Today’s post is by SmartBrief on Leadership contributing editor Liz Ruskin, who is attending the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles this week.
Here’s a controversial idea: Former FTD chief Michael Soenen said a company he was once involved with enabled GPS tracking in Blackberrys and, without saying much about it, distributed them among the sales force. They found, he said, that people weren’t driving 300 miles a day and making eight sales calls. They were driving 30 miles, making four calls and spending “a lot of time at home.”
While some bosses complain that employees waste work hours on personal e-mail and eBay, he sees technology as a tool to improve employee accountability and productivity.
Was this tracking initiative unpopular? You bet, but Soenen says it could save tens of millions of dollars, so employees will just have to lump it, he says. “From the CEO seat, sometimes you have to stuff it down their throats.”
What do you think? (read more…)
Staying abreast of employment law is one of the most important — and often most stressful — aspects of managing people. This year has been particularly tumultuous, with managers wondering what changes to COBRA, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and anti-discrimination laws mean for them.
One possible resource I came across recently: JDSupra. While it’s designed primarily for lawyers to share their work with each other, it could also be a helpful tool for HR leaders and managers. The site is a repository of legal documents, uploaded by lawyers themselves, that anyone can access for free. The self-policing nature of the profession means the content is very high quality, says Aviva Cuyler, founder and managing director. “None of the content is anonymous.”
Playing around on the site for the past couple of weeks, I’ve found three ways that the site could be helpful for a typical HR leader or manager:
- Learn more about specific issues.
This post is from Joe Caruso, publisher of SmartBrief’s health care group, who is attending the Society for Human Resource Management’s Staffing Management Conference this week in Las Vegas.
Stephen A Lowisz‘s workshop on passive candidate recruitment drew a large enough crowd that SHRM had to turn people away at the door at the pre-conference event.
Lowisz, president & CEO of Qualigence in Livonia, Mich., told the audience that the nature and role of the recruiter had changed:
- In the past, the recruiter primarily handled the administrative functions, was transactional in nature and screened out candidates.
- Today’s recruiters need to be sales consultants, be a partner of the hiring authority and must screen in candidates.
- The key to success is identifying the passive candidate’s needs and then advancing the “sale” based on meeting those needs. Recruiters shouldn’t get too focused on pushing the opportunity upon this type of candidate.
On Twitter? (read more…)
Your SmartBrief on Workforce will be ready in a few hours. Keep yourself entertained (and informed) with this other helpful links we found this morning.
Frustrated recruiters can go commiserate with Tim Tolan over at Fistful of Talent about excessively picky hiring managers: “Narrowly defining a search assignment to find, locate and place a candidate who has the necessary skills to meet the job description and fit into the culture of the company is a fair request. We do that all the time. Taking a pass on multiple candidates (for months) who meet all the requirements (and are a great cultural fit) just to find Mr. or Ms. Perfect is not always the right decision to make.”
Image credit, iStock (read more…)
This post is from Liz Ruskin, contributing editor for SmartBrief on Leadership.
Legendary Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski told an audience of business executives how he builds winning teams. Here, from a panel discussion at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles Monday, are a few of his pointers.
- Leadership isn’t singular. No one leads alone, Krzyzewski says. When he was building the team that won gold at the Beijing Olympics, he relied on Lebron James, Jason Kidd and Kobe Bryant as the team’s “internal leaders.” They had tremendous sway on the rest of the team. “If they said it, it’s pretty much going to go,” he says.
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Soaring egos need a higher purpose. Talented players often have outsized egos. It’s not Krzyzewski’s style to break them down, but he has to keep ego from blocking improvement. To get them working as a team, Krzyzewski first meets with each player individually, lays out what he expects from him and instills in each a common purpose.
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