Please Rate This Article: Five Tips to Improve the Cohesiveness in Your Management Team
A cohesive management team is the most important ingredient to your company’s success. The management team needs to function as a team to maximize their accomplishments. To quote an over used phrase, teamwork is really key to an effective management team. This sounds like a simple concept but it is more complicated than you might think. It just isn’t a natural act for people to come together and immediately become effective by addressing common objectives, common issues and common problems.A management team can often become overwhelmed by day to day events which effectively prohibit strategic thinking. Thinking outside the box becomes difficult because they are too busy trying to control what’s going on inside the box. The sharing of common visions and long term goals becomes extremely difficult. Individual personalities, values and personal goals often become roadblocks to functioning well as a team. Getting your management team to focus on common strategic goals is not easy but it is absolutely essential if you are going to maintain competitive advantage and get things done.Five tips to get your management team to function as a unit.1. Take complex plans and strategies and assign accountability and ownership. This creates more efficiency and leverages creativity. Assign responsibility according to individual passions.2. Brainstorming must be encouraged to release team innovation. Bouncing ideas off one another stimulates cr

Please Rate This Article: The Three Ps of Salary Negotiation
Salary negotiations aren’t easy for most people. If you’re going after a new job, you don’t want to price yourself out of the market. If you’re attempting salary negotiations at a job you already have, then you may be afraid of bringing up the subject at all or be concerned you won’t be taken seriously, or worse, that you will make your current boss angry. Fortunately in either case, if you do your homework, approach the matter of salary negotiations in a professional way, you will likely be surprised to hear your employer say yes to your salary requests—and always present them as requests, not demands.The very first step in salary negotiation, though, is to know your own value. This is particularly true when negotiating for a salary increase in a job you already have. To determine your worth, consider these things:• Your skills • Your experience • Your education levelAll of these things are important when evaluating what you are worth as an employee. After you determine your own worth, you want to research how much others are making for the same job you’re doing. Again, your experience, education and skills must be comparable. Someone with the same job title you have may, indeed, be making thousands of dollars more than you are, but when you investigate, you’ll probably learn that the person has 10 years’ more experience than you do, lives in an area where salaries are higher overall or has a higher education level

Please Rate This Article: Useless Resume Objectives
What’s wrong with an objective on a resume? The problem with objectives on resumes is that a typical objective is self-centered and self-serving; therefore, it is useless. Instead of an objective, use a power statement.Let me illustrate what I mean by giving examples of both objectives and power statements. Here is a typical objective, one that HR personnel see on top of resumes all the time:“Customer Service Representative position allowing me to fully utilize my skills and attributes and providing professional advancement opportunities.”What did this objective tell me? The above objective communicated to me basically nothing but for the sake of this case study here are a few points:The person is looking for a Customer Service position. (No problem with that.)The individual’s priority seems to be his/her professional advancement within the organization. (Oops, that’s not the way to treat a potential employer. That’s not what the company wants to hear. They want to hear how you will BENEFIT THEM, not yourself.)The candidate didn’t specify skills and attributes thus didn’t give any glimpse into what he/she can do for the company. (Not good because employers want specifics.)Self-oriented instead of employer oriented. (Not good at all.)Let’s translate the same objective into a power statement.“Award-winning highly accomplished and motivated Customer

Please Rate This Article: Corporate Fraud-In Praise of Jail Time
Finally, we are beginning to see real serious consequences for some of the players in the frauds that have been so prominent in the recent news. A third Enron executive is now sitting in a jail cell, and one WorldCom top dog has been arrested. Even Martha Stewart has finally been indicted.It’s about time!Too many have turned a blind eye to these cases. I would argue that this callous disregard has serious implications for free markets worldwide. America is the image of how a free-market works, and the world is watching.In nations where fraud and corruption are tolerated, free markets don’t last long. Already, many former communist nations are on the road back toward socialism, because brief attempts at developing a functional market-based system failed. These failures usually were the result of weak legal structures and the domination of a class of mafia businessmen who defrauded citizens without penalty. Such a system is doomed. Any nation that tolerates fraud and corruption is doomed to see its market system fail.The strange thing is that very few in the pro business camp have taken the trouble to cry out for harsh penalties. Do we not understand how important fairness and justice is to freedom, and how important all of these are to economic progress? Anyone who values the free-market and the opportunity to engage in honest business activity should be thrilled to see the indictments coming.Instead, we’ve dragged our f