Leading with Integrity

Leadership is often defined as getting other people to do what you want. Using this definition it is no wonder that many people revert to using underhanded tactics to try to "trick" their followers into doing what they want. This is a shortcut to leadership and doesn't result in long term value.

It is this type of "leadership by trickery" that makes people automatically suspicious of their leaders. If you want to develop a long term foundation for leadership, these types of short cut tricks will only prevent you from achieving your goals. Once some of your followers realize that they have been tricked you will lose any credibility you started with.

If you want a solid leadership foundation you must take the long view and consider how every action will impact your ability to lead further down the road. To build trust with your followers you must act with integrity.

Leading with integrity means doing what you say you will do. Many leaders get themselves into trouble by making commitments off the cuff and then not following through on those commitments. If you are careful what you say, you will increase your integrity with your followers simply because you won't have to back out of commitments you made with out thinking. When you do make commitments make sure they are tied to realistic timeframes. If you tell someone you are going to give them a raise next year, you are making a commitment with many factors you can't control. Sometimes saying that you will give them a raise when sales reach $1,000,000 will be a better commitment because it is tied to a goal that will enable you to give the raise.

Sometimes leading with integrity means going through with something to keep your word even when you would rather not. Not keeping your word will often hurt you much more than any inconvenience that is caused by keeping your word. If you ever have to go back on a promise, don't hide it under the rug. Take the time to apologize to the people you made the promise to. Apologize and try to come up with some way to work things out even if you can't make the original commitment.

Another important part of leading with integrity is delegating responsibility. Many leaders fail by delegating responsibility and then taking back over when their delegate does something they don't want. When you delegate you need to be willing to part with the responsibility. If your delegate does something differently than you, you need to support their decision. That doesn't mean you can't steer them in a different direction, but always support their decision whenever possible. If you delegate responsibility and then pull it back, you will demotivate your followers and make it difficult to delegate other items in the future.

Leading with integrity is avoiding the shortcuts that many leaders take. By avoiding shortcuts you can build a strong foundation that will amplify your leadership skills as you develop trust with your team.

How would you rate your leadership style on a scale from 1-5.

Pandemic Review

Can you believe the latest news on MSN today " Swine Flu Has World on Alert".

Boy, I thought 5 years ago that when I began to put in place a Pandemic Plan that it would never be needed. Same goes with the Disaster Recovery Plan, which we updated each year. Looks like we may need to dust those plans off and begin practice runs on utilizing them.

As an HR leader, I am sure you have built a plan. If not you should take the lead now.

Job Hunting on Online Social Networks Like Twitter and LinkedIn

Think back: where were you in 2002? I was in Grade 11, working a sweet job in a video store, considering my options for post-secondary education and seeing a lot of (bad) live music in local shows.

In 2002, Jonathan Abrams launched Friendster, the first social networking website. In 2003, Myspace and LinkedIn (yes, it’s been around that long) arrived on the scene, followed by Facebook in 2004, and Twitter in 2006. Now there are nearly 150 popular sites available for you to join, many of which cater to specific interests and subcultures.

But have you ever seriously thought of using some of these sites to help you find a job?

LinkedIn can be beneficial if you’re keen to work for a particular company or in a specific industry. Searching quickly, I saw job positions available at many top Canadian companies.

Although LinkedIn is currently under-utilized by students and graduates, many academics have been using it for some time. If you’re interested in doing post-secondary studies, check out the number of professors that use LinkedIn – perhaps you can get introduced to someone through another contact and get a foot into graduate studies that way? Tech-savvy professionals are also starting to use LinkedIn to stay on top of their networks.

Admittedly, LinkedIn functions similarly to some of the larger job-searching sites like Monster and Workopolis. But have you ever considered using Twitter? Yes, you read that right, I said Twitter. You can tweet your way to a new job.

Twitter is an interactive network that can be used through text messaging on your cell phone, or updating through computer. Users are given 140 characters to update their friends on what they are doing, similar to the “Status” function on Facebook. This doesn’t seem like anything really important, except I am leaving out one small detail: users can choose who receives their tweets. Thus, you can target your tweets for a specific readership.

If you’re looking for work, what you do is strategically post so your tweets reflect the industry you are looking at. If you have followed (added someone as a friend) people who are in the job market you’re interested in, this makes everything much easier.

For example, if you tweet is something like, “Looking for a summer marketing internship in the GTA. Does anyone know any companies who are hiring?” You may get a series of responses from people in marketing – however, your network has to include people who might be able to answer your question or you’ll just end up spamming the few people who do follow you.

Times have certainly changed since we were in high school. Employers no longer rely completely on word of mouth or print ads to display the jobs they are posting, and you should not be relying on the same methods either. It is time to start spending some of your time setting up your profiles on these key social networks.

Are you in the 21st century yet?

How Finance Departments Are Changing: McKinsey Survey Results

Financial executives say they're more focused than ever on planning and cost cutting. What's surprising is a reluctance to adjust the finance function's structure.

All eyes are on corporate-finance departments as they are asked to cut costs, re-assess risks and cope with the deep uncertainty generated by the current economic crisis. In this survey, we asked finance and other senior executives how their finance departments have changed since the crisis began; what new challenges these departments are facing; which activities are taking up more, and less, of their time; whether their centralization or outsourcing plans are being modified; and how the CFO's focus has shifted.

The results suggest that, at least so far in the current economic crisis, not many companies have made the kinds of structural changes that could most help the finance organization boost its performance. Few respondents report that their companies have modified the organizational structure to give CFOs formal responsibility for more activities through solid-line reporting relationships. Fewer still report any increase in the degree or pace of centralization. Moreover, few respondents report plans to increase the outsourcing or offshoring of finance activities.

What does finance do?

We defined four possible roles for the finance function in a corporation. At one end of this spectrum, the function focuses primarily on reporting and compliance, with most of its time devoted to transaction management in financial accounting.

At the opposite extreme, finance serves as an integral part of the management team to support the creation of value by identifying opportunities and providing critical information and analysis to make superior operating and strategic decisions. The largest group of respondents report that in their organizations, the finance function falls into the latter category, though--not surprising--the function's role varies considerably across industries.

CFOs in manufacturing, for example, are significantly more likely to be value managers than those in the financial services industry, where the finance staff focuses more on transactions.

Respondents note a marked increase in the amount of time CFOs are spending in areas that are critically important during a crisis--particularly, financial planning and analysis, financial-risk management, strategic planning and credit decisions. These areas of responsibility are quite consistent with the most pressing challenges that respondents say finance staffs face: forecasting business results for upcoming periods (31%), implementing cost-saving measures (27%) and freeing up cash from working capital (18%). CFOs are spending less time on responsibilities more easily left to others.

The full article can be found on the link above. Here is a great opportunity for HR & Finance to really partner together in these very difficult times.

Simple Strategy Review

Every month my team and I would review our HR strategy to see if it was still in line with the company's. Tweak here and there and we all were back on track. One thing that I am sure is not on most HR executives strategy is walking around the business and getting to understand from a grass roots what the issues are with employees. This was a big issue with me and I can tell you those daily walks around the business were valuable to HR and to the employees.

There has always been a stigma since I got into HR 25 years ago that when people saw HR walking around they thought of only one thing...TROUBLE. That has always been a stigma I have tried to eradicate from their lexicon. Sometimes successful, sometimes not so but at least I tried and employees saw that and embraced the effort and connection.

I would emphasize to all who read this blog that one of the most important items in your strategy is to make sure you and the other executives of your company walk around and be visible to your employees. It pays off on the stigma issue and also you have the ability to correct issues that are brewing in the business (on the floor, in the cafeteria, in IT, etc) before they become the brush fires we all have become accustom to dealing with on a daily basis.

Do you walk around your business and get to know your employees. Let me know at wgstevens2@gmail.com

Advertising Yourself: Building a Personal Brand through Social Networks

In 2007, Jim MacMillan was at the top of his profession -- a photojournalist who had just shared a Pulitzer Prize for pictures from Iraq's deadliest combat zones -- but he also started to wonder what kind of future that profession had in store for him. His newsroom in Philadelphia was making steep job cuts in the face of plummeting revenues. Then MacMillan attended a BlogWorld conference and returned with a determination to re-invent himself though social networking.

MacMillan has since become highly skilled at using social networking to gain new fans of his photography, and he is hardly alone. Over the last few years, creative professionals -- including musicians, writers and artists -- have found they can reach an engaged audience by making songs available on a MySpace page or building a national readership by blogging. Now, with the economy mired in a recession, many individuals are wondering how to build a buzz about themselves and find new employment opportunities by adapting the same kind of branding techniques used by businesses.

"I saw that the real value of a new media profile, or a social media profile, is distribution [to an online audience]," MacMillan says. While still employed as a staff photographer at the Philadelphia Daily News, he had launched his own web site -- jimmacmillan.net -- for posting his photos and linking to related stories in the news. Like many professionals, he also created a profile on Facebook, Twitter and every social network he could learn about, roughly 40 in all.

Eventually, he took a severance package from the newspaper and threw everything into social networking. Today, he has close to 14,000 followers reading his posts on Twitter -- a number on a par with some celebrities -- and keeps in touch with about 475 friends on Facebook. He believes he reaches a larger and more engaged audience than when he was at the Daily News, but he also concedes his activity is only bringing in "lunch money," mainly through ads on his blog (which receives traffic referrals from his Twitter postings). But by expanding his network, Macmillan says he also has promising leads on better-paying job opportunities at companies, including some that want advice on social networking.

Indeed, social networking is that rare sector of the economy that seems to be booming in the midst of the recession. MediaPost reported that businesses spent $2.2 billion on social-networking in 2008, nearly twice as much as they did in 2007, primarily through advertising on popular sites like MySpace and Facebook.

LinkedIn is by far and away the most popular business-oriented social network -- with more than 35 million registered users scattered across more than 170 industries -- but it is just one of a growing number of sites. Others include Ning, which allows specific businesses to create their own social networks of clients, employees and interested parties; Ryze, which allows organizers to better organize contact lists and schedules; and Xing, which aims to connect business people with experts or potential customers.

It's equally important to be aware of the potential pitfalls of the different online networking sites. In particular, some experts voice concern over business networking on Facebook, because it allows friends and acquaintances to freely post material that will also appear on a person's profile page; the risk is that someone else might post an inappropriate comment or photo that could actually scare away potential business contacts.

Are you addressing the new media rage and exploiting yourself on social networking? I would like to hear your thoughts. Email me at wgstevens2@gmail.com

Where We Are Today?????

This is great, so who is at fault?

Innovation Thrives Among German Firms, Though Hurdles Persist

On the face of it, the idea that Germany could improve its capacity for innovation seems almost ludicrous. Germany is already the world's number-one exporter -- and few of those exports are anything but complex, high-value goods. The country already registers more patents per capita than any other nation. It spends as much on research per capita as anyone. In certain fields, particularly alternative energy, the country seems on track to gain global recognition as a center of innovation and excellence.

"It's absolutely certain that there is no other country with as many (global) market leaders as Germany," says Hermann Simon, chairman of Simon-Kucher & Partners, a global marketing and pricing consultancy headquartered in Bonn.

Christian Terwiesch, a Wharton professor of operations and information management who grew up in Germany, agrees. "If you think about the auto industry, if you think about the chemical industries, if you think about ERP software, and more recently, if you think about alternative energy ... in most of these, Germany is actually cutting edge," he says.

In a way, it's not surprising. Like Japan, Germany has no other way to excel but through innovation. As Manfred Perlitz, a professor of international management at the University of Manheim, puts it, Germany's only natural resource is rain. "At the end of the day, the German economy can only survive through innovation."

Yet, as global competition grows, Germany's tried-and-true formula of developing excellent products and then improving them relentlessly appears to be increasingly vulnerable. Critics point, first, to the fact that Germany largely missed the dawn of the digital age. With a few important exceptions, such as SAP, the information technology revolution was not a made-in-Germany boom, even as Taiwan and Korea grew into major technology powers. The Internet, too, was created largely abroad, not just through the work of such technology giants as the United States and Japan, but from places that were once economically obscure, such as Estonia (Skype) and Israel (Instant Messenger).

Knowledge@Wharton interviewed several German business innovation experts and professors at Wharton about the substantial promise of continued German innovation, and obstacles they perceive that stop it from becoming even better. The picture that emerges is of a country with many important advantages in terms of skills, geography and business culture. It is a tradition that remains strong and vibrant. Yet, there are areas of concern, particularly in how this rich inheritance fits with a changed world in which research and manufacturing are distributed all over the globe.

A Tradition of Excellence

Historically, perhaps the most important driver of German innovation is its high standard of technical expertise. Since the middle ages, Germans have developed high standards of craftsmanship in many fields, a tradition that continues today. "It's an outstanding history of craftsmanship that I think is very important for innovation," Terwiesch says.

In Germany, workers in a number of industries still study as apprentices for three-and-a-half years, during which time they work three days a week and earn a modest salary, and then go to school the other two days. The workers who come out of this system, says Simon, are highly qualified. Nor does the technical focus stay only on the shop floor. Unlike the U.S., where the most ambitious engineers are often drawn into business school and later sent into general management, in Germany, engineering excellence alone is still the best way to get ahead, according to Terwiesch. Simon, who has written a book titled, Hidden Champions of the 21st Century, about 500 of the "world's best unknown companies," notes that half the CEOs on his list are engineers.

"The way you establish leadership in a German company is through deep domain expertise," Terwiesch notes. "I have family members who are still working in Germany. If I look at the way they have built their careers and the level of product knowledge they have, it's absolutely amazing. But you need it. You become an executive primarily because you know what you're doing."

Even at the very top of the company, he says, domain experts are still likely to be in charge. "You could take any board member from BMW and they could, by hand, take a car apart and put it together again," he says.

Stability First 

Respect for expertise leads to a high degree of loyalty between workers and their companies. Longevity at a company is seen as a key competitive advantage -- both for the company and for the worker.

Many people stay with the same company their whole career -- and in some communities, families will have worked for two or three generations with the same firm. "It's an emotional advantage of German workers that they can be even relatively assured that they won't lose their job," says Bernhard Wendeln, president of WEGA Support, the family investment company of the entrepreneurial families Wendeln and Kläne.

Since German workers tend to spend more time at a particular job than those in the UK or the U.S., they learn a great deal about their products. As a result of long years of experience, they develop deep expertise and a long-term focus on trying to do the right thing for the company.

Recalling a stint at BMW, Terwiesch remembers meeting many extremely skilled workers and being amazed at the depth of their product insights in the prototyping laboratory. Although they had not been to college, he says, they had an incredible amount of tacit knowledge about the product. "These people were bright like I had not seen before."

This effect may be even more profound in the Mittelstand, Germany's fabled midsize companies, the kind of publicly unknown but highly profitable firms profiled by Simon in his book about hidden champions.

Terwiesch agrees. "People working there, even people without academic degrees, get really outstanding expertise in metallurgy or some very specific detail of a technology. That creates deep knowledge and an enormous competitive advantage that has, over the ages, made theMittelstand a very important part of the German economy and also a significant driver of innovation."

The roots lie deep in German culture, experts say. "It has to do with the German lifestyle and career patterns," suggests Terwiesch. "In the U.S., it's all about change. People change jobs all the time: They do a startup, it doesn't work, they do another start up, or they go work for a company. They're constantly moving. Germany, on the other hand, is a society that favors stability."

A Limiting Focus

Some critics see risks in this inward focus, and argue that the kind of technical perfectionism that a corporate culture can instill sometimes results in economically unproductive activities. This includes solving problems that don't matter to customers or creating an economically inefficient level of vertical integration.

For example, some of Simon's hidden champions insist on manufacturing virtually everything themselves. Enercon, a leading wind power technology firm, makes 80% of its equipment in-house while other wind power companies make only 20% of their own equipment. "It's very different from the typical strategies of large corporations," Simon says.

Enercon succeeded despite this degree of obsession, but some critics have argued that being overly focused on technical or product expertise can also blind a company to game-changing developments. One leading slide projector company noted by Simon in his book kept on making high-quality slide projectors even after digital projection began to take over the market. Eventually, customers slipped away, but the company did not evolve. It lost its market simply because it couldn't adapt to the digital era.

But that failure may be the exception, at least for small- and medium-sized German companies, which typically stay close to their customers and remain small and agile enough to respond to their changing demands. One reason for the outperformance of some Mittelstand companies is that they talk to their customers more often than do larger companies, where engineering sometimes goes on for its own sake, Perlitz says.

Although German executives are changing places more often now than in the past, the risk aversion of many talented German engineers and other professionals endures. Often, even the most promising young companies have difficulty recruiting capable engineers. Much of the country's best homegrown talent is locked inside the country's great corporations, leaving young companies hard-pressed to find qualified employees. This might not be the case in a different kind of business culture.

Demographics are also taking their toll, as more and more of the country's technologists retire. "Ifyou do a body count, the country is losing a lot of engineers and scientists," says Terwiesch. "There's a big demand for highly qualified engineers that is currently unfilled, and German immigration laws are not making it easy to bring in people from the outside. Over the last 10 years, there has been an enormous demand for good scientists and engineers, way more than the universities can produce."

Even when working permits are not an issue, it is difficult to attract talent to Germany. Many of the graduates of the German section of Wharton's Lauder program, for example, don't end up working in Germany. The barrier? "My impression is that, in most cases, it's salary. The students feel they earn more in an American company, and most of my students stay in the United States after they have the Wharton degree," says Susanne Shields, director of the German culture and language program for Wharton's Lauder Institute. Some also shy away because they hear rumors about long days in the German branches of the biggest consulting companies.

Without sufficient homegrown talent and with limits on immigration, perhaps the only other option is outsourcing. In his positioning of Tata Consulting Services, Ananthanarayan Padmanabhan, director of central European operations, is careful to speak of his company, not as a firm that outsources jobs, but as a firm that is importing innovation -- a good spin, certainly, and given the shortage of engineering talent within Germany, probably more accurate.

Yet in spite of the shortages, Germany's high-priced engineers seem to be competing well in this brave new world of low-cost talent. One case in point: Although trade is often seen as a zero-sum game as far as labor is concerned, Germany's engineering wunderkinder are finding ways to profit from the new world order without losing their own advantage. Already, China and India have both proven an important market for Germany. For example, 40% of Tata's Nano -- the revolutionary $2000 "people's car" -- is sourced from German parts, according to Simon. Nor do the contributions end with parts. Chinese factories may supply the world, he adds, but it's German companies that supply the Chinese factories.

Fear of Failure

The hierarchical nature of German companies may be another barrier to innovation, at least in some rapidly changing industries. Compared to America, the German company tends to be much more hierarchical, says Shields. "The organization is very structured, which can be a good thing. But on the other hand, Germans are not very flexible so it takes a long time for new ideas to come through. There is no open door policy. They cannot just walk in and talk to the boss and say, 'This is what I observe and what I suggest...'"

German education, too, tends to favor knowledge over creativity, says Dietmar Grichnik, a professor of entrepreneurship at the WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management. "This hinders entrepreneurial activities later on."

Ultimately, perhaps, it's a fear of failure that may limit innovation most. According to Grichnik, the legal obstacles to starting a business are not too high in Germany. It's the social norms, he notes, that stop them -- particularly the fear of failure. More than 50% of Germans polled say that fear of failure is a big reason they would not want to start their own company.

But slowly, things are changing, Grichnik adds. A few universities are now offering entrepreneurship courses. Some government agencies offer seed capital, which was once difficult to find. Students are also trying their luck at startups while they are still in the university, taking advantage of their school years as a low-risk time to start a business.

"It's a kind of chicken-and-egg problem," says Jurgen Hablicher, the head of venture capital fund Mountain Cleantech. "There haven't been enough successes that people can look to for inspiration, but without those examples, no one will try."

What are your thoughts on this article?

Most Ridiculous Excuses Why An Employee Missed Work - Can You Top Any Of These?

"Employee’s wife burned all his clothes and he had nothing to wear to work."

That takes the cake. 

EFCA and Its Practical Effects

EFCA (Employee Free Choice Act): 

Lately EFCA has been gaining national attention, a bill  that can revert the trend of declining numbers in  labor unions. Highly controversial for its proposed changes, the bill will completely replace the secret ballot election with card check which requires only 50 % + 1 signatures in support for union representation. A detailed overview of the proposed bill and its practical effects are highlighted in the article below.

At the top of labor's wish list is EFCA, a bill that would radically alter 75 years of labor law governing the representation rights of employees. Specifically, EFCA would fundamentally change three critical aspects of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) by:

• Providing for the elimination of NLRB-supervised secret ballot elections in favor of "card check," thereby enabling unions to organize employees merely by convincing or coercing a majority of them to sign authorization cards;
  
• Changing the rules of bargaining by imposing mandatory interest arbitration on those parties who fail to reach an agreement on their own within 130 days; and
• Subjecting employers to substantially increased penalties and remedial relief.

Practical Effects of EFCA

Until now, an employer "blind-sided" by an underground organizing campaign could respond during the ensuing six-week "campaign" period, during which time it remained free to educate employees on the risks of union representation prior to a secret-ballot election. But in the wake of EFCA ill-prepared employers could suddenly find themselves unionized without so much as a single ballot cast. A drastically streamlined representation process would substantially compromise employers' ability to counter organizing through an informational communications campaign.

1. Limited Time to Respond: If EFCA passes, unions will step up their efforts to utilize secretive card-signing campaigns. This tactic, if left unchecked, would short circuit employer efforts to furnish information explaining the benefits of remaining union free. The employees would be making their decision with only the union's side of the story.

2. Union Pressure: Card-check will enable unions to utilize peer pressure and other forms of coercion to intimidate employees into signing cards, even though they may not actually desire third party representation.

3. Loss of Bargaining Rights and Interest Arbitration: If a union successfully organizes your business, a third party arbitrator could decide the terms and conditions of any resulting collective bargaining agreement. If employers don't like those terms, or worse, cannot make them economically viable, they would have little if any recourse, short of legal challenges on Constitutional grounds.

4. Guaranteed First Contracts: Another practical effect of EFCA is that employers will either have to agree to first contracts or risk having one imposed by an arbitrator. Regardless of how employers get saddled with first contracts, EFCA will require such contracts to stay in place for a minimum of two years.

5. Enhanced Penalties: Mandatory penalties of up to $20,000 per violation, applicable only to employers, could provide labor with a decisive advantage from the standpoint of regulatory enforcement. Compulsory injunctive relief would provide additional leverage. Taken together, these penalties threaten to drive up the cost of litigation during difficult economic times and would certainly encourage unions to file more frivolous unfair labor practice charges as a pressure tactic.

Conclusion

EFCA and the RESPECT Act present unprecedented challenges to employers. Fisher & Phillips has successfully assisted employers in defeating union organizing efforts over the years. We have learned from our experiences that the keys to success are to be proactive, put systems in place to recognize organizing efforts, identify issues that could be exploited by unions, and effectively address those issues so as to render third-party representation unnecessary. Employers that fail to take the pre-emptive actions necessary to deal with these new threats could well find themselves unionized and thereafter presenting information to an arbitrator who will unilaterally shape their work rules, wages, and benefits.

http://www.laborlawyers.com/shownews.aspx?The-EFCA,-Organized-Labors-Legislative-Agenda-and-Its-Impact-on-Your-Business&Type=1122&Show=10884

Get it Right HR - Severance Calculations Misfires

I went to an evening gathering of former employees who had been laid off last week and much to my surprise they were happy with the packages they received but very unhappy with the way HR delivered them. Of the eight(8) people who where there eight(8) said their package data was incorrect and they had to go back to HR to show them that the numbers were wrong. Wrong vacation numbers, wrong severance calculations, wrong address etc, etc.

Is this any way to deliver a final message to employees. It is bad enough with the stress of losing a job but to add this on top of it takes the cake. I am surprised that the information in the packages are not fully reviewed for correctness prior to delivery. Just think how this last action by a company can really turn allies (even if you are laid off) into a bad press adversaries.

One thing I did prior to any delivery was to triple check all the information to make sure it was correct and the numbers added up. I only blew it one time in 2006 and that was one time too many.

Check out the data prior to delivery - do you get it yet?

Maintaining & Building Morale

With the uncertainties of a difficult economy, maintaining morale and motivation is both more challenging and more important. In good times, financial rewards are often motivation enough – but when results are less inspiring, a positive work climate is an important asset to keep employees motivated.