New study says women make better bosses

     According to a new study from Spain, employees think women are better bosses than men. 

     Reasons cited include that women managers tend to instigate more individualized employee feedback, more democratic decision-making, and more workplace channels for interpersonal communication.  The study’s author, Eduardo Melero, an economist and business professor at the Universidad Carlos III De Madrid, said in a statement:  “Women managers seem to be more inclined to use these types of practices, individually, as well as promoting them among the rest of the management team.  And as such, a management team with more women could be more effective.”

     Increased communication between management and employees could well yield such important benefits as enabling the company to make more well-informed decisions based on employee feedback and improving morale among staff who will feel their contributions matter more if management listens to their opinions.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/men-vs-women-managers
http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2241-women-bosses.html

More reasons why sales is a potentially lucrative career for introverts

        Following last Tuesday’s post, I grew so fascinated with the potential of introverts to excel at sales that I did some more digging. My research turned up several more key strengths that could contribute to their sales ability, including superior composure and self-control, as well as excellence in building long-term relationships. Evidently, it might also help if the introvert possesses a strong belief in the value of the product or service s/he is selling. 
http://saleshq.monster.com/sales_careers/articles/98-an-introvert-in-sales

Why should you consider hiring introverts for sales jobs?

        Yesterday New-York-City-area sales trainer Paul Castain started another interesting LinkedIn discussion with the question: “Is sales an extrovert's profession or can an introvert do quite nicely too?” Comments thus far have emphasized the advantages that introverts bring to sales, including better listening skills, better at focusing attention on the prospect and asking questions, and better at handling disappointment. What seems to be emerging is a useful shopping list for hiring sales staff.

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=93464804&gid=1832739&commentID=67512626&trk=view_disc&ut=3KDYMZNuruUB41

Employers are hiring more for attitude, rely more on networking & staff referrals

        Recently Mark Murphy, an American researcher, leadership trainer, and author of Hiring for Attitude (among other books), discussed why many new hires fail quickly, why soft skills are so important now, and how the hiring landscape is changing.
        His research tracking 20,000 new hires found that 46 percent of them failed within 18 months. It also determined that, when new hires failed, 89 percent of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11 percent of the time for lack of skill. The attitudinal reasons included lack of coachability, incompatible temperament, and low levels of emotional intelligence and motivation.
        Murphy comments:  “It’s not that technical skills aren’t important, but they’re much easier to assess (that’s why attitude, not skills, is the top predictor of a new hire’s success or failure). Virtually every job (from neurosurgeon to engineer to cashier) has tests that can assess technical proficiency. But what those tests don’t assess is attitude; whether a candidate is motivated to learn new skills, think innovatively, cope with failure, assimilate feedback and coaching, collaborate with teammates, and so forth.

        “Soft skills are the capabilities that attitude can enhance or undermine. For example, a newly hired executive may have the intelligence, business experience and financial acumen to fit well in a new role. But if that same executive has an authoritarian, hard-driving style, and they’re being hired into a social culture where happiness and camaraderie are paramount, that combination is unlikely to work. Additionally, many training programs have demonstrated success with increasing and improving skills—especially on the technical side. But these same programs are notoriously weak when it comes to creating attitudinal change.”
        Murphy’s findings coincide with many of my own ideas about the importance of soft skills and the need to pinpoint these elusive but all-important qualities in job candidates.  For example see:  Getting a grip on mission-critical “soft” skills:  5 simple steps http://www.printlink.com/resources_insight054.php
or Assessing Job Candidates Beyond the Technical Skills
http://www.printlink.com/resources_insight051.php

        Murphy predicts that, when hiring, employers will place an increasing emphasis on attitude in 2012 and beyond:  “Between the labor pool from China and India and the fact that there are so many workers sitting out there unemployed, we can find the skills we need. The lack of sharp wage increases in most job categories is further evidence of the abundant supply of skills. Technical proficiency, once a guarantee of lifetime employment, is a commodity in today’s job market. Attitude is what today’s companies are hiring for."
        He also says companies are finding their best people through employee referrals and networking rather than the regular channels. “They have started to realize that the high performers they already have fit the attitude they want and that these are the people they should be asking to help find more people just like them.”
        Forbes blogger Dan Schawbel adds:  “Given that data, it seems like candidates should be networking in every way possible—including social networking.” 
http://www.linkedin.com/newsactionBar=&articleID=5567224830140354576&ids=djwQcjgUczAQcPoQejsRdPoRdiMTcPATejgUc3kUc3oPczkTdzkRb3gTcjgOdPkUe3gRdzcRejkSdjkIdzsRd3kPc3gNc3cUd38OdPoRdiMSd3kMej4RdPsMe3AOdjoTdzkR&aag=true&freq=weekly&trk=eml-tod2-b-ttl-1&ut=2CEy-Xc8GKDB41

Growing problem of workplace rudeness exacts hefty economic toll

A recent survey by Robert Half International, the world's largest specialized staffing firm, asked employees to recount the "worst or wackiest" episodes of rudeness they've witnessed colleagues commit in the workplace. Respondents reported a long list of atrocities, everything from office temper tantrums, to texting or answering cell-phone calls during meetings, to grooming in public, to stealing food from the communal fridge.

Although workplace incivility is an under-reported problem, it’s on the rise, according to Lew Bayer, president and CEO of Civility Experts Worldwide of Winnipeg, Manitoba, who comments:  “Many of us have become so accustomed to it, in fact, that boorish behaviour in the workplace goes by unnoticed, or doesn't even seem that rude any more.”

"Our research shows that people are so tired and busy and stressed that they're picking their battles when it comes to rudeness," says Bayer. "They might not say anything about sloppy dress or bad breath, but take a stand about rudeness that shows disrespect for time or for property -- wasting paper, keeping people waiting, spending 40 minutes in a meeting that should've taken 15, borrowing things without asking, returning items in a state of disrepair, using someone else's intellectual property."

In their book The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What To Do About It (2009), American business professors Christine Pearson and Christine Porath say the problem of workplace incivility has been compounded by North America’s increasing tolerance of rude behaviour.  A decade of research led them to conclude that petty incidences of workplace rudeness are exacting a "staggering economic toll," but that few business leaders know how to tackle the problem.  They write that people who experienced incivility "intentionally lowered their productivity, cut back work hours, lost respect for their bosses, put in minimal acceptable effort, and sometimes even left their jobs -- all because of disrespectful words or deeds."

Their book cites a 2005 Gallup poll in which 95 percent of American workers reported experiencing incivility from co-workers.  And although Canadians enjoy a global reputation for superior politeness, Pearson and Porath found that the bad workplace manners reported by Canadians were even worse:  fully 99 percent of white-collar Canuck employees said they had witnessed incivility at work. One in four reported being exposed to it daily.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/miss--manners-134657433.html

Facebook Reduces 6 Degrees of Separation to 4.74—and the number’s still shrinking

A recent study by Facebook, the Università degli Studi di Milano, and other contributors revises the claim that every living person on earth is connected to any other person through only six intermediaries (friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, and so on)--a.k.a. "six degrees of separation"--a theory previously developed by Hungarian author Frinyes Karinthy in the 1920s and American social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. 

The new study reports that worldwide fully 92 per cent of all pairs of Facebook users are within five degrees of separation, with an average of just 4.74 intermediaries, and (here comes the part I love) the average number of degrees between users is getting smaller over time.  In a blog posting yesterday, Facebook reported that today's average of 4.74 degrees of separation is already smaller than the average distance of 5.28 degrees in 2008.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/11/22/technology-facebook-six-degrees-separation.html

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-team/anatomy-of-facebook/10150388519243859

http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4570

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/