What’s Your Tag Line?

Many years ago a recruiter connected with me. During our conversation he asked me what's my tag line. My tag line, what's that? I asked. He said, you know, like someone is a "Problem Solver", or "Deal Closer" etc. You need to have a tag line that describes you, he said to me.The conversation got me thinking. Before that time I had never thought what was my tag line. After some thought, I chose "Enabling People" as my tag line. I like to enable people deliver better, by creating an…

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Objective Subjectivity

 (Image source) So we've moved away from moderation in performance appraisal in our organization. Over the years moderation seemed the best though not always perfect way to grade performance of people. It made sense to rank people with relative performance levels. There was a bell curve to be followed forcing supervisors to push people in defined performance bands. However, the most difficult part was to push people in lowest performance bands. It was imperative that we identify the top performers and the worst performers. Not every supervisor was able to…

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Firing is Easy

We mostly hear how hard it is to give negative feedback and fire people. I have been wondering about this. Yes giving negative feedback is hard and firing people is harder. However come to think of it, actually this is a easiest thing. We are all critical of others and so giving negative feedback comes naturally. We more often than not, find it easier to find mistakes rather than appreciate what's going on well. And if a subordinate isn't working out, firing is an easy way out. The work pressures…

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Recruiters, Wake Up and Use Social Networking to Hire

In a recent post, RWW reports that “In a study of 300 hiring managers and recruiters, Palo Alto-based social networking monitoring service Reppler reports that 76% of hiring managers look at applicants' Facebook profiles. An additional 56% are looking at Twitter, and 48% check out LinkedIn.”The fact that recruiters should be checking out basic info on social networks makes perfect sense to me. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem true, at least for Indian recruiters. I recently got a call from a recruiter, apparently someone involved in senior level recruitment in a…

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Is Changing Jobs the Best Way to Get a Raise?

In a recent employee survey by Mercer it was found that one in two employee is seriously considering leaving their jobs for better opportunities in terms of career and base pay. Interestingly around 66% of employees under age 24 are seriously considering leaving. It leads to an interesting question that I have been pondering over and researching informally:Is changing jobs the best way to get a raise?After say more than 15 years work experience, do you think someone who has hopped jobs more regularly will be paid more than someone…

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Lies While Quitting

@sidin posed a question on Twitter about lies we give while quitting a job. I am sure there’s a full article out with a lot more research. Over the years, I have heard many reasons that people give while quitting. These reasons are not necessarily lies in all cases. These are just a collection of some reasons that I figured were lies after the person had left the organization."I want to do something different" (when the will continue in the same industry doing the same thing)"I am getting a better…

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5 Reasons Why You are Not Being Promoted

I came across Dan McCarthy’s blog recently. Dan is a practitioner in the field of leadership development for over 20 years and is currently the Manager of Leadership and Management Development at a Fortune "Great Place to Work", "Training Top 125", and "High Impact Learning" (HILO 80) company. He has a great blog on leadership that I would encourage you to subscribe to. Dan wrote a great post Head’s Up – You are About to be Promoted or Fired where he shares why you might get promoted or fired. I…

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Why an Updated LinkedIn Profile is Important

I recently discovered how I can effectively use LinkedIn to find potential candidates for recruitment. I simply update my status message with what I am looking for and get responses from interested candidates. Okay, I know this isn’t really new but hey, it’s new for me. Anyway this post isn’t about this discovery of mine. I received a few responses to my status updates. These were from people I know and have worked with in the past. Unfortunately, a few of the people who responded did not have an updated…

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What Type of a Leader Are You?

It’s happened to me a few times now. We are going somewhere and I am asked to follow someone else’s car. I observed three types of leaders:   1.       The Highly skilled but somewhat Self-Centred Leader: The driver in the car ahead of me just zooms past leaving me to figure out the way myself. They are usually very skilled at manoeuvring through the traffic themselves. You will usually lose them at a traffic signal that they go past leaving you stranded waiting for the light to turn. They are…

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