You might go out and have dinner with business colleagues, even have them over to your house for a meal but you have to be careful to protect yourself because when it the organization starts to look for scapegoats it will be you instead of him/her.

There seems to be this fallacy that you can lead others when you have no direct authority over them.  While it is true to a certain extent people usually try and please their supervisors and if their boss is in direct conflict with something you’re trying to do guess who wins ?

The reality is that there are very few people who are willing to stand up and say “it was my fault and I accept the responsibility”.  I have taken the fall for others but that is because I believe a good manager takes all of the blame and none of the credit.  I protect those who work for me and do not jump on a bandwagon to point the finger of blame.  Rather I try and understand what went wrong and how we can learn from it and become a better organization.

If you want to earn respect of those working for you and lead than you have to learn to protect your people and make them better by what they learn.  If you’re not making mistakes then you’re not taking risks you’re just following what others do and thus you become a cog in the machine that produces stuff of little value.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking someone maybe your friend when your career is on the line.  If this happens your best goal is not to get even it’s to confront the person via a one on one and let them know that you have drawn a line in the sand.  This puts them on notice that they can’t deny responsibility for their own actions and that you are going to be keeping an eye out for their performance.   Lead by example but never forget that some other people are out to protect themselves and they are willing to throw anyone under the bus who gets in their way.

I love to be challenged by work and feel great when I overcome an especially difficult challenge.  That is what motivates ME more than anything else but I have to admit that at times it’s easy to become distracted by poor managers, work stations that have no privacy and political coworkers who will do anything they can to undermine your efforts.    The objective is to stay focused on what motivates YOU and to to keep driving towards that objective because there are a lot of thing that are not under your control that you can’t change.

Believe it or not a lot of people would love to have a semi private work station like this because we all need some time to concentrate and be alone with our thoughts

Here are some things to look for in a great company or job..

1. The company has low turnover yet they are also acknowledged as an industry leader.  Be wary of people who take root at companies because to them it’s an easy paycheck and they know what they have to do to “just get by”.

2. The ratings of the company on Glassdoor.com are really poor.  OK it’s pretty subjective but overall they can give you a sense of what to look for and questions to ask in an interview.

3. It’s not about title it’s about being challenged and being part of something very special.

4. People dress casually in jeans or tee shirts and meetings are not the rule of the day.

5. When you ask people “how do you like it here” they convey emotionally how great the company is rather than give you standard interview answers that are in the job description or company statement.

6. People are proud to work for the company and wear company logo gear.

7. After interviewing you would give anything to join their team.

8. Your education is going to continue as you learn from the best people there.

9. The company will pay for you to get an advanced degree or go to classes.

10. It’s not about the money..it’s about being happy at what you do.

Employees at Google get free lunches

Related articles

• how to find work that you love (atolemdro.com)
• These Terrible Interview Responses Will Kill Your Chances Of Getting A Job (businessinsider.com)
• Are you a motivator? (roshnii179.com)
• 6 Types of Motivation Explained (lifehack.org)
• Motivation (hyattractions.wordpress.com)

The opposite of fear is hope. In an environment of hope, intelligent teamwork becomes feasible as everyone focuses less on “What should we do?” and more on “How can we achieve what we really want to accomplish?” Hope also allows a group to collaborate together to make a sound decision rather than trying to second guess what the boss wants.

The key, therefore, to making great decisions is to create the kind of environment where teams of people can work together cohesively to generate outstanding results. Great decisions always bring out the best in people and galvanize them to reach for even more impressive results in the future. To create the kind of environment that will foster great decisions, bring more structure and transparency to the way decisions are made.

Specifically, there is a ten-step process for making great decisions which can and should be applied. These steps have been honed by Fortune 500 and high-growth companies over more than a decade of real world experience.

Once you have this ten-step process in place, you can overcome any obstacles which may prevent your organization from making and then implementing great business decisions.

We all struggle with work-life balance. We talk about it, worry about it, but achieving it, that’s another matter. These days, we’re all under pressure to be on 24-7. We’re constantly being asked to do more with less, deliver results with fewer resources. The truth is that it’s never been more challenging to keep work from becoming our life.

But for top executives and business leaders, the problem is actually far worse. There are two reasons for that.

For all their power, perks, and pay packages, leaders carry a heavy burden of responsibility. Their stress level is higher. They often put way too much pressure on themselves, to the point where failure becomes something to avoid at all cost. For some, failure becomes something they just can’t live with.

It’s all too easy to get drawn in by the attention, the admiration, the ego boost. At work, they’re kings and queens. At home, they’re just another spouse, parent, or friend. Many of them actually feel more competent, more comfortable, even more safe, at work than at home. That’s the attraction of the dark side.

So we call ourselves workaholics, say our work is our lives. We think of ourselves as winners, special, above the masses of ordinary people. It sounds so grandiose, and that’s exactly what it is, a grandiose self-image that can never be fulfilled. A trap.

As for the effect all that has on our ability to perform effectively as leaders, it has a discrete, negative impact on a number of key leadership attributes:

Empathy and humility. Lack of empathy for your own mistakes and failures tends to transfer to others. If you can’t feel empathy for yourself, you can’t feel empathy for those you lead. And knowing that you’re human, just like everyone else, is what humility is all about. Empathy and humility are key leadership traits.

Perspective and objectivity. We live in highly complex and competitive times. When tough issues arise, as they inevitably do, leaders need to be able to disengage, to retreat to a place where they feel safe from all that, a place where they can achieve some level of perspective and objectivity.

Judgment. The biggest problem with grandiose ego is that it fools you into thinking you have to have all the answers. And while you’d never consciously admit to thinking you’re always right, deep inside, you have a need to be just that. That impairs your judgment. I’ve seen it time and again; it’s sad to watch once successful entrepreneurs and executives make bad calls because they stop asking questions and listening to others. Worst case, they can self-destruct and take the whole company down with them.

Confidence. An oversized ego turns confidence into arrogance. Sure, people like Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs managed to get away with being arrogant, but I would argue that Gates and Jobs eventually grew up. Ellison, I’m not so sure. But for the rest of us, it’s irritating, annoying, and hinders our ability to work effectively with and yes, lead others.

Longevity. To be a great leader, you’ve got to be able to hang in there, to be around long enough to see the fruits of your labor. You’ve got to have stick-with-it-ness, the ability to survive the inevitable hurdles and challenges of a highly competitive business world. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and you’ve got to pace yourself to last.

Bottom line. A healthy ego is a good thing. Self-confidence is a good thing. Passion and dedication are good things. But when you stop thinking of yourself as an ordinary person, when you no longer believe that there are more important things in life than succeeding at work, that will catch up with you, sooner or later. Guaranteed.

The Corner Office-Steve Tobak

I keep hearing about “change” within the workplace but the reality is that most people who try and change things are met with a lot of resistance as in Seth Godin’s book on Linchpins.  There are those of us who can quickly look at a situation, think outside the box at a possible solution but then we meet those people who are afraid of change and who give you reasons why you can’t do it rather than why we should do it.

Now I’m not saying that todays middle managers need to come in like a steamroller and change things; what I am saying is that the biggest frustration for a lot of talented business people is that it takes so damn long to get things done and the tons of meeting you need to generate buy-in.  I man God forbid that we should go to our manager and present an idea and have them say “go with it”.  Today it’s more like “let’s schedule a meeting and present a Power Point”.

Most companies expect you to be in meetings. Calendars need to be decorated with sufficient colourful blocks, to signal over-activity and that you collaborating with other employees but  dig a bit deeper and you’ll realize that meetings are a way to diffuse and evade responsibility for decisions.   Yes – let’s spend weeks on weeks “reviewing with stakeholders.” It’s so much safer that taking swift decisions ourselves. Companies place no trust on the individual to make the right decision on their own.

Peter Drucker said “meetings are a symptom of a bad organization” and I believe that 100%.   So does anyone think that someone like Steve Jobs would have been able to managed by someone who made him schedule lots of meetings and develop endless Power Points ?

If you manage someone like Steve Jobs you need to help them bring innovation to your organization.  This means that you need to channel their drive without having them become integrated into the Borg bureaucracy.  This is especially true of younger employees who have no need for processes and procedures.

My other advice is that if you every loose someone who is a Linchpin you need to do whatever you can do to get that person back even if it means swallowing your pride and extending that first hand.  If you’re willing to let them go than you have started down a path towards mediocrity from which your company could become like thousands of other brands that check off boxes.

A disruptive business strategy can shake the basic foundations of common business models in any business or industry. Today, there are many excellent examples of disrupters that have literally changed the way we think about certain businesses. They have clearly changed business models and stand the old saying “This is the way we’ve always done business,” on its head.

For instance, Apple’s electronic products like the iPod or iPad have garnered the most media attention, but its iTunes distribution channel is the real disruptive power. iTunes has laid waste to the traditional music business model. With more than 70 percent of the downloaded music business, iTunes is the disruptive winner. Record companies that once ruled with an iron hand now have to dance to Apple’s tune.

After the music industry, Apple is intent on applying the disruptive powers of iTunes to the book-publishing and movie businesses. Given the millions of iTunes customers who already use iTunes, that’s been bad news for Blockbuster, but good news for Netflix.

Amazon has long been a disruptive force in retailing. It’s looking to disrupt the traditional brick-and-mortar retailing model even further. Its new Price Check application for the iPhone (and soon other platforms as well) lets consumers scan a bar code of a product, and Amazon gives them pricing of the same product from multiple retailers, including itself. If a buyer finds that Amazon is the lowest (not always the case), Price Check will let them order it by phone with one click.

In the world of advertising, Madison Avenue reigned supreme seemingly forever. It perfected the pitch for marketing any product or service on earth. As consumers, our job was only to sit back and listen or watch the pitch on the radio or television. Advertisers would tell us what we wanted and hoped enough of us would buy the product to pay for more advertising.

Social media marketing, the new disrupter of traditional advertising, primarily works to market products and services in the context of a dialogue with customers. No more shouting at the customer. No more mass marketing. With digital platforms like WordPress (blogging), Facebook (social interaction), LinkedIn, (professional networking), Yelp (customer feedback), YouTube (video aggregation), and Digg (crowdsource content), advertising will never be the same game.

So how can a disruptive business strategy apply to you? First, disruptive business strategy comes in many different flavors. There is no one-size-fits-all calculus that can be applied to every business.

Finding a disruptive element you can leverage against your competition and perhaps your industry starts by looking at your business through a different lens. It’s about understanding that disruption is good for you, but bad for your competition.

David Dirks of Port Jervis is a business strategy and marketing consultant

1. Learn to listen more effectively – We are all short of time and have a lot of work to do but listening involves more than hearing the words; you need to understand the rationale behind the words.  Good managers also know that sometimes they need to be quiet and let people speak without interrupting as much.

2. Never forget to say “thank you” – You would be surprised how much a thank you can mean to people especially if you thank them in person and then send out an email to the group thanking that person for their effort.  It’s not always about money.

3. Ask “what do you think” when developing strategy or plans – If you don’t get their input and buy-in you could be wasting your time.  Your people are often on the front lines and they can help you identify the roadblocks that stand in your way.  Don’t develop a Power Point and present it without getting the input from your people.

4. Have one day a week and mark it as “no meetings allowed”.  Death by meetings is becoming to pervasive in corporate America.  Why have to schedule a meeting, sometimes weeks in advance, when you could just get a quick answer by meeting someone for a cup of coffee or stopping by their cube.

5. Spring for lunch – Have a couple of pizzas delivered and invite your people to lunch and ask them “how’s it going?”  Follow up with each person later on especially if you notice that someone was unusually quiet during lunch.

According to a recent Gallop poll the number problem that employees have in the workplace is stress.  As a manager you can do a lot to release this pressure by meetingwith people and addressing the concerns that are giving them the most stress.  If there are rumors of layoffs address the problem directly don’t let it foster out of control to the point it can effect productivity.

Becoming a better manager requires constant learning and adjustments.  It will also determine if you are a good leader or just another captain in the corporate machine.

Related articles

• Don’t take it personally, it’s just business.. (richsmanagementblog.com)
• Managing Generation X (richsmanagementblog.com)
• How Power Point can kill an organization (richsmanagementblog.com)

Like many financial services firms, Wedbush Securities monitors the daily emails, instant messages and social networking activity of its 1,000-plus employees, says Mattias Tornyi, the company’s Director of IT. They use an email monitoring software to flag certain types of messages and keywords within messages, he says. Every day, they end up reading 5% to 10% of the messages employees send.

That’s fairly extensive, but many firms are, at the very least, monitoring some of employees’ Internet, phone and email use, especially larger companies and those in sensitive or heavily regulated industries. The market for email monitoring software has grown more than 25% each year since 2008 and is projected to reach $1.23 billion in 2013, according to IT market research firm Gartner; more than one in three large U.S. companies employ actual people to read or analyze employee email, according to a 2010 study by email monitoring firm Proofpoint. Plus, a survey by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute found that almost half of the small, medium and large companies surveyed monitored phone use, and two out of three monitored web use. Instant-message and text-message monitoring are also increasing, says Stephen Marsh, chief executive of email archiving firm Smarsh.

Not only do employers watch what you’re doing, but many act on what they find. One in five large U.S. companies fired an employee for violating email policies in the past year, the Proofpoint survey found. What was a fireable offense? Most email investigations pertain to issues of employees leaking sensitive, confidential or embarrassing information, or theft – not racy messages sent to a girlfriend from an office email account or the occasional online shopping binge from the corporate desktop.

2. “You’re too old for this.”

When Joyce Kalivas-Griffin, 57, saw a job opening at a private school nearby, she immediately sent in her resume. She was hopeful – the description matched her skills almost perfectly – but heard nothing. Then, she noticed that the job had been posted again, so she tweaked her resume to obscure her age and resubmitted it. This time, the school called her in for an interview. Kalivas-Griffin says she nailed it, but she didn’t get the job: She believes that when the interviewer met her and realized she’s no 30-something, her age tipped the scales against her.

Kalivas-Griffin will never know for sure, but as the workforce gets grayer, age bias is likely to increase, experts say. Roughly 25% of employers said they were reluctant to hire older workers, according to a 2006 survey by the Center on Aging and Work at Boston College, and after looking at only a resume, employers discriminated against women they perceived to be 50 or older, according to a 2007 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It’s a trend, experts say, that’s gotten worse in the recession, as evidenced by the latest data from the Labor Department: laid-off workers 55 and older spent an average of 35 weeks looking for work, compared with 30 weeks for 25 to 54 year-olds. “We know it’s very prevalent,” says Laurie McCann, a senior attorney with AARP Foundation Litigation. “The problem is that people often don’t know it’s happening, because of the nature of applying for jobs.” In a world of online applications, you never see the other candidates, nor do you meet the hiring manager. That’s why career consultants often recommend anyone older than 45 or 50 alter their resume to shift focus away from their age and toward their experience, achievements and skills. You don’t need to list every job you’ve ever had; instead highlight achievements in a measurable way – like say, how much you increased revenue for your department – and be sure to list tech, social media and other skills.

3. “I know when you’re faking the flu.”

As a production manager at a high-end commercial photo lab, Stuart Horvath, 32, supervised both permanent and freelance production assistants. Their job was to process the film, but when someone “didn’t feel like dealing with all the slides that day, the machine would ‘suddenly’ jam,” Horvath says – and he knew it didn’t jam nearly as frequently as a few of his staff members claimed. Then there were the myriad sick days taken by one of his freelancers. Horvath suspected he was faking – and confirmed it when he ran into the employee at a bar on a night when he’d claimed to be sick. Look, he says: “I’ve been a boss, but I’ve been an employee too.”

It’s true: The boss often knows if you’re slacking off, job-hunting, sneaking out, faking sick or padding your expense report. In fact, a growing number of companies are hiring private investigators to track employees who call in sick with a suspicious illness, according to an article published last month in Bloomberg Businessweek. Perhaps it’s a sign of tough times. More than one in four employers say they think more employees have been faking illness and taking the day off since the economic downturn began, a 2009 CareerBuilder.com survey revealed. They’re not merely paranoid: About one-third of workers admit to calling in sick to work when they weren’t. And that’s not all your boss knows. “Sometimes the people on my team spend their days putting up a smokescreen to make it look like they are working hard, but I know they can’t be,” one employer at a financial services firm in Phoenix says. Another knew her employee was looking for another job. The lesson: Your antics are, for the moment, tolerated, but they probably haven’t gone unnoticed.

4. “Your kid? Your problem.”

By now it’s common knowledge that women earn less than men – about 81 cents for every dollar. Having a kid hurts women’s earning potential even further. The so-called “mommy penalty” may manifest in many ways: A mother may get passed over for a promotion because the boss thinks she takes off too much time to care for her kids or that she’s more concerned about the family than her career. A mom may get overlooked for high-profile projects because the boss fears she won’t devote enough time and energy.

Those are hard slights to quantify. Not so for the penalty faced by women who take time off to raise a child – even for a period as short as 18 months. Women with M.B.A.s who left the workforce for a year and a half to raise children make 41% less than men with the same degree; female Ph.D.’s make a third less; lawyers, 29% less, and doctors, 16%, according to a 2010 study by Harvard economics professors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz. “Business occupations place heavy penalties on employees who deviate from the norm,” Goldin and Katz write in the study.

5. “I’m your best friend…”

For the six out of 10 workers who say they’ve considered a boss a friend, this won’t come as a surprise: Being the boss’s pal, or pet, comes with perks. Some bosses play favorites in obvious ways, like giving a particular subordinate the plum assignments or pushing upper management for his raise. Others are more subtle, seeming to treat all employees equally. But then they’ll offer more guidance to a favored worker, or make sure she is introduced to the “right” people, says career and executive coach Roy Cohen. And as long as the relationship works, everyone can benefit: Good relationships tend to lead to higher worker engagement; compatibility can help a worker get a raise or a promotion; everyone likes to work with people they like and trust.

But the footing is never strictly equal when one friend can fire the other. “You have to be very careful,” says Cohen. The boss is still evaluating your compensation and performance, and the minute there’s a problem or a disagreement over either, feelings get hurt. To keep a relationship friendly, without crossing the line into friends territory, avoid talking about sensitive personal issues, he suggests: No matter how close you might feel, ultimately there is always the chance that your boss will use that information in a way that serves his purposes, not yours.

6. “…And your worst enemy.”

But sometimes, the boss is your worst enemy. Just as a good relationship with your boss can bolster your career, a lousy one can tank it. Or worse. One study found that, in incidences of “workplace bullying” — “repeated and persistent attempts by one person to torment, wear down, frustrate or get a reaction from another,” according to the Society for Human Resource Management – the boss is the bully 72% of the time. Nearly half of people who were bullied at work suffered stress-related health problems, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute. Even if your relationship doesn’t deteriorate to that level, your communication can be strained if your boss doesn’t keep his word, gives you the silent treatment, invades your privacy or deflects blame from himself — all of which lead workers to experience “more exhaustion, job tension, nervousness, depressed mood and mistrust,” a Florida State University study found. Worst case, this kind of behavior from the boss can even kill you: A 2008 study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that employees who had worked for four years under a boss who was uncommunicative, inconsiderate or opaque were 60% more likely to have a heart attack.

7. “I don’t promote based on performance.”

Usually, workers have to do a good job to get promoted. But in many cases, that’s not enough. Who rises (and who doesn’t) is a mix of factors, most of which workers have no real control over, including supervisors’ preferences, organizational rules and company culture. In some organizations, particularly larger, more traditional companies, seniority may be the main factor in promotion decisions, says Tony Deblauwe, founder of HR consulting firm HR4Change. Seniority-based promotions are more common in the U.S. than in other countries, according to a 2004 study in the Socio-Economic Review, and “more popular than economic explanations would allow.” Compatibility with the boss is critical, too, Deblauwe says: “Who you know makes a big difference, particularly the higher up you go.”

The reverse is also true: Being smart and capable doesn’t even guarantee your job. One manager in a small Arizona investment planning firm, who declined to give his name to preserve company morale, fired a subordinate whom he says was “very smart,” with good credentials and a degree from a prestigious university. But the manager also found him difficult and hard to supervise, and ultimately fired him: “His strained relationship with me was a big factor in this decision.”

8. “I’m shallow.”

As if being thin and attractive weren’t its own reward, being both helps workers get ahead at work, too. The opposite is also true: People who are unattractive or overweight in their bosses’ eyes are punished for it at the office. In spite of the fact that in most professions, attractiveness has no bearing on performance, many bosses subscribe to the notion that “what is beautiful is good” ( PDF ), according to a psychology researcher from Hofstra. As a result, good-looking people earn 3% to 8% more than average-looking people, who, in turn, earn 5% to 10% more than those rated “plain,” according to a 2005 study by Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas and Jeff Biddle of Michigan State University.

Extra body weight comes with its own employment challenges: 43% of overweight people say they were teased, harassed, fired, not hired, passed over for a promotion or otherwise treated unfairly because of their weight by an employer or supervisor. And overweight people are paid as much as 6% less than their slimmer co-workers in comparable positions, according to Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity ( PDF ). The standards are tougher for women than men: Women with a body mass index of 27 or higher are at “serious risk” of weight discrimination, while men must have a BMI of at least 35 to be at comparable risk, a 2008 Yale University study found. And moderately obese women are three times more likely than moderately obese men to be the victims of weight discrimination, the study also found.

9. “I don’t have time for you.”

Forty-year-old Erika Worth owns a background-check business in Vancouver, Wash., and a detective agency in Los Angeles, putting her in a dual role that requires monthly trips up and down the West Coast. So every time one of her 15 employees has a question about a project or a scheduling conflict, Worth asks them to try to come up with a solution on their own. It’s not that she doesn’t care: She just doesn’t have time to handle every problem as it arises.

Bosses have always been busy, but since the cutbacks of the recession, many managers now have even less time to supervise, talk to, or nurture their staffs, Cohen says. Two-thirds of employees say they have too little interaction with their boss, up from just over half in 2008, according to a study by Leadership IQ. “When times get tough, managers become avoidant,” writes Mark Murphy, who worked on the study. And with unemployment so high, some bosses feel they don’t need to spend as much time with their employees: If the employee doesn’t like it, well, there are plenty of other people who would like their job. “A lot of bosses have this ‘but-I-give-them-a-paycheck’ mentality,” says career coach Sherri Thomas. “They think that the paycheck is enough of a thank you.”

10. “It’s all about me.”

You’ve slaved away on a project for weeks, only to hear the boss give the presentation with no mention of your name. You’ve spent months doing research for that marketing proposal, but when it goes to boss’s boss, there’s no mention of your contribution. Bosses who take credit for your work or blame you for problems that you didn’t fully cause can “be equally – and sometimes more – damaging to employees” than the obvious bully, says Deblauwe.

Nearly half of workers say their boss has taken credit for their work, and more than a third say their boss has “thrown them under the bus” to save himself, according to a study by Spherion Staffing. That kind of credit-grabbing and blame-deflecting behavior is growing more common, says Thomas. In a tight labor market, “there’s so much pressure to achieve and people feel like they have to be overachievers.”

To be fair, this behavior isn’t always as bad as it seems. Sometimes it’s not appropriate to credit each employee, such as when the higher-ups don’t care which member of the boss’s team did what and simply want to know the results, says career coach Hallie Crawford. And “some bosses think of the employee as there to help them and that’s just part of the deal,” Crawford says. They may not be maliciously avoiding giving you credit, rather they may see the employer/employee relationship as not requiring it, she says. And for bosses with large teams, “it might be human error” — they just can’t remember who did what part of the project.

We all love to be creative at work.  It could mean finding a creative out of the box way to address a problem or it could be as simple as developing a presentation that tells a story.  The worst thing that can happen to anyone is to have their creativity crushed with illogical reasoning from someone who just doesn’t get it.

Here is a great example: I recently suggested that a CPG brand hire outside credentialed people to write content for their website as there was a real problem with internal people having the time to write relevant content.  While my boss felt it was great “out of the box thinking” the person in charge of the brand said “we are not content providers and I don’t want to use anyone outside of the company”.  Ha ?  This meant stale irrelevant content that was not being used by our audience but it also showed a misunderstanding of the concept that brands are media today and a great way to keep people engaged is to help them sort out too much information with great content.

There are other ways to stifle creativity as well.  A marketer might have a great idea for a POP display but when your organization tells  you of why you can’t do it instead of making it happen than you know you’re in quicksand.

The bottom line is that we all want to use the creative part of our brains at work but with so many meetings and having to generate so much buy-in it’s hard to take something from a creative concept to actually implementing it.  There are few Steve Jobs who can push things through without being questioned.

Here are some things you can do to innovate and be more creative:

1ne: If you’re attending a lot of meetings where you are just there for an FYI than politely decline them.  Time is money and going from one meeting to another means you don’t have time to be creative.

2wo: Take some time to be creative and set up your creativity.  Understand the barriers to a creative solution and address time to outline the barriers and possible solutions.

3hree: Never go into a meeting you set up without sending a pre-read to members.  You need to get key influencer buy-in and understand the possible objections so you can better be prepared.

4our: Get your deliverables out of the way so you can have more time to be creative.  A lot of deliverables are nothing more than a series of tasks so get them done even though you hate to do them.

5ive: Have fun and look at problems from your audiences POV.  Stop wearing blinders.

Finally..if you find that you are becoming a task master and that everyday you are doing the same thing over and over again maybe it’s time to change jobs.  Creativity is like a muscle.  If you don’t use it, it becomes dormant and turns to flab.  You don’t want that to happen ever because we spend too much time at work.

Related articles

• Adobe study reveals massive creativity gaps, but not in gender or age (venturebeat.com)
• Why You Should Hire Keith Richards (themarlincompany.com)
• ‘Insanely Simple’ Reveals Steve Jobs’ Anecdote & The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success (hitechanalogy.com)
• Failure in the Workplace – Why It’s Good for Innovation (themarlincompany.com)

Trust defines every interaction in a working relationship, it builds intimacy and it strengthens bonds. Without trust no relationship can thrive. Unfortunately people don’t always cherish trust the way that they should. Because it is often given freely at first it is also easily taken for granted. When trust has been damaged it can spell doom for managers,  and it can be very hard, if not impossible, to do your job without keeping watching your back and who the hell wants to work in that type of toxic environment ?

Whether or not trust can ever be restored depends on how badly it was damaged and how much the spurned person feels betrayed. If you’ve had your trust betrayed then you know how hard it can be to let go, move on and fix the relationship. So what is backstabbing and why does it happen ?

It’s called “backstabbing” for a reason; betrayal feels like someone plunged a sharp, rusty knife deep in your back, gave you a pat on the back to dig it in deeper, especially after you treated them so well as their manager. Some people tend to feel that they’re the ones to blame, like they haven’t been paying enough attention to their employees, or that they did something wrong.

The important thing to remember is that you’re the victim. You’ve been a good boss to the person who stabbed you in the back. You were genuine, upfront, and you had nothing to hide. It’s all right to feel bad for yourself, but you shouldn’t blame yourself for being betrayed. You’re the one who’s already suffering from your employees betrayal, so you have every right to be mad and feel victimized.

Nobody is born a backstabber, but there are many reasons why an employee  you once thought to be a good person can betray you. Get to the root of the problem: why did your employee betray the trust you had in him or her for so long? Some of the reasons can get quite ugly:

• Jealousy. Chances are that your employee is insanely jealous of you. Maybe you’re more well-off, more popular with others, or that you’re doing better . Some backstabbers feel that they’re being treated like that “typical employee,” and are not getting as much attention or respect as their others within your group.  They often also feel that they should have your job and like to make up their own rules like coming in late and refusing to openly sharing information with you.

• Selfishness. Another common excuse for backstabbing is, “I did it for us.” Some people try to justify backstabbing, and say that they only did it to protect you from a manager who want to do you harm, or are up to no good. Chances are your employee  is just trying to get away with backstabbing you and trying to justify it in their own mind.

• Somebody else made him or her do it. Two of the most common excuses a backstabber makes are, “I didn’t know what I was doing,” or “Someone else made me do it.” While it’s tempting to take the crocodile tears of your friend as genuine, don’t believe a word of it. Remember: he or she decided to freely and consciously betray your trust when he or she stabbed you in the back.

 

So what can you do  ?  First, let the negative feelings and anger go.  I know you want to get even but remember that what comes around goes around and that these people will eventually be found out for what they are.

 

Second, acknowledge the fact that the working relationship is never, ever, going to be the same.  You can say “it’s water under the bridge” but in reality people can never really forgive a coworker who stabs them in the back.

Finally you can have the courage to do something about it.  This means becoming a hard nosed by the book manager and documenting everything or not allowing yourself to stoop to their level and saying “screw this, life’s too short.  I’m outa here.”  If you don’t have the option of quitting think of the damage that the person is doing to your mental health and the stress they are adding if you stay.

The pain and anger of betrayal at work is not easy to get over and can ruin a great job and turn it into the type of job where you get up every morning with a knot in your stomach.  When you reach out to someone with kindness and as a mentor and they turn that against you it’s their problem not yours.  Life is too short so leave them to their destructiveness and embrace good people who don’t turn against you. Remember you can have a lot of co-workers who you think are friends but they are just co-workers.  Use the term “friend” very closely.

Related articles

• Backstabbers (tearsofdesolation.wordpress.com)
• Betrayal in relationships may be exaggerated disappointment (examiner.com)
• Betrayal (iunctum.wordpress.com)