by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Team Manager Skills
[Our data on hiring at Google show that] what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.
Behavioral interviewing — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.
— Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President
of People Operations at Google
in Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
via The New York Times.com
See also, on this blog,
How to Write an Ad to Hire Employees.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms
[Philosopher Hannah] Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats, but by joiners.
That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning [Adolf] Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world.
–Professor Roger Berkowitz
Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’
New York Times
See also my blog post on the MCI Worldcom fraud, Integrity Ebbs by Inches
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Stress Management
Would you like to more than triple the chances that your employees will volunteer to help a colleague or a customer? In just two months. For free.
Easy. Encourage your staff to meditate for 20 minutes per day. That is the conclusion from a recent study.
The results were striking. Although only 16 percent of the nonmeditators gave up their seats — an admittedly disheartening fact — the proportion rose to 50 percent among those who had meditated. This increase is impressive not solely because it occurred after only eight weeks of meditation, but also because it did so within the context of a situation known to inhibit considerate behavior: witnessing others ignoring a person in distress — what psychologists call the bystander effect — reduces the odds that any single individual will help.
From Grey Matter: The Morality of Meditation
by David DeSteno, Ph. D. in The New York Times
describing research
by Paul Condon, Ph. D., Northeastern University
published in Psychological Science
See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Leadership Development
I have great respect for Dan Gallwey; he is a pioneer of coaching and really gets it. Heard him just yesterday on a video from the 70s or 80s, paraphrasing.
When an employee or competitor fails to deliver what you require, start by inquiring into what he sees as the requirement, what he saw in the performance. Growth comes from seeing the world differently, not from being criticized or corrected.
—Tim Gallwey in a conversation with
John Wooden, Red Auerbach,
George Allen, & Werner Erhard
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, How to Set Goals
One of the things I’ve noticed as a characteristic of the great [athletic] coaches, is that they start with their commitment to a result first and then they’ve looked at the circumstances they’ve needed to deal with from the perspective of the result.
The people who did not make it into the league of the great coaches were often just as articulate, just as smart but they were focused on the circumstances they needed to deal with and then they looked at the result from the circumstances.
— Werner Erhard in conversation with
John Wooden, Red Auerbach,
George Allen, & Tim Gallwey
See also Managing Yourself (from the future) with Specific Measurable Results, on this blog.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Team Manager Skills
The coach whose philosophy I admired most was Amos Alonzo Stagg and he once made the statement he never had a player he didn’t love. He had many he didn’t like and he didn’t respect, but he loved them just the same.
—Coach John Wooden
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Team Manager Skills
The fraud triangle is a model for explaining the factors that cause someone to commit occupational fraud. It consists of three components which, together, lead to fraudulent behavior:
1. Perceived unshareable financial need
2. Perceived opportunity
3. Rationalization
The fraud triangle originated from Donald Cressey’s hypothesis:
Trusted persons become trust violators when they conceive of themselves as having a financial problem which is non-shareable, are aware this problem can be secretly resolved by violation of the position of financial trust, and are able to apply to their own conduct in that situation verbalizations which enable them to adjust their conceptions of themselves as trusted persons with their conceptions of themselves as users of the entrusted funds or property.1
1Donald R. Cressey, Other People’s Money (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1973) p. 30.
—The Fraud Triangle.
See also my post on the MCI Worldcom scandal, Integrity Ebbs by Inches.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Salespeople, Sales Techniques
In 1966 Roshi Philip Kapleau, author of the landmark book The Three Pillars of Zen, was invited to give a talk at MIT by Nobel Laureate Salvador Luria.
Only six people came.
He gave his talk on Zen meditation anyway.
One of the six became Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., who had his first encounter with meditation that night. Kabat-Zinn is a pioneer in the scientific study of mindfulness and is responsible for teaching meditation to many thousands of people.
What is the right audience? The Zen answer is, the audience you have.
See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Stress Management
Many of my clients have noticed that among the many thoughts intruding upon their meditation are some that appear to be genuinely useful ideas and plans. My suggestion is to treat these like any other ideas that arise and use the opportunity to direct your attention back to the chosen focus of your meditation practice, trusting that ideas are plentiful and over time you will be more prosperous operating with a clear mind day-to-day than by grasping at insights and making plans during the short periods you promised yourself to meditate.
And if your mind is dominated by the idea, feel free to pause to take a note or move into execution. Don’t be a victim of your meditation.
For more, here is an article by a successful artist on her experience with this challenge, Amanda Palmer in The Shambala Sun.
See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.
by Tony Mayo | Communication, Conversation, & Confrontation, For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Leadership Development
Bad presentation–or resistant audience?
Executives often find themselves assigning blame. Many believe that ranking and sorting their colleagues is a key management skill–and I agree. A much rarer and more powerful skill is the ability to see our own contribution to the unwelcome behavior we see around us. Why is self-awareness more powerful than judging others? Because altering my own behavior is the best access I have to altering the future.
I know this. I teach this. I also forget to practice it.
In November of 2007, for example, I was in San Diego attending a weekend training for coaches. A breakout session was led by the author of one of the best-known books on coaching. It is a good book and I was very eager to attend. His ninety minute workshop was scheduled six times over two days–I was in a morning session on day two.
The author immediately struck me as irritated, aggressive, and arrogant. (Here I am, always ranking and sorting.) His opening seemed vague and rambling and his responses to questions were not pertinent. (Here I go, proceeding to collect evidence for my case.) People were shaking their heads and looking at each other. Coaches are a fairly supportive audience but in the first fifteen minutes, five of the thirty people walked out, one while the author was responding (elliptically) to his question! (Perfect. I have other people agreeing with me, a seductive substitute for truth.) I decided to (more…)
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