Good vs. bad bosses:

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No manager was born in his/her role as a leading character in a company. Many of them started as employees with fewer responsibilities. Therefore it is important for them to remember where they started and what they expected from their own managers. So, let us have a look at what exactly employees want from their work experiences.

Old vs. new perspective

The prevalent thinking about rewarding employees up until about 25 years ago was to motivate them using the tools at the bottom levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. These are physiological needs including basic needs such as food or shelter and security needs such as job security. The thinking was that as long as the employee was paid adequately, had decent benefits and reasonable job security, then that would be enough. That mode of motivating is no longer suitable. Today’s employees want far more out of their work and from their leaders.

Employers want leadership attention

A McKinsey Quarterly survey in June 2009, found the following results. “The respondents view three noncash motivators – praise from immediate managers, leadership attention (for example, one-on-one conversations), and a chance to lead projects or task forces – as no less or even more effective motivators than the three highest-rated financial incentives: cash bonuses, increased base pay, and stock or stock options.”

This may come as a surprise to some managers, but not to the leaders. Leaders already know this and have been using these tools as motivators for years. This type of leadership style requires excellent communication and interpersonal skills. The smart and effective leader is honing those skills constantly.

Trust
Trust is an important component of leadership and the workplace environment. More is being written about establishing relationships of trust in the workplace. Here are some ideas based on the work of Cloke & Goldsmith (2005):

Discover your future career at Monsanto

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Are you an engineering, business or IT student? Monsanto, one of the world’s leading agricultural technology companies, committed to innovation, focused on working with farmers to produce more with less natural resources, is reaching out to students and graduates! Monsanto offers exceptional careers so if preserving our planet is what moves you and personal and professional development is what excites you then take your career to Monsanto and see where it can take you!Discover
If that wasn’t enough, then you should know that Monsanto ranked 14 on the Top 25 World’s Best Multinational Workplaces list by the Great Place to Work® Institute and consistently ranks high on Computerworld, Forbes, Science Magazine and other lists as a great place to work.

What is Monsanto
Did you know people around the world depend on agriculture and the hard work of farmers for their most basic needs? With global population expected to grow by 40 percent in the next few decades, agriculture will need to become more productive and more sustainable in order to keep pace with rapidly increasing demands!
That is why sustainable agriculture is at the core of Monsanto. The company is committed to developing the technologies that enable farmers to produce more crops while conserving more of the natural resources that are essential to their success.
Producing more. Conserving more. Improving lives. That’s sustainable agriculture. And that’s what Monsanto is all about.

Why work for Monsanto
“There’s a buzz at Monsanto – an energy that’s catching. This is an organization where you define your boundaries”. – says one of Monsanto employees. And it’s true – Monsanto is proud of their winning culture, team-oriented, non-hierarchical and entrepreneurial.

Excel 2010 Advanced: What you ought to know about lookup functions in Excel

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Knowing your way around Excel will definitely improve your work-rate and overall efficiency. But how skilled are you really in Excel? Below you can find an extract of the eBook “Excel 2010 Advanced” which you can download for free. Take a look and see whether you find the provided information useful. Read, download and bring your Excel skills up to a new level!
Insights into lookup functions
Excel can produce varying results in a cell, depending on conditions set by you. For example, if numbers are above or below certain limits, different calculations will be performed and text messages displayed. The usual method for constructing this sort of analysis is using the IF function.
However, this can become large and unwieldy when you want multiple conditions and many possible outcomes. To begin with, Excel can only nest seven IF clauses in a main IF statement, whereas you may want more than eight logical tests or “scenarios.” To achieve this, Excel provides some LOOKUP functions. These functions allow you to create formulae which examine large amounts of data and find information which matches or approximates to certain conditions. They are simpler to construct than nested IF’s and can produce many more varied results. Below you can take a closer look at three of the most common Lookup functions: the Vector Lookup, Hlookup and Vlookup.  
Before you actually start to use the various LOOKUP functions, it is worth learning the terms that you will come across, what they mean and the syntax of the function arguments.
Vector Lookup
A vector is a series of data that only occupies one row or column. LOOKUP will look through this row or column to find a specific value. When the value is found, a corresponding “result” in the adjacent row or column is returned. For example, column D of a spreadsheet may contain figures, and the adjacent column E contains corresponding text. LOOKUP will search for the requested figure in column D and return the corresponding text from column E.

How to get rid of your inner demons and build a high opinion of yourself

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Having a low opinion of ourselves can affect our behaviour, happiness and the quality of our relationships. What needs to be done here is doing an inside job with our assertion. This is a key to our success; otherwise, we put a sticking plaster on the matter and never really move forward. We continue the inside-out approach with this deep-rooted issue.
In this article author, facilitator and business coach Karen Davies introduces different ways of how to build your self-esteem, from the inside, and diminish your assertive challenge.

A real life example
I worked with a client who had difficulties with his boss. He was condescending, over-powering and impatient. His demands made my client feel uncomfortable, compromised and small. Whenever his boss instructed him to do something, he felt a fear of failure and pressure to get the job done. This was particularly tough for him as a perfectionist, and consequently he put so much energy into pleasing his boss that he often let his colleagues down, who also needed his input.

Find out how stressed you are and how to confront your stressors

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Go by the premise that stress is relative, i.e., bear in mind that what is stressful to one person need not be stressful to another. The purpose of the exercise in this article is to identify individual specific stressors so that each individual can evolve customized coping strategies. Eventually you can find out just how stressed you really are. Go for it!

Stress generally manifests in symptoms like:

• Tiredness or fatigue

• Difficulty in getting to sleep

• Overeating and/or loss of appetite

• Muscle aches and pains

• Quickened heart beat

• Sinking feeling in heart

• Increased consumption of alcohol, smoking and substance abuse

• Panic attacks

• Anger, impatience, moodiness

• Memory lapses and lapse of concentration

This list is not exhaustive and only indicative. Often we may be experiencing this day in and day out and assume that it is normal. Similar situations may not evoke similar reactions or feelings in another person. Stress is both people specific and cumulative. It is often one incident after another that piles up and it takes just one more small event to burst the floodgates and be the last straw that breaks the proverbial camel’s back.

When does annoyance turn into stress?

Activities or events that do not agree with our conditioning generally create a psychological dissonance and generate annoyance. If as individuals we do not take stock of these annoyances and realign our conditioning or lifestyles either to altogether avoid the dissonance or accept it for want of a better alternative, we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to annoyances escalating into stressors.

How to identify typical situations that cause stress?

Journaling is a useful practice for identifying typical situations or events that throw us out of kilter.

Go out and buy yourself a pocket diary. Plan to journalize your entire life for a month. Write down incidents as they occur and take care to record date and time of occurrence. Record them in sequential order. For each event recoded, indicate the level of dissonance you are experiencing.

This could be on the following five point scale:

1. No stress at all

2. Starting to feel upset -rapid breathing or sweating starts

3. Starting to feel annoyed, anxious or angry

4. Moderate stress

5. Extremely stressed (feel teeth gnashing, abusive, violent feelings, fists clenched)

The top three, i.e., those scoring between 3 and 5 on the scale, would be the set of situations that burn the individual out.

Over a week and then over a month, certain patterns will begin to emerge. As an individual, each one of us will be able to identify our top-most stressors.

If we look at exemplary events that can cause stress between levels of 3 and 5, we observe:

1. Unscheduled dropping of children to work – uncomfortable with sudden changes in routine

2. Traffic causing me to be late and the aftermath in office

Based on the above, the individual can initiate steps to eliminate the stressors from his or her life. Some of the causal factors would probably be beyond the individual’s control, while others definitely can be addressed and eliminated to improve quality of life.

How to confront the stressors

Now both the aforementioned stressors are conditions that are beyond your power to control. However there is a way to address the first stressor. Before sleeping the previous night the individual can recheck to ascertain the alarm is in active mode. If he had woken up in time, he would have realized the children were oversleeping and could have woken them. Alternatively accept and embrace the change in schedule as a temporary disturbance variable so long as it is not a regular feature of your home life.

Regarding the second stressor of traffic, if this is a regular feature, the best coping strategy would be to first acknowledge the fact. Then creatively visualize workarounds. One of the options is to convert the back seat of the car into a mobile office. Get yourself a chauffeur to drive and enable Wi-Fi enable in the car cabin. You can then take all calls and video conferences while being stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. When there is no immediately pending work, you can gainfully utilize the time for either listening to soothing music or meditation.

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LANGUAGE OF YOUR FACE

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 Fundamentals of communication, P.R. and leadership

 

  Many social and behavioural scientists and communication experts accept the idea that, as mammals, we humans do transmit and receive non-verbal messages. The underlying basis of this position is that if properly trained we can be able to decipher received body language messages. The validity and the reliability of this theory have not been properly established and tested but the idea is still worth thinking about in more detail. In this article, Dr Georgios P. Piperopoulos, professor of communications and public relations will analyse the use of ‘non-verbal communication’ among humans by focusing on our face. Don’t miss this.

What our smiles are all about

Erwin Goffman (1969) coined and introduced the interesting concept of ‘public smiles’. In all human cultures, in what appears to exist at a universal level, the human smile expresses a good sense of humour. It is also commonly accepted that our smile often involves elements of apology, especially in cases where some act or some verbal statement on our part could be interpreted as an attack or insult to the receiver. In such cases we smile and, obviously, we do politely apologize without uttering any relevant words. Finally, as most of us know from experience, there are instances in everyday life where we smile despite being angry, we smile despite feeling bitter, and we even proceed to swallow our disappointments with a smile.

Our face carries specific meanings
In body language our mouth and lips, eyebrows and eyes each alone, or operating in combined fashion, dramatize their own role in the process of our communication with others. Thus, pulling the lip or focusing on one area of the mouth carries specific meanings and so do specific movements of the eyebrows along with contractions of our forehead. Furthermore, although our eyeballs are only organs which carry light from visual stimuli through the optic nerve to the brain, in body language our eyes, with the help of the general area of ​​the face around them, seem to be significant transmitters of specific and meaningful messages to others we are interacting with. This materializes and is conveyed through the intensity and persistence with which we look at the person or persons standing or sitting opposite to us.

The eyes as the mirror of the soul
It is already fairly well established, as a result of relevant psychological research, that when we see something delightful the pupils of our eyes dilate, apparently with the aim to collect as much as possible of the intensely pleasant stimulus, whereas when we see something unpleasant, the pupils of our eyes constrict minimizing the inflow of the unwanted stimulus. Indeed, it is a given in world literature that the human eyes are often