The Nuances of Smiling at Work
Could smiling make a difference in workplace productivity and employee satisfaction? In a new study led by Brent Scott assistant professor of management at Michigan State University the answer is only if it’s genuine. “Employers think that getting their employees to smile is good for the organization, but that’s not necessarily the case,” said Dr. Scott. “Smiling for the sake of smiling can lead to emotional exhaustion and withdrawal and that’s bad for the organization.”
Dr. Scott and a former doctoral colleague, Christopher Barnes, studied a group of city bus drivers during a two week period. They examined the effects of a fake smile compared to cultivating positive emotion by recalling pleasant memories or thinking about a current situation in a more favorable way.
The study, which appears in the current issue of the Academy of Management Journal found gender differences. The mood of women worsened even more than the men and they withdrew from work according to Dr. Scott who attributes the reaction to the fact women are expected and show greater emotional intensity and positive emotional expressiveness than men.
Turns out Peter Pan might have been right in his belief to think lovely thoughts. Dr. Scott found that thinking of a tropical vacation or a child’s dance or music recital, for example was all it took.
Keys to a Successful Career
Even as we examined the influences on the rise of two black executives the EEOC was preparing to hold hearings about whether unemployed job applicants are being discriminated against.
With some employers only considering currently employed applicants, there are those who say denying jobs to the already-unemployed can also have a disproportionate effect on certain racial and ethnic minority community members. Algernon Austin, Director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy of the Economic Policy Institute, says that unemployment rates for African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans are higher than those of whites. Restricting applications to the currently employed could place a heavier burden on people of color, he concluded. Read the rest of this entry »
Overcoming Career Setbacks
Reaching the top of the corporate pyramid is rare, but it’s especially tough for women and minorities.
Every career has its chutes and ladders, pauses and moments of opportunity.
We turn to two executives who faced periods of indecision during their careers and found inspiration for what to do next. As it happens both are black.
When Deborah Wright, CEO of Carver Bankcorp, New York was laid off from the investment bank First Boston she turned to Robert Holland, the first black partner at McKinsey and Company but is perhaps better known as CEO of Ben and Jerry’s for advice about what to do next. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: career decisions, Carver Bankcorp, consultants, executives, Globalhue, intutition, McKinsey and Company, mentors
Ethical or Not?
About a decade ago, I wrote a story about corporate ethics and what companies were doing to practice more ethical behavior. Ethics is one of those stories that gets covered extensively when the economy is in reverse.
So are companies doing all they can to behave ethically? How we behave when others aren’t looking is a mark of character for individuals and is for companies also. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: contract workers, corporate citizenship, discrimination, ethics, executive privacy, fiduciary responsibility
Are You the Boss You Need to Be?
Linda Hill and Kent Lineback ask that question on Harvard Business Review site today.
Should You Turn Down a Promotion to Management?
Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, and faculty chair of the Leadership Initiative , has just co-authored a new book with Kent Lineback called Being the Boss. It was Mr. Lineback who a decade ago wrote about entrepreneurship in the Silicon Valley with Randy Komisar in The Monk and the Riddle.
Mr. Lineback, spent 25 years as a manager and executive and has been candid about his shortcomings. The book he and Dr. Hill wrote may provide new insights for managers and leaders, in the post recession economy. It may even spare employees some grief as their new managers negotiate a learning curve. Dr.Hill says she frequently asks executives, “How many people have suffered as you tried to learn to do this job?”
Tags: leadership, management, mentoring
Is There a Connection Between the New Unemployables and the New Retirement?
Recently Cali Yost, CEO of the consulting firm Flex + Strategy Group who blogs about work/life fit at FastCompany.com wrote about her experience in a New York City cab on the way to an appointment in this post. She then posed the question, “What can we do right now to help people over 55 years old find and keep jobs?” Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Bill Novelli, boomerang kids, Cali Yost, knowledge@wharton, older workers, Peter Cappelli, Ted C. Fishman, the new retirement, the new unemployables, work/life balance
Has a Recommendation Cost You a Job or Promotion?
Even a favorable recommendation could impede a woman’s career according to on-going research at Rice University, that shows qualities described in recommendations for women differ sharply from those of men.
And those differences may be costing women jobs and promotions in academia and medicine according to the findings of psychologist Michelle Hebl, her colleague Randi Martin and graduate student Juan Madera, now an assistant professor at the University of Houston. Dr. Hebl says the ramifications extend beyond academia and medicine into the corporate culture. “Women, even if they are protected by law or the organization, experience discrimination in subtle ways,” she said.
The study, funded by the National Science Foundation, reviewed over 600 letters of recommendation for nearly 200 applicants for eight junior faculty positions at a United States University.
Female candidates were described in “communal” terms like sensitive, caring and nurturing. Their male counterparts were described in “agentic” terms that included decisive, independent and aggressive. “Having people describe you in communal terms is not a good thing,” said Dr. Hebl who says that words that are supposed to be positive are not the ones that come to mind when someone thinks of a leader.
Dr. Hebl doesn’t think using gender neutral terms in recommendations will make a difference. Instead, she suggests recommenders look at the requirements of the job itself rather than resorting to conventional stereotypes. The traits that are valued in the academic job are research ability, independence and autonomy, not words that may say a women is not serious about a job, for example role model.
If an employee asks for a recommendation, Dr. Hebl suggests eliminating qualifiers in your description. “Phrases like, ‘I think she might be good’ or ‘might be a leader’ are doubt raisers about ability.”
Does Your Boss Have Your Back?
As the world was transfixed by the rescue of the Chilean miners today, one person was still conspicuously out of sight. The shift foreman, 54 year old Luis Urzua whose leadership was credited with helping the men endure the isolation for 17 days after the collapse when the world didn’t know if they were alive or not, is expected to the be last miner to reach the surface.
Read the rest of this entry »
Few Women in Management, but Companies Fail to Identify Future Leaders
The General Accounting Office released a long overdue report on Tuesday with the ponderous title Women in Management—Female Managers’ Representation, Characteristics and Pay. And now The New York Times is reporting the news with the headline Still Few Women in Management, Report Says .
True, as of 2007 (before the Great Recession started) the latest year for which data on managers was available, women accounted for about 40 percent of managers in the United States work force. In 2000, women held 39 percent of management positions.
Still the data also pointed to some bright spots. Women were more than proportionately represented in management positions in construction and public administration, and there was no statistically significant difference between women’s representation in management and non-management positions for the transportation and utilities sectors.
All in all the results were unsurprising. Managers of either sex are more likely to be childless–sixty-three percent of female managers and fifty-five percent of male managers had no kids. Is this a reason family friendly policies still have a hard time gaining traction? And woman who are managers are more likely to be single than their male counterparts.
While life is about choices, female managers earned 81 cents for every dollar a male manager earned up 2 cents from 2000. Checking the inflation calculator, that dollar in 2000, was worth $1.19 in 2007, so women are still losing ground not gaining it.
If companies are still not promoting women to management, it may be because for some it’s not even on the radar. According to recent poll by Right Management (a division of Manpower) nearly one-third of North American companies have failed to identify future leaders within their organization. A further 30% reported identifying potential leaders for only some key roles. So many organizations, it turns out, have made practically no provision for future leadership,” said Deborah Schroeder-Saulnier, Right Management Senior Vice President for Global Solutions.
