The 5 Must-Have Qualities Of The Modern Employee

Reference: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2013/08/27/5-must-have-qualities-modern-employee/#!

A few weeks ago I wrote an article covering the 5 Must-Have Qualities Of The Modern Manager. However it’s not just the managers that need to adapt and evolve to the changing workplace; it’s also the non-managerial employees. As I mentioned in the previous article dramatic changes in the way we work are being fueled by new behaviors and new technologies. In fact, there are five trends which are shaping the future of work. To keep pace there are five qualities that the modern employee needs to possess.

Embrace change

Employees have grown accustomed to doing things a certain way. They have used to the same technologies and the same processes for many years but that doesn’t mean that those technologies and ways of doing things are the best for our companies or for ourselves. Consider that in a few years millennials are going to become the majority workforce in the United States. These are people who grew up using social and collaborative tools to communicate, collaborate, and find people and information. This new workforce means new behaviors and new technologies; employees should be stepping forward together and embracing the change that is going to make their jobs and lives easier. As Winston Churchill said, “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”

Have a voice in your company

For the first time in the history of business “leader” and “manager” are not mutually exclusive. Leaders no longer to have to be managers, they have to be people who are passionate, knowledgeable, and comfortable with sharing (which is another key quality mentioned below). New collaborative technologies are empowering every single employee within an organization to share their passions, interests, ideas, and feedback. If you care about something you have the opportunity to become a leader and a known voice on that topic within your organization. However, this can’t happen if you don’t speak up. You can’t become a leader if you are scared of sharing your voice and your opinions. This means using the new collaborative technologies that are available to you to get recognized within your company. Why be a employee when you can become a leader?Have a voice in your company

Be autonomous

Now that employees have the ability to work from anywhere at anytime, being self-directed is crucial. There is no longer a manager watching your every move and reminding you to “get back to work.” This a privilege but it’s also a responsibility. A great deal of trust is being placed on you to accomplish your tasks. As a modern employee you must be capable of executing on your deliverables whether you are in an office, cafe, or at home.

Share and help others

This was one of the key qualities for the modern manger but it’s also a key quality for the modern employee. Traditionally employees wanted to keep ideas to themselves to get credit for their own contributions. This model is no longer effective. With the emergence of collaborative tools, ideas and feedback can easily be traced back to individuals within an organization. Sharing not only benefits the team  but it also benefits you as an employee. Your peers and managers will recognize your can-do attitude and ability to lend a helping hand. Sharing can take many forms; you can share your ideas, feedback, what you are working on, documents, or anything else that you choose to. By sharing, your team and neighboring departments will recognize your name. To be a modern employee you must become comfortable with sharing and helping others.

Filter and focus

In today’s work environment we are pulled in many directions. We are on meetings while we check email, simultaneously tweeting, editing a document, and IMing with a colleague.  With the proliferation of content and tools that coworkers and friends can “ping” us on it’s all too easy to lose focus.  With emerging technology employees must remember to focus on what needs to get done.  This means being able to put people and messages “over ice.”  Information bombards employees from every direction which means employees need to become adept at filtering out and focusing on what’s crucial.

What other qualities do you think are crucial for the modern employee?

If You're Doing It All, You're Doing It Wrong

Vacation is a great time to disengage. The distance can not only help you reset your relationship with your devices and all that they hold for you, but disconnecting from your office can also shed some light on how good a manager you really are.
Maybe we can’t go completely off the grid, as Baratunde Thurston writes about in Fast Company, (a vacation story I recommend highly, by the way):  “I have left the Internet. I’m on vacation. That means no social media updates, responses, check-ins, likes, taps, pokes, noogies, tickles, or head locks. I’m going to practice looking people in the eye and not checking my email.” But we can at least let our business carry on without us and get stronger from the process.
Recently, the New York Times ran an interview with Christopher J. Williams, CEO of the Williams Capital Group, in which he admits that one mistake he made in his business was staying at the “granular level” for longer than he should have, which meant he spent less time managing. “Whenever you don’t know what to do,” he said, “you revert back to what you know, which is, ‘Let me do it because I can get this done.’ ” 
Williams might have gotten a job done faster, but at the cost of not developing his employees. Because when you let other people watch you work, that’s what they become good at—watching you work. And that means you’re spending a lot of money on professional spectators. 
Too busy looking down to look ahead: As a manager, executive, or business owner, it’s our job to lead, to create teams that can optimize the potential of our vision. Otherwise we’re not being the best, we’re being the bottleneck. As a wise mentor and consummate entrepreneur told me long ago: “Just because you can do something well, does mean that you should.”
Secrets of Letting Go: For people who over-identify with their need to control, letting go will create stress at the outset—but I believe that initial stress is worth pushing through, compared with the stress that comes from letting nothing go.
First, be patient and give some time and space.
Second, trust your people and assume the best will happen until it doesn’t.
Third, better be ready to re-direct when something doesn’t go as planned. Remember to re-direct but not jump in.
Wondering if this is you? One way to gauge it, says Williams, is this: How many calls do you get when you’re on vacation? Because if you get a ton, it may be a sign that you haven’t developed your team fully.
Williams said, “Some people love to know they’re needed constantly, and that people have to call them. Unfortunately it’s common, but it’s not the best for the organization. I found that when I’m on vacation and getting calls and constant e-mails, then I must not be doing as good a job as I should to make sure that the group can perform without me.”
Maybe you don’t mind the poolside calls. But you have to ask yourself honestly, how much of that is due to their need—and how much of it is yours?
Source:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/janbruce/2013/08/20/if-youre-doing-it-all-youre-doing-it-wrong/#!

The Tell-Tale Signs Of A Bad Boss

Let's face it; we have all seen and experienced bad bosses. There are the ones that bully, the ones that only care about themselves and their own career, the cowards that hide behind others or the ones that drive you mad by trying to tell you how to do your job in the minutest level of detail. Seeing bad bosses in action can be hilarious but if you are on the receiving end of a bad boss it is usually no laughing matter. Bad bosses cause so much unnecessary stress in the work place and are a major cause of reduced productivity and performance.

The thing is that we are often not fully aware why we get stressed by our bosses, they just make us feel uncomfortable or in the worst case completely stressed out. I work with so many different companies all over the world, across all industries and sectors and believe I can tell whether someone is a good boss or not within seconds of meeting them and their team. You can just tell by what they say, how they say it and how they and their team behave. Here are my top ten tell-tale signs of a bad boss:

The Ego-Tripper - a boss that is arrogant, shows off at any opportunity and is in constant need of boosting his or her ego
The Coward - a boss that takes on no accountability and often hides behind others
The Micromanager - a boss that believes he knows how others should do their job, who can't trust people to just get on with their job and instead and micro-manages everything they do
The Incapable - a boss that has been promoted beyond his or her capabilities, has no clue how to do the job and has lost all respect of subordinates and co-workers
The Over-friendly Mate - a boss that inappropriately wants to be your best mate or nearest friend
The Bad Communicator - a boss that is unable to communicate anything effectively, be it the corporate strategy or individual performance feedback
The Plagiarizer - a boss that takes credit for other people's work or ideas and passes it off as his own (especially to his or her boss)
The Negative - a boss that just can't say anything positive and instead turns everything into doom-and-gloom
The Ego-Centric - a boss that doesn't care about the people who work for him and is not interested in helping, coaching and developing anyone else but himself
The Criticizer- a boss that is quick to critisize mistakes others make and is unable to provide constructive feedback
For me, each of the above are clear signs of a bad manager and when you get a boss with one or maybe two of the signs then you can usually manage around them (not ideal but doable). Really problematic is when you end up with a boss that shows several of them at the same time, in which case I can only wish you good luck!

Do you agree with the list? Are there other tell-tale signs you would add? Or have you got any stories, insights or experiences to share on the topic?

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130821063221-64875646-top-10-tell-tale-signs-of-a-bad-boss

Careful! These 25 Quotes Might Inspire You

Be careful reading these quotes, they might just inspire you to do things you dreamed of doing, they might help you succeed and might even make you happier.

"All our dreams can come true - if we have the courage to pursue them"

Walt Disney

"Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Steve Jobs

“Life is short, live it. Love is rare, grab it. Anger is bad, dump it. Fear is awful, face it. Memories are sweet, cherish it.”

Proverb

"Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresea, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein."

H. Jackson Brown Jr.

"Fear less, hope more, eat less, chew more, whine less, breathe more, talk less, say more, hate less, love more, and good things will be yours."

Swedish Proverb

“Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is you who will get you where you want to go, no one else.”

Les Brown

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us."

Helen Keller

"Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present."

Jim Rohn

"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude."

Thomas Jefferson

"The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will."

Vince Lombardi

"It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed."

Theodore Roosevelt

"Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one a second time."

Josh Billings

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Michael Jordan

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

Wayne Gretzky

“In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.”

Bill Cosby

"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult."

Seneca

"It is only the very wisest and the very stupidest who cannot change."

Confucius

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit."

Aristotle

"Vision without action is daydream. Action without vision is nightmare."

Japanese Proverb

"A goal is a dream with a deadline."

Napoleon Hill

"Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another."

John Dewey

“Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.”

Farrah Gray

“There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.”

Denis Waitley

“Good things come to those who wait… greater things come to those who get off their ass and do anything to make it happen.”

Proverb

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

Lao Tzu

Did you find these quotes inspiring? Let's make this list longer - please add the quotes that inspire you. Either your own or from someone else. Please share your thoughts...

Offshoring: Pathway to a Competitive Disadvantage

Companies that have over-embraced offshoring will take back many critical business functions or eventually lose their competitive advantage. By Frank Wander

Corporate IT remains a source of great dissatisfaction in many companies. After enduring high project failure rates for more than 50 years, companies should already know that highly competent, tight knit teams are a source of competitive advantage and project success. Companies should know that knowledge workers, and successful teams, are corporate assets, not expenses. Moreover, companies should know that talented professionals are not an interchangeable commodity. Unfortunately, workers don’t count, so everyone just soldiers on.

When I examine how traditional IT operates, the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds immediately comes to mind. In it, Charles Mackay recounts how otherwise intelligent people get caught up in manias, like the Dutch tulip craze in the 1600s, where, at the height of the fad, a single tulip bulb sold for 10 times the annual salary of a craftsman. It is part of human social psychology that once a herd mentality takes root, most everyone goes along, afraid to speak out, even if they know the situation makes no sense. That is where we have ended up in IT. Many people in the industry quietly say the offshore model is a source of enduring failure, yet it remains a staple of IT.

- See more at: http://www.cioinsight.com/it-management/expert-voices/offshoring-pathway-to-a-competitive-disadvantage 

Invest in technology for innovation, not productivity | Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum | McKinsey

Invest in technology for innovation, not productivity | Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum | McKinsey

Enterprise mobility, BYOD reach tipping point, says Yankee Group

Apple's iOS, Google's Android are headed for a mobile duopoly in the enterprise

Enterprise mobility and BYOD are reaching a tipping point in 2012, according to Yankee Group principal analyst Chris Marsh.

For the first time, a majority of employees want to use consumer applications for work purposes and a majority of IT departments are allowing them to do it, according to an annual Yankee Group enterprise survey.

"Comparing our enterprise survey data from the past year shows just how much the enterprise mobility market has shifted in 2012. Companies are taking a much more permissive and realistic view toward the imperative of supporting mobility and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environments," Marsh noted.

Twenty percent more employees are using tablets for work this year over last year, but laptops and smartphones still are used the most for the majority of work tasks, he noted.

The Yankee Group predicts that the mobile ecosystem--mobile broadband, mobile devices, mobile apps, cloud services and mobile money--will exceed $2 trillion in revenues within three years.

Companies are on the precipice of a mobile applications gold rush, Marsh said. They are looking increasingly at software-as-a-service as a way to better provision apps to their mobile workforce.

At the same time, an increasing number of companies are having difficulty with mobility management tasks such as distributing applications to devices and upgrading mobile device software, he noted.

Two companies that are not benefiting from mobile boom in the enterprise are Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), according to Marsh. For example, the proportion of companies preferring RIM as their smartphone platform has halved during the past year, and now only 8 percent believe it will be their preferred platform two years from now, according to the Yankee Group analyst.

"If fortunes for either Microsoft or RIM don't change, [Google's] Android and [Apple's] iOS are heading for a duopoly in the enterprise in the near future," Marsh judged.

Read more: Enterprise mobility, BYOD reach tipping point, says Yankee Group - FierceMobileIT http://www.fiercemobileit.com/story/enterprise-mobility-byod-reach-tipping-point-says-yankee-group/2012-10-18?goback=%2Egde_2735943_member_179739980