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BECOMING A GREAT BOSS
By Welcome to the Edward Lewis Blog Page | January 06, 2012 at 03:41 PM EST | No Comments

Great business owners become great based on their actions. Intentions are meaningless. Words are important. Results are everything.

But probably not the kinds of results you might have in mind.

Consistently accomplish these five functions and you, your company -- and most importantly your employees -- all reap the benefits. Fail at these five functions and no matter how hard you work, you and your business will eventually fall short.

1. Develop every employee. If your sole focus is on hitting targets, achieving results, and accomplishing concrete goals your leadership cart is well before the horse. Without great employees, no amount of focus on goals and targets will pay off. Employees can only achieve what they are capable of achieving, so it's your job to help every employee become capable of achieving more.

Plus, even the most self-starting employees can only do so much to improve their skills. As a manager you owe it to your employees to provide the training, mentoring, and opportunities they need and deserve. In the process you listen, guide, and develop loyalty and commitment. Reviewing results and tracking performance is transformed from enforcement into personal progress and improvement -- both for the employee and for business.

Employee development is your primary responsibility as a boss. Spend the bulk of your time developing the skills of employees; goal achievement becomes a natural, long-term result.

2. Take care of problems immediately. Nothing kills team morale quicker than issues that don't get addressed. Interpersonal squabbles, performance issues, inter-departmental feuds all negatively impact employee motivation, enthusiasm, and even individual work ethic.

Small problems never go away. They always fester and grow into bigger problems -- and when you ignore an issue, employees immediately lose respect for you. Without respect you can't lead.

Never hope a problem will magically disappear (or someone else will deal with it.) No matter how small, deal with every issue head-on.

3. Rescue a struggling employee. Every team has an employee who has fallen out of grace: Publicly failed to complete a task, blew up in a meeting, or just makes particularly slow progress. Over time a struggling employee comes to be seen by his peers, and by you, as a weak link.

When that happens it's almost impossible for the struggling employee to turn a corner on his own. The weight of team disapproval is just too heavy for one person to move.

But that weight is not too heavy for you to move.

Before you remove a weak link from the chain, put your full effort into trying to rehabilitate that person instead. Step in and address the situation, but do so in a positive way. Say, "Mike, I know you've been struggling. I also know you're trying. Let's find ways we get you where you need to be." Express confidence, be reassuring, and most of all tell him you'll be there every step of the way.

Don't relax your standards, though. Just step up the mentoring and coaching you provide.

Granted, sometimes it won't work out, so see the effort as its own reward.

4. Serve others -- never yourself. You can get away with this once or twice, but that's it. Never say or do anything that in any way puts you in the spotlight, however briefly. Never congratulate employees and digress for a few moments to discuss what you did. Never say, "This took a lot of work, but I have finally convinced upper management to let us..." If it should go without saying, don't say it.

Your glory should always be reflected, never direct. When employees excel you excel. When your team succeeds you succeed. When an employee rehab project turns into a superstar, remember they should be congratulated, not you.

You were just doing your job the way a great manager should.

Consistently act as if you are less important than your employees and everyone will know how important you really are.

5. Stay humble. As a business owner, you've reached a level many of your employees also hope to someday reach. Some admire what you have accomplished; most respect you for your hard work and achievements. So sometimes an employee will just want to talk or to spend a little time with you.

When that happens you can blow that person off, or you can see the moment for its true importance: A chance to inspire, motivate, reassure, or give someone hope for greater things in their life.

The higher you rise, the greater the impact you can make, and the greater your responsibility to make that impact.

HOW DO EMPLOYERS AND RECRUITERS READ RESUMES
By Welcome to the Edward Lewis Blog Page | December 20, 2011 at 02:10 PM EST | 1 comment

You’ve heard about the thirty-second rule. The one about how long recruiters actually spend reading resumes?
Good recruiters, that is. It takes a lot of practice to accurately read resumes at the speed of a QR code scanner. Note the word “accurately”. It’s one thing to make a brief read of a resume. It’s another thing entirely to achieve a high quality assessment at the speed of light.
New and inexperienced recruiters tend to spend a lot of time trying to knock square pegs into round holes. They waste a lot of time trying to match jobs to candidates instead of candidates to jobs. Tenured recruiters tend to know how to quickly size up a resume. So rather than focusing on those thirty seconds as if it’s a negative thing, let’s dive into what should happen inside those thirty seconds.
Here are some strategies for reading resumes at the speed of light while still catching every qualified candidate that makes their way onto your desk. For job seekers, know that this is the way a lot of recruiters will read your resume – prepare your resume as such!
o First ask yourself: Does the candidate live near where you’re recruiting for or have they clearly stated that they want to move to that specific area? If not, you just saved yourself thirty seconds.
o Hold the resume at arm’s length: Really. Look at the way the resume is formatted and laid out on the page. Is it five pages long? One? Is it highly stylized? What’s the font tell you? Does it look like someone else, like a professional resume writer, wrote it for them? Compare this first impression to your perception of other qualified candidates in the domain that you’re recruiting. Does it look like other people’s resume or does it look weird? Weird isn’t bad, but it might cause an outside of the box search.
o Next, read it backwards: Just figure out where they went to school, if they went to school, and if it looks like they did a good job and value education. It’s important, especially if your company or client organization values education.
o Then read their current job: Determine their core industry and what the person did on a day to day basis. Try to ignore job titles. If you’re recruiting for people to process annual reports, does it look like the person regularly processed annual reports? It couldn’t be simpler. But it’s hard. Just get out of the way and ask yourself, has the person been recently doing what the job requires? Determine if the employer is in an comparable industry or type of company. Think like you’re dumb. Insurance companies like to hire employees at other insurance companies. Startups like people from startups.
o Now figure out their “big” job: Everyone had their break somewhere. Don’t pay as much attention to chronology and the formatted length of each job description – look for the job that gave the candidate the bulk of their experience. Oftentimes because of a natural tendency to favor the most recent, candidates will spend more time detailing their latest three assignments – even if those assignments comprise only 5% of their overall career. Find that big, real job where the person spent the majority of their career. In trying to figure out what a person does, that’s where the money is.
o Do a check for job hopping: Then look again, it’s vital. In general, you want to see a solid work history with long(ish) tenures at their employers. However (and this is also necessary), you have to figure out if the person either A) consulted a lot or B) had an incredibly fast and regular progression through job titles. Consulting work is fine, but you want to see a long history of success with consulting. Fast climbers will also tend to move through employers rapidly, as they jump for new opportunities – this can be good or bad, depending on the opportunity that you have for them. When you’re scanning for job hopping, what you’re really asking yourself is “Does this candidate seem to have a rational progression and a history of success?” Anything else usually can suggest a low performer.
o Finally, do a gut check: Ask yourself if you think the person could do the job that you have for them. This means not just trying to line up past experience with the required experience, but rather asking yourself if your job feels like a natural progression for someone with that background. Certain job titles tend to slip naturally into the next. Other times, you have to make a reasoned leap of faith – if the person doesn’t even have a previous position that would normally fit into yours, do they have a background that could indicate success? Have you had “luck” with people from a particular company or with a certain set of skills? Your gut is the part of a recruiter that needs the most training to be strong. If you’ve lived inside a certain geography or industry, recruiting day in and out, you’ll be able to trust this last step more than any other. If you’re just starting out, don’t give yourself the luxury – think dumb and simple matches. A recruiting machine and nothing more.
Do you have a solid feel for the resume? Can you imagine the person doing what they do? Do you have a sense of their real job and skills beyond their simple job titles? If so, then you have done your job well. Have thirty seconds gone by yet?
If you’re getting all the right signals, it’s time to pick up the phone. And get down to all the easy stuff. Salary requirements. Culture match. Hopes and dreams – really. But that’s another discussion entirely.

FIVE KILLER COVER LETTERS
By Welcome to the Edward Lewis Blog Page | November 18, 2011 at 03:23 PM EST | No Comments

The basic format of a good cover letter is:

-- A three-sentence paragraph up top that summarizes your skills and experience that are explicitly related to the job in question.

-- Bulleted list of achievements that are directly related to the job.

-- Summary paragraph that says you really think you'd add to the company's bottom line (say that in a specifically relevant way) and that you'd like to set up a meeting to talk.

The cover letter should be pretty straightforward. The problem is that most people think they are an exception to the rules of cover letter writing. Most people, in fact, are not exceptions to any rule. Just statistically speaking. And your career will go much more smoothly if you stop thinking like you're a special case.

For cover letters, I find people are more willing to follow general formatting guidelines if the understand the reasoning behind it.

1. Don't stand out

You do not want to stand out for the format of your cover letter. You want to stand out for your skills and experience. Good resumes follow the rules of good resumes because hiring managers want to compare apples to apples. You should follow a generally accepted format so that if you do have things that are great about you, those things stand out. If you use a totally new, creative, innovative, however-you-describe-it, format, the hiring manager cannot see what makes you different beyond that you don't understand how to make life easy for hiring managers.

2. Use bullets

When people read cover letters, they are in a hiring mindset. That is, they are expecting to scan a page to get a general idea of someone. This is what the resume format is great for - leading the eye to the most information quickly. A good cover letter should be that way, too. This means you need to have a bulleted list. The cover letter is short, so include just one list. Three or five bullets (the brain handles odd numbered lists best). Once the bullets are on the page, you can bet that someone reading will read those first. Make them so strong that they get you the interview before the interviewer gets to the resume.

3. Write from the recruiter's point of view

Address the person by name if possible. They immediately like you better. And use the name of their company. People like reading that, too. Write, in the opening paragraph, what skills and experience you have that will allow you to do a great job in the position you'd like to interview for. So often people want to tell the hiring manger ALL their experience. But the hiring manager only cares about the perfectly relevant experience. Also, lift words from the job description and use them in the cover letter.

4. Show you understand the rules of the workforce

Of course, all hotshots break rules. But you can't break rules if you don't know what they are. Breaking implies knowing. Otherwise it's not rule-breaking; it's just acting out of ignorance. A cover letter is a way to show a hiring manager you have learned the rules.

5. Don't ask too much of a cover letter

Look, a good cover letter does not save your life. It's just sort of the icing on the cake. For example, a great cover letter for a job you'll hate is no good. So before you spend a lot of time on that cover letter, do the most important work of any job hunt: seek out resources for how to find a job you'll love