News You Can Use: 11/28/2018
- Managers, consider these things before you give someone a promotion
Moving into a managerial role is usually considered a high point in one’s career. It’s a sign that the company recognizes your leadership potential. In actuality, being a good employee doesn’t automatically translate to being a good leader. That transition requires learning a lot of new skills, sometimes from scratch.
When new managers struggle, so do their teams. The likelihood of losing employees under a struggling manager is high. And that gets costly when you look at all that goes into replacing employees. Statistics on the cost of replacing a new hire run from tens of thousands of dollars to 1.5 to two times the employee’s annual salary.
- You Didn’t Get the Promotion: Now What? 3 Options For Moving On When You Can’t Move Up
Forget society’s formula. Ask yourself what you want. Do you really want to sink more hours into a job that may or may not have anything to do with your passions and beliefs? Is managing a small chain of stores specializing in Halloween costumes for pets worth the extra twenty-plus hours of your existence you’ll put in? If it is, great – but don’t buy into the notion that you need to constantly curb-stomp your fellow man to chase something you never wanted to begin with.
https://www.primermagazine.com/2018/earn/didnt-get-promotion
- The connection paradox: Why are workplaces more isolating than ever? | Dan Schawbel
- How to Be Wrong Without Losing Face
When JFK went on national television and took full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs disaster, the nation didn’t throw up their hands in collective horror and ask themselves how they could have possible elected such a moron to high office. The opposite was true. His popularity rose. Far from losing the trust of the citizenry, he gained even more of it. There’s something inspiring about a leader who can come right out and confess their faults.
The reasons for this aren’t hard to discern. For one, you become relatable, because there isn’t a single person on the planet who hasn’t been in your shoes. Secondly, letting down your guard, showing vulnerability, is attractive and inspiring. Instead of locking the door to your soul, you let folks in.
- Half of Jobs at Amazon’s Two New Headquarters Won’t Be Tech Positions
New York City officials said during a presentation Tuesday night that of the at least 25,000 jobs that the online retailer plans to bring to a new headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, 12,500 will be in tech.
The other half will be “administrative jobs, custodial staff, HR, all those things,” said Eleni Bourinaris-Suarez, vice president of government and community relations at the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which helped broker the Queens deal with Amazon.
Virginia officials said they expect the same job breakdown for Amazon’s new headquarters in Northern Virginia. The company has also promised to bring at least 25,000 jobs to that site.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/half-of-queens-amazon-jobs-wont-be-tech-positions-1542829226
Photo by Caleb Frith on Unsplash
News You Can Use: 12/16/2015
- 6 Ways to Salve Burnout Before It’s Career Terminal
Do more of what you enjoy.
Are you really spending your work time doing what you really enjoy? Or does that get pushed to the side while other, mundane, tasks take priority? Take an inventory of how you spend your day by keeping a journal. Divide a page into two columns, one for the things you don’t enjoy and one column for those you do. Each time you perform a task during the day, record it in one of the two columns along with how much time you spent doing it. Tally the number of tasks and hours spent at the end of the day, or week. If your “don’t like” column towers over the “like” this may be what’s causing your burnout. - Procurement Study Pays Attention to Younger Generation
“In our experience,” says Rudzki,, CPOs can dramatically improve their internal credibility with the executive staff by relating their proposed agenda (including the need to transform supply management) to the metrics that the senior staff and the Board of Directors already monitor.
“Rather than having Procurement introduce a new metric for itself (which may come across as self-serving), we have generally found it to be more productive — and quicker at achieving credibility — to relate the proposed CPO agenda directly to the particular metrics currently in use by the company’s senior management,” he says.
http://www.scmr.com/article/procurement_study_pays_attention_to_younger_generation
- HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR YEAR-END PERFORMANCE REVIEW
Remember, the reason you’re having a review in the first place is to give you feedback that will hopefully help you improve at your job. Avoid going on the defensive or blaming others for your performance failures. In fact, don’t discuss your teammates at all and focus solely on your own performance.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3054456/how-to-make-the-most-of-your-year-end-performance-review
- Why There Will Always Be Human Sourcers
Will we, sourcers, become obsolete? I am not sure about that…..As a global sourcer, I pride myself in my creativity. Sometimes I use a gutsy approach and I approach candidates that would not be the first choice for this role – They could be either too senior, he may have just started a new role, he may be of another industry – Hell – when I start being creative? I have no idea on how to anticipate where my search is going to take me… In the mid of one search, I open another window (One? 20!) and perform another search there with another idea that came up to me on a spur of a moment.
http://www.eremedia.com/sourcecon/why-there-will-always-be-human-sourcers/
- Your Best Employee Is Your Weakest Link
When I ask business owners and managers to identify their weakest link most of them will start a mental inventory of their team’s attitude and skills. But in almost every case the weakest link isn’t the slacker, or the prima donna or the dim bulb who is costing the business the most. Even without a tragic wake-up call, the weakest link is nearly always the person who knows how to do things no one else in the business can do. If that link breaks, even for a sick day or short vacation, it costs your business in small, but cumulative ways that you might not even notice. If they are able, or unwilling, to return to work those costs will accumulate fast.
- Why I Give Everyone Hugs — Even Clients
[This one is for you Tracy]As for work, as odd as this may sound, a hug de-personalizes work situations in a flash. I guess nothing can be more personal than body contact, but for me a hug says, “This isn’t about you or me individually; it’s about us as a team.”
After a discussion in which you’ve been given feedback, especially tough feedback, a hug says that those comments weren’t personal. It says that those comments are just business and that it’s my job to give you that feedback.
Photo: Patrick Fore
Productivity Bulletin: 11/28/2014
Happy Black Friday readers – go buy something and help the economy, but when you are done – here is something educational.
- Increase employee satisfaction by recognizing hard work
The obvious first two incentives are monetary and paid time off. These are also some of the most expensive for the company and usually are reserved for the highest achievers on a managerial or sales force, or are distributed evenly across a company that is showing stellar lateral performance. While this kind of incentive is great at riling up a storm on the sales floor or in the bullpen: if a company uses this too much, it could suffer huge financial loss after a while…
- Productive people never have “free time”
Productive people are never “free.” They don’t have 15 minutes on their lunch break to “have a quick call.” They don’t “kill time”—a terrible phrase. You can always put a window of time to good use if you work for it. Productive people schedule their priorities—not always their time, but always their priorities. When they don’t have something to do, they find something to do.
http://lifehacker.com/productive-people-are-never-free-1661375021
- Kick @$$ at work:
This isn’t the best example in the article, but it is something to consider and reflect upon (seriously, read this article):Remember names: At one job interview, the interviewer introduced himself and then announced that he was going to ‘ask me a bunch of tough technical questions.’ He did and I aced it. I was thrilled with my performance. He then announced that he had one more question for me. My smug self thought, ‘Throw it at me! I just killed all the other ones. Here is what it was:
What is my name?
I didn’t have a clue what his name was and felt like a complete idiot.