Welcome to the Davies-Black Business Blast

Earlier this year, we launched this quarterly e-newsletter as a way to share valuable business resources that help you develop yourself, your team, and your organization. Our hope for this issue is for it to offer managers, both novice and experienced, quick tips and tools to enhance their personal development. As the journey of Davies-Black Business-Blast has just begun, we need your feedback in order to ensure that we continue to feature topics of importance to you. If you have thoughts and story ideas you'd like to share, please contact us at db_newsletter@cpp.com.

—The Davies-Black Publishing Team

Q&A with Cliff Hakim

Cliff Hakim is founder and principal of the career consulting and strategy firm Rethinking Work^®. A best-selling author and noted seminar leader, he is author of the newly released Rethinking Work: Are You Ready to Take Charge?

How did you come to the basic themes of this book?
I came to the primary principles in Rethinking Work first by living, observing, and connecting the dots in my own life. The tenets of this book became clear through the process of guiding hundreds of my clients as they struggled with their own crossroads and pressed forward to satisfy their needs and express their dreams. My anecdotal research led me to a flexible three-step process––reflect, explore, and engage––that became the core elements of Rethinking Work.

Why is "rethinking work" so important now?
The question is no longer, What do I do if I have to change jobs or careers? but when. Over four million people search the Web daily in the United States for jobs and careers. The average 35-year-old has changed jobs up to nine times. Downsizing––despite the impact on the individual, family, organization, and community––has been accepted as common business practice.

Furthermore, to fully realize your humanness, you must change and grow. As you mature, you ask, What is the value of my life? Why am I here on this earth? What do I have to contribute? Have I made this planet a better place?

How does a busy person get started in the Rethinking Work^® process?
Step by step, with patience and perseverance. If you've been busy at work and running hard in other parts of your life, you may be challenged beyond your expectations to slow down and make time to reflect on what you value now, what you want, and what strengths you bring to the marketplace.

Many people have tucked inside of them the knowledge that they need to create their future but have been running too hard to recognize their own wisdom. Therefore, I ask the busy person:

• What do you want less of in your life? What do you want more of in your life?
• What do you really enjoy doing inside and outside of work?
• What's the accomplishment of which you've been most proud? Why?

Each one of these questions is simple and powerful; together they can reveal insights and an energizing pattern to make vital decisions and take deliberate action.

How do I pay my mortgage and live my dream adopting the Rethinking Work model?
Keep these three principles in mind:

1. If you're working, use your current situation as a research base to reflect on what you want and explore possible marketplace scenarios.
2. If you're planning to leave your job or hear rumblings of a downsizing, save as much money as possible and/or negotiate a working partnership with your spouse.
3. Regardless of your situation, adopt a flexible long-term view. Rethinking Work is a journey, a way of living your life and building your career. An instant-result mentality will sabotage your discovery process and achievement.

"To make the management journey enjoyable you have to know what you thrive on and find ways to intersperse that with the difficult and more challenging parts of the job." –Terry Bacon, author of What People Want

Management Myths

If you are like most managers, you are more stressed than ever before. Deadlines keep getting tighter, workloads heavier, resources scarcer. Then there are those complicated "people problems" that keep cropping up, disrupting the tasks at hand. You need help!

Expert management consultants and authors Louellen Essex and Mitchell Kusy advise that to make challenging people problems easier to tackle, managers need to avoid common missteps frequently stemming from management myths such as these:

MYTH: When you see a performance problem, quickly nip it in the bud before it gets out of hand.
REALITY: Many managers tackle performance issues by leaping too quickly to a solution, before they have fully identified the problem. Good performance management is concrete and behaviorally specific. Spend some time assessing the cause of the performance problem so you can create targeted solutions, feedback, and coaching for the problem employee.

MYTH: In a new management position, move quickly to critique, institute changes, and make promises so employees will know who is in charge.
REALITY: Research affirms that, for a new leader, relationship building is far more important as a precursor to successful organizational outcomes than task orientation. When you're new on the job, focus on using your first few weeks to really understand the people you're working with before you focus on tasks.

MYTH: When an employee gets angry, deal with the problem before dealing with the person.
REALITY: Essentially, defusing anger is a two-step process. First, deal with the person's emotion by acknowledging the anger, with empathy. Second, address the problem after you've gained a complete and clear understanding of the angry person's needs.

Essex and Kusy offer more key action strategies to avoid management missteps in their new book Manager's Desktop Consultant. Learn more >>

Rising to The Next Level

Welcome to the executive suite! To avoid being in the 40 percent of new executives who fail within eighteen months of their promotion, you need to adopt new ways of thinking and acting and, more important, let go of old ways. With more than twenty years of experience working with both new and seasoned executives, Scott Eblin, author of The Next Level, has identified nine key set of behaviors and beliefs that successful executives pick up and let go of.

One key behavior, advises Eblin, is that leaders at the next level consider business first and function second. Start with the desired business results and then "reverse engineer"—work backward from there to determine the functional contributions needed to accomplish those results. For the typical superstar who has reached the next level, this requires two mindset shifts. The first is from "me" to "we." From time to time, you'll likely have to sacrifice some of your priorities for the greater good. The second shift is from "we" to "they." Get in the habit of questioning your assumptions by regularly asking what "they're" doing. "They" can be your customers, your associates, your competitors, your regulators, your suppliers, your communities—any group that has an impact on your organization's success.

Learn more about picking up the right behaviors and letting go of the wrong behaviors in The Next Level.

"To be an effective leader, you need to possess a number of important characteristics. However, what really distinguishes the best leaders from all the rest is their political skill." –Gerald Ferris, Sherry Davidson, and Pamela Perrewé, authors of Political Skill at Work

Hiring Secrets of the NFL

While we're in the midst of the 2007 football season now, the spotlight this fall is on the NFL's star players—or star performers! We've become very accustomed to sports metaphors in the language of business today, and interestingly similar issues face both the NFL and more traditional business organizations.

In his recently released book, Hiring Secrets of the NFL, author Isaac Cheifetz brings together his passion for sports and his professional expertise to deliver a playbook full of best practices for organizations to recruit and retain talent like a Super Bowl winner. He drafts the Top 40 hiring secrets of the NFL, applied to corporate hiring. These best practices can help you improve the quality of your hires and avoid costly hiring mistakes. Here are the first ten of his Top 40:

1. Discover the "true must" of the position
2. Hire for the needs of the future, not the past
3. Don't ignore key secondary attributes
4. Choose a "4-3" or a "3-4" sales model
5. Keep it simple
6. Eliminate teamwreckers
7. Understand the hidden costs of teamwreckers
8. Assess arrogance and disruption relative to function
9. Don't try to fix a teamwrecker
10. Seek talented eccentrics

Click here to learn about the other 30 hiring secrets as well as the tools and strategies to build winning teams in business.

"Generally, treating all members of a team as if they are the same is like trying to herd cats… Understanding people's types allows you to tap into their strengths, discover how you work best together, and minimize unnecessary conflict." –Sandra Krebs Hirsh and Jane A. G. Kise, authors of Work It Out revised edition

Davies-Black Author Events

• October 22–24, Las Vegas, NV
  HR.com Employers of Excellence 2007 National Conference
  Beverly Kaye, author of Up Is Not the Only Way, Keynote Speaker
  Pete Hammett, author of Unbalanced Influence, Roundtable Speaker
• October 31–November 3, Long Beach, CA
  2007 Annual International Coach Federation Conference
  Scott Eblin, author of The Next Level, Speaker
  Phil Sandahl, coauthor of Co-Active Coaching 2nd edition, Speaker
  

View a complete listing of upcoming author events >>

Conferences

• ICF Conference 2007 – October 31-November 3

Let us know if you're going to be at this show — we'd love to meet you there.
E-mail us at db_newsletter@cpp.com.

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