Postal horror story highlights need 2 assess contractors & effects of downsizing proactively

Today Monica Bugajski is incensed because she feels Ontario Court Justice Marjoh Agro handed down too light a sentence to a mail carrier who, while on contract to Canada Post,  illegally stashed 7,000 pieces of undelivered mail in her apartment and car after her mail route became too onerous.
http://news.sympatico.ca/oped/coffee-talk/canada_post_worker_hoarded_7000_pieces_of_mail/5b96ef13
My thoughts are that, at least from a strategic HR standpoint, the 2010 incident raises more issues than just the responsibility of the contractor to seek an appropriate remedy from the contractee if changes to her working conditions make her workload overwhelming.  
In practical terms, wouldn't it have served everyone's best interests better (including the recipients of the waylaid mail) if management had been more proactive by:  
(1) Assessing the contractor's capabilities (or those of a prospective employee, for that matter) carefully both before and after engaging her? 
(2) Reviewing the practical ramifications of downsizing both before and after the fact--and thus avoid overburdening a worker with circumstances that clearly exceeded her problem-solving abilities?

http://www.hamiltonnews.com/news/former-stoney-creek-postal-worker-pleads-guilty-to-not-delivering-the-mail/

Now girls rule--literally!--in British monarchy--that is, if 16 national parliaments concur

The 16 Commonwealth nations have just voted to change the rules for royal succession; so if all goes according to plan, after Prince William, Britain's hereditary monarch will become the next queen or king strictly on the basis of birth order, not gender.  http://t.co/VD6qv8v
Buckingham Palace has always refrained from commenting on this political issue, saying it’s a matter for the British and Commonwealth governments to decide.  Rather, it was Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, who successfully urged leaders of the 15 other Commonwealth nations to agree today that Britain’s royal family should scrap the antiquated system of succession by male primogeniture (after the Belgian, Dutch, Swedish, and Norwegian monarchies have already canned it.)
But before this overdue reform can actually go into effect, it must also be approved by the national legislatures of all 16 Commonwealth countries—and the slowness and complexity of this process has been enough of an obstacle to prevent such reforms in the past.  Additionally, I have to wonder how many of the 16 Commonwealth legislatures have a fair proportion of female members, who will be inclined to push for female heirs taking precedence over their younger brothers and other girl-friendly legislation.  (Please see page 34 of my March-2011 column in PrintAction for a more detailed discussion of why having proportional representation of females in government definitely matters.)
https://www.box.net/shared/gy0bmq180s
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/12/royal-succession-reform_n_1007210.html

Please share your experiences regarding mentors for women

It’s encouraging to see that my posting yesterday prompted a dribble of renewed activity on a LinkedIn discussion on female mentors that I launched in Oct 2010.  The platform is an interesting and fun group called Girls Who Print, moderated by Mary Beth Smith of Texas.  To bring you up to speed, I’ve quoted how I began the discussion below:

   

Wanted: Girl success stories

 Does anyone have career-advancement stories with female heroines to share? Or female survival tactics for the recession or glass ceilings?

I’ve just finished reading through all 268 interesting entries posted to Mary Beth’s “And you are… ??" discussion since she launched it in May 2009. Back then she wrote: “Who knew guys would accept an invite to something called “Girls Who Print”??!!

Similarly, it was no surprise to me when I first joined Girls Who Print that my female publisher, Sara Young, was already a member. But it also turns out that my (male) editor at PrintAction, Jon Robinson, is a closet feminist: when editing my [Sept 2010] column (see https://www.box.net/shared/15ln6t43jf), Jon didn't just tolerate my long account of how Ms. Kris Bovay rose through the ranks to become chair of BIA; he even agreed with me that female professionals need to read more of that kind of stuff. Kris has forged an impressive career, although both her family responsibilities and the recent recession required her to change course radically. I hope the widespread supporters of Girls Who Print will exploit this space to share other, uniquely female, path-to-success stories.

Journalist, Chris Matthews (a male whose beat is politics), wrote: “It’s hard getting somewhere without a map. It’s the same reason so many of us love biographies. They show us how others have gotten where we want to go. If you want to get somewhere, study the routes others have taken.”

That goes double for women. Practitioners and theorists agree that in order to succeed professional women need to form the same kind of mentoring relationships that have enabled their male counterparts to advance. But studies show that women in corporate settings have often found mentoring relationships with other women unsatisfying: senior women report feeling either unqualified, discounted, or overburdened as mentors, while junior women complain that senior women are unreceptive or competitive in dealing with them as protégés.

I’m betting that this forum could turn out to be the missing antidote.

To review or make subsequent contributions to this discussion, please refer to the following link:

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=1969742&type=member&item=31566959&qid=846c47d6-8aab-428d-9304-1cbf6507f12d&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egdr_1319731197620_1%2Egmp_1969742%2Eamf_1969742_41605696%2Egmp_1969742

Here’s hoping not only that more conversation will ensue on line about the important topic of mentoring females, but also that it will somehow yield concrete practical benefits for professional women. 

Why do women flunk at mentoring?

Sadly, regarding women mentoring women, I can recall too many instances in my own professional life that mirrored  Kerry Hannon’s experience, as she described it for Forbes yesterday when commenting on a new LinkedIn survey.  The survey shows that too many women are not being or have not been mentored by other women.  Hannon attributes the problem not only to the fact that too few women hold senior positions, but also to the fact that the behaviour of women executives too often ranges from declining to support other women to outright slapping other women down.  Hannon writes:  “They were very protective of their much fought for status.  Heels high, nails sharp.”  What are your past experiences when you’ve tried to enlist other women as mentors?

 http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryhannon/2011/10/25/boomer-women-flunk-mentoring-new-linkedin-survey/

Hire for “soft” skills along with technical skills

Yesterday, in a guest blog for the online version of the Harvard Business Review, Daniel Goleman, Co-Director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University, identified social intelligence as the make-or-break leadership skill set.  His reason:  leadership is the art of accomplishing goals through other people.  Goleman writes:  “Technical skills and self-mastery alone allow you to be an outstanding individual contributor. But to lead, you need an additional interpersonal skill set:  you've got to listen, communicate, persuade, collaborate.”

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/10/the_must-have_leadership_skill.html

In fact, so critical are certain “soft” skills to performing certain jobs successfully that, when hiring, you simply must find a way to determine to what degree job candidates possess them.  But the problem is that soft skills are considerably harder to analyze, quantify, and assess than technical skills.  How-to's on managing this tricky process can be found at the following links:

 “Getting a grip on mission-critical "soft" skills: 5 simple steps”

http://www.printlink.com/resources_insight054.php

“Assessing Job Candidates Beyond the Technical Skills” http://www.printlink.com/resources_insight051.php

2 new resources on how women are faring professionally & globally

A couple of interesting links I’ve discovered this week:
One is a new study by Catalyst revealing how women are assessed differently for promotion than men.  Evidently, women seeking to advance professionally need a proven track record, while men get promoted based on their perceived "potential".  http://www.torontosun.com/2011/10/13/women-blameless-in-pay-inequity-study

The second is “Newsweek’s” recent ranking of the world’s 10 best and 10 worst countries in which to be a woman.  Although they ranked Canada the world’s third best country for females in terms of justice, health, education, and economics, we still scored low in giving women political power.  You can found out whether and where your own country placed on the lists at:  http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/22/women-winning-map.html
More fascinating details on the status of women globally at: 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/galleries/2011/09/18/the-best-places-to-be-a-woman-photos.html

http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2011/09/18/best-and-worst-countries-for-women-from-iceland-to-the-u-s-to-pakistan-and-afghanistan.html

Hot HR election issues

Important issues that need to be addressed in Canada’s upcoming 2011 provincial and territorial elections involve human resources.  These include the need to continue attracting skilled labour and the need to invest in post-secondary education based on current demographic and economic trends. 

Recent studies forecast a looming shortage of qualified workers owing to declining birth rates and the approaching retirement of the Baby-Boom generation (starting this year for people retiring at the traditional age of 65.)  This talent shortage is expected to deepen over the next 20 years, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unfilled positions. 

For example, a 2009 report by Dr. Rick Miner, former president of Ontario’s Seneca College, shows a huge pending gap between employers’ needs for talent and the skill set of those seeking employment.  In Ontario Dr. Miner predicts a labour shortage of 200,000—or 1.8 million people--by 2031 and also that 77 percent of the province’s labour force will require post-secondary credentials by then (compared to 60 percent currently.)  In short, Ontario will need both a larger and more skilled workforce than will be available.

A backgrounder to a provincial all-candidates debate organized by the Toronto Financial Services Alliance (TFSA) at Toronto City Hall on August 31^st, 2011 reports:  “Dr. Miner concludes that, with current trends, 450,000 individuals will not have the skills needed to fill vacant positions by 2016.  The figure is expected to increase to 700,000 individuals in following years, while vacancies requiring post-secondary skills will increase to over one million by 2021 and two million by 2031.”

The backgrounder continues:  “Over a 22-year period Ontario will need to train, re-train or recruit 1.73 million people.  This translates into an increase of 78,636 post-secondary graduates per year, an increase of four times the number of people admitted into the Second Career re-training program.  Another way of looking at this figure is that it would represent a 56% increase in the annual number of graduates from Ontario’s post-secondary institutions (currently approximately 140,000, including college diplomas, bachelor, master and doctoral degrees.)”

Additionally, studies by the Conference Board of Canada and others show that, at Ontario’s current birth rate, we will only replace those workers who leave the workforce, and that all net growth in the workforce will have to come from immigration.

So before you vote in the upcoming provincial elections (Manitoba – Oct 4th, Newfoundland & Labrador – Oct 11^th, Northwest Territories – Oct 3^rd, Ontario – Oct 6th, Prince Edward Island – Oct 3^rd, Sasketchewan – Nov 7^th, Yukon – Oct 11^th) it’s important to ask your local candidates what they propose to do to make training programs more accessible, especially for positions that will be in significant demand in the years to come.

 You also need to know things like what candidates plan to do, or plan to encourage the federal government to do, to attracted skilled immigrants, expedite processes for granting visas and credentials, and allow foreign students to find work here upon completion of their studies.

http://www.psc-cfp.gc.ca/plac-acpl/leave-conge/ann2-eng.pdf

http://www.printlink.com/resources_insight053.php 

http://www.printlink.com/resources_insight033.php

http://www.printlink.com/resources_insight013.php