Victory nor Defeat

by | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms, Team Manager Skills

 

 
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, if he wins,knows the thrills of high achievement, and, if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

 

 

 

—John F. Kennedy
on Theodore Roosevelt
New York City, December 5, 1961

 

 

 

 

 

Poor Morals or Poorly Managed?

by | For Business Owners, Team Manager Skills

 

 

As I discussed in my popular article, Truth or Consequences: Beyond the Punishment Model, employers are too quick to act like cops with the result that employees respond like criminals. Here is more support for my advice, this time from a rigorous study of new restaurant software. Instead of using the software mainly to fire workers suspected of theft, all employees were made aware that the software was looking for misbehavior. The results were positive and–to those not familiar with my approach–surprising.

The same people who are stealing from you can be set up to succeed.

–Prof. Lamar Pierce
Washington University

“The savings from the [monitoring software’s] theft alerts themselves were modest, $108 a week per restaurant. However, after installing the monitoring software, the revenue per restaurant increased by an average of $2,982 a week, or about 7 percent.

“The impact, the researchers say, came not from firing workers engaged in theft, but mostly from their changed behavior. Knowing they were being monitored, the servers not only pulled back on any unethical practices, but also channeled their efforts into, say, prompting customers to have that dessert or a second beer, raising revenue for the restaurant and tips for themselves.”

 

––How Surveillance Changes Behavior:
A Restaurant Workers Case Study
The New York Times

 

 

Google Data Show ‘Behavioral Interviewing’ Works

by | 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.

 

 

The Fraud Triangle

by | 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 needThe Fraud Triangle

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.

 

 

Workplace Passion

by | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Team Manager Skills

 

 

Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.
…
The traits that lead people to love their work are general and have little to do with a job’s specifics. These traits include a sense of autonomy and the feeling that you’re good at what you do and are having an impact on the world. Decades of research on workplace motivation back this up. (Daniel Pink’s book Drive offers a nice summary of this literature.)

These traits can be found in many jobs, but they have to be earned. Building valuable skills is hard and takes time. For someone in a new position, the right question is not, “What is this job offering me?” but, instead, “What am I offering this job?”

–Cal Newport, Ph.D.
New York Times
September 30, 2012

 

 

Confront & Converse: Every Manager’s Responsibility

by | Communication, Conversation, & Confrontation, For Business Owners, Team Manager Skills

 

 

While coaching many top executives I have noticed that managers seeking “advice” are often just avoiding a confronting conversation. I remind them of some wisdom embedded in the development of our language.

Con is Latin for “with.” Con-front is to face something together, to move forward in unison.  Doesn’t that make confrontation more appealing? Appealing or not, it is a big part of every manager’s job.

Versare meant to turn or change, especially to open or close a door. In early English a con-versation meant talking with a person to make a change, to open some doors and close others. This also is a big part of managing.

Still, not everyone knows or remembers how to have these confronting conversations. Here is my step-by-step guide, for free: tiny.cc/toughtalk

 

 

See also, on this blog, step-by-step conversation instructions with video here:
The Conversation Contract.