Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Is Gen Y Taking Over Your Company?

Bruce Tulgan is one of the top thinkers in the world of generational differences and intergenerational communication.  In fact, he has served as a mentor to me in this space for the better part of a decade.

On his blog, Bruce recently shared this scenario:

At a major food conglomerate, summer interns are usually given an assignment, such as a big data-entry project, that they can complete during the course of their summer employment.  An executive there shared with me the story of one of his latest interns.  On the first day, she announced she had invented a new cereal. She had a box, complete with artwork and a bag of her cereal inside, that she called her ‘prototype.’ Clearly she had gone to great lengths, including the recipe and nutritional information and preparing a slide show. She wanted to know when she would be able to pitch her idea to senior executives. “The sooner the better,” she said.

Over at the Fast Track blog, we discuss what we'd do if we were this intern's manager.  Check it out and let me know what YOU think.

5 Never-Heard Networking Tips

When my friend Ben Casnocha sent me a copy of his new book, The Start-Up of You, I knew that I was going to read something innovative about networking.  After all, Ben wrote it with Reid Hoffman, the cofounder and chairman of LinkedIn, and if anything has changed the game of networking in the twenty-first century, it’s LinkedIn.

I was not disappointed.  And so I decided to write a Fast Track post with 5 networking tips from Ben and Reid that you haven’t heard before.  That article turned out to be my most frequently shared post this whole year. 

I hope you'll check it out and let me know what you think of the ideas, and if you would actually use them.

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!

5 Types of Power

I used to think that a leader was powerful if she had a lot of financial responsibility, or if he was directly responsible for a team of hundreds of people.  But there are different types of power, and some may be easier for you to obtain than others.

To briefly recap, in 1959, social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven identified five bases of power, legitimate, referent, reward, expert, and coercive.  In my post on Fast Track, learn more about these and how you can use them to your advantage.

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.

How to Be Happier at Home (and Work)

Gretchen Rubin has been a friend of mine since the early days of our blogs.  Her first book, The Happiness Project, became an international bestseller, and I was excited to read her latest effort, Happier at Home.  The new book focuses on ways we can make our homes places of greater simplicity, comfort, and love.

Since I specialize in careers and work, I naturally zeroed in on the part of the book that focuses on work/life balance.  Managing your time well is critical, because, as Gretchen points out, it only passes faster as we get older.  She cites poet Robert Southy, who explained:

“Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.  They appear so while they are passing, they seem to have been so when we look back on them, and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them.”

Since we don’t “notice” life as much once we’re in our twenties, thirties, and beyond, it’s especially important that we make an effort to be mentally present in each moment.  Happier at Home has dozens of recommendations to this effect, but here are a few that directly apply to the subject of work:

• Do you have kids?  Even though taking care of them can sometimes be boring, resist the urge to check your phone in their presence.  In fact, put the phone away, as it’s admittedly hard to resist.

 

• Don’t check e-mail at bedtime.  The stimulation of reading certain messages will energize you and you’ll have trouble falling asleep.

 

• Don’t type away on your smartphone when traveling from one place to another.  Instead of forcing yourself to use this time productively, leave yourself open to new thoughts, ideas, and experiences.

 

• Do understand when you are most efficient at doing different tasks, and work around that.  I, for example, get better quality writing done if I respect that my mental focus is sharpest in the late afternoon.

 

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.