career coach

Your boss’s dog house

January 13, 2012

Does your boss have a dog house? No, not the kind that he keeps his Black Lab in. I mean does he need to keep someone in the figurative dog house all the time – the one you go into when you are in trouble? Woof I have worked for several bosses that keep a dog house. They seem to need to keep someone in the dog house to stay focused. They target a person or an area of the business with all of their energy, and as long as someone is in the dog house, everyone else is just fine. Sit! I remember working for one such guy. He was one of the meanest people for whom I’ve ever worked. He was belligerent, insulting, and had a very short fuse. When he would get upset with anyone, they basically went in and stayed in his dog house until someone else messed up. I remember spending almost all of my spare time working to stay out of the dog house. What a waste of time, but it did make me better. So, how do you stay of out of the dog house? First, keep to your commitments. If you sign

Take charge and don’t name drop

January 12, 2012

I have been in business for some time now. I love business and I love management. I have had my fair share of challenges, but I have learned something from each one. Some years ago, as a new manager, I had a bad tendency to drop my boss’s name anytime I had to deliver bad news. I used to say “Ken said we need to work overtime” or “Ken said that we need to improve our quality.” In my mind, I was not the bad guy, so that would make my staff love me. I never had a problem delivering good news, only bad. One day, after a particularly tough meeting, a meeting I probably dropped Ken’s name 15 or 20 times so to avoid being the bad guy, I had a visit to my office shortly after the meeting had ended. Tena came in, sat down and sheepishly asked if I had a minute. I had a good relationship with Tena, so her visits were normally pleasant and I invited her in. I could tell from her body language that this was not a normal visit. YOU are the boss! She began by telling me that she really liked me, and enjoyed working with me, but… A

I need a new job!!!

January 10, 2012

In recent weeks, several of my clients have asked my help in finding them a new job. They each have different reasons for wanting to change jobs. Some just want more money. A few are not comfortable with the financial health of their current employer. And, I have one entry level client and one recently “outplaced” client that just need help getting started. Finding a job is not necessarily that hard, but finding the right job does take a plan. There was a time in the recent past when people would just shotgun resumes or respond to every job ad they saw. That method does work, but it is a lot more painful in terms of time, and success. If you think about it, you need to hit the right company at the right time looking for your credentials. Odds seem a little against you. So, it is best to create a plan of attack, and to work your plan. The first rule of thumb that people need to know in the job search is that, as non-scientific it may be, you should expect to spend about one month per $10,000 of salary hunting for that new job. If you

Can you judge a book by it’s cover?

January 6, 2012

I’m sure you have heard that you should never judge a book by it’s cover. That phrase means that what a person looks like does not necessarily reflect on the inner person. Is that always true? 20/20 Vision Humans are primarily visual beings. We judge most everything initially on what we see. The sense we rely on most is vision. We don’t smell people to identify each other as animals such as dogs do. We don’t spray our territories to keep intruders away like lions do. We don’t listen for clicks and whistles to identify friends and family much like the earth’s largest mammals the whales do. No, we primarily use our sense of sight to get our first impressions. Well, if sight is so important to us, wouldn’t it be fair to say that what you see does often reflect the inner person because the person knows what image they are trying to present to you, right? Self Proclaimed Worlds Hottest Sports Reporter? For evidence I present Mexican sports reporter Ines Sainz. Miss Sainz recently tweeted that she had been treated inappropriately at the NY football Jets training camp. She was unhappy that some of the players made some

Super Bob and the Peter Principle

January 4, 2012

Are you a good manager? I have been studying and observing business and business people for more than two decades. During that time, I have seen more than my fair share of personalities that find themselves managing people. Some are perfectly suited to leading people, creating a business strategy, and artfully executing that strategy. Others are miserable in their positions. They complain privately about their disdain for managing people and conflict, and have no idea how to create a strategy, and find themselves reacting to every brush fire. They drive their teams, colleagues, and their own boss batty. I think there are many reason for this, and I have come up with four personality types of leadership that I think demonstrate why some succeed and some fail. The first personality is the winner, the next two are neutral and pass as managers, but the fourth is a disaster. Before explaining that, I want to first to discuss something called the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle The Peter Principle is a book written by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hill that theorizes that every employee will eventually rise to their own level of incompetence. The point is that any human being,

Never, ever surprise your boss

January 2, 2012

I hate surprises from my staff. You can surprise me on my birthday or at Christmas, but I never want any surprises when it comes to business. One important concept of management that is never taught, and rarely discussed is how badly managers hate surprises. Surprises can come in many forms. A project may be late, an important sale doesn’t materialize, or the budget gets blown. Whatever it is, we hate them. Now, that is not to say we hate bad news in general. We may not like it, but if you give management enough time to react, then we can manage the bad news. It is a simple concept, but many people are simply not taught it, and therefore don’t teach it to their staff. Let’s say that you are an important member of a team of programmers all working on a major system. The rest of the team is very dependent upon your contribution to be completely successful. You are toiling away in private, but for some reason you just keep slipping farther and farther behind. You begin to realize you are going to be a week late, but choose not to share that information with your supervisor

Humor in the workplace – just be careful

December 31, 2011

I have often said that there are humor transmitters, and humor receivers. Some people are just funny naturally and transmit their humor effortlessly. They seem to know their audience, the boundries of appropriate humor, and have a natural comedic timing. They say the right thing, at just the right time. We love them. Then there are those that choose to never tell a joke, but are perfectly suited to laugh at the humor being transmitted. I call them the humor receivers. They laugh just as effortlessly at the joke as the humor transmitter is able to tell the joke, and are of equal partnership in this delicate ballet of office comedy. Without them, there would be no point in being funny, as there would be no one left to laugh. ********************************************************************************* For free stuff, go to http://directyourcareer.com/blog/free-career-ebooks-and-resume-templates ********************************************************************************* The third person in this odd, albeit classic ritual, is the trasmitter wannabe. He has none of the qualities of the humor transmitter, but tries time and time again to tell jokes, make pithy remarks, or deliver witty one liners that do everything from fall flat to create that moment we all lovingly refer to as “awkward”. They use foul language at the wrong time. They tell blue jokes in mixed company. They try to “one

I am sooooo busy!

December 30, 2011

“I am sooooo busy! I can’t stand it. I can’t get anything done.” Have you ever said that? I have. Many times in my career I have allowed other people’s deadlines or their lack of planning to affect me. There used to be this little saying some years ago called the 5 P’s. The 5 P’s said “Piss Poor Planning on your Part, does not constitute an emergency on my Part.” We are usually our worst enemies when it comes to productivity and time. We rarely honestly tell the boss how long something will actually take. When they say “I need it today.” We say ok, so they assume that because we didn’t counter that we can’t do it by then. And because you felt that you were not empowered to counter, you felt as if you had to comply with his order. And then what happens? You stress out, try to work faster, make mistakes, and drop it off just as the boss is leaving. Ugh!!! You don’t have to live that way. You have eight hours each day to work. You cannot mathematically fit 10 hours into 8. If you do work ten hours a day, but everyone

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Career and Management