Archive for the ‘Management’ Category
Hiring Priority, Skill or spirit?
Business is picking up and it’s time to start hiring. After you get past the basics of the job, what should be your priority? Skills or Spirit?
Below is an article from Michelle Randall with some interesting insight and examples.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1793369/hiring-for-skill-or-spirit
Why You Should Stop Being a Wimp
Who succeeds in the world of work? It’s not the person that sits back and takes no chances. This is a great article from Suzanne Lucas.
http://www.bnet.com/blog/evil-hr-lady/why-you-should-stop-being-a-wimp/2671
Helping companies run better, grow faster and make more money
Insperity – Helping companies run better, grow faster and make more money.
My last post talked about how business owners can achieve greater profitability with a human capital strategy. Insperity can help make that happen for small and medium-sized companies.
Contact me at broh@dfwbusinesspro.com for more information.
Business Owners make more money with an effective Human Capital Strategy!
Business Owners make more money with an effective Human Capital Strategy!
For centuries we have known that leading and motivating employees in a positive way results in a better place for everyone to work. It also drives greater revenue and profits for the business.
A 1994 Harvard Business Study of 435 public companies showed that companies rated in the top 10% of Human Resources practices had 3.66 times higher revenue per employee than companies rated in the bottom 10% of HR practices. Annual studies by the Insperity Mid-Market group of the top 100 best places to work in the United States shows these companies out produced and out gained the Dow, NASDAQ and S&P.
How does this work? A simple formula.
A persons total capacity for work, TC, equals their minimum required work, MR plus discretionary effort, DE.
TC = MR + DE
As a business owner you can demand MR. Your employees choose to bring DE. How can you help with this decision? Here are the best practices:
- Align employees with business strategy
- Improve employee engagement
- Improved performance management
- Align compensation with goals
- Improve recruiting and retention
- Reduce the cost of benefits compliance
I will expand on these practices in future articles. Email me at broh@dfwbusinesspro.com if your business can’t wait.
“Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.”
“Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.”
Coach Wooden’s quote is more important today than ever before. The rapid changes and multitude of inputs that surround us can be overwhelming. What should I do now? How can I ensure we can still win tomorrow?
One of the most important questions to ask today is, “What should I QUIT doing?”
We keep hearing that little voice in our heads telling us “winners never quit.” Unfortunately, that little voice does not always tell us what we really need to hear. We need to continually challenge and sometimes quit doing things that used to work but now get in the way of success.
- Quit Taking a Ride . . . and Take the Wheel
- Quit Getting Comfortable . . . and Explore the Edge
- Quit Analyzing . . . and Follow your Intuition
- Quit Managing your Time . . . and Manage your Attention
- Quit Showing Interest . . . and Commit
- Quit Moving . . . and Be Still
- Quit Striving for Success . . . and Seek Significance
Lee J. Colan, Ph.D. is President of The L Group, Inc., a Dallas, Texas-based consulting firm. He is a high-energy leadership advisor, author and leadership expert. Dr. Colan has a great insight and tools to help with change. Contact me and I will make the introduction.
Graciousness can pay priceless dividends.
When it comes to serving customers, working with employees or just dealing with people, Bob Greene writes on how graciousness can pay priceless dividends. And it doesn’t cost a thing.
4-star general, 5-star grace
You may have heard the story about what happened between White House adviser Valerie Jarrett and Four-star Army Gen. Peter Chiarelli at a recent Washington dinner.
As reported by the website Daily Caller, Jarrett, a longtime Chicago friend of President Obama, was seated at the dinner when a general — later identified as Chiarelli, the No. 2-ranking general in the U.S. Army hierarchy, who was also a guest at the gathering — walked behind her. Chiarelli was in full dress uniform.
Jarrett, apparently only seeing Chiarelli’s striped uniform pants, thought that he was a waiter. She asked him to get her a glass of wine.
She was said to be mortified as soon as she realized her mistake, and who wouldn’t be? But the instructive part of this tale is what Chiarelli did next.
Rather than take offense, or try to make Jarrett feel small for her blunder, the general, in good humor, went and poured her a glass of wine. It was evident that he wanted to defuse the awkward moment, and to let Jarrett know that she should not feel embarrassed.
As Chiarelli wrote in an e-mail to CNN Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr:
“It was an honest mistake that ANYONE could have made. She was sitting, I was standing and walking behind her and all she saw were the two stripes on my pants which were almost identical to the waiters’ pants — REALLY. She apologized and will come to the house for dinner if a date can be worked out in March.”
Now, even if you’ve never met Chiarelli or followed him in the news, you have to be impressed with him after hearing that story. With his lofty rank in the military, he could have given Jarrett the deep freeze, reproached her and corrected her. But he poured her the wine — “It was only good fun,” he wrote to Starr — and invited her to a meal at his home. He came out of the incident as a decent and magnanimous person.
It’s easy to do, if you care about other people’s feelings. Sportswriters who covered the National Basketball Association in the late 1980s and 1990s like to tell a story about Karl Malone, the great forward for the Utah Jazz. It seems that one day in the baggage-claim area of the Salt Lake City airport, a woman was trying to lift her bags from the carousel and, seeing Malone, who was there to pick up his brother from an arriving flight, mistook him for a skycap.
She asked him to carry her bags to her car.
Malone was a wealthy and world-famous athlete at the time. He could so easily have hurt the woman’s feelings, rebuked her. But what did he do?
According to longtime Salt Lake Tribune sports reporter Steve Luhm, who covered the incident at the time and who confirmed it to me last week, Malone carried the woman’s bags all the way to her car. Only when she reached for her purse to give him a tip did he in a friendly manner introduce himself and decline the offer.
One of the most indelible stories about a person going out of his way to avoid humiliating another person was told in Gay Talese’s 1966 Esquire article “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” widely considered to be perhaps the finest magazine profile ever written.
In the article, Talese described a party at the home of Sinatra’s former wife, at which Sinatra, who maintained cordial relations with her, was acting as host. A young woman at the party, according to Talese, “while leaning against a table, accidentally with her elbow knocked over one of a pair of alabaster birds to the floor, smashing it to pieces.”
Talese wrote that Sinatra’s daughter Nancy, also a guest at the party, started to say: “Oh, that was one of my mother’s favorite…”
Talese continued:
“But before she could complete the sentence, Sinatra glared at her, cutting her off, and while 40 other guests in the room all stared in silence, Sinatra walked over, quickly with his finger flicked the other alabaster bird off the table, smashing it to pieces, and then put an arm gently around [the young woman] and said, in a way that put her completely at ease, ‘That’s OK, kid.’ ”
It can work the other way, too, and can be remembered just as long. I was once working on a profile of a famous singer, also for Esquire, and one evening we rode in his limousine to a concert hall. As he walked backstage he was stopped by a young, nervous and inexperienced usher with a clipboard who had been assigned to make certain everyone in the area was authorized. The usher asked the famous singer if he was the comedian who would open the show.
The singer did not speak to the young usher or make eye contact with him, but instead walked immediately over to a person in the management of the auditorium and demanded that the usher be dismissed.
The singer, in trying to make the young man who had made a mistake feel small, had only managed to make himself seem tiny. What Gen. Chiarelli did, though — like Karl Malone, like Frank Sinatra — was to demonstrate, instinctively and in an instant, what it means to be a big person.
The rest of us may never reach the exalted status of those three men. But kindness knows no social stratum. Every day, we’re given the choice. Consideration? It’s free of charge. It can echo forever.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/02/13/greene.gracious.gesture/index.html
You can’t do great things if you’re just a little better than everybody else!
I read several articles over the holidays that got me thinking about the new year, careers and business leadership. The article below aims to help employees with career and work/life balance. Indirectly Mr. Taylor is advising business owners on managing employees, their business and themselves.
Eventually the “I’m just thankful for a job” business climate will improve. Creating an environment where employees give that “discretionary effort” for success today will also keep them when opportunities open up. It will also help your bottom line, now and down the road.
Call or email me if you want proven help with this critical situation!
Happy New Year!
Bill Roh
Is It Time to Leave Your Job?
by William C. Taylor
It’s the holiday season, when we start making lists of the gifts we want — and of the pros and cons of the jobs we have. The end of one year and the start of a New Year is the time when just about everyone takes stock of where they are with their work, and whether they are where they expected to be.
So as you get ready to transition from your Christmas list to a wish list for your career, ask yourself these five questions about your company, your colleagues, and your personal game plan for what comes next.
1. Does my company stand for something — anything — special?
It’s hard to be thrilled with your job if the company you work for is struggling to succeed, or feels stuck and irrelevant. I’m not talking about obvious problems — red ink and layoffs. I mean the nagging sense that the company will never be anything more than OK, just another ho-hum player in its field. In this hyper-competitive age, you can’t do great things as a company if you’re just a little better than everybody else. Does the company you work for really stand out from the crowd? If not, why on earth are you working there?
2. Am I excited to see my colleagues when I show up for work on Monday morning?
Lots of people sign on with a company because it’s got a cool reputation, or it’s prestigious, or it’s got a great stock price. But quickly you realize that “working for” a company is an abstraction. The reality is that you work with the people closest to you — those in your department, in your unit, in your region. Most experts say that over the long term, employees aren’t loyal to a company as a company. They are loyal to the people they work beside day after day. Can you imagine not spending 40 or 50 hours a week with the people you work beside every day? If so, maybe it’s time to make a move and fine a group of colleagues who stimulate you and motivate you.
3. Do I have a voice at work — does anyone who matters listen to what I say?
There’s nothing more depressing and demotivating than feeling that you don’t matter as a person — even if you’re part of a group that’s working well in a company that’s doing fine. In this age of participation and communication, people are hungry for a say, a voice, a sense that their opinion counts. If you feel like your opinion doesn’t count, maybe it’s time to find a company where it does.
4. Am I learning as fast as the world is changing?
I first heard this question from strategy guru Gary Hamel, and I ask it of myself all the time. In a world that moves so fast, the most dangerous thing in anyone’s career is the sense that you’re standing still — that you’re not learning, that you’re not being challenged, that you’re stuck. If that’s how you feel, that’s a strong sign that it’s time to make a change.
5. Am I making enough money?
Strange as it sounds, this is the worst reason to leave a job. Virtually every study I’ve seen shows that there’s almost no connection between how much money you make and how satisfied you are with your job. There really are things that money can’t buy — and happiness at work is one of them.
Here’s hoping you get what you asked for-both in terms of what’s under the tree and what’s ahead in your career.
http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/111648/is-it-time-to-leave-your-job?mod=career-worklife_balance
Register, Protect and Defend
Register, Protect and Defend
By Barbara Findlay Schenck
Published December 08, 2010
| Business on Main
Paul Allen’s recent patent infringement suit against Facebook, Google and other tech giants has fueled discussions from boardrooms to coffee shops. What needs to be protected, how can you put protections in place, and how do you defend intellectual property once registrations, patents, trademarks and copyrights are filed? Here’s a primer on what every business owner should know.
Registering a business name
Depending on whether a business goes by the legal name of its owner (John Smith Plumbing) or an assumed name (A-Team Plumbing), and depending on its location and business structure (sole proprietorship, partnership, LLC, or corporation), the path into local and state government databases of registered business names varies. The Business.gov website provides forms and instructions for this necessary step toward protecting your business name.
Registering with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
Just because you’re safe to use a name, idea or process doesn’t mean others can’t use it, too. Most intellectual property rights are limited to the territory in which they’re registered. To protect rights across broad market areas, register with the USPTO in one of three categories:
- Trademarks protect words, names, symbols, sounds or colors that distinguish the goods and services of a business. Start by searching the USPTO database to determine that the mark you want appears to be available. If so, hire an attorney who specializes in trademarks to conduct a more extensive search before proceeding to claim the trademark in one of two ways:
- Officially register the mark following the USPTO instructions. The process usually requires the expertise of an intellectual property lawyer but, once registered, the trademark (indicated by the symbol ®) provides government protection from liability or infringement issues and is renewable so long as it’s used in commerce.
- Establish common-law trademark rights by using the mark, accompanied by a “TM” in superscript (“SM” for service marks), consistently and continuously in business dealings. Be aware that common-law trademarks are limited to geographic areas in which the marks have been used and, if challenged, lack the protection of registered trademarks.
- Patents are property rights granted for finite periods to inventors “to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention throughout the United States or importing the invention into the United States.” The USPTO site links to applications, instructions and registered patent attorneys.
- Copyrights give producers of writings, music and works of art exclusive rights to control reproduction of their work. Copyrights take effect once the work is produced in tangible form. To strengthen protection, include a line on the work that states, “Copyright,” or “ã,” followed by the date of first publication, and the name of the copyright holder. For further protection, file a copyright registration through the U.S. Copyright Office.
In addition, the World Intellectual Property Organization provides information on obtaining international protection.
Defending registered rights
Establishing rights is the first — but certainly not the last — step in protecting intellectual property. Even after registrations are in place, responsibility falls to property owners to:
Protect registrations by carefully following government and legal instructions. Misuse jeopardizes registrations and, as a result, exclusive rights. As a famous example, Otis Elevator Company, owner of the Escalator trademark, allowed the word to be misused as a noun, rather than as an adjective followed by a generic descriptor — e.g., Escalator brand moving stairs. As a result, in 1950, courts deemed that “escalator” had become “genericized” and therefore part of the public domain, and trademark protection was revoked.
Move quickly against intellectual property violations. Waiting can erode rights. Though the Paul Allen patent infringement suit is far from decided, The Wall Street Journal includes this quote from University of Missouri law professor Dennis Crouch: “If the patent holder just sat on their rights for a long time … the patent might become unenforceable.”
Register it, use it and defend it — in that order
To protect intellectual property, first work with attorneys and government offices to establish your legal claim. Then use your property — correctly and to the letter of the law. And, finally, should your rights be infringed upon, move quickly and decisively to keep your property proprietary, out of general use, and of high value to your business.
Barbara Findlay Schenck is a small-business strategist, the author of “Small Business Marketing for Dummies,” and the co-author of “Branding for Dummies,” “Selling Your Business for Dummies” and “Business Plans Kit for Dummies.”
http://www.foxsmallbusinesscenter.com/sbc/2010/12/08/register-protect-defend/
Employee Classification: Differences Between Employees and Contractors
It may be tempting. Classifying workers as “contractors” and not “employees” can save you Social Security and Medicare taxes and unemployment tax and also eliminate the hassle of withholding taxes on wages. But misclassification can be costly. All it takes is for one former “contractor” to apply for unemployment or to get hurt on the “job” and apply for workers compensation benefits. Then the questions start, the answers resulting in back taxes, penalties and fines. Possibly going back three years and ensnaring all “contractors” used by the company.
Employee Classification: Differences Between Employees and Contractors
By: Jennifer Leahy | Monday, November 08, 2010
It may be tempting. Classifying workers as “contractors” and not “employees” can save you Social Security and Medicare taxes and unemployment tax and also eliminate the hassle of withholding taxes on wages. But misclassification can be costly. Employers who fail to properly categorize can be liable for employment taxes, plus interest and penalties. Since each and every employee and situation are unique there are no cut and dried rules.
The Internal Revenue Service uses three categories to determine whether a worker is an employee or a contractor:
• Behavioral control. Is the employee told how, when, and where to complete a task? Did the individual undergo or require training? Training suggests that there are specific job requirements that indicate a level of control.
• Financial control. Can the worker lose money on the project? Does he assume responsibilities for all of his expenses? A contractor should maintain financial independence.
• Relationship of the parties. Is there a contract or formal agreement between the two parties? Does the employer offer the worker any type of benefit such as health insurance, paid time off or retirement? Anyone receiving benefits is an employee.
Many businesses and institutions grapple with the complexities of the employee vs. contractor designation.
The Texas A&M University system advises the use of an agreement or contract that outlines the duties of the contractor. The document “should be fairly specific in what is to be provided and amount or lack of control the university/agency has over the individual.”
Employers who are still uncertain about whether an individual is an employee or a contractor can file IRS Form SS-8, Determination of Worker Status for Purposes of Federal Employment Taxes and Income Tax Withholding, and receive a ruling to insure compliance.
In a recent statement to the Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions, Deputy Secretary of Labor Seth Harris warns against the far-reaching ramifications of misclassification.
“When employees are misclassified, their employers typically do not pay unemployment taxes or carry workers’ compensation insurance for those employees. As a result, unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation funds are underfunded. Moreover, employers that obey the law end up carrying the weight for scofflaws in the form of higher workers’ compensation premiums,” offers Harris.
Harris notes a Tennessee study conservatively estimates that, due to misclassification in the construction industry alone, the state lost between $4.9 million and $11.4 million in employers’ unemployment insurance payments and between $30 million and $70 million in workers’ compensation premiums in 2006. A report by Ohio’s Attorney General found that misclassification cost the state $20 million in unemployment compensation payments, $103 million in workers’ compensation premiums, and more than $36 million in unpaid state income tax revenues in 2005.
As many states experience budget shortfalls, identifying and punishing businesses who fail to properly classify employees has become a higher priority. Correctly classifying workers can save business owners financial penalties as well as the headache of government intervention.
High-performing companies take a radically different approach to human resources
Business leaders – does your human capital strategy for 2011 need an upgrade. Do what high-performing companies do, reboot the function!
High-performing companies take a radically different approach to human resources, study says
By: CCH Staff | Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Workforce issues are critical as companies struggle to emerge from the global recession. Yet many companies are failing to make human resources a priority or to adopt workforce best practices being used by a few leaders. And there are significant gaps between senior leadership and human resources executives when it comes to addressing workforce challenges. Managing talent, leadership development, employee engagement, and strategic workforce planning are the areas that executives feel are most important—and for which they believe they have limited current capability.
Those are the key findings of a new global report by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the World Federation of People Management Associations (WFPMA). The report, Creating People Advantage 2010: How Companies Can Adapt Their HR Practices for Volatile Times, is based on a global online survey that captures the views of 5,561 human resources and business-unit executives from 109 countries in multiple industries. The survey, a follow-up to BCG’s “2008 Creating People Advantage” report, was conducted between December 2009 and March 2010; it was supplemented by detailed, face-to-face interviews with more than 150 senior executives, mostly from multinational companies.
“The report shows that high-performing companies don’t just put more resources into HR—they reboot the function,” said J. Puckett, a Dallas-based senior partner and head of BCG’s Organization practice in the Americas. “Leaders go deeper on human resources issues than their competitors. They focus on flexibility, not on cutbacks, and are more willing and able to use human resources as a strategic partner.”
The survey also indicates that there are significant talent gaps in key industries, functions and geographies, as companies fail to groom new talent to replace current leaders. The gaps will become more acute over time, with many reaching critical levels in the decade between 2020 and 2030.
Among the key findings:
High-performing companies take a radically different approach to HR. They put much more effort than low performers into measuring workforce performance, transforming HR into a strategic partner of senior management, and branding themselves as good employers. These three priorities of top performers ranked dramatically lower at low-performing companies.
High performers actually focus efforts on fewer, carefully chosen HR projects, but they keep refining and experimenting in these areas to make them stronger.
Excellent financial performance correlates with a corporate focus on employee performance and rewards. (The report defines high performers as companies that have demonstrated top-quintile revenue and profitability growth within their industry over the past three years.)
Companies feel unprepared to meet their most critical HR needs. Respondents identified four areas as most critical: managing talent, leadership development, employee engagement and strategic workforce planning. But they also said that these were among the areas in which they had the least capability at present.
Companies are too short-term-oriented, not paying enough attention to a coming leadership skills shortage at senior levels that will peak between 2020 and 2030. Critical talent gaps threaten multiple companies, industries and regions that will be hard pressed to identify and train future leaders. Fully 56 percent of survey respondents cited a critical talent gap for senior management’s successors.
Here again, high-performing companies outpace their competitors. High performers manage to recruit 50 percent of their top executives from internal talent pools. Low-performing companies source only 13 percent of their senior leaders internally. In addition, when developing future leaders, high-performing companies rank people development and effective decision-making higher than do low performers.
Companies are failing to draw on the broadest possible array of talent. In 44 percent of companies surveyed, women constitute 10 percent or less of the talent pool.
The biggest talent gap is expected in the IT function. Geographically, the largest gap will occur in Japan and in the region of the former Soviet Union. A separate 2010 study by BCG and the World Economic Forum showed that by 2030, the U.S. will face critical talent shortages in IT and business services, construction, healthcare, hospitality, financial services, trade, transport, communications, and public administration.
Strategic workforce planning is a critical but underused tool. The time horizon for workforce planning should be at least as long as the one for strategic planning—five years or more. Yet only 15 percent of respondents said their companies deploy simple workforce supply models, and only 9 percent said they use a sophisticated workforce supply-and-demand model. When it comes to performance measurement, only 27 percent said they use advanced metrics such as value added per person.
Flexibility works and cutbacks don’t—but low-performing companies continue to cut. Flexibility measures, such as streamlined processes and flattened hierarchies, are more effective in period of prolonged economic difficulty than cutbacks are. The German short-time work model, which leverages reduced pay for reduced work, was rated 10 percent more effective than the average measure. Yet low-performing companies continue to use traditional cutback measures such as layoffs, eliminating overtime or reducing training. High-performing companies, by contrast, focused on flexibility.
HR/business unit partnerships show promise—but both sides must improve their skills. 73 percent of respondents said their companies have introduced partnership programs between human resources and their business units, and they consider this the most effective means of connecting HR and line businesses. But skills gaps must be closed. Respondents said that HR executives need to build their skills in business planning and analytics, and that business managers must improve their ability to deal with low-performing employers and to develop HR strategy.
Work-life balance is no longer a priority as employers shift focus to performance. Work-life balance was a top-ranked concern when the survey was fielded in 2008, but rated much lower in 2010. In the 2010 survey, top emerging concerns were enhancing employee engagement and improving workforce performance and rewards.
In the U.S., the top priority was leadership development, followed in order by managing talent, workforce planning and employee engagement.
Managing work-life balance fell from 4th in the 2008 global rankings to 16th in 2010. Managing change and cultural transformation fell from 5th in 2008 to 12th in 2010. Managing demographics fell from 12th in 2008 to 19th in 2010.
“Managing demographics has been greatly undervalued,” said Puckett. “It remains highly relevant to multinational companies, especially as the workforce ages, exacerbating the talent crisis.”
Middle managers are critical for success. They are the key to employee engagement, communicating company values, and the smooth running of the business on a day-to-day basis. But they need to be empowered by being given larger responsibilities, trained for their expanded roles, and more involved in strategic decisions.
“Managing talent, leadership development, strategic workforce planning and employee engagement are the most critical topics around the world, ” said Grant Freeland, a Boston-based senior partner in the Organization practice. “The good news is that they are on the table. But there is much more that organizations need to do to meet HR needs that, if unaddressed, could reach crisis proportions.”
Added Ernesto Espinosa, president of the WFPMA and a coauthor of the report: “The challenge for HR is to bring talent management practices of executives to the next level in order to support business growth.”
Source: The Boston Consulting Group; www.bcg.com.
http://www.hrtools.com/leadership_and_management/articles/high_performing_companies_take_a_radically_different_approach_to_human_resources_study_says.aspx