Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

CEOS Are Loosening Up

A recent IBM study of more than 1,700 chief executive officers from 64 countries and 18 industries worldwide has some intriguing implications for organizational culture.

Although I’ve spoken with several HR leaders over the last few months about the necessity of transforming the way we work, I’ve always felt this uneasiness that CEOs weren’t on the same page. The IBM study assures me that this is not the case. Leaders clearly see that command and control is outdated and ineffective.

Knowledge Sharing in All Directions

According to the research, companies that outperform their peers are 30 percent more likely to identify openness as a key influence. Using social media mainly, CEOs are encouraging their employees to create new workstreams that tap the collective intelligence of the firm and allow employees to connect with and learn from one another.

For more survey results, some of which are surprising, take a look at my full post on the AMEX Open Forum.

Dilbert Has Come to Your Office

A few years ago, I consulted for a Fortune 500 company on young professional development. The CEO publicly proclaimed that this incoming talent represented the future of the organization, and that nurturing it was his top priority. He put his money where his mouth was. That company spent millions of dollars creating a young professional training program that was the envy of its competitors.

The fancy training program may have impressed the young professionals when they walked through the door, but it was another story once they started their jobs and had a chance to experience the company’s culture day in and day out. The young employees complained bitterly about languishing in dead-end positions with minimal guidance for years on end. The initial bells and whistles weren’t enough to hold them. Bored and frustrated, many resigned.

This scenario pinpoints what Deloitte University executives call the Dilbert Paradox.  For a full discussion of what this means and what we do about it, check out my full post on the AMEX Open Forum.

Senior Job Seekers are Least Prepared to Fill Open Positions

According to the second annual Job Preparedness Indicator research study, released today by the Career Advisory Board established by DeVry University, senior-level job seekers are the least prepared to fill available positions in today's market.  One-in-five hiring managers say that few senior candidates have the right mix of skills and traits to serve their needs, and in particular are lacking in higher-order abilities such as strategic perspective, general business acumen, and global competence.

Developing these skills is a must, but tenured candidates can also modify their approach so that hiring managers see them as more markeable and capable of filling open jobs.  Suggestions to this effect include:

• Look carefully at senior-level job descriptions and brainstorm specific examples of how you’ve performed at least 75 percent of the responsibilities in the past.  Play up any experience you have liaising or working directly with international colleagues.

• Use LinkedIn actively.  Don’t just slap up your profile and forget about it.  Join groups for senior-level professionals in your field, and ask and answer member questions.  Set a goal of meeting at least 5 new senior-level contacts a week, and engage them in high-level industry conversation.

• Take the spec approach.  New consultants are sometimes asked to take on a project on spec, meaning they do the work gratis so the company can evaluate their worth as a paid asset.  Even if you aren’t asked, proactively identify and solve a problem facing executive management and present your solution in interviews and other conversations.

• Raise your pay expectations:  If you are satisfied with making a salary well below your true earning potential, you are literally underselling yourself.   Use payscale.com and salary.com to research the incomes of people who do what you do with your amount of tenure, and when asked, confidently cite a number in the middle.

One final piece of advice: As a senior-level candidate, you cannot rest on your laurels simply because you've been in the workforce a while.  Earn hiring managers' confidence and buy-in by demonstrating that you are invested in keeping your skills fresh and in learning and growing in a new position.

Is Self-Plagiarism Okay?

I know a very young and successful business book author named Jonah Lehrer.  Lehrer has written two bestselling books and is frequently in the news, but last month it was not for a positive reason.

Slate – among other outlets – recently reported that Lehrer had been caught stealing…from himself.

“Media watcher Jim Romenesko claimed that Jonah, a newly minted New Yorker staff writer, copied his blog post “Why Smart People Are Stupid” from a 2011 Wall Street Journal story “The Science of Irrationality.” A few hours later, New York’s Joe Coscarelli and writer Jacob Silverman discovered a bunch more instances in which Lehrer reheated his leftovers.”

Is there a problem here?

Since I originally published my full post on Fast Track, other evidence has come out against Lehrer.  But my original question about self-plagiarism still stands, and I want to know what you think.  Is this okay, or not okay? 

College Career Centers Are Challenged in Preparing Students for Work

The skills gap is getting wider.

According to the Job Preparedness Indicator research conducted by the Career Advisory Board in late 2011, only 14 percent of hiring managers felt that job candidates had the requisite skills to fill open positions.

At the Career Advisory Board, which is presented by DeVry University, our mission is to help job seekers and careerists advance, so we decided to go to the front lines and assess what career counselors thought about this.  This summer, we worked with the National Association of Colleges and Employers, an organization that connects career services professionals with HR professionals, to conduct a series of phone interviews and a formal survey with college career center directors.

In this research initiative, we explored some of the challenges directors face in their mission to help students land and succeed in jobs.  These obstacles include working with administrations that don’t understand the value of the career center, being understaffed, and assisting diverse students. 

As a result of their current circumstances, career centers have had difficulty ensuring that graduating students are “marketplace ready.”  Indeed, less than 25 percent of directors felt that most of their students had the tools and skills necessary to find a job.

Here, we delve deeper into the directors’ most pressing concerns and share topline thoughts on how we can collaborate to narrow the skills gap.

College Administrations Underestimate the Career Center’s Value

Overall, college career centers have a perception problem.  Many administrations view them purely as immediate “placement centers” and marginalize their role in shaping America’s future talent pool.  Unfortunately, this attitude negatively impacts student perception, and they may not use the career center as expeditiously as a result.

In our conversations, many of the directors claimed that although administrators are generally supportive of their efforts, this support is overshadowed by bureaucratic processes, budget cuts, and a lack of appreciation for the full range of available student services (assessment, employer matching, resume help, interview coaching, job fairs and educational programming – to name a few!).  Our formal survey especially echoed directors’ financial concerns: nearly thirty-two percent felt that their administrations were not particularly helpful with respect to funding support for the career center.

Unfortunately, without strong and well-funded career centers, schools’ hard-won and well-educated students will become percentages in the growing nationwide problem of youth unemployment. 

Directors must develop a value proposition of “total career preparation” and proactively market the breadth of center activities to school administrators.  They should aim to get a seat at the table in discussions around school mission and overall leadership strategy. 

Using benchmarking data from the schools who are most successful in transitioning students from college to career, directors must advocate best practices and lobby for an earlier and more forceful introduction to students (for example, implementing a mandatory career services module for freshman orientation and/or making 1-3 career center visits a graduation requirement).  Only this type of integration will ensure a solid understand of the essential steps to launch a meaningful career, and sufficiently motivate students to undertake them.

Career Services Centers Are Understaffed

When asked about their greatest need with respect to helping students, 42 percent of the directors said more staff.  Several had experienced budget cuts that made it difficult to support existing programs – let alone launch new ones.  Extra personnel in the career center would make it possible to provide more one-on-one student counseling and follow-up, expand educational programming, and enhance marketing efforts. 

Hopefully, greater visibility within the administration will result in the strengthening of career center ranks.  Career centers can also work with third-parties to offer free online and on-campus career readiness bootcamps and mentoring initiatives, and connect with local industry via meet-and-greets with students.

Private sector organizations can use their recruiting dollars to sponsor relevant software licenses for assessments, mock interviews, and other tools.   And finally, if career centers must do more with less, they should develop scripts for typical conversations like the initial student consultation and handouts for frequently requested information such as occupational research resources.

Meeting the Career Needs of Diverse Students Is Difficult

An incredible 85 percent of directors feel that they are not as effective in helping diverse populations such as adult students, international students, disabled students, minority students, and veteran students land jobs and prepare for successful careers.

One idea for directors to facilitate the advising and hiring of diverse students is to form programs that pair current students with similar alumni who are currently employed.  Such mentorships would provide insights that are unique and expressly relevant to a particular student group.

In order to better customize the approach for each student group, career centers need to create systems that will efficiently track students’ progress through the career center, and the services that are being used.  This will provide critical data with respect to what is working – and not working – for each group. 

The skills gap is a complex issue, and certainly career center directors and their staff can’t solve it by themselves, or overnight.  Nevertheless, they are a critical piece of the puzzle, and with some targeted effort, improving student career readiness is absolutely within reach.

The Mass Exodus Has Begun

Many people (myself included) predicted a mass exodus of workers from their jobs when the economy picked up.  According to a recent survey conducted by Robert Half International and OfficeTeam, a staffing service specializing in the placement of administrative professionals, it’s already happening.

According to Robert Hosking, executive director of OfficeTeam, the top reasons employees are quitting their jobs this year include:

• Many professionals hunkered down during the recent recession and felt like they were lucky to just have a job. Now, they feel more confident that companies are hiring again and they can find a better opportunity.
• Not getting along with the boss is a major reason employees leave.  A poor relationship with your manager can really take a toll on morale and prevent you from moving up in the firm.
• Many professionals leave for new opportunities with better pay, benefits or job titles.
• Lack of challenge on the job is another common reason people quit.  Nobody likes to be bored.

For more survey results, check out the full post on the Fast Track blog.

 

Managers: Should You Sweat the Small Stuff?

A reader wrote in with this scenario:

As a manager, I know how to handle big performance issues; people need to be warned, given time to improve, and then either shape up or ship out. I’m wondering, though, about less severe issues and how to properly handle them.

One of my biggest day-to-day headaches are the minor transgressions, those behaviors that technically violate policy or slightly inconvenience employees, but are far from a fireable offense. For example, our company doesn’t allow sneakers as part of the dress code. We have an employee who walks to work, so he wears sneakers to come in and keeps a pair of appropriate shoes at his desk. This would be fine, but he often forgets to change and will spend the majority of the day violating the dress code. Generally he forgets because he jumps right in and focuses on something more important: his job! I don’t feel like I can sit this guy down and tell him that he’s violated our shoe policy and he’ll need to remember to change or he’ll be fired. That just seems silly.

Another example is an employee who doesn’t check our message board and won’t set up email reminders. She doesn’t want the email clutter, but also doesn’t want to take the time out of her schedule to check in for important messages every now and then. So if we need something like a health insurance form filled out, I need to hunt her down to get it completed. Obviously this example DOES affect my job, but am I to threaten the job of one of our top performers over it?

These ARE policies and requirements we’ve set though, and I don’t want to give the impression that our policies (small or large) can be violated without consequence. There are many examples of minor transgressions at the office. Each one adds up to drain more of my time/energy, and I do see signs of other employees following suit. Without consequences, there is no motivation to change.

Over at Fast Track, I weighed in along with three other fantastic career and workplace experts.  Let us know what you think of our advice and if you have anything to add!

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go

I am very fortunate to count Beverly Kaye among my smartest and savviest mentors.  For those of you who might not know her, Bev is a pioneer in the field of talent management and career development and continues to innovate at the helm of a large HR consultancy and with her new book, Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go.

Besides the title, I also love that the book debunks myths (Blind Spots, anyone)?  Here are a few Bev offers with respect to career development inside large organizations:

Myth 1 – There is simply not enough time.

No one will argue that time is among the scarcest resources available to managers today. But let’s get real. You’re having conversations already — probably all day long. What if you could redirect some of that time and some of those conversations to focus on careers?

Myth 2 – If I don’t talk about it, they may not think about it and the status quo will be safe.

Why invite problems? Developing people could lead them to leave and upset the balance of your well-running department, right? Wrong. Employees have growth on their minds — whether you address it or not. Withholding these conversations is a greater danger to the status quo than engaging in them.

Myth 3 – Since employees need to own their careers, it’s not my job.

No one will argue that managers don’t own the development of their employees’ careers. Employees do. But that doesn’t mean that managers are completely off the hook. You have an essential role in helping and supporting others to take responsibility. And that role plays out in large part through conversation.

Myth 4 – Everyone wants more, bigger, or better: promotions, raises, prestige, power.

If you believe this one, then your employees all look like baby birds, their mouths always wide open, wanting to be fed. This image probably loses its appeal quickly even for doting bird parents — much less busy managers. But based upon our research, this image is patently inaccurate. When asked about what they want to get out of a career conversation with their managers, the number-one response from employees is “ways to use my talents creatively.”

Myth 5 – Development efforts are best concentrated on high potentials, many of whom already have plans in place.

This one’s a cop-out. You can indeed see a significant return on the development you invest in your high potentials. But they make up only about 10 percent of your population. You probably have another 10 percent of marginal performers who are on a very different kind of plan. But what about the 80 percent in between — the massive middle responsible for doing the bulk of the work? Imagine what even a small investment in their development might yield.

Growing your business means growing your people.  And with the pending demographic shifts and corresponding talent shortage, never has this been more important.  Fortunately for us, Bev’s the perfect authority on the subject!

Do Companies Honestly Care About Their People?

A few years ago, I consulted for a Fortune 500 company on young professional development. The CEO publicly proclaimed that this incoming talent represented the future of the organization, and that nurturing it was his top priority. He put his money where his mouth was. That company spent millions of dollars creating a young professional training program that was the envy of its competitors.

The fancy training program may have impressed the young professionals when they walked through the door, but it was another story once they started their jobs and had a chance to experience the company’s culture day in and day out. The young employees complained bitterly about languishing in dead-end positions with minimal guidance for years on end. The initial bells and whistles weren’t enough to hold them. Bored and frustrated, many resigned.

Earlier in the summer, I attended the Deloitte University OnTalent Roundtable with a group of top HR executives, and John Seely Brown put his finger on exactly what I’d witnessed in that Fortune 500 company. He called it the Dilbert Paradox.  For more on this unfortunate phenomenon and what we can do about it, check out my Culture Beat column on the AMEX Open Forum.

IBM CEO Study Shows Big Leadership Changes

A recent IBM study of more than 1,700 chief executive officers from 64 countries and 18 industries worldwide has some intriguing implications for organizational culture.

Although I’ve spoken with several HR leaders over the last few months about the necessity of transforming the way we work, I’ve always felt this uneasiness that CEOs weren’t on the same page. The IBM study assures me that this is not the case. Leaders clearly see that command and control is outdated and ineffective.

According to the research, companies that outperform their peers are 30 percent more likely to identify openness as a key influence. Using social media mainly, CEOs are encouraging their employees to create new workstreams that tap the collective intelligence of the firm and allow employees to connect with and learn from one another.

For more results on the IBM study and what they mean for you, head over to the full piece at the AMEX Open Forum.