Partying with your boss

Are there limits beyond which we would consider harmful in the process of having fun with our bosses and colleagues? Should we not drop all guards when out on team building activities and just have fun as we would in the company of other friends? This is a critical concern many employees seem to have as they prepare for the office team building retreats.

It is midyear and companies are reviewing the progress of their organizational plans over the last 6 months. This process often takes place out of the office in the form of retreats or dinners to reflect and celebrate the achievements as they plan for the second half of the year. And this ushers in the party season for most of the workplaces. How can we best have fun with our colleagues and bosses while at the same time ensuring we appreciate and respect the power relations within the workplace? 

This was a dilemma that Francisca faced six months during the Christmas break party at her former employer. She feels like she had gone overboard and that could have resulted in her dismissal a few months later. She had accompanied her workmates to the beach party at the close of the year and as had been suggested by the management team, she put all protocol behind her and decided it was time to party and have fun, celebrating great strides made by her department throughout that year.

As she prepared for the party, she had shopped for her most desired party dress and true to her judgment, most of the workmates informed her about how ‘hot’ she looked. She however noticed that a few of the staff appeared shocked at seeing her dressed in the way she was. They had all along known her as a relatively conservative staff and could not relate the Francisca they were seeing at the party with the one sitting behind the accounts desk. It was truly a shocker for all. 

As the meals were served, she appeared too conscious of her weight and hence went for the smallest of the plates and served a portion that could hardly pass for a serious dinner. When the time came for the wine to be served, she generously served herself and in a matter of minutes, she started talking to everyone on the table as though they were her younger brothers and sisters. She got into a joke-making mood and some of them were squarely targeted at her bosses and as the team ate the night away, some of the bosses were getting more and more uncomfortable with her talk and decided to move to other distant tables. Francisca had lost her person and was uttering words least expected from such a finesse woman.

Parting with your boss is one of the most important occasions for workplace teambuilding. It presents an opportunity for the team to interact with each other away from the confines of the office environment. This enables staff to know each other more and provides an opportunity to share ideas not easily available on the normal days. 

It is however important to note that even with the expanded and free space during office parties, some level of protocol and respect is still expected of everyone in attendance. The boss still remains the head of the unit and should be accorded their appropriate respect regardless of the games and dining. You will want to consider using appropriate language when dealing with the persons at the party as they remain the same people you meet at work.

As people get overcome by the power of the pleasure during parties, there is always a tendency to utter words that may easily jeopardize your chances of growing within the organization. A friend once indicated their dissatisfaction with their job while under the influence of alcohol at an office function and as a result, the contract was not renewed when the time came for the performance appraisal. Although no reference was made to the comment made at the party, other colleagues indicated it could have been informed by the talk at the office party. 

And so, the next time you go out partying, party as much you like but within the confines of decorum and respect for others.

Be alert for feedback during job search

You can never afford to miss out on that all important call while on job search, but Janet missed the call. She had been on the job hunting mission for the last 5 months and had sent out lots of applications to all who would care to receive. As long as there were no returned mail messages, she assumed that her applications had reached the intended persons. By the 5^th month, she had lost track of the number of applications she had sent and the kind of jobs she had applied for.

One mid morning, while switching on her phone to update her Facebook status, she got a note that someone had tried calling her. She brushed over the message and went on to work on her Facebook account, reading other posts and checking on what her friends were up to. Later in the following week, while travelling back home on a bus, she decided to call back the number that had attempted to reach her the previous week and to her shock, as the receptionist picked up the call, she realized that it was one of the potential employers who had tried calling her for a second interview.

When she was eventually transferred to the HR department, she was informed that the office had attempted contacting her for a second interview but since they could not reach her, they had facilitated the interview for two other candidates and already considered one of them for the job. By this time, the bus conductor had been standing next to her for a few seconds requesting for her fare and in her disappointment, raised her voice and asked the conductor, ‘why should I pay for a job not offered? Ooops…she exclaimed, paid the fare and requested the driver to have her alight at the next stage though she was yet to get to her final destination.

Many people would not forgive themselves for missing out on key feedback during job search. With the knowledge of the hustle and the challenges of job search, it is important to always remain vigilant for any form of feedback from a potential employer or reference by a friend or job search partner to a potential employment opportunity.

Always have your phone on at all times. In addition to having it on, since you will find yourself in some relatively noisy places, consider having your phone vibration alert on so that should you not hear the ringtone, you would at least sense the vibration. Should you find a missed call, regardless of your experiences with many friends who ‘flash’ for you to call back, take the risk and call back as it may just be that important call for you to confirm whether you are available for an interview.

Ensure your phone battery is always beyond the 50% mark as you don’t want it to go off when receiving an important call. It is hence expected that if you must call back when you find missed calls that you should have enough phone credit to enable you call and talk to any potential employer in no hurry. You don’t want to find yourself telling the potential employer to call you back as you are out of credit. Create a great impression on phone. Have communication expenses as key on your job search budget (hoping you have such a budget and well resourced)

Finally, the other common feedback channel by many employers is email messaging. As a job seeker, consider checking your emails as part of your daily priorities. If possible, and it is now possible with the high level of phone connectivity to the internet, check your email account at least thrice a day just to be sure you are aware of any important messages sent to you. Often send yourself an email to ensure your email address is still functional and has not been hacked and currently sending out promotional messages to other people.

How are you faring on your 2012 resolutions?

We are now midway through 2012. It has been a hectic start of the year and as we keep up the pace on the second phase, a pause to reflect on the journey so far could be a welcome idea. The pause is important just to provide a self-facilitated guide on whether we are on the right track towards our 2012 goal. Allow me to remind you that at the start of the year, we took time to reflect on the year ahead and listed a number of resolutions for the year 2012. Looking back at our performance so far could just be what we need to ensure we remain true to our personal commitments. I suggest we consider three important resolutions most of us may have made in January 2012.

Self Supervision: Remember the consideration you had about the need to be more self supervised? You may have suggested that through this year, you will want to remain true to your workplace calling and meet the deadlines and targets even when no one is watching. You may have committed to ensure that you report to work early even when the boss is on leave and to be at work throughout the prescribed working hours. You may have considered the need to ensure you do not use your office stationery for personalized engagements neither would you divert to pursue personal business while on official trips.

Work-life balance: In a bid to make your work life more productive, you made commitments to be more available with yourself and with other spheres of your life beyond the job engagements. You committed to ensure are are at work for a specified number of hours and have quality time with your family and friends. As you might remember, you may have suggested to yourself that it will be important throughout this year to check on your leave schedule to ensure you take time off from work at certain intervals to ensure you refuel your system and be on ‘a regular service’ just like a motor vehicle would. It could be that you made a personal commitment to join a gym in your neighbourhood to check on your unfitness as reflected severally when climbing up the staircase. It could be that you bid farewell to the lift at your workplace and gladly considered the possibilities of befriending the staircase, at least going up 3 floors by the stairway every day.

Career progression: This appears as one of those key resolutions that we all seem to share. We consider the possibilities of growing in our careers, working through means of enhancing our visibility at work. To this end, you could have planned for an extra professional course and was willing to set aside some resources for self sponsorship. There could have the suggestion of joining a professional body in line with your career interests and had started off contacts with the group on requirements of membership and the calendar of events for the year. As a way of bolstering your linkages with other professionals, you could have joined LinkedIn social network and hoped to keep abreast of the goings on in the sector and had committed to be an active member by way of engaging other professionals on issues that interest you.

Great were the resolutions. As we come to the middle of the year, how are you fairing? Out of the issues you committed to pursuing especially with regard to your career growth, how are you fairing? On a scale of 1 to 10, one being very poor and 10 being excellent, where are you on the scale? What percentage of the resolutions have you started working on? Mine is to wish you well. Keeping up to the promise may not be easy but with focus, you will have yourself to congratulate 6 months down the lane with positive results. I will checkout on you in December 2012 on the final lap results.

Dealing with ill health at work

Every so often, we all have to deal with situations when our colleagues at work fall ill. In some of these situations, we have to live with the effects of the ill health as some are long term while in other cases, it is a one off condition that gets treated and has the staff get back to normal work processes. Dealing with ill health situations at work can be a stressor and if not well managed, can lead to reduced performance and strained relationships at work.

Consider the experiences of Monica. When she was diagnosed of cancer late last year, it appeared to her as a dream. She had always heard of persons being diagnosed with the illness and had never, just like the majority of us, imagined herself having to bear the effects of cancer. By the time the diagnosis was arrived at, she had hopped from one hospital to another in search of the best treatment for the unending pain around her chest. With the diagnosis confirmed, she informed her line manager who requested her to also discuss the situation with the HR department.

The most important news that Monica got from her employer was that the company insurance cover would take care of her treatment and therefore needed not to worry about the financial implications of the condition. This was a real boost to her commitment to the employer as she felt appreciated and cared for. However as she started off with her treatment, it was realized that she had to be redeployed from her current duty station to ease the process of accessing the health centre. This meant swopping positions with another staff. This was not easy. Since she was working from a far flung town, none of the staff at the head office in the capital was willing to swap places with her. The management of the company had to almost force a certain staff to relocate.

Ill health among the staff team can be a real source of organizational headache yet since people will once in a while break down (just like machines also do), every workplace needs to be ready to deal with this situation when it arises. It is as sure as the sun rising tomorrow that a staff will at some point fall ill. In addition to the strains caused by the need to redeploy ill staff, the workplace also experience a sudden slump in performance. Ill health slows every one down as the persons take time off to seek medical attention. This affects team performance since each person has a role within the system.

It is also clear that in most cases when staff fall ill, their tasks are in the short term redistributed among the rest of the team and this leads an overload within the team. If this is not well appreciated, it leads to discontent and could easily break the team.

Since staff will at some point in their work-life get sick, it is important for the organization to develop responsive policies aimed at providing adequate support to the ill staff. Such policies relate to provision of medical services at the employers’ expense or through an agreed upon cost sharing mechanism. The employer must be seen to be concerned about the health of the staff and not project themselves as only interested in the staff when they are in good health.

Since ill health has a way of taking strength and time away from the workplace, it is key for the teams to be prepared on how to best reallocate tasks among them whenever one of the team mates is taken ill. You don’t want to work in an environment where your colleagues grumble and murmur whenever you fall ill since they have to bear the burden of your tasks. Staff should consider being helpers since we all will go through the cycles of life at our own times.

Finally, it has been noticed that some staff take advantage of their ill health to abscond work or operate below average. Taking advantage of ill health is an immoral practice and since others would easily note when the colleague is taking them for a ride, it is likely that there would be a revolt to the detriment of your career growth plan.

Make yourself more visible at work

How come some people seem to land better jobs and opportunities with ease while others appear to be moving round in circles at work? Could it be a case of sheer luck or something else about them or the persons who offer them the jobs? These are concerns that employees are once in a while heard asking themselves during breaks and especially when a colleague has been promoted or has got a new opportunity.

I have indicated in this forum before that career growth is never a passive process. Any person who grows and gets big in the world of work works at it. If you sought for a chat with any of the persons you would regard as upward mobile in their careers, you will notice the levels of effort they put on enhancing their visibility. It is true that as long as a lamp is lit and hid under a bushel, no one will get to notice it. The Bible has an illustration to the effect that a city built on a hill can never be hidden. Similarly, people who light lamps do not hide them under buckets.

If you consider yourself a beautiful city that people should be attracted to or a lamp that has light that others should benefit from, you should consider your level of visibility. People employ people and people who are visible to other people get noticed and considered when opportunities crop up. The field of persons seeking for jobs is getting crowded with every passing day and hence the need to find means of standing out from the crowd. So, what simple ways can you use to enhance your visibility?

For a start, facilitate a self assessment with regard to your capacities on your area of interest. It will be helpful for you to build the value of your personal brand and create a niche around your capacities so that you can compete with the market from a vantage point. The ability to perform and deliver positive results is one of the key ingredients of trust. People will trust you with opportunities when they realize you have the ability to perform and deliver results as expected.

Secondly, confident and aware of your capacities, seek to expose yourself to the world. There are several times when opportunities to volunteer on short term projects arise and many employees struggle with volunteering for such engagements. The mindset of most employees is that the new engagements are never part of their initial job descriptions. Little do they realise that such opportunities could be the golden seasons for them to expose themselves to all in the company and beyond on what else they can do beyond their job profiles.

The third effective way of exposing yourself to the dynamic world of work is seeking for opportunities to give talks beyond your workplace. By joining a membership professional organization, look out for opportunities where you can give talks to other professionals or even community members. You should always be alert on who is present at such talks as you may just find yourself creating invaluable linkages with top notch executives who participate in some of your talks. One talk could lead to another and eventually to the possibility of being hired for a dream job engagement.

Finally, let us forever appreciate the invaluable resource presented by the internet to any person in need of career progress. The online community is on a viral growth path. The opportunity it creates is awesome and only the passive can fail to gain mileage through this platform. Through the use of social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, you have the whole world to tell about yourself. I have seen the enormous benefits derived through my blog kahihuonline and the LinkedIn profiles. It is just…unimaginable.

So, the next time you feel like you want to seriously get back onto the career growth path, use this as a possible checklist and hit the ground, starting with the social media platforms available on your phone as you read this article.

When employees fight each other

Of all the conflicts that affect the workplace, one of the most destabilizing is when employees fight each other. These could be cases when staff move on to protect their turfs and feel like others are attempting to over step their worlds at work. A case in point could be the fight between Mary and Anthony. When Anthony was employed at the local government ministry, he was full of excitement as he settled into his office. He was happy that after a long period of job search in the government, he had finally secured a well paying job. The job was in line with his ambitions as an urban planner and was sure he had eventually struck his right career code.

During his initial months of induction, he had to move from office to office seeking information about the processes and procedures at the workplace as part of the orientation process. He however realized that along the way, one lady Mary, was exhibiting some not interesting attitude towards him. She was generally rough and not inviting every time he would seek for some support from her. Unbeknown to him, Mary was feeling highly threatened by Anthony’s presence at the office  hence she sought to sabotage his work.

Since Anthony was not aware of what the issue was, he kept on checking out on Mary until she turned out violent on one of the mornings. At this specific occasion, as Anthony sought to be linked up with one of the key partners, Mary responded by demanding that he stops seeking favors from partners and settle on what he had been employed to do. This was the start of the long fight between the two. As the fight continued overtly and covertly, the other staff started to notice the bad blood between the two. This affected the team and seemed to split the allegiance of the team into two.

Fights among staff are common occurrences. They are triggered by a raft of reasons, the main ones being the desire to protect personal turfs or the clash of individual personalities. When these fights erupt at work, they have a way of sucking everyone else in the department into it and tend to create factions within the workplace. These teams fight against each other resulting in an organizational fight from what started off as a personal conflict.

It is important to note that as much as disagreements arise at the workplace, it is the responsibility of all the staff to enhance amicable engagements among themselves. We realize that these conflicts are not evitable and should hence work towards resolving all misunderstanding among staff for the peace of the workplace. When there is a fight among or between workmates, the attention and energy of the tasks ahead is diverted as people spend all resources at their disposal to win over the faction branded as the enemy. This leads to reduced productivity and loss of workplace enthusiasm.

It is hence important to identify the conflicts early enough and seek for ways of resolving them as quickly as possible since that which starts off as a harmless fight for control of turfs could easily spiral into a huge storm that could carry every one along. 

A great performer but of bad character

As the dust settles on the 2011/2012 season of the English Premier League, and as the celebration and sulking give way to reality, several lessons abound from the league. As Manchester City went on to win the coveted cup after waiting for an entire 44 years, a wait longer than the average age of most of the persons reading this column today, the win did not come without its share of the good and the ugly experiences. Key among the experiences relate to one Mario Balotelli. His behavior on and off pitch have made him the discussion point across the globe since as much as he is a super player of great strength, he is loved and hated in equal measure because of his unpredictable character.

This experience brings to mind the age old question on how to best manage staff who are great performers but possess undesirable character qualities. You must have come across the said personalities where a staff has been hailed as great performer but has character flaws that could jeopardize the otherwise good performance. The said staff could be a gossip, uses vulgar language on colleagues and clients or even attempts to defraud the company once in a while. Should we be concerned about staff character so long as they are good performers? Shouldn't performance be all that matters?

For a staff to be branded as a good performer, we should consider more factors and not just their achievement of the laid out targets and objectives. As much as hitting the target is a great thing for a staff, hitting the targets through moral processes should always be the concern of every staff. The character of the staff determines the overall performance of the team. If the character of one staff affects the performance of the rest of the team, it should be a reason to worry by the management. The employer should be keen to reward an employee not just because of what they have achieved but for both ‘the what and the how’ they have achieved the indicated targets.

As much as a staff’s performance is great today regardless of the character, only time will tell since character flaws have been known to cripple great performers. We have witnessed great politicians, religious leaders, footballers and great parents brought down to their knees by their poor character. It has been said that character is the foundation on which every sustainable success is built. Without a positive character, the current performance is truly built on quicksand and should hence not be celebrated. How many of the leaders around us have we frowned upon due to their poor character regardless of their great performance?

This is therefore a wakeup call to all staff, recruiters and supervisors to place equal premium on both character and performance. I overheard a senior executive indicate that they would rather pick on character given a choice between performance and character. The reasoning is that staff of good character can easily be moulded to perform while persons of poor character generally take a while to be reformed as they may not in the first place value a personal reform agenda. No wonder most of the employers today seek to know more about the candidates they interview beyond their indicated high achievement on the CV.

And so, as you consider your career growth, find ways of strengthening the foundation and beautifying the paths by reflecting positive and admirable character. You can never go wrong with a good character. It is a trait that will take you places.