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Staff Door » 2009 » March

Weekly Reading List (2009/16)

March 28th, 2009

Welcome back! Staffdoor’s weekly reading list, the classified reading list on HR, Teams, Leadership and People explores, every week, what has been said and done on the blogosphere. This week, for some odd reason, the crisis chatter seems to have died down again, with bloggers and journalists much more focused on solutions and analysis! Do enjoy your reading, add us to your RSS feed in order not to miss any of our posts or occasional articles and don’t hesitate to comment!

Let’s start wth the shorterm, nevertheless still present crisis conversation:

An interesting series on creativity, by Mike King. To be continued next week…

Tips, tricks and suggestions on managing the most important person in your organisation, YOU:

Managing people, performance and talent in your organisation:

Leadership, or how to be visible in the organisation:

(c) Theodore

(c) Theodore

Recruitment 2.0 - ultimate solution to the crisis?:

Team, groups and performance:

Strategy and Reward… Increasingly discussed online - a sign of the future?

A discovery in London City - women’s salaries also have issues here (mind me, with the levels of those salaries…):

(c) Theodore
(c) Theodore

As usual, some ideas on our generations in the workplace, with a focus (surprise) on the Ys:

A pair of articles on communication and interaction in the workplace:

Let’s finish with a few lines on HR, Employee Relations,Management and Performance:

Thank you once again for reading this weekly reading post. We hope it is useful to you! Keep in touch for our upcoming article!

May your week be truly engaging… and may your comments get flourishing!


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Weekly Reading List (2009/14)

March 27th, 2009

Here it is again, this week’s Staffdoor Reading List, the only weekly categorised reading list for HR, Leadership, Team performance and People management topics on the Internet. Please enjoy your reading and don’t hesitate to comment below or mail us your feedback.

(c) Theodore

(c) Theodore

Lets start, as usual, with the weekly crisis ranting. I really can’t wait for the moment this turns into a recovery ranting:

Very closely associated to the crisis this week, how talent and skill management is (under) used:

Two great articles on change management:

Recruitment, succession planning and employer branding:

Some of the less pleasant parts of the employee relationship: grievance management & Termination:

Nothing on the Y generation in the blogosphere this week, however, two great posts on generations in the workplace:

And a few lines on gender in the workplace (and most particularly the gender salary gap):

Team Performance and :

Leadership & motivation:

(c) Theodore

(c) Theodore

Workplace communication:

Reward & Remuneration:

Learning & Development:

Performance Management:

Interesting publications:

May your week be truly engaging!

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Weekly Video Post: Where will we find tomorrow’s leaders?

March 25th, 2009

Welcome on this week’s video post. An interesting view by Linda A. Hill, Professor, Harvard Business School on the future of Leadership and how we can best identify and find tomorrow’s leaders and how to construct an environment that will facilitate this quest.

Key phrases:

  • Leadership from behind
  • Leadership as collective genius

Enjoy!

Thank you for viewing our post and see you next Wednesday! If you do have a comment, feel free to leave it below or to send a message to whatIthink@staffdoor.com

May your week be truly engaging!


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Weekly Reading List (2009/13)

March 21st, 2009

Welcome back! Some exciting new articles this week, as always filtered and categorised for your easiest pleasure. Enjoy  the reading!

Let’s start with some anti-crisis ideas and thoughts:

A few ideas about communication in the workplace:

Employer Brand and some how to ensure your place is the best one to work in:

All you ever thought about performance management (but were afraid to write in your blog)

(c) Theodore

(c) Theodore

Leadership, Leadership, Leadership:

Learning and Development as our organisation’s saver:

Why and how HRM should be strategic:

Generations in the workplace are still a hot topic:

And some HR fun to conclude:

Don’t forget to comment, send your thoughts to whatithink@staffdoor.com and may your week be really, effectively and truly engaging!

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Weekly Video Post: Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence and Leadership

March 20th, 2009

A new series on Staffdoor Blog!

From this week onwards, we will be promoting a publicly available video on Leadership, Team building or Organisational performance. When? Every Wednesday. Don’t miss a single publishing by registering to our RSS feed. This week, an interesting post by Harvard Business Publishing on Social Intelligence and Leadership.

Thank you for viewing our post and see you next Wednesday!

May your week be truly engaging!

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Weekly Reading List (2009/12)

March 15th, 2009

Thank you, once again, for reading us! Welcome on Staffdoor’s weekly, categorized reading list.

Let’s start once again with the usual crisis chit-chat. Bloggers are starting to get philosophical about the downturn and offering some nice, theoretical solutions:
-Hiring Happens (Alice Snell)
-Re-skilling in a recession: do the shuffle (Ross Bentley)
-Boss Basics: The Delicate Art of Managing Layoffs (John Hollon)
-Layoffs Are Not a Panacea (Jim Stroud)
-4 Leadership Changes for Tough Economic Times (Dike Drummond)
-What kind of leadership do you need for a downturn? (Kate Sweetman)

Procrastination, Innefectiveness and Wasted time:
-Stop Habits that Waste Your Time in Meetings (Mike Dummond)
-The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Leaders (Carmine Coyotee)

A number of leadership ideas and proposals:
-Does your leadership style involve constant crisis? (Hayli Morrison)
-Do Leaders have to be Extroverts? (Mike Drummond)
-Leadership Styles and The “Goldilocks Effect” (Mike Drummond)
-Hiring Leaders (Miki Saxon)
-Improve your Leadership by Partnering with your Team (Dike Drummond)
-Are you making room for Mavericks? (George Ambler)
-Hiring Creativity (Miki Saxon)
-Failure … What’s That? (Leadership associaes)
-Does competition really motivate? (Slow Leadership)
-Culture, Reviews And MAP (Miki Saxon)
-Smart Decision Making - The Role of Results and Intuition in Modern Business (Zeger Degraeve)
-Wake Up On The Right Side Of The Bed (Matt Cheuvront)
-Your Mission (Should Be): To Change The World (Mike Shoemaker)
-The Feedback Sandwich (Dike Drummond)
-8 Steps for Acting on Inspiration (Mike King)

Reward and Remuneration, transparency and their link to motivation:
-Your Thoughts: Candidates, Salary, and Disclosure (Laurie)
-Rewarding Employees: Motivation vs. Imitation (Chris Ferdinandi)

Sourcing ideas (including recruitment, employer branding and expatriation):
-Job centres to scrap lie detector tests for benefit claimants (Nick Golding)
-Outsourcing HR: Having Resumes Screened In India (Michael D. Haberman)
-Recruiting, Social Media, and Candidate Evaluation (Laurie Ruettimann)
-Are job candidates entitled to feedback? (Ask a manager)
-Wisdom, Discernment, Integrity and Decisions (Steve Roesler)
-What India’s Talent Shortage Means for the US (Rosabeth Moss Kanter)
-Reinventing Executive Search (Bob Corlett)
-Employer branding still makes its mark (James Rockett)
-4 Skills That Aren’t Helping You (Jamie Varon)

Performance and Performance management at their best:
-But They’re Sooo Intelligent…! (Steve Roesler)
-When Goal Setting Goes Bad (Sean Silverthorne)
-Weekly Roundup: Pros and Cons of Setting Goals (Hayli Morrison)

Generations in the workplace:
-Leadership’s Future: Would You Hire Your Kid? (Miki Saxon)
-Nine months ago they were our savior. Are the gen Y’ers now a lost generation? (Andy Headworth)

Technology in the workplace (and in the HR department):
-Employers should encourage use of Facebook and Twitter (Kat Baker)

Behind great organisational performance, there is great personal performance…
-How I Learned to Say No (Steve Demaio)

And team performance can help too:
-Are people really your most important asset? (Dan Bobinski)
-What’s Your High Performance Team Experience? (Art Petty)
-How to Build a High Performing Team (Mike Drummond)
-Leaders “Infect” People with their Mood - For Better or Worse (Mike Drummond)
-Talking to team members about performance (Wally Bock)

To conclude, a few lines on cross functional Leadership learning:
-A Guide to Cross-functional Leadership Developmental Moves (Dan McCarthy)

There we are! That’s all for this week! See you next week for a new weekly reading list. Don’t forget you can comment under the posts, that there are some proprietary Staffdoor blog posts and that pressing on the orange RSS button on the right will ensure you never miss a single post on this blog!

Hint: A series on how Team roles can help during a recession will be posted on this blog soon. Keep in touch!

Thank you for reading us!

May your week be truly engaging!

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Social networking is the future of recruitment, maybe…

March 15th, 2009

We, the recruiters, are saved!

Social Networking, Linked-In, Facebooks and other twitting devices are going to expand our recruitment reach, attract truly interested talent, generate word of mouth about our organizations. These amazing technologies are going to decrease our hiring costs, bring turnover levels to zero and show our CEO how well connected, established and respected we are in our industries and on the market in general.

Well… Maybe!

Job boards, online CVs, CV processing tools… All were exceptional tools at some point! They all had their moments of glory… before starting to frustrate both the recruiter and the user. Today job-boards are seen as too broad, CV processing tools as too imprecise and careless in their analysis and online CVs as too impersonal.

It is one of the reasons why social networks are so attractive to recruiters today! They are thought to allow personal contact with potential candidates and people who know potential candidates. And people who know those too.

They facilitate communication and allow the “I’m looking for a…” message to become independent and, through the social grapevine reach the ears of the person you’re really looking for. She/He will then automatically apply and start a successful career in your organisation.

Well, that’s the theory. In reality, Social Networks only represent a fraction of your networking potential. In some cases, they might even hide the true extent of your real network as its users forget that online networking tools are only a symbolic representation of who you know in the real world.

To take the argument even further, social networks may be responsible for a dilution of social relationships, as short, e-mail type messages increasingly replace the effectiveness of a phone call to your contact or a coffee to catch up.

With those issues defined, one can see why social networks are probably not the best tool to use for recruitment:

1) They are not any different than the current electronic offer: although they propose to leverage the recruiter’s contacts to find the appropriate candidate, they are offering the same old “job board” type of service. For the added value of using your network, they demand an important premium which will only work if you have developed a strong and effective visibility in your network. And, at the end of the day, their specificity being in the use of the social network, little effort is invested in developing a truly useful and powerful search engine for the offers.

2) They hide more candidates than they find: by channelling your recruitment message through your network, the communication is limited to a very specific range of people. The message remains hidden to most users or lost within the thousands of other job offers of the usually mediocre job search engines and databases. Not to mention that it totally ignores the people that are not members of the site, that have made the mistake of registering with another service or that do not have access to the web.

3) They lack relevance and focus: within the dozens of useful (and sometimes less useful) applications, different uses of the site try to gain visibility and users. From the communication of travelling schedules, the exchange of documents, the linking between groups and organizations (I will resist the urge to mention the useless and intrusive applications on Facebook that try to buy you or throw sheep - or worse - at you.) uses of the sites vary enormously. In this messy and multidirectional communication feast, the recruitment message is easy to lose and loses its relevance when people decide they are not interested in looking for a job after all.

4) They are not used correctly: who has never received a random “friend request” on a social network? People seem to be racing for expanding their network, showing a higher number of connections and boasting about it. Few people understand the true use of online networks: closed communication with deeply trusted and true contacts/ friends. Using social networks too broadly results in “noise” being created, with irrelevant and uninteresting information being broadcasted not only to you, but also to the people in your network’s network.

Does that mean it is impossible to use my favourite social network to find a candidate? No! It is not! But some rules must be respected in the way you do it!

1) Get off that chair, switch off that screen and start networking (for real): I mentioned earlier that social networks were only a representation of your real network. Well, they are! Unless you take some action on your network, unless you really turn online contacts into engaged, motivated and dedicated friends, they will never “work” for you.

And this cannot be achieved by simply knowing where the other is, or what he/she is doing. You really need to get out there, and start having coffees, meeting people (and their friends), going to parties and not simply learning about them.

Although this may seem natural for many, it is surprising how people seem to not realise that social networks do not work for you automatically. You need to cultivate them, make sure that the relationship is still there and that it’s still alive. If it is not, act! Not online, but offline! Go get a coffee, organise a meeting, send a bunch of flowers, send that file John/Julia is so desperate to get that he/she is posting it on facebook! Show that you’re still alive, and willing to take action, not online, but in the real world!

Once your network is (back) in place, you can start relying on those people to take action for you; to start looking for your candidate in your immediate environment.

2) Make sure communication is two-way: Many people just connect and then forget about their contacts. Even worse: the practice of “using” the network sporadically, entering into action and requesting services on the sole ground that “I am your friend” when the need arises.

Just like you would in real life, your “online network” should be leveraged in a balanced, regular and controlled way. You need to make sure that services are returned and that your network does not perceive you as only a “receiver”. Within your network, communication should be constant (non-dotted line) and two way. This behaviour will allow you to locate opportunities to actively assist people within your network and “return” past or future favours. In that way, you will avoid giving the impression that you only call on contacts when you need them and strengthen the relationship in the long term.

When it comes to recruitment, you will be able to ask people that you have helped in the past to help you in the present to locate the dream candidate.

3) Get your network to actually network: If your first degree network is out of touch with their own first degree, your message will not go beyond those with whom you probably are in daily contact anyway. You need to make sure that your contacts’ contacts are also active and dedicated networkers, that they will act as communicators for their own people and advance your own message when you need them to.

By having strong communication channels established beyond your first degree contacts, you will make sure that any messages or requests you send out are actually spread across the network and does not get lost because your contacts lose interest

4) Help them network: and finally, act to strengthen your network. The more your contacts are connected with each other, the more you will increase the chances that the message has a high and broad impact, with a long and strong reach. In effect, the more you interconnect the contacts in your network, the more you increase the chances that the message arrives safely in the ears of that “ideal candidate”.

Introduce people within your network who may enjoy or benefit from meeting each other, let them connect and start helping each other. Beyond developing your reputation as an excellent networker, you will contribute to improve the way your network works for you.

You should now have a real, effective network, facilitated by the beauties and advantages offered by technology.

Where does recruiting come into all this? Remember when your organisation hired the CEO’s friend’s daughter? Remember when so-and-so brought the CV of someone you may have found interesting?

It works in the exact same way online! Once you have a dedicated, well connected and helpful network, you will be able to expect from them similar behaviours. In your regular exchanges with your contacts, you will have plenty of opportunities to let them know (in a casual and non artificial way) that you’re looking for a highly skilled, experienced financial controller. And because they care, because your connections are still alive, they will actually get (social) networking work for you.

There is only one trap in the whole process: social networks are there to make money and they will use whatever means possible to achieve their goals. Make sure that social networking remains a tool and NEVER let the site actually use your network for you. At the end of the day, have you ever asked your coffee shop owner to find you an accountant?

Thank you for reading this first post. Don’t hesitate to comment below.

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