Direct Your Career - The Professional Guide to a Better Career

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

Just Another Manic Monday (and your job search)

December 7, 2011

I got up this morning and had a somewhat odd flashback to a time about ten or fifteen years ago. Like most people, I never liked Monday’s. After spending a weekend doing what I wanted to do, and maybe sleeping a little late, I had to get up early and head back to work. The only exception to that rule was when I was looking for a new job. In the old days (or back in the day as they say now), I would be somewhat excited about Monday, because I had spent Sunday pouring over the Sunday want ads looking for jobs. Because newspapers ruled the day at that time, the Sunday classifieds was where you would see America’s largest companies advertising for their best jobs. You could search the ad in alphabetical order or by job class and find the best openings. The companies would give you the skill set and experience for which you needed to apply, and their contact information to submit a resume. Most wanted resumes via “snail mail” (the post office) or via fax. Some really advanced companies had email, but few had any online application systems. The Monster But all that changed when

Page 10 of 10

« 1 … 8 9 10

Career and Management