Another Day in the HR Field

One of the most important outcomes of my Organizational Behavior class is the self analysis each student completes during the course.  There are several assessments covering topics such as personality, leadership, decision making, and more.  This coupled with a semester long look at how individual, group, and organizational behavior affects the results (good or bad) of a company leaves each student with their own impression of what it takes to be a good leader or manger.  The following is a brief summary of just how one of my A students Galen F. Schneider views the world as it relates to the topic in the Title above:          Five big traits every good manager needs to possess in order to succeed not only in the business world, but also as a manager, are: 1.        A high motivation to manage 2.        A moderately high to high self-monitoring tendency 3. ...

Is compensation a numbers or a head game?   I think it is a little bit of both, and here is why.   My story with comp starts when I was just in high school and college.   I really wanted to go into accounting because I thought that numbers were fascinating.   I had taken every single business class in high school and had intended to earn a Business Administration degree because I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life back then.   My dream was to be business women wearing suits, making decisions, and managing people.   What that actually looked like in terms of industry of specific field in business, I had no idea. While in college I had to take intermediate accounting, statistics and calculus as well as higher level classes.   Intermediate Accounting was just not fun and I ended up stopping at that point and changing my major.   I had finished my statistics class and my calculus but I didn’t move on to the higher level ma...

Seriously! I have been trying to find time to write this post for some time now. Over the years I have been hearing time after time about companies who have serious communication issues. I have worked for and consulted for companies like this. As hard as one works to improve the problem, the reality is bad communication in organizations is like smoking, overeating, & cussing. Sometimes its just a hard habit to break. Communication problems are not new but what seems to be a commonality in companies in more recent years is they seem to rely too heavily on EMail rather than picking up the phone or walking 10 feet across the hall to talk "in person" to their coworker, supervisor, or owner. Personally I think hours of employee labor could be saved if folks would consider the good old fashion way of communicating. Don't get me wrong, I too have been known to rely on it too heavily at times as well. I'm not perfect by any means but I can recognize that at some p...