Procurement & Career Guidance
I spent the last two months reading articles, finding videos, and reading books about leadership development. I was surprised with what I found.
45% of managers report they did not receive formal training to manage people or develop strategy.
How can we have so many people striving to advance, yet we don’t have a good system to ensure we are developing good managers and leaders?
This video covers development strategies mixed with my own personal experiences and thoughts.
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash
Children from ages 4 to 10 were presented with scenarios in which they had to give up chocolates in order to get a cake or plant seeds in a garden to get tomatoes. All children expressed dislike for those who did not contribute and were even willing to give up stickers to punish them. The youngest subjects exhibited a stronger aversion to free-riders than 9- and 10-year-olds.
However, when a freeloader has a good excuse for not contributing — e.g. her pet ate her chocolate — the aversion was greatly reduced, the researchers report.
“Even young children expect cooperation and are willing to work to sustain it even at cost to themselves,” Dunham said. “I find this very positive. The seeds that sustain cooperation seem to emerge early on, and while as a society we need to sustain and nurture these values, we may not need to instill them in the first place.”
https://news.yale.edu/2018/07/23/even-4-year-olds-dislike-freeloaders
At the heart of the program is a compensation system that meticulously tracks how much every person and team contributes to earnings. Workers receive a base salary, which they augment by earning Will for completing tasks. Quarterly bonuses can rival a year’s pay for top performers, says Naito. “It’s enough to buy a foreign-brand car every year,” he says. “We call it the ‘Will Dream.’ ”
Earning virtual currency begins at the team level, where bosses allocate a portion of the group’s Will budget to each task they must complete. Team members then use an app to bid in an auction for those jobs. Assignments that don’t attract any bids often turn out to be unnecessary, Naito says. And managers who’ve misused or abused the system have been abandoned by their workers, who are free to move to other teams.
Whether it’s accounts won, servers maintained, leads gained, or warehouses managed, all of our activities in our professional careers can be quantified. By sharing your specific high scores rather than vague duties, you give your future boss the ability to understand how far you can run, how high you can jump, in your career.
When you start to think in high scores, you’ll banish boring phrases such as “seasoned executive,” “responsible for,” and “managed.” And you’ll recast your experiences to include the most exciting and impressive outcomes you’ve achieved in each area of your job. Share your high scores attained, achievements unlocked, and badges won to attract your future boss’s attention in 2020.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90446884/how-to-write-the-best-resume-for-2020
Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash
Transparency is at the heart of the recent employee controversy. “I was put on administrative leave, without warning. My account was deactivated while I was working,” Laurence Berland told fellow workers at Friday’s demonstration. He claims that he was grilled for two and a half hours by Google executives–not allowed to take notes or even use the restroom–and that he was never given a clear explanation for his offense. “I had to find out from the press,” he told the crowd, referring to the Bloomberg article.
The only documents he claims he accessed were appointment calendars of Google executives–calendars that are open for any full-time employees to peruse. The motivation, he says, was to see if management was meeting to discuss ways to monitor activist workers like him.
Google employee organizing has always centered around ethical issues like the company’s cooperation with the federal government or its treatment of women, minorities, and contractors. It’s not been about money–at least not for the employees themselves.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90435484/the-protests-at-google-are-about-free-expression-not-money
Returnship programs aren’t, strictly speaking, new. Goldman Sachs launched the first returnship initiative a little more than a decade ago; since then, 50-plus companies have opened their doors, including IBM, Johnson & Johnson and United Technologies. In April, Apple offered a 17-week return-to-work program for professionals who both took time away from work and have more than five years of professional experience. These programs are typically open to people who have left their industries for two or more years and last for a limited period — usually between eight weeks and six months — and are designed to provide networking and mentoring opportunities, help returnees refresh their professional skill set and give the company a chance to gauge whether the returnee is a long-term fit.
However, these programs are not without their flaws. While some returnships are paid, many are not. Others require the returnee to pay for their participation. Hiring, too, can vary widely. While Ford’s returnship program hired 98 percent of its enrollees, Goldman Sachs only accepted 1.9 percent. Both are on extreme and opposing ends of the hiring spectrum; research indicates that most programs hiring between 50-100 percent of their participants.
When I first became a product manager, I was supervising an engineering team. It became clear pretty quickly that I didn’t understand the complexities and constraints team members were facing. And because no one was going to teach me how to do my job correctly (and they shouldn’t have to), I realized I had to be proactive in learning about the challenges.
UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT OF PAST FAILURES
To right the wrongs in the department, I needed more context around the team’s past efforts. I needed to examine what succeeded and what failed and assessed it against the current landscape before proposing any ideas. For the team to take me seriously, I knew that I had to demonstrate knowledge and awareness around the broader circumstances.
MEET WITH TEAM MEMBERS INDIVIDUALLY
Meet with everyone on the team individually, and ask them what’s going well or poorly. Pose questions that hit on the elements of a SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This will help you spot problems, find the high-impact small wins, and determine any longer-term projects and issues.
In that vein, set one-on-one meetings to build trust with people in other departments. A lack of expertise can be an advantage in terms of learning how the rest of the organization views your team—you can play the role of student and demonstrate you care about others’ perspectives and how your team’s work relates to theirs.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90434738/how-to-manage-teams-when-youre-not-the-subject-matter-expert