10 Reasons Your Employees Hate You (Or at least reject you)

Here's a fun (though serious) list to ponder.

Being the boss comes with some great perks- a better bank account, corporate benefits, and a fancier title- but why, before you even hold your first meeting, do you get the sense your employees hate you? Unfortunately, more power comes with more problems, and Neil Giarratana, author of "CEO Priorities" and former CEO himself, offers 10 reasons your employees hate you before you even settle into your office:

1)Someone else had aspirations for your job, didn't get it, and concluded that the selection process had serious flaws.

2)Blame MUST fall on someone, and, because you're the biggest beneficiary of the company, you are the biggest target.

3)Your style of leadership or rumored future plans could be the problem. Even if you made NO indication of any future plans, rest assured the rumor mill is alive and well.

4)Someone in the company knows you from another company situation or from within the company, and got to know you during your climb up the ladder. His 'memories' of you are more like nightmares. He might have even worked for you at a previous company.

5) There are concerns you will bring in a new team and replace current management, which could involve new hires or people from your old company.

6)Your real or rumored lifestyle may offend certain people in the company.

7)You seem so different from their beloved previous leader that you can't be any good.

8)You come from another industry and don't understand what "our industry" and "our culture" are all about.

9)No one really knows what you're going to do, how you're going to act, or what policies you will follow, but everyone knows that in spite of that, it will be and has to be stopped.

10)You may already know an executive in the company and you may not think very highly of him. In all probability, he will know this, too, and be part of an 'undercurrent' problem you experience with him because he will be concerned that you will readily replace him.

In his book, CEO PRIORITIES (Career Press), retired international CEO, Neil Giarratana, shares "conduct and survival related" insights and recommendations aimed at providing future and current CEOs with the means to be on the positive side of that "popular opinion" equation and thereby reduce or eliminate the disdain factor so omnipresent in today's discussion of business leadership.

3 Tips for Executive Development

Leaders are suffering from their own business hangover. During our recent political in-fighting and economic uncertainty, businesses have had their nose to the grindstone striving to do more with less. Everyone was so focused on surviving and cutting, they're just now looking up and realizing they have no clear next steps, limited vision and no energy.

AmyK, who has worked with Martha Beck (Oprah's Life Coach, bestselling author and columnist for O), National Geographic, IBM, John Paul Mitchell Systems, to name a few, offers you, our readers, these three quick and easy tips for executive development that any business leader can practice to immediately improve his/her leadership performance:

• Focus on energy, not time. Time is a constant; energy is a manageable, renewable resource. What's sucking out your energy and what refuels it? Your answers will influence your strategy for energy management within the constraints of time.
• Leadership happens one conversation at a time. Slow down and ask better questions. Focus on thought-provoking questions over reports. In meeting prep, devote at least five minutes to think of three to five questions that will lead to a more productive, more thought-provoking meeting. These five minutes will save you hours down the road.
• Create internal alignment. Step back and ask yourself: What am I resisting? What am I judging? What am I attached to? Answer these three questions and you'll gain clarity, insight and a foundation for momentum.

About our Guest Author:

With over 700 presentations to 20,000+ executives in seven countries, AmyK Hutchens serves as an Intelligent Activist and business strategist to leaders around the globe. AmyK is a former senior EVP of operations for a leading sales and marketing firm, director of education for Europe and Australia for a 900 million dollar consumer products company, and chosen member of National Geographic's Educator Advisory Committee. She is the winner of five Telly Marketing Awards and the Summit International's Award for Creativity (2008) and a featured guest on NBC, Fox and ABC for her brain-based commentary on current events.

Leadership Roles: a process of co-construction

A new research article published in Academy of Management Review suggests that leadership identities are assumed by individuals in an organization through a process of co-construction. The mechanism appears to work as follows. In their social interactions, individuals either claim, grant or, it would seem, assign leader and follower identities to themselves and, relationally, to their colleagues. According to the paper's authors, "through this claiming-granting process, individuals internalize an identity as leader or follower, and those identities become relationally recognized through reciprocal role adoption and collectively endorsed within the organizational context."

It is not enough if every time during a team meeting, one member of the team takes it upon herself to delegate the majority of the tasks discussed to her peers. What is needed is co-construction. That is, in order for the team member who does the delegating to assume the identity of "leader", her peers must submit to the delegation; they must "grant" that the identity / role is appropriate through reciprocal adoption of the role of follower. By assuming the role of follower, they, in turn, confer a leadership identity upon the other. Thus, their roles are co-constructed. It takes two to make a leader.

How does this conceptualization of leadership challenge received wisdom on the topic of leadership development? Further, how does this affect our methods of identifying high potentials in the organization?

DeRue, D. Scott; Ashford, Susan J.. Academy of Management Review, Oct2010, Vol. 35 Issue 4, p627-647

You can also join the discussion of this topic on our facebook page.

Performance or Learning Orientated Employees: Who Is Best For An Organization?

A joint study conducted by the Universities of Houston, Georgia, and Connecticut, confirmed that when employees face changes the performance typically is diminished until the new work habits are assimilated. However, those motivated by “performance” view a positive evaluation of their performance by others higher than the actual learning process vs. those who embrace the idea that “learning” would improve their abilities in the long run. The article is provocative in that it suggests that employees motivated by learning rather than performance are more desirable but it also offers an interesting strategy for bringing around those who are purely performance oriented.


Do you know what motivates the employees and managers around you?

How would you introduce changes in your organization if your employees were mostly performance-motivated?

Ahearne, M., Lam, S. K., Mathieu, J. E., & Bolander, W., “Why are some salespeople better at adapting to organizational change?,” Journal of Marketing, 74 (May 2010): 65–79

Upcoming Webinar

I need to plug a pretty exciting webinar that we will be hosting on December 11th, 2008.

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"What learning experiences are companies proposing to their executive talent to get them ready to secure strategic relevance and fuel business growth?" 

Dan Fisher and Michel Buffet will provide some answers to this question based on their experience of designing and delivering customized leadership and management training programs to organizations. More specifically, they will address the new business case for leadership development, breakthrough and practical approaches to keep leaders engaged and committed to learning, and robust ways to measure impact and ROI.  

Time & Location: 1:30 PM Central Standard Time as a global event on your laptop

Keynote Speakers: Dan Fisher and Michael A. Buffet, live from New York

Dan Fisher, PhD: Dan is a managing partner at Fisher Rock Consulting. He provides consultation on selecting, developing, and utilizing senior leadership capital within the context of positional demands, strategic goals, and organizational culture to clients across a wide range of industries. He has extensive experience assessing senior executives and providing them with critical insights and information on their pivotal strengths, key developmental needs, and potential derailers. He is often retained by clients to coach executives on being more effective leaders and achieving breakthrough results. Dan provides high stakes assessment on executives, for internal and external selection, and has designed and delivered leadership development programs for some of today’s top global companies. Prior to co-founding Fisher Rock Consulting, Dan was Director of Assessment Services for Worklab Consulting, a subsidiary of the law firm Seyfarth Shaw. A partial list of the clients he has worked with to date includes Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America,  Barclays Capital, ICAP, Highbridge Capital Management, Andor Capital MasterCard, McGraw-Hill, ADP, GE, Ciba Specialty Chemicals, Eaton, Hewlett Packard, DoubleClick, Renegade, Alltel, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Dan received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of California at Santa Barbara and completed his post-doctoral studies at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, where he later became a faculty member. In addition to serving on the board of The Metropolitan New York Association for Applied Psychology and the American Psychological Association’s Society for Consulting Psychology, Dan is an active member of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. 

Michel A. Buffet, PhD: Michel Buffet is a partner at Fisher Rock, a consulting firm that works with senior leaders and Human Resources executives on organizational change and custom talent management solutions. Before joining Fisher Rock, Michel was a Partner at Oliver Wyman and for over 10 years, worked in the areas of organizational design, team and board effectiveness, executive talent management, and organizational assessment.  Prior to this, Michel conducted cross-cultural training and development at the Training Management Corporation and at the Prudential Intercultural Services.  He also worked on various applied measurement projects at Citibank Bankcards and for the Department of Personnel of New York City. Michel holds a PhD in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University and a DESS in Social Clinical Psychology from the University of Paris.  He was a contributor to Relationships That Enable Enterprise Change: Leveraging the Client Consultant Connection (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer, 2002).  His most recent article on executive onboarding appeared in the October 2007 issue of Talent Management.  He has presented his work at several business forums on organizational transformation and leadership.  He is a member of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the Metropolitan New York Association of Applied Psychology, the American Psychological Society, and the French-American Chamber of Commerce of New York.  He is bilingual in French and English and fluent in Spanish.  He lives in Princeton, NJ.

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If you would like to attend this event, please send an email to info@hr-meter.com with the subject line "Upcoming Webinar"