“You want me to pick you up a biscuit for breakfast?” One colleague asked another on his way into the office one morning. “No, Mary Ila is coming today.” “Gotcha.” he replied back. The HR Manager I work with regularly was the one refusing the biscuit because she knew if I’m there for the day, I am going to take her (make her go) to lunch. This is such a given that now her collogues know when I’m there not to count on her to be there at lunch time. Her friend/co-worker with the biscuit didn’t need any further explanation
My LinkedIn Daily Rundown feed started out today with “Jobs are cutting experience requirements….” Reporting that, “an extra 1 million jobs were opened up to candidates last year with “no experience necessary.’” There is a lot of buzz about the hot job market now with the unemployment rate at a pre-recession low. But what do you do to fill jobs in this economy? As the Daily Rundown suggests you can: Lower requirements.Whether it be experience, education or skill requirements, lowering them can increase candidate pools. I often find that job descriptions have qualifications in them that really aren’t “required” to be successful
After a particularly long doctor’s appointment with our seven-year-old, the topic of his prescription (he has epilepsy and takes a medicine to control his seizures) came up. The nurse practitioner came back in to say she had sent it to the pharmacy electronically. My husband said, “We need it written in 500mL increments.” She looked at him like who do you think you are, trying to tell me how to write a prescription. I looked at my husband and tried to telepathically tell him, “Explain to her why you are making that request.” I may or may not have also
“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.” Max DePree Feedback is a critical to any successful performance management and development process. With trends in feedback moving leaders towards less formal mechanisms of feedback and away from a formal performance appraisal, we still need to be thinking about how to define the current state of someone’s behavior and performance in order to direct what we want to see. And sometimes we can formalize things and still make them feel “casual”. A way to do this is to have a 1. Start 2. Stop 3. Stay session. To do this:
My first professional mentor was a man. In college, I helped him with his research and he helped me grow as a human being in too many ways to count. It was no big deal for us to have one-on-one discussions in his office with the door closed. I never thought anything of it. I suspect he didn’t either. Nor were my parents concerned. They are as grateful to him for the positive influence he had on me as I am. This mentor often spoke truth with directness to the situations I was dealing with that I found myself getting