When your manager is the office bully……….

Office bullying normally consists of offensive, insulting or threatening behavior.

It may start with bulldozing your ideas and thoughts and can be as severe as calling you names and threatening to fire you or give you a poor raise or rating.

You can confirm your manager is a office bully if:
He threatens to give you a poor raise or get you fired if you disagree with his thoughts or ideas.
He thinks you are a wimp if you don’t stand up to him and if you do he threatens to fire you.
He thinks 99% of your ideas are good for nothing and calls you an idiot or other offensive names.
He insults you in public repeatedly but in a humorous or sarcastic way.
You hear him spreading malicious stories about you and when you confront he refuses to even talk about it and goes on to insult you.

BBC published a article practical way to tackle office bully’s:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2949646.stm

I finally said yes for a Blackberry

I fought this for quite sometime and the fight has been with my own belief that its a nuisance and will throw my personal work-life balance into a tizzy.....I reasoned that I would constantly check mail and not pay attention to my poor husband and my poorer daughter with the blackberry in my life......I also said to myself only workaholics took blackberry and I am not one of them or I don’t want to be one of them.........

But you know I now realize or let me say may realize that it’s not the technology that will throw one's work life balance into a tizzy but it’s one's own ability (or inability) to prioritize and strike a balance. Only time will tell (I give myself 2 months) to make up my mind on whether to keep it or lose it.........I only hope this works out and I wont be sorry I took it.

Career Planning and how it’s not what it used to be………

Old school thought around career was it’s a straight steady climb to the top and career ladder was the term used to describe the approach. But new age thinking suggests that there is nothing like a career ladder and instead there is a career lattice would be multi-path and built around people’s needs over time (like balance of work-life).

Here are some more thoughts on how career planning and thinking around the same is changing………

New Thinking:

• Careers would be an undulating journey of climbs and lateral moves.
  
• You don’t have to necessarily work what you never did before; it’s ok to specialize.
  
• Its ok to play on strengths and do jobs and roles that suits you.
  
• You manager at the end of the day is interested in getting the best out of you.
  
• When you are looking at career advice don’t depend only on him, get yourself different perspectives.
  
• There need not be one role model you look up to all the time, career role models can change over time.
  
• Training is not the only way to learn new skills.
  
• You cannot work on more than 2 areas of development at one point of time
  
• There is a no glass ceiling for women.
  
• Executive presence is not just about dressing well, communicating well and confidence it’s also about delivering results, maintaining composure under pressure, knowledge about business.
  
• Forget what companies have to say about career development, eventually you own your career so start taking ownership and taking lead in planning it.

The tough get going during tough times

Yes, that's true folks.....Its tough times for India Inc and organizations old and new are facing business uncertainty and the prevailing tough economic situation like never before. Attrition is down, Jobs are few, travel and recreation budgets have crunched or disappeared....but what are you doing as a HR leader...

Start with looking at your own spend and headcount: Its not business as usual and you should take a hard look at that flab you have in the recruitment teams, HR operations and everywhere else in your team. Its time to be lean and mean......and this is not meant just for your business guys. If no one asked you to re-look at your team budgets (headcount and spend) you better start before someone does.

Attrition is down: Good news and bad.......yes the number has gone down, but have you looked at the quality, I mean like who exactly is leaving and who is not......When the economy is down and there are fewer jobs outside, your least effective and non performing employees find it more difficult to get a job outside and stick around. Your top performers who always had it good still find the jobs. You need to start working on having stronger measures to nudge the non-performers out.

Take a hard look at your communication: While you wont see too many people leaving you now because of the job market, their motivation may be down due to uncertainty over job security or pipeline of work. Times like this need more focus on communication. There is lot of news (good and bad) floating around and you would want to ensure that the right messages reach your employees and you quickly address the bad news with tact and swiftness.

Tell your leaders to work on his body language: Your leaders might be the most impacted by this situation but they cannot walk around looking like heavens have fallen.....employees look up to them for assurance.

Keep your flock engaged: Your team is also prone to all the pitfalls of this situation and while you do all you can for the business you need to focus on your team and their engagement.

I am sure there is plenty of other things you should re-look so, go on get back to work!
Here is a good post I came across that talks about good things that happen to HR during recession.......http://www.workforce.com/section/01/feature/25/51/04/index.html