There is no denying that technology has changed how we do business. We can stay connected to our colleagues 24 hours a day from virtually anywhere in the world, and access to limitless amounts of information is at the touch of our fingers.

On the one hand, this increased connectivity allows us to move faster, be more productive, and work harder than ever before. On the other hand, it makes for a long workday.

But how much is too much? In a survey of more than 600 people in multiple jobs and industries across more than 50 countries, Hogan found that:

The 40-hour workweek is dead:

Our respondents were unusually engaged:
“Engagement refers to how employees perceive their jobs and employers,” said Hogan President Dr. Robert Hogan. “It is the opposite of alienation. When employees are engaged, they like their jobs, they work hard at their jobs, they take initiative, and they show loyalty.”

Highly engaged respondents were more likely to:
• Talk to friends and family about work more than once per day
• Believe that they enjoy their job more than their friends and family
• Work more than 50 hours a week
• Work outside of business hours because they want to

“How people react to constant availability depends on how engaged they are,” Hogan said. “The more engaged an employee, the more he or she will be willing to bring work into their family/home life.”

Humans are social animals and spend much of their time working in groups and teams, yet most people don’t understand the dynamics of effective teamwork. That is not to say people do not recognize good teamwork when they see it, but many do not know what to do in order to get people to work together effectively. Some of this confusion is due to the following misunderstandings about teams and teamwork:

Myth #1: Teams always perform better than individuals. Although we like to think that groups outperform individuals, there are some tasks that are better performed by individuals. Repairing cars, setting up home theaters, and conducting sales calls illustrate this clearly. Yes, teams of mechanics can work on cars and companies can endorse eight-legged sales calls, but in many cases this would degrade the performance of the individuals doing the work. Our default action is to assign work to groups rather than individuals and this often leads to redundancies and inefficiencies. Leaders need to look at the nature of the work to be performed and determine the best way to get it done.

Myth #2: Athletic teams are good analogies for business teams. Leaders often use athletic teams as examples for creating high-performing work teams. Given the prevalence and visibility of professional sports teams, these analogies are understandable but misguided. Work teams are nothing like athletic teams. Think about 2012 Super Bowl Champions the New York Giants. Many private and public sector leaders would love their teams to perform like the Giants, but professional athletic teams differ from work teams in five important ways. First, professional athletic teams obsess over talent. Potential players must participate in combines, mini-camps, training camps, and preseason games before final hiring decisions are made. Many work team members are selected on the basis of availability and internal politics rather than skill. Second, athletic teams practice-to-play ratio is something like 100-to-1, whereas work teams spend little if any time practicing. Third, professional athletic teams have clear team goals (i.e., win a championship) and objective measures of success (win-loss records), whereas work teams often suffer from ill-defined goals and metrics. Fourth, the challenges and threats facing professional athletic teams (i.e., next week’s opponent) are clearly understood, whereas the challenges facing work teams are much harder to anticipate. Finally, athletic coaches teach their teams how to win. They are constantly teaching team members new strategies and tactics for beating competitors, whereas work leaders rarely, if ever, educate their teams. These differences do not mean work teams should not borrow some of the best practices of professional athletic teams, but mindlessly applying sports analogies to work teams is not particularly useful.

Myth #3: Corporations are team-oriented. If you look at the corporate values of any company, collaboration and teamwork usually appear near the top of the list. Although companies constantly preach the importance of teamwork many of their processes and systems encourage individualism. Most company’s performance management systems are based on individually oriented goals and accomplishments; team goals, contributions, and results typically take a back seat. Likewise, hiring and compensation systems, budgets, and support programs (i.e., IT help desks) are often slanted more towards individuals than groups. Though they often hope for teamwork, companies reward individual effort.

Myth #4: Effective teamwork is common in most organizations. Many people believe that if you put together a group of high performing individuals, they will eventually coalesce into a high performing team. Unfortunately we all know examples of work and athletic teams that had the right talent but failed to perform to expectations. Effective teamwork is actually a relatively rare occurrence. Although we have all belonged to hundreds of teams, only a few qualify as high performing teams. Because most groups and teams have ill-defined goals, use ineffective work processes, squander resources, or suffer from interpersonal conflict, they usually fall short of their goals. 

By Gordon Curphy
Curphy Consulting Corporation
Guest blogger and author of The Rocket Model

You’ve seen him around the office – the life of the party, the guy with the novelty necktie, and funny but slightly offensive slogan on his coffee mug. All the world is a stage, and he’s got the leading role. After all, you don’t get ahead in this world without standing out.

On the climb up the corporate ladder, the line between strength and weakness isn’t always clear. Although his penchant for attention can be amusing to co-workers, he is also a distraction in the office, often too busy showing off to make a real contribution.

Watch this video to see the show-off at work, or visit www.howdoyouderail.com to view the entire HDS video series. Follow on Twitter @ImHiColorful #howdoyouderail

Western societies tend to attribute success to individuals – Hannibal is often seen as the leader who conquered much of the land surrounding the Mediterranean and it was Steve Jobs who transformed Apple into one of the world’s most valued companies. But these individuals would have failed had they worked alone. Hannibal’s success can be rightly attributed to assembling a highly effective army; Steve Jobs’ success depended on highly talented product developers and software engineers. Hannibal and Jobs not only had a knack for gathering the right cast of characters, they were also very adept at putting the right people in the right positions and getting everyone to work together effectively. More often than not, less talented individuals who work well together often accomplish more than talented individuals who play dysfunctional family feud. Despite the fact that all major human accomplishments have been the result of collective rather than individual efforts, systematic research on groups and teams is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Most of the research on teams from the late 1940s through the early 1980s was focused on the processes and dynamics associated with leaderless groups. Tuckman’s famous forming, storming, norming, and performing stages of group development was one of the more robust findings from this research and can readily be observed anytime groups of volunteers get together. Yet these four stages rarely occur in the world of work, since competitive threats, authority hierarchies, pre-assigned goals and roles, and time and task pressures profoundly affect group dynamics. Research on work teams over the past 30 years has resulted in these six major findings:

1. There are important distinctions between groups and teams. Teams have overarching goals; members do interdependent work and share common fates. Groups are collections of individuals who have individual goals, do independent work, and are rewarded or fail based on their individual efforts.
   
   
2. Teams are not always more effective than groups. The relative effectiveness of teams versus groups depends on the nature of work to be accomplished; sometimes teams are the best option and other times groups are a better way to go.
   
   
3. Highly effective groups and teams are relatively rare. People work on many groups and teams over the course of their careers, yet most fail to perform at their potential.
   
   
4. There is no widely accepted model for building high performing groups and teams. Several models for building teams have been offered but none have been widely adopted.
   
   
5. Effective leaders are the exception rather than the rule. Somewhere between 65-75 percent of people in positions of authority are unable to build teams or get results.
   
   
6. Leadership matters. It is true that leaders cannot do it alone and may get a disproportionate amount of credit or blame for team outcomes, but who is in charge does matter. Dysfunctional leaders beget dysfunctional teams.

By Gordon Curphy
Curphy Consulting Corporation
Guest blogger and author of The Rocket Model

College graduates face a harsh reality regarding their career prospects. According to the New York Times, recent graduates are entering the toughest job market in the last quarter of a century; only 56 percent are employed in jobs that require a college degree, 22 percent are working in jobs that do not require a college degree, and 22.4 percent aren't working at all. 

These circumstances aren't limited to recent graduates. Underemployment among workers with a bachelor's or higher degree rose from 3.9 percent in December 2007 to 8.4 percent in March 2011, an increase larger than any other segment of the economy. 

The widespread and persistent nature of under-and unemployment in a group that is technically skilled and educated suggests that this demographic lacks the skill set necessary to obtain employment. 

Are You Employable? examines what employers really want in their new hires — and finds interpersonal skills come out on top. 

Bosses from Hell

Bad bosses make for good comedy, as movies like “The Devil Wears Prada” attest. But for workers and the companies that hire them, subpar superiors are no laughing matter.

According to Dr. Robert Hogan, poor managers – who range from incompetent to tyrannical – do more than make workers’ lives miserable. They also lose money. Research shows that ill-managed companies earn far fewer profits than well-managed ones, says Hogan, who is president of Hogan Assessment Systems, an international distributor of psychological assessments.

Worse, they cost people their health. Sixty-five percent to seventy-five percent of workers say the most stressful aspect of their job is their immediate supervisor, find studies by Hogan and others.

“So these guys aren’t just bad for business --- they’re killing people,” Hogan asserts.

What’s to be done? Psychological researchers need to pinpoint the best leadership qualities and interventions. In the field, practitioners need to use good assessment tools, develop training programs and suggest hiring practices based on these interventions. Many people fall into management jobs based on seniority, hierarchy or technical ability rather than personality and talent. Good leadership must be nurtured, and “bad leaders need to be confronted with their flaws,” Hogan says.

From Monitor on Psychology May 2012

She’s the one with the can-do attitude. The boss needs that proposal by tomorrow? No problem. Have a 3 a.m. conference call? She’ll be there. You need 10,000 copies correlated and stapled? She can do that, too. Sure, she may over commit, but you don’t get ahead by saying “no.”

On the climb up the corporate ladder, the line between strength and weakness isn’t always clear. Although her eagerness to please served the over-committer early in her career, now, she has an overflowing calendar and a reputation as the boss’s pet.

Watch this video to see the over-committer at work, or visit www.howdoyouderail.com to view the entire HDS video series. Follow on Twitter @ImHiDutiful #howdoyouderail

The modern economy is changing more and more rapidly than ever before. Companies depend on their leaders to guide them through this turbulent marketplace, making the availability of savvy, well-developed leaders a crucial part of business suc­cess. However, a recent survey found that although the majority of HR directors identified high-potential leader development as their most important focus, more than 80% of those surveyed expected their HR budget either to shrink or stay the same.

This leaves many HR managers struggling to answer an important question: In such a cost-driven busi­ness atmosphere, how can companies still provide critical professional development opportunities to their leaders? “Awareness Coaching” demonstrates that by combining the powerful science of personality assessments with a limited number of coaching sessions, companies can provide a highly impactful, cost-effective experience for their high-potential employees.

As a world leader in personality assessment and consulting, Hogan strives to provide the highest level of service to our customers. Practitioners, stand-alone consultants, coaches, and other domestic independent users are one of the fastest-growing segments of Hogan’s business.

To better serve this market segment, Hogan announced the Independent Consultancies Team, a new division under the Corporate Solutions department dedicated to providing world-class support to these United States practitioners and their clients.

To learn more about what these changes mean for you, or for information about joining Hogan’s network of independent consultancies, contact us at info@hoganassessments.com.

Meet the outsider. You’ve caught an occasional glimpse of him around the office. Capable and resilient, what he lacks in social grace he makes up in cold rationality. Sure, it gets lonely at the top, but that’s the way he prefers it. He is the lone wolf, the recluse, the strong, silent type.

In the climb to the top of the ladder, the line between strength and weakness isn’t always clear. The same rugged independence that helped the outsider early in his career can come off as cold and alienating when he’s stressed, bored, tired, or otherwise distracted.

Watch this video to see the outsider at work, or visit www.howdoyouderail.com to view the entire HDS video series. Follow on Twitter @ImHiReserved #howdoyouderail.