used already decided & ready for implementation.

Giving special attention to the store windows as they are responsible for generating close to 25% of the customer footfalls in the store. Store windows help in creating a distinctive character of the store which can set it apart from the competition. Thus, windows should be given high priority as a competitive weapon.

The décor, the lighting, the merchandise, the service needs to be in tune with the brand image and thus suiting the likes of customer profile. Changing displays often will help in giving a fresh look to the store every time a customer visits the store.

10. Training : This is one area where the retailer can focus a bit in order to improve the level of interaction that is taking place between the customer & people who are responsible for providing the right solutions to the customers. This can be a part of human resource management, however as this function ahs assumed huge significance owing to the lack of skilled manpower in the industry, it is important that the retailer understands this and create a workforce which fiercely loyal and trained in all aspects of its business.

This will not only give the retailer that competitive advantage but also dent the entire competition the hard way and take the business altogether to a different level.

Use public relations & don’t wait for news to happen; make store news happen. For example send the local media write ups on fashion trends, product details, use care instructions, tips on fittings, highlights of the industry. Attend as many shows or seminars, read as many periodicals, visit as many retail hubs to keep pace with the latest lines, new merchandise, new services, style trends. Talk shop with other retailers to understand the practices outside your company. Always keep a tab on the competition but never be afraid of it. Competition will enhance your performance.

And finally, think from the customer’s perspective and you will know what the customer is exactly looking for. This will give the business that competitive advantage.

All About Winning, Succeeding, Surviving & Existing

2007-10-16T09:57:00.000-07:00

Time Management

Rapid Reading Advice For those with an overload "in" box, consider these tips:

• Read only the first sentence of each paragraph on a document, then selectively read key paragraphs.

• Set aside reading time during the morning - most people tend to read more quickly and with better concentration early in the day.

• Arrange not to be interrupted during reading time.

• When examining a book or report, always look at the summary first.

Reading On the Run

New York-based organization management consultant Ronni Eisenberg suggests when you receive a magazine, which you tear out the articles that interest you and throw away the magazine. Keep the articles in an "on-the-go reading" file to be brought along on short trips or while you wait in someone's office.

Tips from The Top

Imitate the top performers in every field. They'll teach you how to be a success in your field. Entertainer **** Cavett had a little trick when he was starting out to show business. Just before he was about to go onstage, he'd look in a mirror and pretend he was Bob Hope. He'd imitate Hope's air of confidence, the way he carried himself, so that some of that self-assurance would rub off on him. It's not a bad idea. One of the best ways to succeed in any field is to imitate the top performers, the ones, who really stand out. You can do that in your field. Pick out people who are really good and try to imitate them. It could be somebody from your own company or someone from another firm. It doesn't even have to be a person who does the same job as you. When people call you on the phone, for instance, and you like the way they handle themselves, try to imitate them on your next phone call. You can imitate different attributes of different people. The cheerfulness of our local auto mechanic, for example, or the way your favorite waitress always remembers your name, or the patience of the repairman who comes to fix your office copying machine. When someone impresses you, ask yourself why. Was it their smile? Their efficiency? How did they do it? Can you follow their example? What can you learn from them? Once you develop the habit of looking for top performers, you'll see them in every field. And you'll have a ready-made pattern for success.

15 Minutes To Greater Productivity

Time management and productivity often go hand-in-hand. Use the STOP method to make sure you are making the most of your time. See clearly you problems and objectives. Identify what you must do to solve problems or meet goals as quickly as possible. Target the causes of problems and the reasons behind what you are doing. Analyze your current action to determine whether it will effectively accomplish what it should. Organize options. Are there faster but equally effective alternate methods to those you are currently using? Learn new methods that will save time in the long run. Plan your work and proceed. Initiate the most efficient action plan to get the result you want.

One More Time: Get A Life Break Those Old Habits

Does your weekend usually include a few hours at the office? Do you pick up dinner at the nearby restaurant or fast-food chain? Is your significant other your laptop computer? If so, you suffer from a common complaint among executives: the lack of life.

Here are the warning signs:

• Lack of clarity and focus. You work hard, but does the work matter to you?

• Unclear time boundaries. If you frequently look up from your desk surprised to find that

you're late for a personal occasion, your workload is making decisions about your life rather than you.

• Unclear boundaries in your thought life. Does your off-hours conversation revolve around your job?

• Lack of fulfilling relationships. Does your family complain that about the time you spend working?

• Weakened spiritual life. You may have forgotten that work should be an element of the transcendence in your life, not a barrier.

Workaholics Anonymous

There are telltale signs of workaholism:

• It's dark when you leave for work - and for home - even in summer.

• No matter how hard you work, it never seems enough.

• You have no fun, but have fantasies of escaping.

• You don't know what's happening in the lives of your loved ones.

• You're plagued by aches and pains.

• You forget things you've known for years.

• You can't get into the car without turning on the radio or getting on the phone.

• You buy exercise equipment or enroll in a health club - without using them.

Endurance Skills Not-so-trivial NWTS

Your attitude, dress, work habits, and general behavior affect your career. These nonwork trivialities, or NWTs, are just as important as job performance. Take a good hard look at yourself. Do you treat everyone as an equal? Do you avoid making value judgements or jokes about individuals or groups because they're different from you? Do you think before you speak? Do you treat your company's money as you would your own? Do you accept responsibility for your own actions? Make a list of as many NWTs as you think of, including the above, and rate yourself. Think you need improvement? Model your behavior after a fast tracker in your company.

Ten Commandments of Communication

1. Keep it short. Be concise without being boring.

2. Keep it focussed. Decide on your objective. Prepare your message. Delete everything unrelated to your objective.

3. Keep it simple. Use little words.

4. Open with a grabber. Start with an interesting fact or story.

5. Don't apologize. Present yourself as an expert. Don't use qualifiers like "I think."

6. Use action verbs.

7. Edit everything. Never settle for your first draft of anything.

8. Be honest. If you don't know, say sp. Don't lie to people.

9. Be a good receiver. When someone speaks, listen.

10. Ask questions to clarify. Ask for an explanation when you don't understand.

What People Expect?

What you need to prevent communications breakdown during crisis.

• Responsiveness: when problems occur, be prepared to talk about them internally and externally as aggressively as you respond to them operationally.

• Openness: if the public should know about a problem your organization has, voluntarily talk about it as quickly and as completely as you can, especially to those most directly affected.

• Concern: when business problems occur, keep the people most directly affected posted until the problem is thoroughly explained or resolved.

• Respect: respect and seek to work with those who oppose you.

• Responsibility: unless incapacitated or inappropriate, the senior operating executive on-site will be the spokesperson during emergencies and other significant events.

• Sensitivity: at the earliest possible moment, step back and analyze the impact of the crisis. Your intention is to inform and alert all appropriate audiences.

• Integrity: if you are at fault or perceived as such, acknowledge the situation promptly. Be true to your corporate and personal consciences.

• Compassion: always exhibit concern, empathy, sympathy, remorse, or contrition, whatever the case may require.

• Generosity: go beyond what is expected or required of you, even to the point of "doing penance" where appropriate.

• Honesty: learn from your mistakes, talk publicly about what you've learned, and renew your commitment to keeping errors and problems from resurfacing.

Source: The World Executive Digest

How To Relate Work To Other Commitments

2007-10-16T09:38:00.000-07:00

In a university commencement address several years ago, Brian Dyson, CEO of Coca Cola Enterprises, spoke of the relation of work to one's other commitments:

"Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them work, family, health, friends and spirit - and you're keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls - family, health, friends and spirit - are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life."

How?

Don't undermine your worth by comparing yourself with others. It is because we are different that each of us is special.
Don't set your goals by what other people deem important. Only you know what is best for you.
Don't take for granted the things closest to your heart. Cling to them as they would your life, for without them, life is meaningless.
Don't let your life slip through your fingers by living in the past or for the future. By living your life one day at a time, you live ALL the days of your life.
Don't give up when you still have something to give. Nothing is really over until the moment you stop trying.
Don't be afraid to admit that you are less than perfect. It is this fragile thread that binds us to each together.
Don't be afraid to encounter risks. It is by taking chances that we learn how to be brave.
Don't shut love out of your life by saying it's impossible to find. The quickest way to receive love is to give it; the fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly; and the best way to keep love is to give it wings.
Don't run through life so fast that you forget not only where you've been, but also where you are going.
Don't forget, a person's greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated.
Don't be afraid to learn. Knowledge is weightless, a treasure you can always carry easily.
Don't use time or words carelessly. Neither can be retrieved.

Life is not a race, but a journey to be savored each step of the way. Yesterday is history, Tomorrow is a Mystery and Today is a gift: that's why we call it The Present............!!!

If You Don't Innovate, Someone Else Will

2007-10-04T16:34:00.000-07:00

Contributed to Rediff By Govindkrishna Seshan in Mumbai

India is the 11th country on his agenda this year -- and the diary's still open. But Robert Tucker doesn't find the constant travel exhausting. Instead, the corporate innovation guru uses the opportunity to study how innovation is being practised in different markets and then offers the examples as case studies.

A former professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and now the president of California-based consulting firm The Innovation Resource, Tucker is the author of several bestselling books on the subject, including Winning the Innovation Game, Managing the Future and Driving Growth Through Innovation.

Recently in India to conduct a seminar on corporate innovation, Tucker spoke to Business Standard on how Indian companies need to stay ahead in the global innovation race.

Excerpts:

How would you define innovation?
To me, innovation is the process of coming up with ideas and bringing them to life. Any time you come up with an idea and implement it, you have essentially innovated. Not all ideas are commercially viable but, nevertheless, they are innovations.

In business, the commercial viability of an innovation is of supreme importance. Companies don't just need ideas, they need ideas that can make people see value. The idea you implement must make the consumer want to open his wallet and spend his money on your product.

Hence, in a corporate scenario, innovation to me is essentially of three types. Product innovations, like the i-Pod or Post-It notes. Process innovation, when you come up with a new process that reduces time or cost or makes you reach from point A to point B faster: Toyota and Tata are continuously making process innovations.

Then there's strategy innovation, when you find a better way of serving your customer � Air Deccan, for instance. A couple of years ago it looked at low-cost airlines across the world, picked some of the best practices, and then made itself. Now, that's an excellent example of strategy innovation.

Remember what I said about commercial viability? A couple of months ago, people in the US queued up outside stores to buy the i-Phone. Now, that's innovation.

Does innovation have a greater role to play now?
Innovation today is ranked among the top three priorities on every CEO and manager's list. Today, you see people working with laptops and cellphones, which, in five years, will be obsolete.
Around the world innovation is happening and it is happening fast. I was in Tel Aviv recently, where managers can operate store cameras and keep a check on their employees through their cellphones.

Similarly, a refrigeration truck can call its driver when the temperature inside starts rising. Now, these technologies can be used anywhere; there's a global innovation race on. So innovation needs to be taken a lot more seriously.

The good news, however, is that several Indian companies are responding well to this challenge. And this has helped India achieve greater prominence on the global economic stage. Companies like Mahindra & Mahindra, the Tata group and Ranbaxy , in particular, have done well. When I last visited India, in 2003, the Tata group was valued at $12 billion, I read today that its net worth now is $63 billion.

What are these companies doing differently? How important is innovation in India?
India is a very young country. Youngsters are open to trying new products and are ready to spend. They demand new and improved products that enhance their lifestyles. Hence, companies here need to be innovative to survive.

What Indian companies have done right is... First, these companies are thinking globally: they don't want to be the best in the market or best in the country; they want to be the best globally.
Second, they are speaking to their consumers in a more organised fashion. And last, the leadership in these organisations is very serious about building a culture of innovation.

How does an organisation build a culture of innovation?
A company is the result of its ideas. When the leadership shows serious intent for innovation, it percolates to all levels and you build a culture of innovation. Behaviour that gets rewarded gets repeated.

So your managers need to reward people who are taking risks, people who are experimenting with ideas, people who are being creative and are attempting to do things better. When you reward such behaviour you are sure to create a culture of innovation.

People by nature are creative, but you as an organisation need to be able to tap it. Employees are either being creative at their work place or are going home to their sports, passions, interests and spending their creativity there.

Companies need to ask people to be creative, and praise employees who try things differently, irrespective of the outcome. I spend most of my day asking managers to stroke their chin and ask their teams politely if there is a better way to do what they are doing. Most managers never ask this question, or they ask it in a very confrontational manner.

Innovation seems to be restricted to technology and IT companies. Do consumer goods companies also need to innovate?
FMCG, too, has seen its innovation but large companies here are fighting for shares rather than creating markets. Also, many companies are facing strategic convergence, making their strategies similar and, hence, difficult for consumers to differentiate.

But that does not stop innovation: if you don't innovate, somebody else will. Take Coca-Cola and Pepsi. While these companies fought on marketshare, somebody else went ahead and launched Red Bull and Gatorade. Both were extremely innovative products that quickly made huge markets for themselves.

What is the lifecycle of an innovation? Does it cease to be innovative once others copy it?
The microwave and the computer are still relevant innovations. But yes, the day it is copied, a company loses the competitive edge an innovation provides. So the time between your implementing an idea and it being copied by competitors is the real life span of an innovation.

But companies cannot sit idle after completing an innovation because then they will let others catch up. The idea is to keep moving and keep innovating so that by the time others copy plan A you have already moved to plan B.

If there are "good" innovations, there must be bad ones as well...
Ideas can be implemented badly or they may be not be commercially viable, but there is nothing called "bad" innovation. Many times, an idea may be just ahead of its time.

For instance, DuPont invented Kevlar, which is 10 times stronger than steel, many, many years ago. At the time tyre manufacturers, who were approached with the product, were not very keen. The product was not used for many years, until the company found new uses for it.

Today, Kevlar is used by people who work with glass, oyster-opening gloves are made of Kevlar, armies and police personnel around the world use Kevlar vests, embassies of many nations have Kevlar curtains draped on their walls... So Kevlar was not a bad innovation. It was just not used correctly.

Here Is A Very Interesting Article....Some Neo Economics For a Change..

2007-09-30T19:57:00.000-07:00

Savins is Sin and Spending a Virtue.....Read on and Discover...

Japanese save a lot. They do not spend much. Also Japan exports far more than it imports. Has an annual trade surplus of over $100 billions. Yet Japanese economy is considered weak, even collapsing. Americans spend, save little. Also US import more than it exports. Has an annual trade deficit of over $400 billion. Yet, the American economy is considered strong and trusted to get stronger.

But where from do Americans get money to spend? They borrow from Japan, China and even India . Virtually others save for the US to spend. Global savings are mostly invested in US, in dollars. India itself keeps its foreign currency assets of over $50 billions in US securities. China has sunk over $160 billion in US securities. Japan 's stakes in US securities is in trillions.

The Result:
The US has taken over $5 trillion from the world. So, as the world saves for the US , Americans spend freely. Today, to keep the US consumption going, that is for the US economy to work, other countries have to remit $180 billion every quarter, which is $2 billion a day, to the US ! Otherwise the US economy would go for a six. So will the global economy. The result will be no different if US consumers begin consuming less.

A Chinese economist asked a neat question. Who has invested more, US in China , or China in US? The US has invested in China less than half of what China has invested in US. The same is the case with India . We have invested in US over $50 billion. But the US has invested less than $20 billion in India . Why the world is after US?

The secret lies in the American spending, that they hardly save. In fact they use their credit cards to spend their future income. That the US spends is what makes it attractive to export to the US . So US imports more than what it exports year after year.

What That Means is....
The world is dependent on US consumption for its growth. By its deepening culture of consumption, the US has habituated the world to feed on US consumption. But as the US needs money to finance its consumption, the world provides the money. It's like a shopkeeper providing the money to a customer so that the customer keeps buying from the shop. If the customer will not buy, the shop won't have business, unless the shopkeeper funds him. The US is like the lucky customer. And the world is like the helpless shopkeeper financier. Who is America 's biggest shopkeeper financier? Japan of course. Yet itʼs Japan which is regarded as weak. Modern economists complain that Japanese do not spend, so they do not grow. To
force the Japanese to spend, the Japanese government exerted it self, reduced the savings rates, even charged the savers. Even then the Japanese did not spend (habits don't change, even with taxes, do they?). Their traditional postal savings alone is over $1.2 trillions, about three times the Indian GDP. Thus, savings, far from being the strength of Japan , has become its pain.

Hence, what is the lesson? That is, a nation cannot grow unless the people spend, not save. Not just spend, but borrow and spend. Dr. Jagdish Bhagwati, the famous Indian-born economist in the US , told Manmohan Singh that Indians wastefully save. Ask them to spend, on imported cars and, seriously, even on cosmetics! This will put India on a growth curve. "Saving is sin, and spending is virtue." Before you follow this neo economics, get some fools to save so that you can borrow from them and spend.

This is what US has successfully done in last few decades

Communication - Manager's Perspective

2007-09-30T19:47:00.000-07:00

Research indicates that managers spend somewhere between 50% - 80% of their total time communicating in one way or the other. This isn't surprising, since communication is so critical to everything that goes on in an organization. Without effective communication there can be little or no performance management, innovation, understanding of clients, coordination of effort, AND, without effective communication it is difficult to manage the expectations of those who are in a position to make decisions about your fate.

It can also be said that many managers do not communicate well, and do not set an organizational climate where communication within the organization is managed effectively. This isn't surprising, since a manager who communicates ineffectively and does not encourage
effective organizational communication is unlikely to hear about it. Poor communication is self-sustaining, because it eliminates an important "feedback loop". Staff are loathe to "communicate" their concerns about communication because they do not perceive the
manager as receptive. Both staff and management play out a little dance.

In short, you may be fostering poor communication, and never know it. You may see the symptoms, but unless you are looking carefully, you may not identify your own involvement in the problem. What can you do about it?

Your Role In Communication Improvement

Effective organizational communication, regardless of form, requires three things.

First, all players must have the appropriate skills and understanding to communicate well. Communication is not a simple process, and many people simply do not have the required depth of understanding of communication issues.

Second, effective organizational communication requires a climate or culture that supports effective communication. More specifically, this climate involves trust, openness, reinforcement of good communication practices, and shared responsibility for making communication effective.

Third, effective communication requires attention. It doesn't just happen, but develops as a result of an intentional effort on the part of management and staff. Too often, communication, whether it is good or bad, is taken for granted.

First, if you want to improve communication, you will need to ensure that you and staff have the skills and knowledge necessary to communicate effectively. This may mean formal training
is in order, or it may mean that you coach staff and provide feedback so that they can improve.

Second, you play a critical role in fostering and nurturing a climate that is characterized by open communication. Without this climate, all the skills in the world will be wasted.

Finally, you must bring communication to the forefront of organization attention. If you make the effort to improve communication, your staff will recognize that it is important. If you ignore it, so will staff.

Some Specific Tips:

1) Actively solicit feedback about your own communication, and communication within the organization. Ask staff questions like:

When we talk, are you generally clear about what I am saying?

Do you think we communicate well around here?

Have you got any ideas about how we could communicate better?

Consider including these questions (or similar ones) in your
performance management process, or staff meetings.

2) Assess your own communication knowledge and understanding

3) Working with your staff, define how you should communicate in the organization. Develop consensus regarding:

a) How disagreements should be handled.
b) How horizontal communication should work (staff to staff).
c) How vertical communication should work (manager to staff, staff to manager).
d) What information should be available and when.

Once consensus is reached, support the achievement of these goals through positive reinforcement and coaching.

4) Look at the impact of the structure of your organization and how it impacts on communication. Indirect communication (communication that is transferred from person to person) is notorious for causing problems. Look at increasing direct communication where the person with the message to send does it directly with the receiver.

5) Learn about, and use active listening techniques. This will set a tone and contribute to a positive communication climate. If you don't know what active listening is, find out. It's important.

6) Consider undertaking a communications audit.

Conclusion

We only have space to give you a few tips, and communication is a very complex process. If you would like to increase awareness and attention to communication, consider copying the self-assessment checklist and distribute it to staff. Suggest that they complete it for their own use, and follow it up by discussing organizational communication in a staff meeting. Be aware that exploring communication patterns and effectiveness can bring to the surface a number of resentments and perceptions.

2007-09-30T19:28:00.000-07:00

How Do You Attract and Retain the Best People?
by Anne Riches

"At the end of the day, we bet on people, not strategies."

That's what Allied Signal CEO Larry Bossidy says and it's as true for Small Agencies as it is for any other employer - public sector or corporate.

How can your Agency become the employer of choice?

At the employee level it covers the "cradle to grave" of employment.

How do we:

*	Recruit them - including how we treat the unsuccessful applicants
*	Induct them
*	Manage them, daily, monthly, yearly
*	Motivate them
*	Educate, coach and mentor them
*	Develop their careers
*	Pay them
*	Promote them
*	Recognize and value their contribution
*	Find out and deal with their professional concerns
*	Encourage a healthy working lifestyle
*	Assist them develop professional networks
*	Support them in times of personal challenges
*	Handle the way they leave - for whatever reason?

Here are some ideas to start implementing today:

But don't leave this to the HR people alone. This is a major line management responsibility. It is a strategic organizational challenge - to be taken on by everyone.

Seven Reasons Why Organisational Culture Matters

2007-09-22T21:38:00.000-07:00

Organizational culture can improve employee satisfaction. We spend 40 or 45 or 50 or more hours at work each week. Many of us spend more time with those we work with than we do our families.

For us to be content and fulfilled people, that time must be valuable for more than a dollar. . .

We want to be engaged in our work. We yearn for work that is enjoyable, meaningful and engaging. When we are engaged we are safer on the job, more productive and more willing and able to delight Customers. It is for these basic reasons that organizational culture matters. It is the right thing for an organization to do - to think about the work environment, working relationships and "how we do things here." Focusing on building and sustaining an organizational culture is one way of showing that people are the organization's most valuable asset.

There are of course many other bottom line business reasons to focus on and build organizational culture. Here are seven of those reasons.

A strong culture is a talent-attractor. Your organizational culture is part of the package that prospective employees look at when assessing your organization. Gone are the days of selecting the person you want from a large eager pool. The talent market is tighter and those looking for a new organization are more selective than ever. The best people want more than a salary and good benefits. They want an environment they can enjoy and succeed in.

A strong culture is talent-retainer. How likely are people to stay if they have other options and don't love where they are? Your organizational culture is a key component of a person's desire to stay.

A strong culture engages people. People want to be engaged in their work. According to a Gallup survey at least 22 million American workers are extremely negative or "actively disengaged" - this loss of productivity is estimated to be worth between $250-$300 Billion annually. Your culture can engage people. Engagement creates greater productivity, which can impact profitability. Need I say more?

A strong culture creates energy and momentum. Build a culture that is vibrant and allows people to be valued and express themselves and you will create a very real energy. That positive energy will permeate the organization and create a new momentum for success. Energy is contagious and will build on itself, reinforcing the culture and the attractiveness of the organization.

A strong culture changes the view of "work." Most people have a negative connotation of the word work. Work equals drudgery, 9-5, "the salt mine." When you create a culture that is attractive, people's view of "going to work" will change. Would you rather see work as drudgery or a joy? Which do you think your employees would prefer? Which will lead to the best results?

A strong culture creates greater synergy. A strong culture brings people together. When people have the opportunity to (and are expected to) communicate and get to know each other better, they will find new connections. These connections will lead to new ideas and greater productivity - in other words, you will be creating synergy. Literally, 1 + 1 + right culture = more than 10. How is that for leveragea?

A strong culture makes everyone more successful. Any one of the other six reasons should be reason enough to focus on organizational culture. But the bottom line is that an investment of time, talent and focus on organizational culture will give you all of the above benefits. Not only is creating a better culture a good thing to do for the human capital in the business, it makes good business sense too.

Hopefully this article has helped you see that time spent enhancing your organizational culture will be time wisely invested. Regardless of your current culture, it is never too late to enhance it and to begin creating the benefits described above.

What are you waiting for?

Upclose with Kumarmangalam Birla - Lessons Learnt

2007-09-22T21:31:00.000-07:00

Under Kumar Mangalam Birla the $6 bn Aditya Birla Group did not just acquire a new logo, it transformed itself. From a commodity based organization steeped in babu culture. It is today an aggressively modern multi cultural transnational with more than 72,000 people drawn from twenty different nationalities. In this exclusive with The Smart Manager Kumar Mangalam Birla shares his nine important learnings.

Transformation is about turning aspirations into reality, converting setbacks into opportunities. It is about courage of conviction. It is about what Charles Handy, one of the world's leading authorities on the nature of work, calls, "The creation of new alchemists from ordinary people." Transformation, to me, is the end result of a highly energized process that combines human ingenuity with its indomitable spirit to make new things happen and create value.

The transformational process can be so absorbing that often its lessons reveal themselves long after its implementation. Today, as I reflect on our group's journey over nearly a decade, I do believe that we have changed in some very fundamental ways. In fact the genetic coding of our group stands altered substantially. We have become a transnational, multi-cultural entity with more than 72,000 people, drawn from twenty different nationalities of whom more than 70% are under the age of forty.

Ten years ago women managers were few and far between. Today women constitute more than 6% of our employees and the number is on the rise. As we venture into new countries the world over, our group's geography has changed phenomenally as well. So has the work ethos which has been shaped to stay contemporary and relevant in a different world. However, much as we have changed, we continue to constantly reinvent ourselves.

Let me quote Alvin Toffler, futurist and author of the path-breaking work, The Third Wave, who wrote, "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." In fact, much of the change process for us has been about learning, unlearning and relearning, and I have tried to cull out for you the nine lessons which we believe are key to our transformational process.

Lesson # 01
The first question that to my mind needs to be addressed is: "What is it about the transformation process that needs to be managed?" It is my personal view that for those at the helm of an organization in the throes of change, management is restricted to largely two broad areas. The first is the ability to manage time effectively because an organization in a state of flux throws up many more demands on your time as compared to one in a steady state. And the second area is that of energy management because the process of change can be rather exhausting, both physically and mentally, and requires sustained levels of high energy over a prolonged period of time.

Other than these two areas that need active managing, the process of transformation is mostly about leadership. Leadership at all levels in the organization as much as leadership at the top. It is about plugging in to the minds and hearts of people. It is about rallying them around to a compelling and exciting vision of the future. It is about upping the quality of imagination of the organization. So the first lesson for us has been that the process of change is perhaps 90% about leadership and only 10% about managing.

Lesson # 02
Back in 1996, we launched for the first time a Corporate Identity. The intent at one level was simply to have a group identity that would serve as a corporate logo. We chose the rising sun. That the impact of a symbol can be so enormous is something that took us by surprise. At a time when the group was going through emotional turmoil, the symbol of the Rising Sun brought the different parts of the group together, helped us as an organization to reenergize ourselves, cross the bridge, and to get started on the path to change.

The learning was quite striking. The need to relate, to belong to a club, to an association, basically to some sort of fraternity is inherent in all of us. The corporate identity served that need, as also as a proxy for a charismatic leader who was missed greatly. At another level, it made an emotional connect that wove the group into an integrated whole.

The Rising Sun, in a strange way, brought a new optimism and served as a rallying point for the organization. That really, in a strategic way, was the first positive step for us in our process of change. The lesson we learned is that symbolism can and does have a positive effect. In our case, it was the corporate identity. In another situation, the symbol could well be different.

Lesson # 03
It is stating the obvious but I do believe it is important enough to say it anyway: a critical area in any change process is that of communication. The process of transformation is about communication, communication and more communication. In the case of a corporation going through the pangs of change, I do not believe that you can ever over communicate. And I cannot think of any instance in our case where the change process was set back because of over-communicating. Looking back, however, several instances do come to my mind when I think we could have communicated more, better and faster.

Using technology to advantage in communication can add a zing to the process. Reaching out to as large an audience as possible, engaging with small groups, opinion makers and those who may be impacted adversely, is obviously critical. And communication is the key to making this happen.

A significant part of the learning about communication has also been that the same message is filtered by different audiences within the organization differently, given each one's unique world view, context and perspective. Some time back, I learnt about a survey conducted by the United Nations. It was an international survey and it had only one question. The question was: "Please give your honest opinion on the shortage of food in the rest of the world and suggest solutions." The information was urgently required, but the survey unfortunately was a huge failure.

In Western Europe they couldn't understand the meaning of the word 'shortage'. No one there had ever experienced a shortage of anything. In Eastern Europe they couldn't understand the meaning of the word 'opinion'. Having been under socialist rule for years, no one had ever volunteered an opinion. In the Middle East they couldn't understand the meaning of the word 'solution', for obvious reasons: there never had been any solution to any of the difficult problems there. In Africa, sadly, they couldn't understand the meaning of the word 'food', which comes by so rarely. In Asia, they couldn't understand the meaning of the word 'honest'. And in the United States they could not understand what is meant by the 'rest of the world'.

On a more serious note, the point to be made is that it is important to customize communication, so that different audiences within the organization understand the message in its right context, in the way it was intended. So, the third take away for us was that when you succeed in the transformation, it is because your communication worked.

Lesson # 04
Different people have different roles to play in the process of change. I believe that the management of most organizations focuses sharply on high performers - the people with high potential or the high fliers as they are commonly referred to. That is, of course, important but, I do believe that what is equally important, is to focus on that bulk of the organization who are somewhat dismissively referred to in management jargon as 'the stayers'.

These are people who make the day-to-day, month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter things happen. Their role in the process of change is critical. Just as 70% of the human body is made up of water, so also 70% of any organization is made up of people who follow the rules, who keep it moving ahead at a steady pace.

You cannot have everyone setting the rules. We need people who follow the rules, people who may not contribute in a significant way intellectually, but who are happy to implement the rules diligently. Ignoring this segment of people in a process of change, I believe, can lead, to use the analogy of the human body again, to organizational dehydration. For sustaining the transformation, you need to engage and recognize this quiet majority. These are people who are often less visible but who to a significant extent make the organization what it is.

So we owe it to this mass to keep them motivated, to recognize their contribution which very often gets overshadowed by the performance of the 'stars'.

Lesson # 05
There is something to be said about the virtue of organizations that are heterogeneous in their composition. Most long-standing Indian business houses like ours have tended over a period of time to become homogeneous. This is apparent in the kind of people we recruit, in the patterns of behavior that we espouse, leading to a cloning impact of what, we believe, is the right kind of manager or leader who would be successful in our own organizational context.

Our experience has been that a heterogeneous mix of people, though very difficult to lead, helps in the process of change. You need the fast pacers, the spinners, the good wicket keepers just as much as the pinch hitters, to become a winning team. It has been our experience that altering the genetic coding, albeit carefully, can be a productive exercise that can significantly improve the quality of constructive dissent and the quality of decision making, particularly in a period of rapid change.

Bringing in people from organizations with different cultures, who have different skill sets, a different pair of eyes, can be useful, so long as they all bond with the basic values of your work place. So, moving away from homogeneity or creating a climate that embraces different cultures and gives them wings whilst keeping the organization rooted in its core values, can be a productive exercise and a useful catalyst in the change process.

Lesson # 06
It has been our learning that it is good to analyze failures. We do this not merely to not repeat the same mistakes, but equally to showcase success. We have created a platform called the Aditya Birla Awards where team achievements across the organization are recognized every year. The genesis of these awards is that each one of us needs some-thing to be inspired by, more so, when we are being stretched in all directions in the process of metamorphosis. Showcasing success does that for you. It inspires, it motivates, it has a ripple impact which cannot be accounted for numerically, but has hugely positive, qualitative returns.

Importantly, it has been our belief that whilst the individual stars, the sterling performers are important, it is the creating of star teams across the organization that is most critical. Individual stars who cannot become a part of star teams, are of little value. In fact, they can be disruptive instead of being productive. So, showcasing success and applauding it, is critical. It creates a surround sound that says we can do it, an ambience of an organization in celebration and the impact of it can be quite astounding.

Lesson # 07
A considerable part of the change in our case reflects shifts in geography as well as a rapid pace of mergers and acquisitions. The result is that the organization is faced with the challenge of having to integrate with a culture that is foreign to it and practices it has been unexposed to. For example, in our group, an Indian manager who moves to Thailand on secondment takes time to adjust to the fact that the night shift has only women workers, something that is illegal in India. Similarly, an Indian manager posted to our Australian mines can find the task of ferrying workers to the mine site by an aircraft, to and fro each day, a rather unusual experience.

I have to say that our long-standing presence overseas and the exposure it brought with it, has made the task of adapting to different cultures a lot easier. All the same, an attitude of willingness to learn and assimilate from different cultures is an absolute must.

Lesson # 08
Tracking the organizational climate, especially in a process of catharsis, we believe is critical, simply because you cannot set a problem right until it is correctly diagnosed. We have relied heavily on the organizational health study methodology. In 2000, the study covered 7,200 managers in fifty locations. By 2002, it had extended to 8,700 managers in 65 locations. This year we have covered 10,000 managers in ninety locations. For us the Organizational Health Survey is the barometer of the 'happiness at work' index in the group.

The revelation for us has been that the feedback from the surveys have been more honest and brutal than we had imagined. In the same unit, scores have ranged from very high to very low on different parameters. This indicates that the feedback is honest, should be taken seriously and worked upon. Year after year, teams have worked with exactitude, attacking the specific problems of each unit in a way that involves people from across the organization.

Tracking organizational health has become an institutionalized process for us and has paid immense dividends. So, the learning on this front has been that seeking feedback in an institutionalized way and acting on it is a huge positive in the process of change. The underlying philosophy is that whilst it is the duty of the management to ensure that the company is a good employer, the responsibility for ensuring that it is a great place to work in is shared across the length and breadth of the organization.

Lesson # 09
Today, every organization puts a premium on speed. We loathe anything that is not fast enough, for obvious reasons. In a process of transformation however, one learning that stands out for us is that it is only infinite and indefinite patience that brings immediate results. Different parts of the organization respond differently to the change stimuli. It is unrealistic to expect the transformation process to take off at the same pace throughout.

Just the other day, I had a friend telling me that the only exercise his wife ever does is to jump - jump to conclusions. In a change process too, people are quick to jump to conclusions as to the motive behind the process, how it will impact them and the shifts in the balance of power it would create. Internalizing the process of change takes its own course however fast one might wish to push it through. There is no getting away from it and therefore there is no substitute for consistency.

We have, I find when I look back, in some instances, tended to fall a prey to what one might call the 'last mile exhaustion'. It is that period in the journey of change where the novelty of the new ideas have faded, when sufficient ground has been covered, and the goal is near, but yet not quite so. It is sustaining the organization's will power and stamina through that last mile that very often makes or breaks the process of change. So, the ninth take away has been that one must guard against falling a prey to the 'last mile exhaustion' in the journey of change.

I want to end with a quote of Eric Hoffer, "In time of change, the learner will inherit the earth while the learned are beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists."

Here is one Effective Training Methodology

2007-09-22T20:25:00.000-07:00

Maybe you've had on-the-job training where someone showed you how to do something and then asked you sign off that you learned the material. Never were your skills tested. No one asked you to demonstrate proficiency. You simply observed someone doing what you were supposed to learn, and they said you were "trained."

Unfortunately, this scenario is all too common. The problem? That's not training. The ability to stand up and talk does not a trainer make. In the same way, just because we show someone how to do something doesn't mean they've learned.

A couple of situations stand vividly in my mind. One is the facial expression of the production manager for a large manufacturing plant. While conducting a train-the-trainer workshop I reviewed what I call the "four step skill-transfer method." About half-way through the lesson this manager's eyes got big and his mouth opened. "So that's why our people aren't learning," he said.

Then there's the sales manager who takes a new sales rep out to show him the ropes. After meeting with a few prospective clients, the manager says to the new hire, "Okay, you've watched me do it, now it's your turn." Naturally, he's perplexed when his new hire messes things up. What's interesting is when he blames the new sales rep for "not getting it."

How adults learn is not a preprogrammed brain file, nor is it installed in us when we're born or when we become a manager. Don't misunderstand; this is not a criticism of these managers. If no one has ever shown them how to train effectively, then how could they possibly know? How adults learn is not a preprogrammed brain file, nor is it installed in us when we're born or when we become a manager. We must learn how to do it.

Therefore, the following is dedicated to managers and all who are responsible for teaching others how to do certain tasks. If it seems elementary, it is. The process can be tedious. It seems to take up a lot of time. But it also works, and works well. If you think about the time and money lost from people not performing tasks as they should, then this investment of time spent up front is small by comparison.

Why do I advocate this method? First because cognitive learning (knowledge / understanding) and physical skill learning (muscle movement / dexterity) are inherently different. This method separates the two, and puts brain learning before muscle learning. It's an effective order because when the brain understands what's supposed to be going on, it's easier for it to communicate accurate instructions to the muscles.

There are other reasons I like this method, but I think you'll see them as it's explained. Here are the four steps:

1. Instructor Does, Instructor Explains. This means that as the teacher, you must demonstrate what it is you want your students to do, and, as you're going through the various activities, provide narration to describe and explain what you're doing. As you demonstrate, explain nuances, tricks, tips, cautions etc.

2. Instructor Does, Student Explains. In step two, you're going to demonstrate again, but this time the student tells you what to do and what to watch out for. Be careful not to lead the student into any of the steps - he or she should tell you what to do before you do it.
This step allows the learner to engage the new skill mentally. He or she seeing the procedure in his or her mind and having to articulate it to you, but you have control over the actual process. A misstep in verbal instructions from the student does not have to be acted upon if the actual doing might cause damage or harm. This allows for corrective instruction from you without damaging equipment or causing personal injury.

3. Student Does, Instructor Explains. In step three the student performs the task with step-by-step instructions from you. Obviously the student's mind is thinking about what needs to happen, but your instructions are providing accuracy and safety.
Also in this step, one of the biggest obstacles to learning, student embarrassment, is kept to a minimum. The student can focus brainpower on the manual dexterity required instead of trying to remember what to do next.

4. Student Does, Student Explains, Instructor Evaluates. Here the student merges the mental and physical learning under the guidance of you, the experienced instructor. The student builds confidence and the stage is set for true ownership of his or her ability to do the task. It's not just "I showed you, now you do it." The student truly has the ability to explain what should be done and demonstrate proficiency in doing it.

This four-step method is not necessary or even applicable for all learning situations. But when teaching certain skills, it ensures solid learning. Again, it may seem simplistic, redundant, and time-consuming. But consider the options:

Demonstrate once and then have to demonstrate again and again plus fix all the mistakes later (not to mention lost productivity and profits), or:

Take time up front so true learning occurs right from the start.

Give it a try. It takes time and patience, but the results are very much worth it.

What is 5S?

2007-09-21T08:21:00.000-07:00

5-S can be defined as

1. Seiri (Proper Arrangement and Clearing Up)

a) Look around your work area and ask yourself “is it really necessary for all items to be there?” b) Separate O.K., reworkable and rejected items

c) Rework the reworkable items and dispose of the rejected items.

2. Seiton (Orderliness) Items must be placed inprefixed locations so that they are easily accessible and can be easily used. Make sure that iten=ms can be clearly identified by labelling them properly.

3. Seiso (Clean Up) Seiso means cleaning the work place and all the machinery by ourselves.

4. Seiketsu (Standardisation) Even a clean work place with proper selection and proper arrangement will soon become dirty if Seiri, Seiton and Seiso are not continuously repeated. Let us prevent problems by keeping things standardized and maintaining a good environment.

5. Shisuke (Discipline) Everyone shuld be disciplined to follow strictly the rules and maintain standards while working. For example let us adhere to the timings and let us follow the prescribed operation standads. Everybody should wear shoes for safety.

Advantages of 5S

By thoroughly enforcing 5S in each work area.

1. Operations can be performed without error, proceeding in a well-regulated fashion, resulting in fewer defective items thereby increasing the overall quality of product.

2. Operations can be performed safely and comfortably, reducing the chances of accidents.

3. Machinery and equipment can be carefully maintained, reducing the number of breakdowns. 4. Operations can be performed efficiently, eliminating waste thereby incrasing the efficiency and productivity.

How to Achieve 5S?

5S can be achieved very easily by every employee by having a close look at his work place. He is to ensure that

1. No rejected / unwanted items are lying at his work place.

2. All items are kept in proper locations/order.

. Everybody should co-operate with each other in keeping his and others areas and the machines clean.

4. All follow rules and regulations and maintain required standards.

Please Check

1. Do you have any unuseful thing around you?

2. Are all the required things kept at their allocated places?

3. Are you following the timings?

4. Are you following the operating standards?

5. Let us all review 5S.

Top Ten Ways To Be Happy At Work

2007-09-21T08:07:00.000-07:00

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.

1. Choose to Be Happy at Work Happiness is largely a choice. Many may argue, but it's true. You can choose to be happy at work. Sound simple? Yes. But, simplicity is often profoundly difficult to put into action. Think positively about your work. Dwell on the aspects of your work you like. Avoid negative people and gossip. Find coworkers you like and enjoy and spend your time with them. Your choices at work largely define your experience. You can choose to be happy at work.

2. Do Something You Love Every Single Day You may or may not love your current job and you may or may not believe that you can find something in your current job to love, but you can. Take a look at yourself, your skills and interests, and find something that you can enjoy doing every day. If you do something you love every single day, your current job won't seem so bad. Of course, you can always make your current job work or decide that it is time to quit your job.

3. Take Charge of Your Own Professional and Personal Development Sometimes employees change job because their bosses fail or lack to help them develop professionally. Who is the person most interested in your development?? The answer, of course, is yourself. You are the person with the most to gain from continuing to develop professionally. Take charge of your own growth; ask for specific and meaningful help from your boss, but march to the music of your personally developed plan and goals. You have the most to gain from growing - and the most to lose, if you stand still.

4. Take Responsibility for Knowing What Is Happening at Work People complain that they don't receive enough communication and information about what is happening with their company, their department's projects, or their coworkers. Passive vessels, they wait for the boss to fill them up with knowledge. And, the knowledge rarely comes. Why? Because the boss is busy doing her job and she doesn't know what you don't know. Seek out the information you need to work effectively. Develop an information network and use it. Assertively request a weekly meeting with your boss and ask questions to learn. You are in charge of the information you receive.

5. Ask for Feedback Frequently Have you made statements such as, "My boss never gives me any feedback, so I never know how I'm doing." Face it, you really know exactly how you're doing. Especially if you feel positively about your performance, you just want to hear him acknowledge you. If you're not positive about your work, think about improving and making a sincere contribution. Then, ask your boss for feedback. Tell him you'd really like to hear his assessment of your work. Talk to your customers, too; if you're serving them well, their feedback is affirming. You are responsible for your own development. Everything else you get is gravy.

6. Make Only Commitments You Can Keep One of the most serious causes of work stress and unhappiness is failing to keep commitments. Many employees spend more time making excuses for failing to keep a commitment, and worrying about the consequences of not keeping a commitment, than they do performing the tasks promised. Create a system of organization and planning that enables you to assess your ability to complete a requested commitment. Don't volunteer if you don't have time. If your workload is exceeding your available time and energy, make a comprehensive plan to ask the boss for help and resources. Don't wallow in the swamp of unkept promises.

7. Avoid Negativity Choosing to be happy at work means avoiding negative conversations, gossip, and unhappy people as much as possible. No matter how positively you feel, negative people have a profound impact on your psyche. Don't let the negative Neds and Nellies bring you down.

8. Practice Professional Courage If you are like most people, you don't like conflict. And the reason why is simple. You've never been trained to participate in meaningful conflict, so you likely think of conflict as scary, harmful, and hurtful. Conflict can be all three; done well, conflict can also help you accomplish your work mission and your personal vision. Conflict can help you serve customers and create successful products. Happy people accomplish their purpose for working. Why let a little professional courage keep you from achieving your goals and dreams? Make conflict your friend.

9. Make Friends "Do you have a best friend at work?" Liking and enjoying your coworkers are hallmarks of a positive, happy work experience. Take time to get to know them. You might actually like and enjoy them. Your network provides support, resources, sharing, and caring.

10. If All Else Fails, Job Searching Will Make You Smile If all of these ideas aren't making you happy at work, it's time to reevaluate your employer, your job, or your entire career. You don't want to spend your life doing work you hate in an unfriendly work environment. Most work environments don't change all that much. But unhappy employees tend to grow even more disgruntled. You can secretly smile while you spend all of your non-work time job searching. It will only be a matter of time until you can quit your job - with a big smile.

Sixways To Shoot Yourself In The Foot During A Job Interview - By Greg Williams

2007-09-21T08:02:00.000-07:00

You may have had the experience of returning from an interview glowing with the knowledge that you nailed it. Then, you wait weeks for someone to return your calls, only to find out that you missed the mark. It may be that you were simply beat out by a more qualified candidate. However, it could be that you made a mistake somewhere along the line that knocked you out of contention. Here are six big gaffes to avoid.

1 Discussing pay too early - Temp jobs aside, if you're really not just out there for the money, asking about pay right away is going to make any other questions you ask sound conniving and insincere. Unless the subject comes up, don't wade into the issue of money in the first interview. You can talk about it after you impress the employer enough for a second interview.

2 Talking tech to non-techies - Feel free to discuss what you know, but remember: If you're talking to non- technical managers or human resources representatives, you're not going to impress them with talk about life in the trenches. Answer questions about your work history briefly and keep the tech comments to a minimum until you know the history of the company and the people involved in the hiring process. If you have questions about the technology in use at the site, keep your questions specific and relevant to the position you're applying for.

3 Ranting about your philosophy - Maybe you hate Bill Gates, Windows XP, and the whole Microsoft Office Suite—but keep it to yourself. Spouting off about your tech philosophy can ruin your chances at the position. Chances are, you'll work with people who need your help with a product you don't like, so you don't want to blast the tools you will likely be using and supporting. If you're asked your opinion about a product, be honest, but don't preach or rant. The interviewer probably just wants to see how you respond to such questions.

4 Climbing the advancement ladder in the interview - If you're joining the ranks of a company, the last thing the interviewer wants to hear is, "How fast can I get out of this job?" Don't ask about opportunities for advancement until the second or third interview. If you're joining a company just to advance into another position, silence is golden. Keep it to yourself unless the interviewer asks or unless it is somehow already known and planned that you'll be on a rapid advancement path. Remember that what you say now can come back to haunt you later. You don't want to brag to someone who might be under your wing after a promotion. And you never know what may happen if you get the job. Learn to accept and adapt, and above all, be happy you have a job.

5 Allowing electronic interruptions - Cell phone and pager etiquette might seem a trivial thing to those who are hooked up, but you can kiss any job opportunity goodbye if you interrupt an interview to take a telephone call, especially if the human resources representative has a low tolerance for personal digital devices. Only if you are exchanging information by invitation should you reveal the fact that you carry a PDA. If you wear it on a belt loop or somewhere that is exposed, lose it, along with any other electrical device hooks and loops, and store them in pocket, purse, or briefcase. If you can't spare the time away from the rest of the world to do an interview, why are you applying for the job? If you think getting rid of electronic communications devices isn't important, just ask any human resources rep who has had a person answer a cellular phone during a job interview. Then ask whether the person got the job.

6 Neglecting to send a follow-up thank you - Beyond thanking your interviewers for their time as you leave, it's vital that you follow up in written form. If the competition for a position is tight, a thank-you note can mean a lot. If the manager is slow to hire, the arrival of your note can serve as a reminder about the candidate who's awaiting the manager's next move. Just after you've completed the interview, take note of anything specific you discussed and make a point of referencing it in your letter. Even a nice greeting card is better than nothing. It may seem like a small detail, but the experts will tell you that this tried-and-true tactic really makes an impact.

Develop Effective Work Relationship By Susan M. Heathfield

2007-09-21T07:42:00.000-07:00

You can submarine your career and work relationships by the actions you take and the behaviors you exhibit at work. No matter your education, your experience, or your title, if you can't play well with others, you will never accomplish your work mission.

Effective work relationships form the cornerstone for success and satisfaction with your job and your career. How important are effective work relationships? Effective work relationships form the basis for promotion, pay increases, goal accomplishment, and job satisfaction.

The Gallup organisation studied indicators of work satisfaction. They found that whether you have a best friend at work was one of the twelve key questions that predicted job satisfaction.

A supervisor in a several hundred person company quickly earned a reputation for not playing well with others. He collected data and used the data to find fault, place blame, and make other employees look bad. He enjoyed identifying problems but rarely suggested solutions. He bugged his supervisor weekly for a bigger title and more money so he could tell other employees what to do. When he announced he was job hunting, not a single employee suggested that the company take action to convince him to stay. He had burned his bridges.

These are the top seven ways you can play well with others at work. They form the basis for effective work relationships. These are the actions you want to take to create a positive, empowering, motivational work environment for people.

Bring suggested solutions with the problems to the meeting table. Some employees spend an inordinate amount of time identifying problems. Honestly? That's the easy part. Thoughtful solutions are the challenge that will earn respect and admiration from coworkers and bosses
Don't ever play the blame game. You alienate coworkers, supervisors, and reporting staff. Yes, you may need to identify who was involved in a problem. You may even ask the Deming question: what about the work system caused the employee to fail? But, not my fault and publicly identifying and blaming others for failures will earn enemies. These enemies will, in turn, help you to fail. You do need allies at work.
Your verbal and nonverbal communication matters. If you talk down to another employee, use sarcasm, or sound nasty, the other employee hears you. We are all radar machines that constantly scope out our environment. In one organization a high level manager said to me, "I know you don't think I should scream at my employees. But, sometimes, they make me so mad. When is it appropriate for me to scream at the employees?" Answer? Never, of course, if respect for people is a hallmark of your organization.
Never blind side a coworker, boss, or reporting staff person. If the first time a coworker hears about a problem is in a staff meeting or from an email sent to his supervisor, you have blind sided the coworker. Always discuss problems, first, with the people directly involved who "own" the work system. Also called lynching or ambushing your coworkers, you will never build effective work alliances unless your coworkers trust you. And, without alliances, you never accomplish the most important goals.
Keep your commitments. In an organization, work is interconnected. If you fail to meet deadlines and commitments, you affect the work of other employees. Always keep commitments, and if you can't, make sure all affected employees know what happened. Provide a new due date and make every possible effort to honor the new deadline.
Share credit for accomplishments, ideas, and contributions. How often do you accomplish a goal or complete a project with no help from others? If you are a manager, how many of the great ideas you promote were contributed by staff members? Take the time, and expend the energy, to thank, reward, recognize and specify contributions of the people who help you succeed. This is a no-fail approach to building effective work relationships.
Help other employees find their greatness. Every employee in your organization has talents, skills, and experience. If you can help fellow employees harness their best abilities, you benefit the organization immeasurably. The growth of individual employees benefits the whole. Compliment, recognize, praise, and notice contributions. You don't have to be a manager to help create a positive, motivating environment for employees. In this environment, employees do find and contribute their greatness.

If you regularly carry out these seven actions, you will play well with others and develop effective work relationships. Coworkers will value you as a colleague. Bosses will believe you play on the right team. You'll accomplish your work goals, and you may even experience fun, recognition, and personal motivation. Work can't get any better than that.