What do recruiters want?

Initiative and problem solving can be asked for in a variety of ways.  Many adverts will simply ask for candidates who can “take the intiative to get a job done" or "have the ability to resolve problems"; others, however, may not make it so obvious.  You have to learn to interpret phrases like:

• “We need people who can set goals and surpass them; people who have ideas, flexibility, imagination and resilience…”
• “Want to take responsibility and like to use their initiative; Have the confidence and the credibility to challenge and come up with new ways of working…”
•  “An enquiring mind and the ability to understand and solve complex challenges are necessary…”
• “We are looking for fresh, innovative minds and creative spirits ...”
• “We’re after ambitious graduates who can respond with pace and energy to every issue they face…”

These quotes are all taken from job adverts in graduate magazines and they are all asking for more or less the same two things:

• The ability to use your own initiative, to think for yourself, to be creative and pro-active.
• The ability to resolve problems, to think logically and/or laterally, to use ingenuity to overcome difficulties and to research and implement solutions.

These are important skills which recruiters look for.  They want staff who will take the personal responsibility to make sure targets are met; staff who can see that there might be a better way of doing something and who are prepared to research and implement change; staff who react positively, not negatively, when things go wrong.

Do you have these skills?

Problem Solving

The easy answer is yes!  We all use our initiative and creativity to solve problems every day.  A simple example is - it’s raining and you are going out to meet a friend but you don’t want to get wet, so you solve the problem by using an umbrella, or getting a taxi, or changing the location/time of the appointment or, maybe, changing the appointment to a ‘virtual’ one so you don’t have to go out at all.  Whatever you decide to do, you have used your creativity and initiative to solve a problem!

It is important to view problems, particularly relating to employment, as opportunities for improvement, both for yourself and for the organisation. You are likely to have to apply techniques of problem solving on a daily basis in a range of working situations:

• You may have to use your degree subject knowledge to resolve technical or practical issues
• You may have to diagnose and rectify obstacles relating to processes or systems
• You may have to think of new or different ways of doing your job
• You may have to deal with emergencies involving systems or people.

No job is without its problems and it is important to show to a recruiter that you have the personal resilience and the right skills to see problems as challenges, and to thrive on the pressure they may bring.

The precise skills or techniques you will use can vary considerably, depending on the problem and your role in the organisation.  You may have to use a logical, methodical approach in some circumstances, or be prepared to use creativity or lateral thinking in other situations; you will need to be able to draw on your academic or subject knowledge to identify solutions of a practical or technical nature; you will need to use other skills such as communication and planning and organising to influence change. Whatever issue you are faced with, some steps are fundamental:

• Identify the problem
• Define the problem
• Examine alternatives
• Act on a plan
• Look at the consequences

This is the IDEAL model of problem-solving. There are other, more complex methods, but the steps are broadly similar.

Initiative

You use initiative on a daily basis to solve problems. Recruiters also look for staff who can take the initiative to improve something, whether it is a service, a process or a product. Typically, recruiters will look for staff who:

• Go beyond expectations in their tasks, projects or job description, without being asked, and accepts additional responsibilities
• Demonstrate a positive attitude to getting things done, looking beyond the obvious for all relevant facts and information
• Minimize potential problems by anticipating and preparing in advance

Using your initiative in a work context is about spotting opportunities to develop the business. This can, for example, include learning new technology to make your work more productive/faster; being willing to look at processes and systems to see if there are things you can suggest to improve workflow; recognising opportunities that will improve the business and being prepared to follow them through; volunteering to learn new tasks so you can be adaptable and help out in emergencies or at peak periods.

How can you prove to a recruiter that you have these skills?

You have to think of examples of when you have used these skills.  These examples can reflect everyday situations, as well as more specific ones.  It is just as valid to tell a recruiter how you overcame a problem whilst travelling abroad, for instance, as it is to tell them how you resolved a difficulty with a customer during a work placement. You could use examples from your work experience, your leisure activities, your academic work and even your personal circumstances (resolving issues with flatmates, coping with a family emergency etc.).

What is important, is how you describe it.  It is not enough to say “I often take the initiative to resolve problems”.  You have to prove it!

We suggest you think of an example and then use the STAR technique to describe it:

S	Define the Situation
T	Identify the Task
A	Describe your Action
R	Explain the Result

This technique is useful at all stages of the selection process so it is worthwhile getting to grips with it.  Here is a detailed example:

S- define the Situation: (where were you? what was your role? what was the context?) 
I work shifts at a call centre which manages orders for several online companies.  One evening I had to deal with a very irate customer who had been promised a delivery a week ago and had still not received it. 

T – identify the Task (what was the problem? what was your aim? what had to be achieved?) 
Whilst listening to the customer, I accessed his record.  This was no help in solving the problem as it simply re-iterated what the customer was saying and did not give any more up-to-date information.  I promised the customer that I would do my best to help but I would need to do some research and phone him back.  He reluctantly accepted this.

A – describe the Action you took (be clear about what you did!) 
I could not check with the office as they were closed and my Supervisor had already left for the evening, so I searched for the same product code to see if I could find updated information on other records.  This confirmed that the product was now back in stock and that several deliveries were actually scheduled for the following day.  There seemed to have been an error which had resulted in my customer’s record not being updated, so I reserved my customer his machine and then persuaded the Logistics Manager to include him in the schedule.

R – highlight the Result you achieved (what was the outcome? be specific and, if possible, quantify the benefits)
My shift was over but I telephoned him back and explained what I had done and hoped very much that it was convenient for him to accept delivery the following day.  He was delighted with the initiative I had taken and thanked me.  Two days later my Supervisor told me that I had received excellent feedback from a customer and I would be nominated for Employee of the Month!

To use the STAR technique effectively, remember:

• You are the STAR of the story, so focus on your own actions.
• Tell a story and capture the interest of the reader.  Include relevant details but don’t waffle.
• Move from the situation, to the task, to your actions, and finally to the result with a consistent, conversational approach.

A detailed statement like this can be used in online applications, or used at interview. It is also easy to adapt it for use in your CV, eg:

1. My work experience at the Call Centre required me to develop good problem solving skills when dealing with difficult customers with stock and delivery issues.
2. I have good customer service skills developed through resolving problems relating to stock and deliveries whilst working for a Call Centre.

Adapting Your Examples

The example above, for instance, could easily be altered to prove your communication skills, show that you can adapt and be flexible, and that you have great customer service skills.  It is worthwhile spending time writing statements like this about all your experiences and then adapting them to match each recruiters’ specific requirements.

courtesy: University of Bradford

Are You the Victim of a Bad Boss?

Your Bad Boss Needs Supervisory Skills?

How many times have you witnessed someone working in a supervisory position without the necessary supervisory skills? How many times have you questioned why some leaders get the roles that they do? Probably, often. It should come as no surprise to you, then, that at least once in your working life, you will be the victim of a bad boss.

Stanley Bing recently updated his 1992 book, Crazy Bosses. In fact, there are several popular books that address wicked, mean, dysfunctional, or just plain, bad bosses. But what if your boss isn’t that bad? What if all your boss needs is a little supervisory skills training?

You have come to terms with the fact that your boss will never be the leader he appeared to be during the interview. You reluctantly realize your boss prefers golf or shopping to mentoring you. She stole your ideas. He even assigned you a couple of high-profile controversial projects that went bad. Naturally when this happened he went missing.

Signs of a Bad Boss

How can you tell if your boss is “mean,” “dumb,” “toxic,” “out to get you,” or if he simply never had the advantage of Supervisory Skills 101? You know that promotion to supervisor is often a reward for a good worker. Remember that the "Peter Principle" suggests that people are often promoted to their level of incompetence. The Principle is still alive and well in corporate America. Here are a few clues that your boss could use some basic supervisory skills training.

• He ignores the classic, time honored cliché, “Praise in public, criticize in private.”
• She gives you assignments and doesn’t follow up.
• He doesn’t support you when something goes wrong.
• She thinks everything is fine when it isn’t.
• He constantly claims that he is empowering you, but isn’t.
• She micro-manages and needs to know everything.
• He acts paranoid.
• She jumps to conclusions.
• He doesn’t know how to plan, prioritize or organize.
• If it isn’t her idea, then it can’t be good.
• He implements two-faced attacks.
• She tells sarcastic jokes or teases.

How to Deal With Your Bad Boss

Now that you've come to the conclusion that your boss doesn’t lie awake at night thinking about how to torment you, is there anything you can do? One activity that may be a cathartic experience is to make a list of the supervisory skills you think he or she is missing. Next, rank the list from most annoying to least annoying. Pick the top two or three worst offenses. Recognize that these are your hot buttons and start developing a strategy. Don’t wait for these things to happen again without having a plan for your own actions. The worst thing you can do is - nothing, hoping the problems will resolve themselves.

Don’t sacrifice your health or self-esteem. Polite confrontation should always be your first move. However, a bad boss lacking supervisory skills may not recognize your attempt and this tactic may backfire. Limiting contact may help you personally but isn’t usually a good professional move. However, putting some distance between you and your supervisor might be a temporary solution.

Action Plan: Deal With a Bad Boss With Poor Supervisory Skills

Here are a few other suggestions for dealing with a bad boss with poor supervisory skills:

1. Find someone you can trust for a sanity check. It is probably better if this person does not work in the same environment as you.


2. Make a pact with yourself that you will use the time to adopt good supervisory skills yourself.


3. Remember that the best employees don’t always make the best supervisors.


4. Do not fret if you have experienced a total meltdown with this person; it is time to try a new strategy: forgiveness. Regain your strength and move forward with confidence and professionalism.


5. Start identifying other sources of positive reinforcement for doing your job to the best of your abilities. We all want approval and recognition for a job well done.


6. Read and learn from the experts. Just make sure you are reading the right material. If you have decided that your boss simply lacks supervisory skills, try Managing Up: How to Forge an Effective Relationship With Those Above You.

From Terra Vanzant-Stern, PMP, SPHR/GPHR

Recommended Resources:

• Stanley Bing, Crazy Bosses - Fully Revised and Updated. (Harper Collins), 2007.
• Gini Graham Scott, A Survival Guide for Working With Bad Bosses: Dealing With Bullies, Idiots, Back-stabbers, and Other Managers from Hell. (AMACON), 2005.
• Jean Lipman-Blumen, The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians – and How We Can Survive Them. (Blumen), 2006.
• Marilyn Haight, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Boss? 13 Types and How to Survive Them. (Infinity), 2005.
• Frank Buchar, Super Skills for Supervisors: A Narrative Approach to Developing Supervisory Skills. (Buchar), 2005.
• Roseanne Badowski and Roger Gittens, Managing Up: How to Forge an Effective Relationship With Those Above You.

Does Management Really Work?

Are organizations more likely to succeed if they adopt good management practices? For a decade we’ve been conducting research to find out. That may seem like a foolish endeavor – isn’t the obvious answer yes? But as classically trained economists, we believe in re-examining long-held assumptions to see whether they stand the test of time.

 

To formulate a testable hypothesis for our research effort, we asked whether or not the thousands of organizations we studied adhere to three practices that are generally considered to be the essential elements of good management:

 

1. Targets: Does the organization support long-term goals with tough but achievable short-term performance benchmarks?

 

2. Incentives: Does the organization reward high performers with promotions and bonuses while re-training or moving underperformers?

 

3. Monitoring: Does the organization rigorously collect and analyze performance data to identify opportunities for improvement?

 

Our teams of researchers asked managers open-ended questions designed to ferret out details about how their companies were – or were not – implementing these practices. We learned that our indicators of better management and superior performance are strongly correlated with measures such as productivity, return on capital employed and firm survival. Indeed, a one-point increment in a five-point management score that we created – the equivalent of going from the bottom third to the top third of the group – was associated with 23 percent greater productivity.

 

Transforming Manufacturers

 

When we began assessing management practices, we focused on medium-sized manufacturers, both independent and multinational-owned companies that had 50 to 5,000 workers. With more than 100 researchers accumulating data since 2004, our sample has come to include more than 8,000 firms in 20 countries in the developed and developing worlds.

 

Examples of bad management were easy to find. 

For example, a manager at a privately held manufacturer in France, with about 500 workers, was hamstrung by his firm’s inability to motivate employees. Union pressure and labour regulations meant that workers effectively had jobs for life. The only way he could balance his production line was to team up poor employees with star performers, but this practice prevented stars from earning team bonuses and eventually drove them out of the company.

 

 

Are organizations more likely to succeed if they adopt good management practices?

 

The answer to that question may seem obvious, but economists prefer to test such long-held assumptions. An economist-led, international research effort conducted for the past decade reveals that poor management is rampant and that most leaders of poorly managed institutions are unaware of the deficiencies. When manufacturers were systematically taught how to implement good management’s basic features – targets, incentives and monitoring – performance improved measurably and dramatically.

 

Bringing these fundamental best practices to the wide array of companies, schools and hospitals that need them can ultimately increase wealth and can substantially improve education and health care. A call for “better management” may not seem like a cutting-edge idea, but given the potentially large effects on incomes, productivity and delivery of critically needed services worldwide, it may actually be a radical one.

 

 

Using a business-assessment tool we developed with McKinsey partners John Dowdy and Stephen Dorgan, we determined an average overall management score for each organization. Low scores abounded. More than 30 percent of U.S. firms and more than 70 percent in Brazil, China and India scored a three or lower. These firms fail to collect even the most basic performance data and offer few employee incentives.

 

When we started, facilities were often dirty and unproductive, and accidents were common. Even though wages were low, the company’s profits were meager.

 

The intervention transformed the plants that had received help. On average, they cut defects by more than 50 percent, reduced inventory by 20 percent and raised output by 10 percent. Productivity at one factory increased by almost 20 percent, and average profits rose by what we estimate to be roughly 30 percent. Safety also improved.

 

@Beyond The Factory Floor

 

Having seen the effect on manufacturing operations, we expanded our research to other kinds of organizations. So far we have conducted interviews at 1,000 schools in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Italy, Sweden and India, and at 1,300 hospitals in those countries and in France, ranking each of the organizations in much the same way as we ranked the manufacturers.

 

Our management scores showed that, overall, schools and hospitals are even more poorly managed than manufacturing companies. A nurse in the U.K. told us that her hospital didn’t store bed linens on each floor. One evening, she went to a different floor to get new linens for a patient; upon returning, she found that another patient had died from a seizure. With no process for monitoring or correcting problems like this, the linens policy persisted two years later.

 

What To Ask Your Managers?

Interviews with plant managers at more than 8,000 manufacturers in 20 countries revealed which management practices are actually being used on the front lines. Here is a small sampling of interview topics and related questions. For more detail, go to worldmanagementsurvey.org.

 

+ Interconnection of targets: “How are goals cascaded down to the individual workers?”

 

+ Clarity and comparability of goals: “Does anyone complain that the targets are too complex?”

 

+ Consequence management: “How do you deal with repeated failures in a specific business segment?”

 

+ Instilling a talent mind-set: “How do senior managers show that attracting and developing talent is a top priority?”

 

+ Removing poor performers: “How long is under performance tolerated?”

 

+ Unique employee-value proposition: “What makes it distinctive to work at your company?”

 

+ Retaining talent: “What does the company do about a star performer who wants to leave?”

 

+ Continuous improvement: “How do problems typically get exposed and fixed?”

 

+ Performance tracking: “What key indicators do you use for performance tracking?”

 

+ Performance dialogue: “For a given problem, how do you identify the root cause?”

 

 

 

The public sector is also strikingly bad at rewarding good employees and dealing with underperformers. One U.S. high school principal confided to us about a teacher who spoke so quietly that her pupils struggled to hear her, and grades were often poor. The principal had repeatedly offered training to help the teacher, to no avail, so the poor teaching continued year after year.

 

Comparing management practices with outcomes, we found that high-scoring schools have better exam results: A one-point improvement in the management score is associated with about a 10 percent jump in student test performance. Similarly, at hospitals, a one-point management-score increase is associated with a 0.5 percent lower 30-day mortality rate for heart attack victims who are admitted to emergency rooms.The example of Virginia Mason Medical Center, in Seattle, illustrates what can happen when a health care organization makes a concerted effort to improve management practices. In 2002 it introduced procedures, such as extensive performance monitoring and weekly team meetings, inspired by the Toyota Production System. These changes dramatically improved patient care. In the breast clinic, for example, the average elapsed time between a patient’s first call and a diagnosis dropped from three weeks to three days. The changes returned the hospital to profitability after years of losses.

 

 

Author Note: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

Those 7 mantras for a happy living..............

1. Time and again, reflect on your life in relation to the cosmos. It is not even a drop in the ocean. This awareness will simply drop all the smallness in you and you will be able to live every moment of your life.

2. Remind yourself of the highest goal in your life. You are not here to grumble ot to complain. You are here for something much bigger.

3. Serve! Engage yourself in community service to whatever extent you can.

4. Have faith that the Divine loves you dearly and is taking care of you. Have the trust and faith that you will get whatever is needed in life.

5. As we flip the calendar, we need to keep flipping our mind as well. Often, our diaries are full with memories. See that you don’t fill your future dates with past events. Learn and unlearn from the past, and move on.

6. Smile more! True sign of prosperity is an unconditional smile on your face.

7. Take some time to walk by yourself. Nurture yourself with music, prayer and silence. Do a few minutes of meditation, pranayama and yoga. This heals and rejuvenates you, giving you depth and stability.

Confidence with Humility - The rarest of the Commodities in today's world.

One of the rarest combinations in the human personality is the co-existence of confidence and humility. Often people who are confident are not humble and people with humility are not confident. Confidence blended with humility is most appreciated by everybody.

How can confidence be developed in one who is humble, and humility in one who is confident?
1. When you see your life from a bigger context of time and space, then you realize your life is nothing. 
2. When you are humble, you need to see that you are unique and dear to the Divine, which brings confidence, and when you realize you are insignificant, that brings humility. 
3. When you have a Guru, you cannot be arrogant. Your guru gives you confidence and also brings humility in you. The weakness in humility, and the arrogance in confidence are removed. You are left with confidence and humility!