Advice on Disagreeable Coworkers

From CareerJournal.com

From the overly touchy marketing honcho to the HR person with the people skills of a toad, everyone else is always a problem. Which isn’t a problem except you have to work with them.

How? Remember that not everyone has to like you. The office isn’t a pageant for Miss Personality.  Getting the personal out of the way is the place to start. Then,

Focus on what you need to achieve by working together, not on how awful you think the other person is or how insufferable they may think you are. Wendy Alfus-Rothman, a New York psychologist specializing in executive coaching and leadership development, says that when you have the conversation with your co-worker, say something like: “When you talk to me in that tone of voice — and I don’t think it’s deliberate — I feel attacked. What I’d really like is for you to tell me what does and does not work, so we can put together a killer presentation.”

Start-up Success? Your Employees

From Stanford Graduate School of Business

What’s worse for the success of a start-up — the founding CEO getting canned or a big change in how employees are treated? Wrong; it’s the latter.

A decade-long study of Silicon Valley start-ups shows that if a new company severely alters the founder’s vision of how employees are treated it is three times more likely to fail.

Earlier research identified a couple of basic forms of employee relations:

• Bureaucratic and autocratic models, in which employees are managed by formal controls and procedures or close oversight, lead to the greatest failure rates and lowest growth rates in market capitalizations.
• The “star” model, which recruits, rewards, and supports employees on the basis of their talent; and the “commitment” model, in which employees work essentially as a close knit family, support start-up success.

The fun comes when the company started in Style B shifts to Style A when it gets bigger and harder to manage.  Resistance to shift might be difficult, but not futile. And it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out how unhappy your former “stars” are going to be.

Says the researcher: “Business plans usually have 20 pages on the product, and a paragraph about employee relations, and that needs to shift.”

The Road to Profits and Growth

From American Management Association

Bottom-line satisfaction or top gowth? Does it have to be either or? Not in some companies.

The secret is

…rooted in customer benefit. The customer benefit of a product or service is not what it is or what it can do. It is the reward that customers receive through their experience of choosing and using that product or service.

If a product has a high perceived benefit, the customer is the one who will work hard to ensure profits.

They are more likely to consent to a high price for a high benefit; they will not require additional costs to persuade them to keep buying; and they will be happy to promote to new customers through word-of-mouth recommendation, thus lowering your marketing and selling costs.

Take away the costs that have nothing to do with customer satisfaction, and you improve the bottom line. Not sure where that leaves the accounting department, but…. The author’s mantra: Grow customer benefit, not customer focus.

Executing Strategy…Yeah, Right

From American Management Association

You know things aren’t good when a new poll by the Human Resource Institute and American Management Association shows that the majority of business professionals think their companies are only moderately successful — or worse — at executing strategies.

Now you probably know why things don’t get done in your company. But what makes a strategy take hold at another? Clarity. The researchers found that “creating a clear strategy” was the number-one enabler of a strategy gaining traction.

Unfortunately, this truism surfaced too: A particularly large difference exists between the extent to which companies value a clear strategy and the extent to which they actually deliver a clear strategy. Also probably related: Companies that had a CEO in place for at least five years fared better than those with turmoil at the top.

Managing Across the Age Gaps

From BusinessWeek.com

Although the article couches this as a problem for the future entrepreneur, managing a staff of different age groups is often a challenge here and now. Here are some pretty right on descriptions of what the ages want, and what the manager can give them.

The baby boomers—born between 1946 and 1964— want respect for their experience and expertise. It’s not the advancement they’re after but challenge and respect for the dues they have paid.

The Generation Xers — born between 1965 and 1976 — will be loyal to an organization that provides a mentor who willing to listen to them.

Generation Yers — born between 1977 and 1991 — need to know why they need to do something to ensure that they do it. And they’re impatient with the idea of waiting 10 or 15 years to pay their dues.

Millennials — born since 1991 — are the proponents of cutting-edge technology.

Easy VC Money

From Business2.0

Well, easier, anyway. This month, Charles River Ventures debuts its QuickStart Fund, a batch of $250,000 loans. You’ll have some competition — there are 3,000 loan application forms. But, even better, the loans come with no strings attached. Seems that for the poor VC with money burning a hole in his pocket, there just doesn’t seem to be so many Googles and Amazons to invest in any more.

More Than a Little Romance in the Office

From Inc.com

Got a little something going on in the office? You’re not alone.  

Four out of 10 U.S. workers admit to being involved with another colleague at some point, according to a new survey by Spherion, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based employment firm, and Harris Interactive. A separate survey by Vault, a New York-based career publishing company, found that 17 percent of workers have actually been caught trysting on the job — up from just 2 percent last year.

Time to Update That Resume

From CareerJournal.com

It’s always time to update your resume. Good advice here, including which format of resume is best for job histories with gaps, ones with stuff to hide and other somewhat honest concealments. In the intitial contact, we know you’d never sink to :

1. An objective that doesn’t match current openings.
2. Inappropriate or insufficient educational credentials.
3. Incompatible salary requirements.
4. Poorly organized, sloppy or hard-to-read content.

From the Blogs

Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed quotes a columnist who explains all those complicated financial instruments in terms of a mere two cows. Kedrosky adds his own version about VCs at the end. Mooving.

Guy Kawasaki, in How to Change the World, ponders the age-old question: Is your boss an a**hole? “I’ve often wondered which came first: Was the person always an asshole or did accomplishing something great (probably by luck) mean that people would tolerate bull-shiitake behavior? One thing is for sure: not all assholes do great things, so there’s no causal relationship.” (Hey, you with the smug smile: Try the self-quiz.)

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 takes on SEO. Back in the day before metrics, we used to yell at each other about the importance of site design prefaced by the words: “Well, I think…” Very bad. Karp, rightly, hears that same lame argument in SEO these days. Comment posts are great SEO lessons, btw.

Grow-Your-Own Managers

From CareerJournal.com (registration)

Apparently leaner times have led businesses to a real duh conclusion: It’s easier to train the staff you got to be managers than bring in outsiders.

Such programs tap employees to enter multi-year programs involving management classes, coaching sessions and stretch assignments that throw them unfamiliar challenges. That’s been standard operating procedure at biggies like General Electric Co., but now smaller companies are joining the training ranks.