(MEATY MORSELS FROM THE WEIRD AND WONDERFUL WORLD OF WORK)

“Becoming successful doesn’t happen overnight. Bite size offers some handy hints on how to get ahead without being obsequious” GET THE BUZZ! Listen carefully to other people’s voices and gauge the impact they have on you. Now record your own voice and try and gauge the impact this has on others. Encourage your colleagues to be honest with you: does your voice sound positive? A positive heart will lead to a positive voice   “LITTLE THINGS MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE” “Personalise Relationships” (See each member of your team as a human being) You can call it what you like, employee  relations or labour relations, but in the end  it is all about relationships. Successful business is built on motivated relationships and one essential stream of relationships is between team leaders and their teams. When these fail the business stops. Team leaders need to discover a whole world of of little personal things about each team member and thus build a relationship based on mutual personal interest. For Example How did John’s best friend’s party go? What does Aishah like to do at weekends? Has Laura completed her studies yet? Why is Samuel looking so grim? Can I see the photos of Gladys’ grandchildren? Being personal is synonymous with treating each employee as genuine human being. It means appreciating what makes them tick. What annoys them and what makes them come into work everyday. It means knowing something about their family as well as about their interest outside work. Being personal leads to a high degree of motivation. The converse, a totally impersonal approach inevitably leads to demotivation. But being personal is a two way process that involves revealing some personal aspects about yourself to team members. This helps create the necessary emotional connections and demonstrates that you too are a human being with a heart. Inevitably there are boundaries. Personalising relationships with team members is not synonymous with becoming intimate or even close to them. What it means is discovering innocuous areas of common interest within which a personal relationship can be grounded and built “A LEADER SHAPES AND SHARES A VISION WHICH GIVES POINT TO THE WORK OF OTHERS” By Charles Handy

10 STEPS TO SUCCESS

One in five people plan to start their own business. If you dream about being your own boss, but if you wonder if you’ve got it in you, then read on to discover the strengths that will make you successful.

YOU NEED:

MANAGEMENT ROLE MODELS

MAURICE CHENG
(CEO, INSTITUTE OF PAYROLL AND PENSIONS MANAGEMENT)
Says about Alan Charlesworth

The best manager I’ve ever worked for is Alan Charlesworth, who was managing director of (market research specialists) Mintel International Group when I joined the group as sales and marketing director in 1986.
I was recruited to expand Mintel’s information and research operation and had a solid track record in marketing and market research. Up until this point I’d had a successful consultancy career working at top-team level in blue chip companies but I had no clear idea about actual management skills. The biggest thing I learned from Alan was the importance of giving employees the freedom to act and not trying to micro manage them. He made sure you understood the goals and parameters of the game and put control mechanisms in place, but once you were up and running he left you alone. You knew though, he was there if you need him.
He was also one of the best marketers I have ever known. At Mintel, we had the opportunity to modify the whole research information product set practically from the ground up. He knew that effective marketing came down to working out where your product capability sits in the market and understanding how to create customer demand from this base – it’s really about having a strategic grasp of how a market functions, not just mailshots and slavishly following research.
Alan is still a good friend. We meet up every few months and often end up discussing work. Having been involved in advanced management training in the late 1990s, I have a real appreciation of the benefits of mentoring and tapping into the experience of others – I would describe Alan as the nearest thing I have to a mentor.
Organisations have a huge amount of creativity in their staff but many wall in it. Good management is not just about defining goals, it’s about taking a chance and knowing how creative you can go beyond the boundary. For me, this was a very liberating experience.

THE RISE OF THE MODERN MANAGER

Managers haven’t always enjoyed responsible and rewarding roles. Not so long ago they endured pitiful pay, no power and a distinct lack of prestige. Jennifer Davies charts the progress of management from low-status lackey to high powered professional.

If you cast your mind back 70 years, who do you imagine was sitting at your desk doing your job in 1936? Somebody similar to you perhaps – prime management material, with a portfolio of qualifications, plenty of relevant experience and a salary to match? The likelihood is that nobody was doing your job, as it probably didn’t exist. And even if it did, it would have been a far cry from the challenging, responsible role you enjoy today.
Seventy years ago, the term manager meant something totally different from today’s usage. Modern managers, with their prestigious positions and sophisticated skills sets, are a million miles away from their pre-war counterparts, who suffered low status, paltry pay and a chronic lack of skills. Today, qualified and professional managers are widely recognized as critical to the success of any business. But this wasn’t always the case. Management has undergone a series of transformationsin the last 70 years as the organisations and society within which managers operate have evolved .
            Before World War II, there just wasn’t the need for managers as we now know them. British business was still broadly dominated by the family firm. The vast majority of companies were small and the day-to-day running was done by the people who owned them – well-to-do families or cliques of owners. There was a gaping gulf between the workers and the owners, and managers were just another layer of bureaucracy – one rung above the workers but still worlds apart from the wealthy proprietors.
            ‘Before the war, managers had very low status,’ explains Professor John Wilson of Lancashire Business School. ‘Each department was run by a board of director and underneath him would be a manager, which effectively relegated them to a very subsidiary role.’ Managers were little more than paper-pushers with no power of their own, who earned low salaries and commanded little respect in society. There certainly weren’t any management qualifications as managers didn’t need them – their roles simply weren’t wide enough to warrant them.

A new dawn for management

            But all that began to change in the fifties and sixties, which heralded a new era for British management. Over this period the prevailing proprietorial system of business broke down as families and syndicates sold off their equity enmasse to professional investors and investment trusts. Suddenly, the people with money in a business had no desire to run it on a day-to-day basis. They needed knowledgeable, responsible people to run things on their behalf. They needed managers.
            As directors took a back seat, managers began to head up the divisions and make the decisions that had previously been the sole domain of the board. ‘There was a much greater degree of delegation of responsibility down to managers,’ explains Professor Wilson. ‘Managers moved from being very much junior people to professionals with status, qualifications and authority both internally and externally.’
            But despite this sea change in the prestige and responsibilities afforded to managers, there was little change in the skills needed to make it in these roles. Thanks to the intense merger activity of the time and the increasing American influence, businesses were getting bigger. They took their lead from the only large organizations around at the time, the armed forces, which meant the command and control of structure ruled supreme. Companies were organized along military lines, with workers slotting in to strict hierarchies and knowing their place in the structure. It was almost universally accepted that those few at the top would give orders that the many at the bottom would obey, meaning managers were largely required to do little more then tell people what to do and make sure they did it. They could rely on their position to give them power – a far cry from the wide range of motivational and influencing techniques in the modern management toolkit.
            Since the post-war revolution in organizational structures, we have seen a much more gradual evolution in management styles, techniques and skills. As the social, cultural and economic landscape has progressed from 1970, the rigid hierarchies that ruled British businesses have slowly eroded, to be replaced by more complete structures. ‘There’s been a massive change culturally, and we see it in the relationship between school teachers and children, government and the populace, and management and staff in organizations,’ explains Steve Tarpey of training specialists the Roffey Park Institute. ‘It’s no longer readily acceptable in the world to exercise direct authority, to use command and control techniques.’
            Sociologically, today’s workers – generation X and Y – are less accustomed to the idea of the all knowing authority figure. As divorce rates have risen, the assumption of pre-war generations – that all adults were reliable and had authority – has gone. People no longer expect those in charge to be utterly dependable, and instead rely on their friends, peers and networks. ‘That’s had a big impact on management and authority in organizations.’explains Professor Jonathan Gosling of the University of Exeter. ‘Workers aren’t so respectful, in a doffing their cap kind of way, of bosses. They know the boss is in charge but they don’t necessarily expect them to be right.

Financial Force  

Sustained economic change has also had a major impact on management, transforming the traditional managerial career path and expanding the workload. In the eighties and nineties, companies faced a huge increase in competition caused by the growing globalization of the marketplace. Many companies responded to these commercial pressures by making large numbers of managers redundant, sparking a wholesale rethink of the managerial career. ‘By the 1990s it was very clear that jobs for life were unsustainable.’ explains Dr. Tim Osborn Jones of Henly Management College. ‘Where once you would start as a graduate with a big blue chip company, follow their management development scheme and stay with the same organization until you were 65, that simply wasn’t the case any longer.’
            As companies laid off whole swathes of middle management, the relatively simple career map managers had traditionally enjoyed – start with one company, show your commitment and make your way up the ladder – swiftly disappeared. ‘Delayering removed several rungs of the career ladder, and that’s critical to the style of management career today – you can’t just keep taking nice neat steps.’ says Tim.
            But it wasn’t just managers being made redundant. Faced with an urgent need to downsize, the first thing many firms did was strip out their support staff. Where once even relatively junior managers had enjoyed secretarial support, as typing pools disappeared and all but the senior bosses lost their Pas, they were left to fend for themselves.
            This has had a knock-on effect on manager’s workloads, pushing time management and multi-tasking to the fore. ‘I think a lot of the long hours are down to admin,’ says Alan Redman, business psychologist at consultancy firm Criterion Partnership. ‘Managers aren’t putting in 60-hour weeks doing the leadership stuff, it’s not all the having a vision, it’s filling in spreadsheets, it’s going to policy meetings, it’s about the grind that 20 years ago there would have been any number of other people doing.’
            The technology explosion of the last two decades has only added to the administrative burden. ‘One of the offshoots of the technological revolution is that the e-mail has replaced the letter, the mobile phone has flourished,’ explains Roffey Park’s Steve Tarpey. But interestingly, as technology has advanced, a lot of the routine administrative work has flowed back into managerial roles. I think most people’s roles now encompass much more administration than they used to.’
The IT explosion has also played a pivotal role in the switch from an economy based on manufacturing to one that relies on information – the knowledge economy. In his 1988 essay, The Coming of the New Organisation, Peter Drucker predicted that, 20 years on, the typical large business would be knowledge-based, writing: ‘The centre of gravity in employment is moving fast from manual and clerical workers to knowledge workers who resist the command-and-control model.’
            Drucker was right – and it’s had repercussions for managers everywhere. The shift from an autocratic style of management towards the democratic demanded managers perfect a whole new portfolio of traits and techniques. Managing is no longer about making sure manual workers are producing goods at a sufficient rate. Increasingly, it’s about managing knowledgeable, valuable – and ever-more demanding – human capital. It is no longer enough to just tell people what to do; managers have to focus on influencing and involving their staff.
            Alan Redman recalls how, in the early nineties, Star Trek character Jean Luc Picard, captain of the Enterprise, was held up as a role model for contemporary managers. ‘His management style was about involving everyone in a decision while having the authority to make the right call.’ he explains. ‘It was a long way from the Captain Kirk style that we were used to.’
            As companies came to see their staff – and the knowledge they held in their heads – as their most valuable resources, managers were expected to ditch their traditional directing and delegating management styles in favour of coaching and supporting. ‘What we were expecting of our managers was a sense of “here’s what I want you to do, here are some ways you can do that, and here I am to help you do that and be interested in how you’re getting on,” says Alan. ‘That was in stark contrast to the manager who was constantly on your case telling you what to do and the other manager who was in their office not telling you much about anything.’

Great Expectations

The complex demands of employers and staff alike mean modern managers, unlike their pre-war paper pushing predecessors, need a highly sophisticated skills set to succeed in their roles. Where once you needed no qualifications to land a managerial job, ‘today we expect managers to be qualified, to have a certain personality, to be capable of performing a whole range of tasks,’explains Professor Wilson. ‘Not only that, managers are operating in a highly complex economic, social and political arena compared to their counterparts in the forties and fifties.’
            The last decade, in particular, saw the rise of emotional intelligence as a key managerial competence, along, with a growing emphasis on leadership. ‘Managers across the board are now expected to demonstrate leadership qualities,’ explains Alan Redman. We expect them to be able to inspire their staff to be creative, or embrace change, to bring people along with them through the force of charisma, vision and inspiration – and that’s a big task.’
            While it’s hard to imagine management undergoing another transformation on the post-war scale anytime soon, the gradual evolution that has characterized the last 50 years looks set to continue.
            Trends and techniques may come and go, but as technology advances apace and knowledge workers grow in value, one thing is certain: management is only going to get more challenging – and more vital to organizational success. And managers will need to have more tools at their disposal than ever before

LET'S LEARN ENGLISH

In Terror of English

English is really not a foreign language in Malaysia. In fact, by the decree of Ministry of Education, Malaysia, English is made the second language. Everywhere you go you can easily see advertisements and billboards in English. We have English newspapers and television and radio channels in English - thanks to ASTRO, TV Malaysia  - They offer more English programmes compared to Malay, Chinese or Indian programmes. So imagine my surprise when in my course of being a trainer I’ve met quite a number of working people who claimed that they are terrified of the English language, particularly for oral communication. My first reaction was, “Really? You’re afraid of English? But why?” Mind you, this was my reaction when I was still green in my training experience. Nothing much faze me now… I hope. Okay, back to the issue at hand.  I can understand if they told me that they don’t like to use the language or they feel unpatriotic, but being terrified is a whole different matter already. It doesn’t matter where they work, be it in government agencies or in the private sector, many seemed to share this fear. In the end most of them opt for the easy way out – by refusing to use English at all. Of course, they may slip-in one or two commonly used words of English in a sentence when they are speaking, but overall they prefer to fall back on the national language or their own mother tongues. What could actually be the reason(s), you may ask.
So now let me tell you the why of it.  Many say that they are afraid of making mistakes particularly in terms of grammar and structure.  So rather than making grammatically or structurally wrong sentences, they prefer not to use it at all. Another reason says that they developed the fear because their environment do not provide them room to practice the language, so when they are thrown in a situation where they have to use the language, they become terrified. Lack of vocabularies is next in line. Having to struggle for words embarrass them.  In fact some are also afraid to use English because people might laugh at them for their mistakes.  To write in English is even worse because then there is visual proof of their mistakes. Well, I am not discarding these reasons as being unimportant or unrealistic. Like any other problem, any reason for it is a huge reason because it is a personal reason. However, what we have to ponder on is the counter-reasoning - why is it crucial for working people to overcome this fear?
It is essential to change the mindset in order to discourage this fear of English. To do so, the easiest way is to show them the advantages of acquiring this language.  First and foremost, having the skills to communicate in English is a step towards career advancement. Those who can, be it in written or oral English, in general are easily recognised by their superiors. Once you’re recognised, you tend to be given more trusts and opportunities which in turn would give you a higher possibility of a promotion or salary increment. Another is self-advancement. In today’s world without border, information highway is at its most efficient. The majority of information is delivered in English language. Therefore, you can be one the people who can educate themselves and improve your knowledge particularly in matters regarding your profession. This can also be turned into career opportunities and advancement. It also opens up more options for you in terms of work employment. These are just a few among many more benefits that you can reap by having the ability to communicate in English.
Now that you know the advantages you need to know the ways to improve yourself. The old age advice is to read more English materials. Well, I would not say this is a fast cure for all because not everybody learn the quickest way through reading. If you go along with the Multiple Intelligence theory, those with verbal-linguistic intelligence might be. If you do belong to this group of people then, you should read more English stuff particularly those with more conversational input like dramas, plays or novels. Read the dialogue aloud to practise the pronunciation and intonation use in different situation. The practice will help you be more familiar in using the language.
However for those who are not in this group, you could try watching English movies, series or documentaries. So get some DVDs to help you. Instead of just watching and listening to it, you should copy or imitate the way the actor/speaker says different sentences. That would quicken the way you grasp the usage. You will also learn to use the right grammar/structure automatically as you are taking each sentence as a whole. You will also learn to use it in context.
Another way to practise, if your environment does not provide you with room for it is by listening to the radio – English station of course. So what you can do is try to respond to DJ’s comments in English. Speak aloud, as if you’re talking to him or her. This way you train your brain to structure sentences and find appropriate words to use. If you keep this practice up, your brain will familiarize itself with the language and store up more information/vocabularies subconsciously.
These are among the few ways that you can administer on your own. Of course, the surest way of building up English language competencies is by enrolling yourself in a class. Not just a short two-day class. I assure you there is no miracle worker that can suddenly make you proficient in just two days. A longer duration course would be better to help you familiarize with the language and keep you on the right track, practice wise. So invest and enroll yourself in this type of courses and gain the tool for your career advancement. Best of luck then.
Sincerely,
Kay.

FOR YOUR INFO, KAY’S PROFILE IS AS FOLLOWS:

Name  :  Ms NOOR KHAIRIL AKMAR BT. MOHD ALI
Status  :  Associate Trainer of TNI
Specialization : 
Communication and Presentation Skills using the English Language  as the means to communicate;Subtitling from English to B.M. and vice-versa; Translation  from English to B.M. and vice versa; Management and Marketing   
Description :
Ms Noor Kharil, oftenly known as “Kay” has 10 years of experience in teaching and training. She has taught in both the public and private sectors which gave her an insight to the problems and issues of English learning and usage in this country. She has also conducted workshops and gave talks to various organisations, schools and universities, both locally and internationally.  She was also involved in providing consultation, developing modules and training for the “train-the-trainer”, team building and customer service programmes.
Qualifications: Bachelor of Education in TESOL, University of Southampton, UK
Working Experience :
Annkay Knowledge SB – Partner/Chief Human Resource Officer
Cyberlynx      Multimedia SB. – Content Development Manager
Cyberlynx Language Centre – Assistant manager – Corporate Training
INPENS College – Head of English language unit
Nilai College – English lecturer