Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Do Career Fairs Work for Executives?

As Americans fall victim to layoffs and downsizing, they're flocking to career fairs, causing long lines and exhausting hiring managers whose booths are overflowing with candidates.

National Career Fairs, a Las Vegas-based company that organizes fairs for job site Monster.com throughout the country, says it has already had a 40.7% increase in attendees this year over 2007, and that's sure to continue as the year goes on.  Job site CareerBuilder.com has seen a 33% increase in job fair attendance this year.  Crowded venues and lines can frustrate attendees looking to get face time with recruiters.

More senior executives are standing in line, even though the caliber of jobs and companies represented at the fairs often isn't appealing to this group.  These unguided out-of-work executives don't have a clue how to go about landing on their feet by engineering the right job offer.  Still, even senior-level career fair attendees are just hoping to make a connection in a marketplace crowded with more people just like them.

After about six months of wandering through career fairs and uneducated personal networking, senior executives realize they have missed their opportunity to make a good first impression on potential employers...and then begin to implement career damage control.

Dignity through Work

Employees want to have fun at work; turnover among managers who feel pride in their company is 21% lower than among those who don't.

Rudy Karsan is CEO of Kenexa, a Wayne, PA based human resources company that helps companies get inside the minds of their employees.  Karsan says, "When you're in a job that you're good at and enjoy, you're not just a better worker.  You're a better spouse, a better parent, a better citizen."

Yet, knowing employees are passionate is pointless if a company doesn't know how to exploit the passion.

Kenexa's help companies learn what inspires employees by running data through algorithms that identify correlations and possible causations.  Then Kenexa devises strategies to improve work environments and recruit, evaluate and keep talent.

The Bottom Line: Companies with higher satisfaction scores had 700% higher stakeholder return.

Source: FAST COMPANY, November 2008

Dealing with a Narcissist Boss

Be prepared to look for another job if you cannot agree with your narcissistic boss. Remember, the company is betting on his vision of the future — not yours.

Here are a few tips on how to survive in the short term:

• Empathize with your boss’s feelings, but don’t expect any reciprocal empathy.  Look elsewhere to boost your self-esteem. Be cautious if he asks for an honest evaluation. What he wants is information that will help him solve an image problem.  He will resent any honesty that threatens his inflated self-image, and he is likely to retaliate.
• Give your boss ideas, but always let him take credit for them.  Find out what he thinks before presenting your views.  If he is wrong, show how a different approach would be in his best interest.
• Hone your management skills.  Narcissistic leaders often give subordinates many more orders than can possibly be executed.  Ignore requests that don’t make sense.  Forget about them.  He will, too.

Avoiding Narcissism's Traps

Not all narcissistic leaders are so entrapped by their personalities that they can’t be open to change and willing to learn. 

Harvard anthropologist and psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby, PhD, called such individuals “productive narcissists” when he wrote “Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons” for the Harvard Business Review (January–February 2000).  Maccoby's article identifies three basic ways to avoid common traps:

1. Find a trusted sidekick. Many narcissists can develop a close relationship with one person, who can act as an anchor and keep them grounded. But this person must be sensitive enough to manage the relationship.  The sidekick must convince the leader to accept new ideas, showing him how they fit with his views and serve his interests.
2. Indoctrinate the organization. The narcissistic CEO wants subordinates to think as he does about business. He is skilled at converting people to his point of view and indoctrinating managers with his personal ideology.
3. Seek therapy or executive coaching.  If narcissists can be persuaded to undergo therapy or coaching, they can work through their rage, alienation and grandiosity. They can keep their strengths and diminish their weaknesses.
   
   

Narcissistic Leader's Success Breeds Failure

Narcissistic leaders often attain greatness. 

They can see what the future holds; they aren’t analyzers or number crunchers who try to understand or explain it.  They are focused on creating it.

Another compelling quality is their gift for attracting followers. Narcissistic leaders intuitively know how to inspire through their words, speeches and language.

But as narcissists become increasingly self-assured, they act more spontaneously. They feel free of constraints, and ideas flow.  They believe they’re invincible, which further inspires followers’ enthusiasm and feeds into feelings of grandiosity.

The adoration narcissists crave can have a corrosive effect. As their personalities expand, they tune out cautionary words and advice.  Past successes create an exaggerated self-confidence.  If anyone disagrees with them, they feel justified in ignoring them, creating further isolation.  The result is flagrant risk-taking that can lead to catastrophe.

Narcissists selectively listen to the information they seek. They don’t learn easily from others, as they’re overly sensitive to feedback. They are vigilant for signs of disagreement, which are interpreted as betrayal.

They don’t like to teach others, but prefer to indoctrinate or preach.  They dominate meetings.  The result for the organization is greater internal competitiveness.

Narcissistic leaders are uncomfortable with their emotions and keep others at arm’s length. They have walls of defense and generally want to avoid knowing what others think of them.

One serious consequence is failure to listen when they feel threatened or attacked. And while they crave empathy from others, narcissistic leaders are not known for returning the favor.

But narcissists possess a kind of street-smart emotional intelligence. They are acutely aware of whether people are with them wholeheartedly.  They know who they can use and can be brutally exploitative.

Narcissism Defined

We are all somewhat narcissistic, or self-centered. If we lacked this tendency, we couldn’t survive or assert our needs. “Healthy narcissism” allows us to lead a company and its people to greatness.

Narcissists are independent, not easily impressed, and excel at innovating and thinking in original ways. They are driven to gain power and glory.  Harvard anthropologist and psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby, PhD, called such individuals “productive narcissists” when he wrote “Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons” for the Harvard Business Review (January–February 2000).

Productive narcissists are experts in their fields and pose critical questions to learn everything that could possibly affect their companies and products. They want to be admired and respected, but not necessarily loved.  They aggressively pursue goals and are less concerned with rules and “the way things have always been done.”

Of all personality types, narcissists run the greatest risk of isolating themselves, especially during  moments of success.  Because of their independence and aggressiveness, they are constantly looking out for enemies and sometimes become paranoid when stressed.

Holiday Gift for the Narcissistic Boss

This week, I had a short conversation with an HR manager who had been receiving my weekly leadership tips.  She said she 'loved' the leadership tips but didn't send them on to her narcissistic executives because their egos blinded them from improving their leadership capability. 

Since few HR managers have the power or guts to take the action necessary to improve the leadership ability of those in management, they need outside help in fostering leadership development within their organizations. 

There is an old Yiddish proverb that applies to every organizational leader: "The fish always sinks at the head."   The leader with CEO Disease doesn't know the smell that he or she is spreading throughout the organization.  The personally coached CEO discovers what smell he or she is spreading across the corporate culture and works to make it a productive and positive scent.

Today’s CEOs attempt to emulate superstars like Bill Gates, Andy Grove, Steve Jobs and Jack Welch.  They hire their own publicists, write books, give interviews and actively promote their personal philosophies.  Their faces appear on magazine covers.  They strive to become shapers of their unique brands of leadership style.

Overinvested in Employees?

The current economic slowdown has forced many business owners to reevaluate their expenses.

Especially during a recession, lower staff costs can be a real competitive advantage.  While larger companies are usually forced to slash overhead by executing layoffs, their nimbler counterparts can evolve constantly.

"Businesses must be faster on their feet," says Eric Siegel, founder of Siegel Management, a consulting firm based in Bryn Mawr, PA, and a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.  "We're going to see more small firms that can easily dial up or down in their efforts and resources."   

As evolving business models and technologies enable the growth of the microbusiness sector, more tiny companies are likely to achieve huge profits.  "In many cases, you can make more money as a smaller firm," says Siegel.

How do lean businesses outperform rivals with fatter payrolls?

In 2006, the Georgia Institute of Technology studied the methods that forward-thinking small businesses use to maintain their competitive edge.  Many of the most profitable small firms in the study favored strategic alliances, long-term contracts, close client relationships, and highly efficient manufacturing systems.

Source: Fortune Small Business, November 2008

Nonverbal Communication

As a professor at the MIT Media Lab and author of "Honest Signals," Alex "Sandy" Pentland began applying technological tools to question human behavior--how people use nonverbal communication cues; the results were startling and powerfully instructive for executives.

Many of Dr. Pentland's finding based on data from a device he calls a "sociometer," a wearable, badgelike contraption that can continuously measure various nonverbal aspects of people's interactions--have implications for both how executives communicate and how they understand what is being communicated to them.

These signals are really qualitative readings of brain state.  Take activity.  Everyone has an autonomic nervous system; it's the oldest part of your nervous system, the fight-or-flight part.  When you get excited about something, it gets aroused.

Similarly, as a measure of interest, people pay attention to each other, and you can read that from the timing between people who are in conversation.  Humans also have a system called a mirror neuron system.  Strangely enough, when you watch someone move, a part of your brain that corresponds to the same movement lights up.  And when people mimic each other's gestures when in conversation, research has shown that it's very definitely correlated with feelings of trust and empathy.

And the final one he focused on was fluency, or consistency.  Consistency in tone or motion tells you who really knows what they're doing, or is really practiced at it, at least.  And that's another sort of honest signal; it's very hard to fake.

How will Boomer Women Vote?

White women age 45 to 64 are one of this year's most hotly contested voting blocs, evenly divided between Barack Obama and John McCain, and wide open to being pulled either way, according to a recent Associated Press-GfK poll.

A sizable 44 percent of them remain persuadable--that is, either completely undecided or favoring one candidate while conceding they may change their minds.  That's bigger than the 33 percent of all voters still persuadable!

About one is six voters in the 2004 presidential election was a white woman in that age range, exit polls showed.  These are the Boomer women--middle-aged children of the post-World War II generation.  Many are veterans of balancing jobs with running households, and often acutely aware of their families' economic pressures because they write the checks, buy the groceries and fill the tank with gas. 

These Boomer women are valued and needed to exercise their responsibility, serious work ethic, "can do" attitude and competitiveness in stopping the bankruptcy of their country.  They need to exercise their leadership capabilities in finding, promoting and voting for the best political candidate in 2008 who is for sound money, reasonable tax policies, and ready, willing and able to fight terrorism the way Canada, Sweden and Switzerland do.

They are feisty, used to demanding answers and making choices.  With a worldwide economy that's lurching toward recession, they're demanding that the presidential candidates show them concrete solutions to the financial crisis and other problems.

As a group, these middle-aged white women have not yet been swayed by either contender in contrast to black and Hispanic women, who back Obama by the same heavy proportions that minority-group men do.  They're split between McCain and Obama, and identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans in about equal numbers, the AP-GfK poll showed.

While voters overall trust Obama more than McCain on the economy, Boomer women in the AP-GfK poll are about equally split over which candidate they prefer on the issue, though they narrowly say Obama better understands how the financial crisis affects them.