CollaborationIsAPositiveOutcome

Ira S Wolfe was a guest on "Behind the Lines" hosted by Diane Dayton. Diane interviewed Ira about his new book, The Perfect Labor Storm 2.0. The show is being broadcast several times this month on Blue Ridge Cable 11.

Ira will be testifying in front of the PA House of Representatives Committee on Aging and Older Workers on January 30. He will address the impact of an aging workforce and pending retirements on PA business.

And finally, Ira recently collaborated with Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder on a new book, The Coming Job Boom. Bonnie is the author of The Public School Parent's Guide to Success. The Coming Job Boom is the "ying" for the "yang" of The Perfect Labor Storm. While the Perfect Labor Storm is beginning to make managers feel like storm chasers looking for qualified workers, high school and college students must be smiling at this Upcoming Job Boom. For those young workers with the right skills and motivation, the job market will make these kids feel like - well, like kid's in a candy store! The book release is scheduled for April 2008. Watch for more info in future newsletters.

When speaking about the most desirable employee traits with managers these days, "collaboration" is almost always one of the first words out of the mouths of managers. Like many hyped management solutions, "collaboration" is being thrown around as the next miracle cure to fix a wide range of dysfunctional or ineffective employee and strategic behaviors. And that's a problem - a big, costly mistake when it comes to hiring and managing employees.

Despite the over-zealous application and grossly misunderstand benefits, collaboration is not only desirable but a pre-requisite for recruiting, managing, and retaining today's workforce. In fact, I'm willing to state here that collaboration is not only a required strategy for companies but core competency owned by every employee in the company. "Team-building" is no longer productive in its own right if harmony and consensus is the desired end-game. Collaboration must be the result.

But like mission statements that are hung on the wall with the expectation that every employee will walk and talk in step, hand-in-hand toward a common destination, collaboration is talked but not walked. Managers talk about working together to put differences aside but generally end up ignoring and accommodating un-collaborative employees. When conflict is not managed effectively, dysfunction reigns and performance suffers.

Collaboration as a positive outcome of conflict seems paradoxical to many people Conflict is the very thing that most managers strive to avoid. (Remember, last week's discussion of "harmony?") The common assumption that conflict is bad is wrong. Conflict is not only good but highly functional if the participants understand the rules and know how to play the game. Collaborative skills therefore should be a highly sought-after competency from here on out. What does a skilled collaborator look like:

Steps up to conflicts, seeing opportunities not problems,
Anticipates conflict, listens, and acknowledges all sides of the story.
Finds common ground and gets cooperation with a minimum of noise
Hammers out tough agreement, getting buy-in by integrating different perspectives (invigorating the forest by not ignoring the trees).

Sometimes it helpful to look at a skill by recognizing the behaviors of people who do not manage conflict effectively and bypass collaboration completely:

Avoids or ignores conflict.
Will let things fester rather than dealing with it (or them).
May try to get everyone to accommodate, to get along rather than addressing the real issues.
Gets upset when people disagree.
Takes conflict personally.
Tries to fix the problem before finding a solution.
Gives in and says yes too soon.
May be excessively competitive and have to win every dispute.

Next week: What in it for businesses and managers who understand the positive value of conflict.

Do you and your managers have the skill or potential to collaborate? Do your staff or partner meetings feel more like dysfunctional family dinners than professional planning sessions? Call us about building collaborative teams or hiring collaborative employees, call us at 800.803.4303 or 717.291.4640.

The construction industry will need an average of 185,000 new workers annually for the next 10 years to meet the nearly equal growth and replacement needs, according to a labor supply outlook released in January 2007 by the Construction Labor Research Council (CLRC)
The greatest demand in the next 10 years by craft will be for

"An actual shortage of bodies is highly unlikely," CLRC said of the future workforce. As has been typical in construction, there often is "a mismatch between skills available and skills required."

Read more about skilled worker shortages in the NEW Perfect Labor Storm 2.0 (soft and hard cover versions)

NEW Chapters! Generational Conflicts in the Workplace, Managing the Future Workforce, Attracting Young Employees in a Seller's Job Market plus hundreds of new facts, trends and stats.

To order Perfect Labor Storm 2.0, call 800.803.4303. Discounts for orders of 10 or more. Specify hard or soft cover.

Ever wonder how many hours are spent trying to fix a bad hire? You might want to be sitting down when you read this. Brad Smart (author of Topgrading) surveyed his readers about how many hours managers spend smoothing things over with the ticked off customer, unruffling feathers with co-workers and support staff, coaching and mentoring, lost opportunity, missed goals, performance meetings, severance packages and other distractions resulting from hiring the wrong person. What's not often considered is the time and resources spent trying to fix a wrong could be invested in mentoring and coaching high potentials.

Smart found the average time spent working with a mis-hire is 150 hours for an employee earning between $90,000 and $150,000. For anyone who ever said, "I don't have the time to spend recruiting and hiring top performers," let's follow that with, "but I have 150 hours to waste on managing the mis-hire!"

In the 2005 version of his book Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching, and Keeping the Best People Smart asked 52 companies to estimate the dollar cost of mis-hires. The results were astonishing: the average cost for someone earning $100,000 was $1.5 million.

What is Smart's message? Every time you avoid a mis-hire (of someone earning about $100,000 base) you save $1.5 million and 150 wasted hours.

Try JobClues ... a state-of-the-art, fast, affordable assessment tool guaranteed to help you make smarter, more informed hiring decisions.

Take the test yourself ... you'll be amazed at the accuracy of the assessment results ... and you'll immediately see how this tool will give you keen insights into a candidate's abilities and "fit" for the job you want to fill.

For a FREE JobClues report, click here or call toll-free at 800-803-4303 about our special unlimited use pricing.

March 4 - Hiring Right is Not Kid's Play: Fitting the Right Pegs in the Right Holes Business Solutions "On the Road" Harrisburg Regional Chamber. Location TBA

March 6 - National Human Resource Association, Pasadena, CA. Breakfast Keynote: Perfect Labor Storm 2.0

October 2008 (tentative) - American Staffing Association Annual Meeting - Workforce Trends That Change The Way You Will Do Business

"If you're the boss and your people fight you openly when they think you're wrong, that's healthy. If your people fight each others openly in your presence for what they believe in, that's healthy, But keep ALL conflict eyeball to eyeball."

Permission is granted to consultants, managers, business owners and HR professionals to reproduce content from this newsletter for your internal publications, or to distribute copies to your workforce, on the condition that you reproduce the credits and contact information as follows: "Reprinted with permission from Ira S Wolfe and Success Performance Solutions. Copyright 2008 Ira S Wolfe." We also hope you will forward the newsletter in its entirety and recommend to others that they subscribe.