As you may have noticed, I have a fairly consistent 26-27 replies to my blog posts. And as my husband figured out (he was moderately impressed with my “following” before he did), they are students in the Advanced Topics in Workforce Management course that I am teaching in UB’s MS Accounting Program. This post represents the last to which they have to reply. I’ll miss reading their posts here, but I will also miss seeing them in class every week as our time together runs out in 3 more classes.

(more…)

I started my professional career in the legal industry and in 9+ years as a law clerk and an attorney, in at least two law firms and in a clerkship, in I don’t ever remember having an official “performance” evaluation. But I also don’t recall ever feeling like I didn’t know what was expected or how I was doing.

When I switched careers to Human Resources, my first two jobs were in healthcare where there are accreditation standards that require formal, documented performance evaluations. And yet, I still can’t recall having a performance evaluation either as an employee or as a manager.   Maybe I blocked it out.

(more…)

An oft-cited statistic is that 70% of development actions should come from experience, 20% from relationships/feedback and 10% from education/training. The source is often listed as CCL and Lombardo and Eichinger. It has been cited so often that is has become gospel. But recently, there has been a spate of articles raising an issue of whether this statistic may be receiving more weight than is justified by the research behind it.

Here’s the research, according to TDMagazine.  It comes from 191 executives looking back on their careers and listing what things made the difference in how they now manage.  The lessons learned followed this 70:20:10 breakdown. (more…)

When you are looking for a pattern, you can see it all over the place. Just recently, a client asked me what I thought about job descriptions.   I could hear in her voice that she wasn’t sure what my answer would be and that it may have been a source of much discussion inside the company.

Here’s the rub … with the nature of work changing, with the speed at which technology is changing how we do our jobs and with the constant drumbeat of disruptive innovations in many industries it is just plain hard to keep a job description up to date and accurate.

(more…)