Some organizations will excite you. They’ll stimulate your success and growth. Others will be stressful. They may lead you to quit before you’ve accomplished much or learned what you hoped to. With the pressure (or excitement) of finding a new job, it’s all too easy to pursue a job opportunity or to accept an offer with only a hazy view of how the institution really operates. The path to an institution you’ll like is to investigate the culture you’re thinking of joining before you accept the position.

Sean (name has been changed) is a master at this. He pursued a job offer at a Fortune 500 company to be the first Chief Administrative Officer (CAO). He was well-qualified, presented himself well, and got the offer. He’d been competing with capable people. He was proud he’d “won the contest.”

The next step was a return visit, after which he’d decide to accept the offer. Sean had already learned a lot about the company’s businesses and some things about the organization. His priority now was culture and how the new position might fit: “I asked people, ‘What are you excited about? What are you proud of? Who are your close friends in the company? How does the group function together?’” Sean learned things like who the heroes were, what made them successful, and what his biggest challenges and opportunities would be in the job. The different people he met with were learning from his questions. It was almost like he already worked there, and they were jointly determining how to make the new role successful.

Surprisingly, Sean turned down the offer. The new role was a misfit in the company’s culture.

As he learned more about the company, Sean questioned how he’d be viewed as the first CAO in a company where everyone else focused on bottom-line results. It was a highly performance-driven environment with lots of business units. Corporate staffs were secondary.

“I asked how they’d keep score on me, how they’d really know I was making a difference,” he said. “We never got to satisfactory answers to that question. They weren’t hiding anything. This CAO position was a new one, and they didn’t really know.”

Sean was concerned that this new position wouldn’t fit in the company’s culture, that he wouldn’t really be accepted, and that it wouldn’t be a springboard to the line job that he really wanted after two or three years as CAO. He might have made it work, but why take the risk?

It’s not uncommon for job seekers to enter organizations without understanding the culture and come away disappointed. When considering a new job, be sure to investigate the institution’s culture. Consider these questions to guide you:

1. What should I learn? Understand the organization’s purpose — not just what they say they’re doing, but also how their purpose leads to decisions and what makes them proud. Learn how the organization operates. For example, consider the importance of performance, how the organization gets things done, the level of teamwork, the quality of the people, how people communicate, and any ethical issues.

Except for ethical issues, there’s no absolute standard of what’s best in organizational culture. Different purposes and different organizational features can be more or less appealing to different people. When you understand how the potential employer operates, you’ll need to consider how well that matches your goals. Your target organizational culture is an important part of your aspirations.

2. How should I learn? Read everything you can find about the institution, but read with a critical eye. Institutions have formal vision statements, and they often mention cultural topics in other public reports, but these documents are written with a purpose in mind. Independent writers take an independent perspective. They can be more critical, but they can miss details and get things wrong.

Discuss culture with people in the organization. You’ll talk to people in the interviewing process, of course. But you may learn different things if you meet others there who aren’t involved in your recruiting process. Also talk to people outside the organization who know it — customers, suppliers, partners, and ex-employees. Their different experiences with the institution will affect their views, so ask about situations where they’ve seen the culture in action.

3. When should I learn? It’s hard to learn about culture at an early stage in your search. But your impressions can guide you to target some institutions and avoid others.

Culture may come up in job interviews, although it may be complicated to do much investigation when you’re trying to sell yourself. People sometimes worry that discussing culture might make people uncomfortable and put a job offer at risk. The culture topic is certainly not off-base, and it is necessary to know for future growth in the company. Hiring managers should expect it. Whether it’s in interviews or after you have an offer, you’ll do best if your questions show you’re learning rapidly about the organization, taking the employer’s perspective, and beginning to figure out how to succeed there. Culture questions can cast you in a positive light. Sean’s line of questioning confirmed the CEO’s judgment to hire him, even if Sean didn’t like the answers.

What’s your view of how culture affects the job search? Has culture played a part in how you choose your future employer?

When Choosing a Job, Culture Matters is a post from: Hand & Associates, Executive Management Firm

NEW YORK | the economist

AS WALMART grew into the world’s largest retailer, its staff were subjected to a long list of dos and don’ts covering every aspect of their work. Now the firm has decided that its rules-based culture is too inflexible to cope with the challenges of globalization and technological change, and is trying to instill a “values-based” culture, in which employees can be trusted to do the right thing because they know what the firm stands for.

“Values” is the latest hot topic in management thinking. PepsiCo has started preaching a creed of “performance with purpose”. Chevron, an oil firm, brands itself as a purveyor of “human energy”, though presumably it does not really want you to travel by rickshaw. Nearly every big firm claims to be building a more caring and ethical culture.

A new study suggests there is less to this than it says on the label. Commissioned by Dov Seidman, boss of LRN, a firm that advises on corporate culture, and author of “How”, a book arguing that the way firms do business matters as much as what they do, and conducted by the Boston Research Group, the “National Governance, Culture and Leadership Assessment” is based on a survey of thousands of American employees, from every rung of the corporate ladder.

It found that 43% of those surveyed described their company’s culture as based on command-and-control, top-down management or leadership by coercion—what Mr Seidman calls “blind obedience”. The largest category, 54%, saw their employer’s culture as top-down, but with skilled leadership, lots of rules and a mix of carrots and sticks, which Mr Seidman calls “informed acquiescence”. Only 3% fell into the category of “self-governance”, in which everyone is guided by a “set of core principles and values that inspire everyone to align around a company’s mission”.

The study found evidence that such differences matter. Nearly half of those in blind-obedience companies said they had observed unethical behavior in the previous year, compared with around a quarter in the other sorts of firm. Yet only a quarter of those in the blind-obedience firms said they were likely to blow the whistle, compared with over 90% in self-governing firms. Lack of trust may inhibit innovation, too. More than 90% of employees in self-governing firms, and two-thirds in the informed-acquiescence category, agreed that “good ideas are readily adopted by my company”.  At blind-obedience firms, fewer than one in five did.

Tragicomically, the study found that bosses often believe their own guff, even if their underlings do not. Bosses are eight times more likely than the average to believe that their organization is self-governing. (The cheery folk in human resources are also much more optimistic than other employees.) Some 27% of bosses believe their employees are inspired by their firm. Alas, only 4% of employees agree. Likewise, 41% of bosses say their firm rewards performance based on values rather than merely on financial results. Only 14% of employees swallow this.

The View from the Top, and Bottom is a post from: Hand & Associates, Executive Management Firm

“Culture” is the hot buzzword in business these days, and with good reason.

Many business leaders are coming to realize that if a company’s internal culture isn’t healthy—if it isn’t focused on the right values and goals, and if it isn’t behaving in the right way—then ultimately, that will become apparent to the outside world. It may leak out via dispirited employees writing tell-all op-ed pieces, as Goldman Sachs’ Greg Smith did. But even if something dramatic like that doesn’t happen, over time a dysfunctional corporate culture is likely to affect everything from your company’s performance to the way your brand is perceived. As Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz recently said, “The value of your company is driven by your company’s values.”

I think most of us who are running businesses understand this, but what’s perhaps less clear is: How do you give your company culture the occasional boost—or in some cases, the extreme makeover—that may be needed from time to time, to ensure that people are sharing the same values, the same mission? How do you renew that sense of “we’re all moving in the same direction, together?”

Mission statements don’t necessarily get the job done; at a certain point a mission statement is just words on paper. Likewise, company leaders may issue memos or give rousing speeches to the troops, and that’s effective up to a point—but it’s still more words than action.

I’ve come to believe that the best way to rejuvenate a company culture is to give people inside that company a fresh idea or driving principle they can embrace, rally around, and act upon. It has to be more than words, though—it has to feel more substantial, more engaging, more revolutionary than that. In short: You need to launch a “movement” within your own company.

What do I mean by a movement? Well, first of all, let me clarify that movements don’t have to be about political issues or grand attempts to bring about social change. As I explain in my new book Uprising, there are all kinds of movements—including, increasingly these days, movements started by companies.

Guy Kawasaki, author of “Enchantment” and former Chief Evangelist for Apple said: “Uprising is a must-read for anyone who wants to start a mass movement like Macintosh. Whether you’re one person with an idea or a global brand, Scott can show you the way to enchant, evangelize and enroll followers.”

Like the work Kawasaki helped achieve for Apple, a company may start a movement as a means of rallying consumers, fans and fanatics around an idea; but it can also start a movement that rallies employees around a shared sense of purpose and a joint mission.

A movement to “Think Different”

We all know the story of Steve Jobs’ incredible turnaround at Apple Computer after returning to the company in the late 1990s—it led to a series of amazing product introductions that have continued up to the present. But Apple didn’t start with the products—it started with the culture. At the time of Jobs’ return, the 20-year-old company had lost some sense of its own purpose, its “specialness.” One of the first things Jobs did was to start a “Think Different” movement inside the company, particularly aimed at the product developers. Before the outside world ever saw those famous “Think Different” ads, those two words were appearing on banners and T-shirts at the company’s headquarters, ensuring that everyone at the company lived and breathed this philosophy. “Steve was inviting everybody in that company to rethink everything,” recalls the longtime Apple ad chief, Lee Clow of TBWA/Chiat/Day. “At the time, he didn’t have any new product yet, and Apple was almost out of business. But to him, the first mission was to get everybody singing off the same song sheet again.” By the time “Think Different” became a public campaign—and an external movement that rallied creative people everywhere around this idea—it was already an established internal movement at Apple.

It’s not easy to spark a movement within a company—it can be a large and ambitious exercise in change management. It may take months (or, to look at it another way, it never ends; transforming a corporate culture tends to be an ongoing process).

“Movements are the future of marketing. They can successfully galvanize the hearts, minds and wallets of the consuming masses and moreover for those working behind the brands. Doesn’t mean that crappy creative can change the world, but combining movement thinking and GREAT creative you can do anything,” says Martin Cedergren, Swedish CD and one of the most awarded creatives out there.

A company culture on the “Rise”

My firm StrawberryFrog has been involved in a number of these transformations with some of our clients, including a recent movement launched by Mahindra Group, the India-based family of companies that produces everything from aerospace technology and automobiles to software. The company felt it needed to find a core purpose that could carry it into the future and unite a diverse group of a million employees working in a range of industries. Gradually, a common thread emerged between what Mahindra was trying to do as a company—break new ground and pursue a larger purpose—and what people around the world were hungry to do, in terms of becoming more innovative so they could rise to the challenges of today.

So Mahindra developed a movement around this notion that the company was “rising up” to its own challenges—and in so doing, could also help other people to rise up to the world’s challenges. This idea would eventually become a public campaign/movement, which included a number of programs that encouraged and rewarded innovation by members of the public. But first the company needed to fire up its own workforce and get them invested in this mission. For employees, “Rise” offered permission to innovate and set new goals—a potential break from ingrained practices and old ways of doing business.

Our process of working with Mahindra on cultural transformation took more than a year. It started with an internal discovery process—talking to senior managers across the company about how they work, their goals and values, and their own perceptions of the company. One of the main objectives was to clarify the higher purpose of the brand. From the standpoint of a company and its employees, you must get to the essence of why you do what you do (as opposed to what you do or technically how you do it).

You also want to see if there’s a gap between the company’s ideals and its actual behavior. To the extent that such a gap exists, it’s best if the people inside the company come to this realization on their own. One approach StrawberryFrog uses is to hold “mirror workshops” designed to reflect the present realities of the company’s culture and behavior—which will usually provide a pretty good idea of areas that may need to be addressed or changed. At Mahindra, people were challenged to think about how this “Rise” idea might be applied or adapted to their own situations.

Have You Anything to Declare?

If you’re trying to rally people around an idea, you can’t use fuzzy corporate jargon. A movement idea must clearly and forcefully articulated—it should sound more like a declaration or, better yet, a manifesto.

We’ve worked on manifestos with a number of clients and they can be a great way to rally people around a big idea. It may be a page or two in length—or it may take the form of a new company “bible.” But regardless of form, it should be forcefully worded—almost “revolutionary” in tone. (Here’s an example of a manifesto we wrote for Smart Car when they were launching a movement.) If the word “manifesto” makes you think of an overthrow, it should—you’re trying to overthrow the old, stale elements of the culture. In keeping with this insurrectionist spirit, it can help to make use of flags, banners, symbols—all the things one sees in political/social uprisings, the symbols that bind people together behind a shared vision or goal.

It often is necessary to change company policies and procedures when you’re launching a movement within a corporate culture. Words in manifestos are great, but actions, of course, speak louder. One of the things we do is brainstorm with companies on bold actions they could institute within the company as a way of signaling to everyone who works there, “It’s a new day.”Google did something like this when it implemented “20 percent time” at the company, meaning that employees could devote 20 percent of their time to working on their own big ideas and innovations.

Kipp Kreutzberg, Chief Marketing Officer of European Wax Centers, one of the best and fastest growing franchise businesses in the United States according to Inc. Magazine told me: “Movements invite consumers to become a part of something big and meaningful. This is a stark contrast to “non-moving” traditional marketing in which the consumer is at best a bystander or witness of something beyond his/her own participation.”

Oftentimes, a movement that starts within a company eventually gravitates to the outside world, becoming a successful consumer movement—such was the case with Apple “Think Different” and Mahindra’s “Rise.” But these companies understood that before they could become more innovative in their offerings or change the way they were perceived by the outside world, they had to start by reinvigorating and re-focusing their own company culture. And they found that the most effective way to do that was by sparking a dynamic movement inside the company. The revolution starts from within.

How Do You Change Your Company’s Culture? Spark A Movement is a post from: Hand & Associates, Executive Management Firm

By Gordon Silcox

Medieval maps are popularly thought of as marking dangerous, unexplored territories at the edge of the known world with such phrases as, “Here There Be Dragons” or even, “Here also are huge men having horns four feet long, and there are serpents also of such magnitude that they can eat an ox whole” (quotations from Wikipedia).

Today, now that technology has pretty well put to rest the notion of serpents lurking in remote watery regions of the Earth, interest in the concept of “dangerous, unexplored territories” is still very much alive – among our Hand & Associates leadership coaches.  Our coaches frequently venture with their clients into the unknown, to observe the processes that influence the complicated functioning of their minds and emotions.  This is where the modern-day ox-eating serpents lurk.  We’ll call them “gremlins,” who whisper and sweet-talk and trick clients into perpetuating—to mention a few of gremlins’ ghastly gadgets—blind spots, denial, and fear of loss of “something,” such as prestige in the eyes of others.

We all rely on habits we have formed, as we strive to sustain order and meaning in each of our lives.  But some mental habits can prevent us from facing up to those pesky gremlins, and can prevent clients—even among excellent-performing leaders—from energizing their untapped potential and reaching yet higher levels of achievement.  We all know the terminology:  “I need to get out of my comfort zone,” or, “I know I’ve got to think outside the box.”  But oh, so difficult to achieve on one’s own!  It often takes a skilled coach, working in partnership with the executive client, to unlock that potential and co-create the kind of results that coaches refer to as “transformational.”

Scholar-consultant Susanne Cook-Greuter and others use the term, the “growing edge” to refer to that place within each of us where dwells the potential for self-improvement and fulfillment—which can only be achieved by doing the difficult, on-purpose work of pushing limits, stretching the boundaries of so-called comfort zones.  In coach-speak, we like to call this, “starting by facilitating the client’s self-awareness, then assisting her/him to modify habits and behaviors in such a way as to more closely align words and actions with his/her own (and others’) meaning-making and mental processing preferences.” This is not psychotherapy.  This approach is pure coaching:  Helping the client to become self-generating at a higher level of performance by developing and strengthening his/her portfolio of competencies. The alignment of words and actions with key stakeholders’ own ongoing quest for life-meaning, in turn, creates the more integrated and fertile environment in which the client can positively influence the real-time circumstances s/he faces—or, in other words—create an environment in which the client can be a true leader.

As a coach, these are the activities that I engage in daily and which enable me to regard the arc of my own career as having brought me to the point where I feel (as has been said of real estate development) I am engaging in my “highest and best use.”  And this is said with humility, since coaches know absolutely that they themselves must be persistent in their continuous willingness to make the journey, just as they assist their clients to do, into dangerous unexplored territories to observe their own “growing edge.” At least we know that there is  less risk today of encountering “huge men having horns four feet long.”

And so  .   .   .   .

 Set sail at high tide.

Lade low cargo and victuals,

Secure for rough seas,

Chart the course, set the first watch—

Primed, prepared, push on with faith.

Terra Incognita – No Dragons, Just Gremlins is a post from: Hand & Associates, Executive Management Firm

But translating this into action is much more difficult. As the former head of executive development at GE used to tell me, “There’s a difference between doing it and really doing it.” Many firms have trouble keeping their best people, despite their investments in talent management. In fact, a study last year by the Corporate Executive Board indicated that “25 percent of employer-identified, high-potential employees plan to leave their current companies within the year, as compared to only 10 percent in 2006.”The study also found that 40% of the internal job moves for high potentials ended in failure.

So despite the focus on high potentials and the importance of effectively managing them, why do so many organizations struggle to do it well? Let me suggest two reasons.

Discomfort with Differentiation: In order to focus on high potentials, some employees need to be singled out. And, truth be told, most managers hate to differentiate. They would prefer to treat everyone the same, avoiding the uncomfortable process of sorting people by levels of performance. As a result, managers will identify certain employees as “high-potential” simply because they don’t want to tell them that they’re outperformed by their colleagues. And others, who are appropriately selected, are not told because it would create an uncomfortable two-class system. In other words, managers avoid declaring who the high potentials are, for fear of upsetting people who were not selected.

Discomfort with Developmental Dialogue: Even if high potentials are identified properly, bringing them to the next level requires a continual, complex dialogue. Managers need to stretch, challenge, and coach their high-potential employees and make sure their assignments push them beyond their comfort zones. To do so, they have to work with senior business leaders and HR to clarify assessments, identify opportunities, and coordinate possible moves. Without multi-dimensional dialogue about these issues, managers tend to hold on to their high-potential people instead of helping them along an intentional developmental pathway. High-potentials then may interpret this as a lack of company support and will be inclined to look elsewhere.

Unfortunately, engaging in this kind of developmental dialogue is foreign to many managers and can cause just as much anxiety as the need to differentiate. In fact most managers avoid coaching discussions, particularly with employees who have more potential in their careers than they do.

Taken together, the twin discomforts of differentiation and dialogue hinder high-potential programs, even when senior line and HR executives do a good job of centrally structuring assessments, rotations, and training. This may at least partly explain why so many company-identified high potentials don’t remain with their firms.

To increase the odds of success, senior executives need to focus not just on the high-potential programs, but the underlying anxieties of managers who have to execute them. One way to do this, for example, is to require managers to mentor one of their high-potential direct reports. Not only will this approach be good for the chosen employees in the short-term, but also it will force managers to get more comfortable with performance differentiation and developmental dialogues. As anyone who has done it can attest, mentoring benefits the mentor as much (if not more) than the mentee.

The Paradox of High Potentials is a post from: Hand & Associates, Executive Management Firm

Soaring to Success is a career and life enhancement and empowerment manual. Brown guides the reader to focus on the opportunities inherent in challenges and help discover personal and professional success, happiness and fulfillment. Soaring to Success allays the fears and anxieties that are prevalent, directs us to find our passions to ultimately create a successful, joy-filled life, while guiding us through life’s inherent ups and downs in an empowering way.

Soaring to Success offers a practical step-by-step plan to make each of our careers and  personal lives full of achievement and satisfaction. Brown covers such topics as self-analysis, defining what success means, interpersonal and motivational tools, negotiation strategies, how to find your dream job, what to do (emotionally and practically) if you lose your job, how to manage and overcome fear, and, lastly, where the best opportunities are in the economy.

Soaring to Success is a post from: Hand & Associates, Executive Management Firm

Some of the companies Mara works with on the topics of career development, leadership skills, strategic planning, team building, executive development and outplacement include: Raytheon, Oakley, Warner Brothers, AEG/LA Live, Mattel, FOX, Wellpoint, IMAX, Hilton Hotels, CW Network, Activision, Univision, City ofHope, Allergan, Cheesecake Factory, and Reed Publications.  In addition, Mara works with numerous entrepreneurs, politicians, business executives and celebrities.

In her earlier career Mara worked in the Advertising and Marketing industry for fast-food chains, concert venues, newspaper publications and entertainment attractions.  She understands the corporate world having risen high in those ranks in the retail and entertainment industries. Mara has a B.A. degree in Psychology, and an M.B.A. degree in Marketing and Organizational Development.  Mara’s first self-help book, Landing on Your Feet, was published world-wide by McGraw Hill and went on to become a best-seller and translated in to 3 other languages.  Her latest 3 books are:

Soaring to Success…How to Succeed in Any Economy      

The Interior Castle… Finding Spirituality in Your Everyday Life      

What Now…The Road From Success to Significance

Mara hosts, writes and produces a local cable television show called, “Living Your Dreams.”  Now in its eighth year, the show’s goal is to entertain, inform and inspire its audience.

Mara has also recently served a 4 year term as the Chairperson for the Women’s Advisory Board to the City of West Hollywood City Council, and on the Steering Committee Board for the City’s Annual Women’s Leadership Conference as the Chairperson for the Programming sub-committee.  Mara volunteers for Pet Orphans, Free Arts for Abused Children and LA’s Best.  Through all her endeavors, Mara helps people take their careers, relationships, finances, health – their lives – to new levels of success, abundance, love and happiness, while living their lives with joy, meaning and significance.

Coaches Corner: Mara Brown is a post from: Hand & Associates, Executive Management Firm

“All I needed were two personal recommendations to be eligible. As everyone in the office agreed I was good at my job, I didn’t think this would be a problem. But while the male executive signed the paperwork without hesitation, my immediate boss refused to sign. When I asked her right-hand woman why, she pulled me to one side and explained that my boss was jealous of me,” she writes.

But wait. Isn’t being beautiful supposed to be a workplace plus? Isn’t the world set up to reward the comely? I decided to do a little digging to figure out whether attractiveness is a workplace boon or burden. Here’s what I found:

We believe looks matter

In a 2010 Newsweek poll, 63% of Americans surveyed thought good looks were a factor in a male employee’s hiring and 72% believed beauty played a part in helping women land a job.

 It’s better to look good on paper than in pictures

While including a photo with your resume is a no-no for most jobs in North America, it’s common in parts of Asia and Europe. Researchers in Israel found that good-looking men who included photos with their job applications were more likely to be called for interviews than their less attractive counterparts with comparable skills and work experience. For women, the opposite was true. As The Economist reports:

“Attractive females were less likely to be offered an interview if they included a mugshot. When applying directly to a company (rather than through an agency) an attractive woman would need to send out 11 CVs on average before getting an interview; an equally qualified plain one just seven.”

Thin is in, but only if you’re a woman

Researchers at the University of Florida discovered that white-collar women who weighed 25 lbs less than the average weight of the study participant group they looked at took home about about $16 000 more per year. Women who were 25 lbs above the average earned approximately $14 000 less than peers of average weight.

As for men, those weighing 25 lbs less than average had salaries that were $9000 lower than their beefier counterparts.

A bright smile affects your salary

It might sound like a stretch, but researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research discovered that women who grew up in areas that used fluoride in their water supply earned an average of 4% more than women who grew up guzzling non-fluoridated water. There was no effect for men. Their conclusion?

“We find little evidence to support occupational sorting, statistical discrimination, and productivity as potential channels of these effects, suggesting consumer and employer discrimination are the likely driving factors whereby oral health affects earnings.”

 If you’ve got it, flaunt it?

In her op-ed, Brick makes an off-hand mention of flirting with male superiors as a means of advancing her career, but Catherine Hakim devoted an entire book – that would be Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom – to encouraging women to leverage their ‘erotic capital’ to achieve career and social success. She claims that men want sex more than women do, so women should exploit this desire gap to get ahead in the world. In other words, if you’ve got it, flaunt it. As Hakim puts it in an interview with Slate:

“Having erotic capital isn’t something you sort of turn on and turn off like turning on a tap or faucet, in the same way that intelligence isn’t something you either switch on or switch off. It’s there as part of the sort of person you are: in your style, in the way you talk to people, in the way you dress every day, in the hairstyle you wear every day. And it’s really a change of perspective that I’m recommending, that women should know that all of this has value.”

And, as you might have guessed:

Good-looking people earn more

Or so says Daniel Hammermesh, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. According to his research, attractive people earn an average of $230 000 more over the course of their working lives than those who are less genetically blessed. There’s even a premium/penalty system at play whereby those judged most attractive earn a bonus over those of average beauty and the least attractive get docked compared to the norm. The most disadvantaged? Homely men. They earn 13% less than their average-looking colleagues

Does It Pay More To Be Pretty? is a post from: Hand & Associates, Executive Management Firm

“We need to be stricter with our hiring practices next year,” he said. “We want to keep them past a year.”

I wanted to turn around and tell him, “Maybe you don’t need to be stricter with your hiring practices. You can bring them in but you’re not keeping them. It could be your corporate culture.”

Managers

Authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman said in their book, First Break All the Rules: What The Worlds’ Greatest Managers Do Differently, that people don’t leave jobs, they leave managers. If employees don’t get along with their managers, don’t like them or don’t respect them, they will leave a company despite a high salary or great benefits. A bad manager is a big factor in employee performance. A good manager, no matter the salary, will inspire loyalty.

Managers who don’t create the right opportunities for their employees, don’t communicate with them, and don’t appreciate them often find themselves dealing with a high turnover rate. Good managers are people you keep in touch with even after you leave a position. Bad managers are people you keep track of so you can avoid them in future.

Constant Reorganization

Companies that seemed to reorganize every six to nine months don’t have a good retention rate. Their upper management gets shifted into different positions, managers are changed and even business units are renamed. Almost every time a reorganization happens, people get laid off. This creates an environment of uncertainty and people don’t feel like they can lay down roots.

Negative Competition

Competition is good, gladiator wars aren’t. Pitting people and departments against each other does not encourage people to stay. Some people thrive in all stressful environments, most don’t. Why do you think there are so many articles about how to manage stress? People will leave a job if stress makes them ill.

Lack of Support

Do you communicate with your employees? Have you sat down and created a plan for their growth within the company? Has that plan been implemented after sign-off? If a manager doesn’t take the time to know his employee and foster growth, people will feel unappreciated. Do you know what unappreciated people do? They walk.

Mary Kay Ash, the founder of Mary Kay cosmetics, once said about appreciation, “Everyone wants to be appreciated, so if you appreciate someone, don’t keep it to yourself.” That company appreciates its sales force with gifts, recognition and glamorous events. Managers don’t have to go that route, but acknowledging their employees’ work will make a huge difference to retention rates, as discussed in this Workopolis article.

As Mary Kay Ash also said, “People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn’t make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.”

Why Your Employees Are Leaving … is a post from: Hand & Associates, Executive Management Firm

It’s not just the number of hours we’re working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.

What we’ve lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It’s like an itch we can’t resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.

Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you’re taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you’re driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn’t?

The biggest cost — assuming you don’t crash — is to your productivity. In part, that’s a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you’re partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it’s because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you’re increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.

But most insidiously, it’s because if you’re always doing something, you’re relentlessly burning down your available reservoir of energy over the course of every day, so you have less available with every passing hour.

I know this from my own experience. I get two to three times as much writing accomplished when I focus without interruption for a designated period of time and then take a real break, away from my desk. The best way for an organization to fuel higher productivity and more innovative thinking is to strongly encourage finite periods of absorbed focus, as well as shorter periods of real renewal.

If you’re a manager, here are three policies worth promoting:

1. Maintain meeting discipline. Schedule meetings for 45 minutes, rather than an hour or longer, so participants can stay focused, take time afterward to reflect on what’s been discussed, and recover before the next obligation. Start all meetings at a precise time, end at a precise time, and insist that all digital devices be turned off throughout the meeting.

2. Stop demanding or expecting instant responsiveness at every moment of the day. It forces your people into reactive mode, fractures their attention, and makes it difficult for them to sustain attention on their priorities. Let them turn off their email at certain times. If it’s urgent, you can call them — but that won’t happen very often.

3. Encourage renewal. Create at least one time during the day when you encourage your people to stop working and take a break. Offer a midafternoon class in yoga, or meditation, organize a group walk or workout, or consider creating a renewal room where people can relax, or take a nap.

It’s also up to individuals to set their own boundaries. Consider these three behaviors for yourself:

1. Do the most important thing first in the morning, preferably without interruption, for 60 to 90 minutes, with a clear start and stop time. If possible, work in a private space during this period, or with sound-reducing earphones. Finally, resist every impulse to distraction, knowing that you have a designated stopping point. The more absorbed you can get, the more productive you’ll be. When you’re done, take at least a few minutes to renew.

2. Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. If you don’t, you’ll constantly succumb to the tyranny of the urgent. Also, find a different environment in which to do this activity — preferably one that’s relaxed and conducive to open-ended thinking.

3. Take real and regular vacations. Real means that when you’re off, you’re truly disconnecting from work. Regular means several times a year if possible, even if some are only two or three days added to a weekend. The research strongly suggests that you’ll be far healthier if you take all of your vacation time, and more productive overall.

A single principle lies at the heart of all these suggestions. When you’re engaged at work, fully engage, for defined periods of time. When you’re renewing, truly renew. Make waves. Stop living your life in the gray zone.

Harvard Business Review

The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time is a post from: Hand & Associates, Executive Management Firm