Click here to read the complete article>>>

For much of its 13-year history, particularly the early years, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone. Let the engineers do their stuff. If they become stuck, they’ll ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place.

But Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.

“In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”

Click here to read more>>>

No business wants its work force pilfered by the competition, especially when it comes to key performers. And that’s even more so for small and medium-sized businesses than bigger ones, which can ill afford to lose and try to replace important players.

So businesses that want to hang on to top talent need to make moves to retain their staff, experts say.

Employees entertain offers to jump ship for a variety of reasons, usually when their needs aren’t met. And it’s not necessarily about money, says Maureen Neglia, a Toronto-based senior consultant in Towers Watson’s talent and rewards practice.

When someone’s ideas stop getting heard, other employers start to look attractive, says Iain Morris, a Toronto-based partner with Mercer Canada Ltd., a global human resources consulting firm.

Indeed, Ms. Feltham says her director of business development took a pay cut to join her firm because he felt his opinions would count more, she says.

Click here to read more>>

There exists are a myriad of reasons for why organizations counter but to me it boils down to two key factors – power and optics.  Power in that an employer has lost and needs to regain it and optics as it pertains to how the organization may look upon an executive who has lost a key member of their team.  In the luxury hotel world the optics also relate to the ownership group – try explaining the loss of a superstar DOSM to an owner that is reexamining the management contract.  According to data compiled by the National Employment Association, 80% of Executives who accept a counter offer will not be with that organization in 12 months – are you one of the 20%?

In the search I referenced above, the candidate kept me abreast of the counter process and felt that she owed it to her current organization to hear them out – there is a psychological reaction to leaving an employer.

Make no mistake – you owe an employer nothing other than your focus and diligence while employed.  Companies downsize and cut back frequently very often cutting loose loyal and committed employees – the company will often state that it was tough decision made for business reasons.  Should an employee not similarly have the right to make tough decisions for personal reasons.

Your current employer is under tremendous pressure to hold on to talent – if countered remind yourself of these key points:

1. why do I have to leave to be rewarded and effusively told how much I mean to the company?

2. do they value me or do they value my position – they are two different animals.  I am not replaceable, my position is.  Have they downsized people at my level in other parts of the organization?  Can the articulate why I mean so much to the company or are they playing upon my guilt and sense of loyalty?  Are you upset that I am leaving or are you concerned about the personal ramifications my departure might have on you and the company?

3. I considered the new opportunity for many reasons – those reasons have not changed – why does a new organization quantitatively value my services more than my existing company?  Nothing really changes – if in one year I am still not feeling motivated/rewarded/valued do I need to solicit another job offer to correct it?

4. What about the new employer – they have undoubtedly invested a great deal of energy, money and time in you and your candidacy.  They negotiated in good faith, met your demands – do you not ethically feel committed to them?

The purpose of this note is not to influence candidates we represent – we work for our clients and as such must ensure that their best interests are kept top of mind.  However, when you resign, you will be bombarded with platitudes and praise. For 80% of the workforce, those plaudits are fleeting.

Brent Billing (brent@lwjobs.com)

THE KEY QUESTIONS
1. What was your most challenging job? Why? What did you learn from this job?
2. What was your least challenging job? Why? What did you learn from this job?
3. In what situation did you find that you had to overcome major obstacles to meet your objectives? What did you do? Why? What did you learn from the experience?
4. Who do you admire most? Who do you admire least? Why?
5. In what situation did you attempt to do something, but failed? Why did you fail? What did you learn from this situation?
6. Describe a bad experience that happened to you. What did you learn from it?
7. Describe a situation where you tried to help someone change. What strategy did you use? How did the situation end?
8. Describe a mistake you made in dealing with people. What did you learn from it?
9. What was your best learning experience? What was your worst learning experience? What did you learn from each of them?
10. Describe the last major change you made. Why did you do it? How did it work out? What did you learn?

Click here to read the complete article>>

Click on the link to read the entire article…  http://tiny.cc/w2ltb

If you want to be really good at something, it’s going to involve relentlessly pushing past your comfort zone, along with frustration, struggle, setbacks and failures. That’s true as long as you want to continue to improve, or even maintain a high level of excellence. The reward is that being really good at something you’ve earned through your own hard work can be immensely satisfying.

Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we’ve found are most effective for our clients:

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

Click on the link to read the entire article  http://tiny.cc/fb7ad

Careers

Job interviews: Prepare for the right comeback

James Dimas LAURA LEYSHON for the Globe and Mail

Here are some do’s and don’ts for job seekers on giving the best responses to potential employers’ probing questions

Wallace Immen

From Friday’s Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Sep. 09, 2010 4:57PM EDT Last updated on Friday, Sep. 10, 2010 6:15AM EDT

James Dimas thought he was well prepared to answer any question a job interviewer could pose, but he was caught completely off guard when a hiring manager asked: “What’s your favourite colour?”

“I had no idea what he was getting at,” said Mr. Dimas, who was interviewing for a full-time job in information technology in Vancouver.

“I know there is a theory in personality assessment that picking red means you are competitive, blue might indicate that you are creative and pink might be an indication that you aren’t aggressive enough. But it’s still a stupid question,” said Mr. Dimas, who lives in Vancouver and has been blogging about his interview experiences on the website LinkedIn.com.

Click on the link to read this article http://tiny.cc/omavj

To read the entire article click on this link <http://bit.ly/9AE3JR>