Laura Wolfe Coaching LLC

Supporting the Evolution of Careers, Leaders,

& Climate Consciousness

Ethics Anyone?

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Florham_Park_NJ_Little_Red_SchoolhouseIs ethical behavior of employees an important issue for your organization? How exactly are you managing this one? Some companies offer ethics training; another option is to address it in the pre-employment phase using integrity testing and/or background checks.

Yet, another approach is to consider the environment from which you recruit – specifically, the educational institution and its culture re: ethics. Are there consequences for academic dishonesty? People you can ask include career services folks, faculty members, and students or former students. You can ask administrators but they are typically either unaware or at the heart of the problem.

Behavior modeling is one of the most fundamental ways humans learn. If students observe others engaging in academic dishonesty with no consequences, guess what the lesson is? If you want recruits who understand wrongdoing will not be tolerated, make sure that is the message they get while in school.

Don’t believe cheating in school is much of a problem or that there is a relationship to out-of-school behavior? Check out this interesting research from a few years ago.

Would love to know your thoughts on building an ethical workforce.

Scary Managers

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red with angerIt may be Halloween but you don’t have to be a scary manager. You can grab my book Performance Pearls: Information for Improving Workforce Performance FREE for kindle on Amazon.com between 12:01am October 30 and midnight October 31 (PST).

 

Performance Pearls was written for supervisors, managers, and leaders who want to do the right thing but aren’t exactly sure how to be a better performance manager. Plus, the content is designed to be consumed in small bites because few working managers have large chunks of time to read.

 

Underlying it all is the belief that better managers really do make the world a better place: for the employee, for the family, for the company, and for the community.

Would love to hear what you do to be an un-scary manager.

 

Consuming Research

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Seems that academic research is more readily available, in forms more easily consumed. Its theories, models and formulas are also used more often in an attempt to explain and understand both common and uncommon events. What a great thing.

Here’s a list (in no particular order) of sources I consider to be good explainers and occasionally synthesizers of information:

Some of the above have been a target for criticism, especially by critics who question the interpretation, randomness, and dubiousness of the statistics reported and discussed. My response to this – the world is incredibly complex; consume as much available information from as many sources as possible. Be open to how others interpret the situation. Then make your own determination of what is or is not happening.

What got me thinking about research is that I am currently reviewing submissions for the Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychologists (SIOP) 2014 annual conference. Four of out the five submissions I have to evaluate are posters.

Poster submissions are full-on, detailed descriptions of research written in academese. Flashback to grad school where I spent seven years reading academic journal articles. I loved the learning but man, am I glad for alternative sources. I do miss the grad school class environment though, where everyone (supposedly) had read the research and it was discussed. Hearing what others thought it all meant was cool.

One big lesson from grad school: Doing good social science research is very difficult. My hat is off to all who do.

Would love to know your go-to sources for cutting edge research.

Being Gotten

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JamesGandolfiniIt’s hard to believe James Gandolfini is gone – especially after seeing Enough Said over the weekend in which he starred along with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. This movie is about how important it is that someone ‘gets’ you and how rare that is for many. Seems as we age, it’s harder and harder to feel really understood.

Brene Brown might say that’s because we lack the courage to be vulnerable and to be seen. If you aren’t familiar with her amazing work, check out her TED talks or her books.

I think employees want someone to get them as well. And in most cases, it’s the supervisor or manager who needs to do the getting. What does it take for a manager to get an employee?

Listening is a great first step. Really taking the time to see the employee is important too. Understanding why the person is in the job and what they are trying to accomplish is another part. Learning what motivates a worker, what is important to them, and what their career goals are also helps a manager get someone.

It may not be possible to completely get an employee, given the constraints of the work environment. But people know the difference between a company that cares who they are and one that doesn’t.

All of us get that.

Here’s hoping James Gandolfini will be recognized by the Academy for this performance.