3 ways to create a good first impression at your new job

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by Art Markman

Starting a new job soon? Here’s what you need to do.

There is a lot of value in having a good first few weeks at a new job. For one, it’s hard for other people to really evaluate how you’re doing when you first start. It takes a while for new projects to get to a point where they yield results. But, there is evidence that when you have a favorable impression of someone, you evaluate their actions more favorably than when you have an unfavorable impression. This is called “the halo effect.”

It starts before you start 

You should be preparing for your first day on the job even before you get there. If you’re new to a company, you should be reading up on it. Ask your new boss for some information if they don’t provide it. Find out as much as you can about what your responsibilities are going to be.

You aren’t going to be ready to get actual work done before you start, because you won’t know exactly what you’re being asked to do. But the aim is to familiarize yourself with terms you might encounter at work and to have a set of questions you’d like to get answered as you get started. Once you begin the new job, information is going to come at you fast and furious, so the better prepared you are in advance, the easier it will be for you to handle the flood. Continue reading →

The one interview question that tells you if the candidate is right for the job

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BY ANNE MARIE SQUEO

The founder of Proof Point Communications observes that hiring is the hardest thing managers do because they need to both objectively assess and reflect their workplace while getting to the heart of what makes a candidate tick. Here’s what she’s learned about doing it right.

 

Hiring talent is the hardest thing a manager does. Period. I thought I’d cracked the code on this process about a decade ago by conducting multiple interviews, sharing a dinner with front runners, calling references not provided. And yet, my odds of success were about the same as roulette.

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Can Bad Managers Become Great Leaders?

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By   Amelia Haynes

The short answer is yes—if they take the right steps to curb counterproductive behavior.

Science confirms what many executives already know: that good leadership goes deeper than being smart, skilled and visionary.

The true influence of a great leader can be measured only by their impact on others. After all, a leader’s behavior directly affects the energy of their people: in one study, 59% of people said their leader has the largest influence on their personal energy. So the less constructive leaders’ behaviors are, the worse their organizations will perform.

What a leader does—and how they do it—has real consequences for their bottom line. And toxic bosses, research shows, can have wide-ranging negative effects on a business, leading to nearly $24 billion in healthcare costs and productivity lost.

Good leadership requires self-control, emotional energy and effort? The combination of job-related stress, and the energy and effort required for self-control results in what scientist’s call “chronic power stress”: the accumulated weight of responsibility for the success and failure of organizations and their people. Often, the more senior the role, the heavier this burden becomes. Continue reading →

The Three C’s Of Leadership

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by Greg Henderson

If you Google the word leadership, you’ll probably get billions of results. Leadership has become an overused buzzword that we no longer know the true meaning of, much less how to ensure we have it in our organization. Leadership is such a popular topic that practically every leadership website, podcast and article has created its own set of traits for a great leader.

One website might say that you must possess 10 essential qualities, ranging from integrity to agility to being a decisive leader. Another site might say there are only five must-have leadership characteristics, and if you are a strategic thinker and innovator, you will be an effective leader. Yet another source could list a completely different set of traits than all the others.

What are you supposed to do? Who’s right — or mostly, right? Or better yet, who is flat-out wrong?

Experts agree that genuine leaders need specific, identifiable attributes for success. In my experience, where they fail is their inability to identify that it’s the leadership mindset that is the most fundamental quality of all. Continue reading →

4 leadership trends to watch in 2022

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BY DAVID ROCK

This summer I embarked on my first proper vacation in years. Despite full vaccinations and being diligently masked, within 24 hours of flying I somehow got COVID-19 and was out of action for weeks. My much-needed vacation became something else entirely.

Every week CEOs ask me about the relentlessness of this uncertainty, of how to make hybrid work environments more productive and take better care of their employees. I wish I had a better answer than the one I have been saying since March 2020: Stop hoping this will be over soon, and instead activate what’s known as the Stockdale Paradox. In short, accept that things are really difficult, and will likely stay this way for a long time, but that eventually, things will get better. And in the meantime, focus on making things better that are in your control.

This overarching mindset was just as relevant at the start of the pandemic, when we all went into psychological shock, as it was during the long, painful stage of lockdown, and just as relevant now as we start to move into a rehabilitation phase. Thinking like this is important for staying focused, present, and productive. We need to let go of trying to create a false sense of certainty.

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