Monday, April 20, 2015

What Managers Need to Remember: By Your Pupils You’ll Be Taught

“Can you believe it? Now because of realignment, he works for me.

We worked together for years and he was my boss. He was extremely mean and cruel during those years and would just nit-pick through all my assignments. I needed the job so I stayed and put up with it.

But you know I just could never ‘get even’ or stoop that low.”

Karma is described as the underlying principle that brings back the results of actions to the person performing them. In other words, what goes around comes around.
It could also be described as this: We harvest exactly what we sow; no less, no more.

What a weird scenario

As we move up the career ladder, we manage lots of people who cross our paths and move on, hopefully, to bigger and better things.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

When It Comes to Successfully Leading People, Soft Skills are the Key

We had two very distinct corporate headquarters and now we just have one. At our corporate office in
Boston, the doors were locked on the executive floor and you couldn’t get in with your badge unless you worked on that floor.

Now everyone’s badge works on the floor. I also moved the coffee machine outside my door so people had to walk by my office to get to it. Now I can tell people to stop in and say Hi.”

That statement was from CEO Linda K. Zecher of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She was recently profiled by Adam Bryant in his weekly interview series, Corner Office in The New York Times.

By the way, this weekly article allows you to peep through the crack of the C-Suite. It is a must read for HR professionals who are looking for insight from senior leadership and their thought processes.

A different scenario, indeed

However, as I read about this one with Linda Zecher I thought of my own experience and it was diametrically opposed to her version. In my version, the new CEO comes in and immediately re-launches what was a normal floor where everyone roamed into an “executive floor.”

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Building Ambassadors, or Why You Need to Offer More Than Just a Job

“I am so thankful that I got this new job. I now work for a non-profit and we are spearheading all these new initiatives, connecting children and health care. I am on a mission. Never been so excited about a job before from my past of working for profit companies.”

This email message came to me the other morning from one of my colleagues in the U.S. I am hearing more of this type talk from people over the last few years.

This brought me back to a time one of our rising executives quit a promising job and career because her dream job materialized — one that would allow her to work with animals. At the time, I was sitting there listening to this and in the back of my mind, I just did not get it.

Yes, I have changed

So, as I read this “thankful” message the other day, I got ready to respond and noticed that the tag line on my email reads:

We are dedicated to building a better society by helping companies to transform their workplace.”