Guest Article: Two gems of wisdom to guide your year ahead by Ross Clennett

I've previously alerted you to the excellent blog of Chris Savage, Wrestling Possums, Chris has started the year with a cracking post, Here's The Best Advice You Will Get All Year in which he relates two pieces of advice he received recently. Here's the advice: Take more time, cover less ground and Be clear what gives you pleasure, and do more of it I love it! Regardless of

Article source:Ross Clennett - Two gems of wisdom to guide your year ahead»



Check out more of Ross Clennett's work at hisblog

Managing vs. Leading - Finding a Balance

There are important differences between managing your team and leading them.  Leading includes the ability to develop, motivate and challenge the group while trusting their ability and working along them side-by-side.  Managing on the other hand includes maintaining group dynamics, operations and all necessary delegation, and whilst it doesn’t touch on the ‘inspiring’ side of working with others it relates to the necessary ‘getting things done’ aspect of work life.

The following suggestions can help you become an effective ‘Leading Manager’

Share your vision

Make it a frequent habit to tell your team how their contributions and performance align with the organisation’s goals. Invest in learning about what your team would like to achieve in their career and current role. Link this information to current challenges and tasks they are responsible for. Offer them the chance to step-up and exceed expectations for the benefit of the company but more importantly, themselves. This won’t only benefit their motivation to align their interests with yours but will give you a team that is more focused on achieving long term goals.

DON’T FORGET: Be honest, staff can sniff out when you’re pretending to care about their goals from a mile away. If your immediate needs don’t relate to them straight away, be sure that it is going somewhere in the long run and communicate the process clearly to your team, and don’t remove yourself from the discussion or the process itself.

Delegate to develop

Allow your team the freedom to prove themselves by delegating challenging tasks and responsibilities.  Clearly state the goal of the task and trust that they will deliver. While monitoring your team’s progress is important, avoid micromanaging as this will not contribute to their overall development. It is important that you remain open for questions and lead by example. Ensure that the area you are developing them in is consistent with the company’s long term goals.

DON’T FORGET: Team differently experienced staff members in similar roles together for new projects. This will give more experienced staff a chance to learn effective delegation and communication, whilst less experienced staff have a chance to learn alongside those who are in positions they would like to reach. Give them clear goals that they should achieve with the other, and a chance to create their own objectives.

Empower and Reward

As your staff become more adept at certain tasks they should also become more responsible for the task’s development, improvement and management. If you can motivate your staff to ‘take control’ of their own performance in certain areas they will feel more confident in creating and measuring their outcomes to report back to you. This also gives them the feeling that they should be learning new ideas and techniques that add value to the task, their expertise and of course your business.

Reward plays an important part in empowering staff. If staff exceeded expectations, let them know that this could lead to new tasks and responsibilities for them, and explain how this impacts the company's opportunities as a whole. Make sure all staff are aware of the achievements and are all a part of the success.

Remember, operationalising and delegating tasks are important practices to grasp for any leader. You can’t always be the ‘good guy,’ but you definitely can add leadership strategies into everything you do to make sure you, the team and the business can continuously head in the right direction!

Guest Article: Asking the Right Interview Questions by Ben

Last week I was driving to do some face to face interviews for a key position. With five hours on the road, I had a little time to think about what made the “perfect” personality, skill set, etc. for the opening. Then I started backing into the interview questions I wanted to ask. While we had asked mainly about background and experience during the phone interview, I wanted more of an idea of how people fit during the face to face (and final) interview.

Funny enough, I was listening to a podcast for a portion of the drive, and the speaker was talking about some of their hiring practices. He said that when he’s hiring for a “doer” position, which ours definitely was, he asks a specific question to delve into the person’s background of doing things. Basically, he says, “What have you done?” and takes the conversation from there with follow ups, etc.

If I had to critique most people I’ve seen interview in the past, they don’t do a good enough job of the follow up questions. They have their favorite questions and they are sticking to that list no matter what the person says. However, if you really want to dig deeper, uncover half truths, and establish an actual baseline for what the person can actually do, then you need to listen carefully to their responses, then ask an additional question.

It doesn’t have to be complex, maybe just a “tell me more about that” or “and then how did it turn out” or “what did your manager think about what you did?” Those questions aren’t on any preparation website, so it’s hard to study for them. You should get a good picture of what the person is actually capable of from those sorts of interactions.

I’m also now a big believer in asking situational type questions to determine how a person will respond. We haven’t done much of that in the past, but this time around I asked a dozen questions based on what an average day/week would look like, and the answers steered us to the right person.

How do you decide what questions to ask in an interview? Is it time to change?

The post Asking the Right Interview Questions appeared first on upstartHR.

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Check out more of Ben Uebanks' work at Upstart HR

Guest Article: Driving Innovation with Event Planning by Ben

Event planning? Really? I thought HR was supposed to give up the “party planner” role in the move to strategic partner… Well, let’s hear what the indubitable Sue Meisinger has to say about that:

Open Communication Spurs Innovation

Meisinger then pointed to employee social events as an opportunity to tear down boundaries that many HR professionals seem to miss. She asked the audience to raise their hand if they resented the fact that their organization expected them to organize social events, such as holiday parties and corporate picnics. Dozens of hands shot up in the audience.

“Excuse me while I go on a rant here. You’re looking at this from the wrong perspective, and you shouldn’t resent this opportunity and instead embrace it,” she said. “You need to look at these employee events as strategic opportunities to open communication channels.”

In social settings, people talk and get to know each other, and HR’s role should be to help encourage that interaction and promote the culture where people talk to people, she added.

“Is it more likely that someone from accounting will return a call or consider a suggestion from someone in publications that they barely know, or is it likely that they will listen and pay attention to someone whom they remember meeting and sharing a good time?” Meisinger asked. “HR’s role is to ensure clarity and the organization’s efforts to develop and maintain a culture that encourages and celebrates innovation.” Source: SHRM

Bringing it home

I am the events team lead at work. To be totally honest, I’m not very good at the details part of the event planning. It’s just not an area that I am strong in.

However, I do put effort into determining what events support the culture we want to develop and how to use the events as a way to link diverse groups of employees. There is no substitute for the conversations and camaraderie that develop as a result of the events we have for our staff.

Another element is seeing our senior leaders participating in these events alongside our staff. That opportunity to interact on a personal level increases the trust in our leadership.

So, say what you will, but I’m going to keep putting the effort into developing events that our staff enjoy, because that is one of the things that makes our culture what it is. What are your thoughts on the topic?

The post Driving Innovation with Event Planning appeared first on upstartHR.

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Check out more of Ben Uebanks' work at Upstart HR

Guest Article: Guarantees: Stop letting clients penalise you for their stuff ups by Ross Clennett

As I checked back into ShortList for the New Year, I was greeted with the first headline of 2014 'Impossible to predict length of Australian downturn: PageGroup CEO'. The article goes on to detail the period-on-period declining results for not only PageGroup but also Hays, Robert Walters and Data 3. You don't need to have been in this industry for very long or look very far or talk to too

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Check out more of Ross Clennett's work at hisblog

The Psychology of New Year resolutions + how to make them stick

Setting New Year resolutions is a fun way to begin the year. Making resolutions is so popular as psychologically, we all seek self-improvement. Naturally, we want to maximize the positive and minimize the negative. But as you can imagine, the follow through is less than perfect… Around 60 per cent of people make resolutions at the start of the year, but only around 10 per cent actually manage to keep their promises all year round.

Have your New Year resolutions survived so far? It can be particularly difficult, especially the career or business-focused resolutions because much of the business world really only gets back to full strength in February. So let’s explore the New Year resolution a bit further and see how you can ‘stick to it!’

Why January?

It makes sense that people want to reach their potential and expand their horizons, but why is January the appropriate time to begin these endeavours?

Obviously the New Year is strongly associated with a “fresh start” because it signifies new beginnings. What happened last year becomes old news and we become determined to make the best of the year ahead.

For many people, December is a time of indulgence and expenditure. As a result, people often enter into the New Year feeling guilty that they behaved so excessively. People whose resolutions fall in the categories of health, diet, fitness or finance tend to have high expectations that they will make up for their luxurious Christmas. For others, it is a time of uncertainty. Many plans are yet to be confirmed so anything is possible! Mix this with some extra time available to tackle resolutions and you have many people wide-eyed to try new things.

 

Time to Revisit that Resolution!

There are many factors that will influence whether you will stick to your resolution. Psychologists acknowledge that human behaviours are not easily predicted. Individual differences separate every single person on various dimensions. Age is influential in explaining who is more likely to set resolutions in the first place, with older adults less likely to set resolutions than the younger generations. Factors such as self-efficacy, organisation and perseverance however, are more important in terms of whether they will actually stick to resolutions.

 Get S.M.A.R.T.

The S.M.A.R.T approach to goal setting is widely used in the business world to encourage employees to reach their targets. S.M.A.R.T is an acronym that describes 5 qualities goals (or resolutions) should possess:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Time-sensitive

This approach, if implemented correctly, can be invaluable in terms of achieving your New Year resolutions and give you the boost to achieve even more!  But don’t forget, this is only possible when you stick to it. Make notes, write in your calendar when you’d like to achieve goals by, and set a job application target of how many applications you need to make each day!