Your #Career : Job Stability? 5 Types of Employees That Companies Don’t Want Anymore…Are you a Hard Worker? Are you Loyal? That’s Great, But those Attributes Don’t Necessarily Mean you’ll Stay Employed (or Even Get a New Job).

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In the modern work world, it takes more than just proving you’ll stay put; you have to actually prove your worth to your employer. Know that there are certain types of employees companies don’t value as much as before. If you’re one of these types of workers, beware, you may have a hard time getting ahead.

Free- Direction Rail Tracks

Here are five types of employees companies don’t want anymore.

1. The flat liner

When you first started working for your company you had plenty of goals and fresh ideas. Now, all you want to do is get your check and go home. You’re either suffering from burnout, tired, or just don’t care anymore. It’s time to start caring. If you don’t get some motivation and develop ways to contribute to the company, your employer may eventually show you the door. Management expert Jeff Schmitt said this type of employee has simply stopped trying to learn. “We’ve all worked with them. They’re just there, biding their time and collecting a check. No goals. No plan. No purpose. Years ago, they were among the young Turks who begged for more responsibility. Now, they’ve mentally checked out…No, they’re not introverts who mask their passions. They’re simply employees who quit learning and getting better,” said Schmitt.

 

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2. The martyr

This is the opposite of the flat liner. You would do anything for the benefit of your employer. No request is too much. The word “no” never leaves your lips. Work every weekend for the next five weeks? No problem. Miss the birth of your first child? You got it. Years ago employers loved this level of dedication, but that’s not the case anymore. That’s because the martyr is a potential liability. You’re just one sleepless night away from making a critical error. This is why cloud communication company GetVOIP said this type of employee is actually toxic to the work environment. “The polar opposite of the slacker may seem like an employer’s dream, but a worker who insists on doing everything themselves can cause their own serious set of problems … They may have control issues, or may be working too hard to prove themselves, but they bring an imbalance to the team, foster unrest in the ranks, and are at risk of burnout,” said GetVOIP contributor Reuben Yonatan.

3. The ghost

You lack visibility and you like it that way. Your goal is to fly under the radar: Come to work, finish your projects, and go home. Your desire is to avoid conflict so you can hang on another day. The problem is, being invisible doesn’t work for very long. Being a ghost won’t protect you, it may actually hurt you in the long-run because no one will know what skills you bring to the table. Don’t let your fears of getting let go cause you to hide. Your employer won’t have the time to figure out your value when it’s time for layoffs. What’s even worse is you may be confused for a slacker. Management expert Patty Azzarello said avoiding visibility is a bad idea.

I find that very often when people take this position, they believe that they are on the high ground—that they are somehow morally superior to those who are more visible. And that being visible is, by definition, a shallow, self-serving endeavor. There are three issues with this:

1. If you choose to “fly under the radar,” don’t be confused or upset when you get passed over for raises and promotions. This was your strategy— to make sure no one knows you are there!

2. You are missing the opportunity to do better, more effective, more valuable work, if you don’t connect with others to increase your access to knowledge, experience and learning from others.

3. You are withholding value from the company by not sharing what you have learned with others. There is nothing political about communicating things of value and sharing knowledge. And when you do this, guess what?—you are no longer invisible!

4. The lifer

This type of employee is rare, but they still exist. If you’re one of them, it’s time to change up your plan. Staying with a company for a while can be good, but not if your career has stalled and you don’t have any plans to make a significant contribution. Companies want more than dedication, they want results. Years ago, loyalty was rewarded, but things have changed. So if you’re looking for a pat on the back for coming to work every day, you’ll be waiting for a very long time. So stop counting your perfect attendance for the last 10 years as major accomplishment.

Andrew G. Rosen, founder of career site Jobacle, said being a lifer can lead to complacency. “This can sneak up on you like the flu in the summer … Every season, you should reflect on your job and think about how a hiring agent will perceive your tenure. Are you becoming the lifer you promised you’d never be? If the work no longer excites you and the company is not willing to invest in you, it’s time to find an organization that will,” said Rosen. So if you’re a lifer who is making significant contributions and you’re learning new skills, good for you. But if you’re a lifer just sitting around until it’s time to retire, you may find yourself out of a job sooner rather than later.

5. The trainee

Sure, everyone needs a bit of training every now and then, but if you don’t have the basic skills required to do your job, you’ve got a problem. Employers just don’t have the time to hold your hand. “The Washington Post has a great piece from Peter Cappelli about how the ‘skills shortage’ that people like to blame on schools (and on college students’ choice of focus in their studies) is BS … and that the real issue is that employers just don’t want to train people anymore,” said Alison Green, founder of the website Ask a Manager.

Follow Sheiresa on Twitter and Facebook.

 

CheatSheet.com | May 4, 2016 | 

#Leadership : What To Do When A Key Hire Quits…TAKE A DEEP BREATH. It Always Hurts When a Key Contributor Leaves, But There are Ways to Deal with it That Can Ease the Pain.

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A great member of your team just came to you with an unexpected resignation. I’m sure you’re somewhere between being upset that you’re being deserted and worried about what you are going to do to handle that person’s contributions. Maybe you’re even more concerned that this will be the start of an avalanche—how many more people are thinking about leaving?+

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Sad businessman sitting at workplace and trying to find solution of problem

I know it’s a big loss and a big hassle to have to deal with a key hire departing, but, it’s totally normal and manageable.  Get through the pain quickly and elegantly, and get yourself back  as fast as possible.

TAKEA DEEP BREATH. If you’re successful, this is a scenario you’ll experience many times in your career. It always hurts when a key contributor leaves, but there are ways to deal with it that can ease the pain.

Here are my recommendations for when you hear that you’re about to lose someone who means a lot to the organization:

Find out why they are leaving.  Are they running away from something or running toward something?  Do they have their heads on straight regarding the situation?

Are they salvageable?  If there is something wrong, can you fix it?

  • I always use additional compensation as a last resort, as it’s usually not compensation that makes them want to leave.
  • If you can fix it, is the person mature enough to re-commit and be wholly engaged? You only want people onboard who are fully engaged.

 

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If you decide they are salvageable, still do a gut check and make sure you’re not getting gamed. Sometimes people use the threat of leaving as a way to angle for more money. Unfortunately, people sometimes do disingenuous things.

Be very careful not to build an entitlement culture where people think if they threaten to quit, they become eligible for a promotion. That makes costs go crazy and makes you powerless. Reserve the times you are willing to get gamed for one percent of the employee population—the true talent—not 30-50 percent of the people who are trying to get a better offer. Only go through heroics for the true stars. Everyone knows what’s happening and you have to be careful about how they see you responding. If not, soon everyone will be at your door with a counter offer and request for a raise and promotion. How can you tell what’s what? Probe where they are going, then tell them that it sounds like a great opportunity and that if it doesn’t work out, they are welcome to come back.

If they will definitely be leaving, can you negotiate a transition plan that is beneficial for both of you?  Can you get their agreement to help out in a pinch even if they are in a new job?

Treat them with respect and dignity on the way out.  Celebrate their contributions and let them know they are welcome back if things don’t work out where they are going.

But remember, you need to celebrate the people who stay and do good work as much as—or more than—the folks that leave.  Several times I’ve heard people say they only received recognition when they left (the squeaky wheel gets all the oil syndrome), which leads to very bad cultural dynamics.

  • Make sure the team knows that the departing person will be missed, but talk about the actions you and they can take to ensure that the company will still achieve its dreams.
  • Recognize that this is a great opportunity for someone else to step up and get a promotion.

Finally, look back and assess whether this was a surprise. Did you see it coming?  Make it a point to proactively know where all your key talent’s heads are and work hard to keep them motivated and in the game.

I know it’s a big loss and a big hassle to have to deal with a key hire departing, but, it’s totally normal and manageable.  Get through the pain quickly and elegantly, and get yourself back to terra firma as fast as possible.

 

Forbes.com | May 3, 2016 | Maynard Webb

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Your #Career: Passed Over for a Promotion? Your Next Steps…Turn a Rejection into Bigger & Better Future Jobs With these Strategies to Make Yourself a Stronger Candidate

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Nobody likes being passed over for a promotion, but it can be a defining moment in a career. Individuals willing to stay put and strengthen their skills often find that such rejection can lead to bigger and better things, several leadership specialists say.

Free- Door to Building

​Few people avoid this common setback. Fred Hassan, a former chief executive of ​Schering-Plough Corp. and Pharmacia Corp., was rejected for a senior corporate strategy job at ​another pharma company early in his career.

Mr. Hassan says he kept his cool and instead accepted a less prestigious promotion that required him to relocate. It’s important “to carefully evaluate options outside that department or even outside the company,” he says.

It is tempting to quit after losing out on a plum job. Since November 2014, executives at big businesses such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. , Pfizer Inc., Procter & Gamble Co. andAbercrombie & Fitch Co., have walked away after failing to win a top executive role. Tom Staggs, Walt Disney Co.’s second in command, decided to step down this spring after learning he wasn’t likely to succeed CEO Robert Iger.

For most of us, it’s smarter to stay on, experts say.

“A promotion turndown initially feels like the end of your career, but could propel you further if you take time to reflect,’’ saidHeather Vough, an assistant management professor at University of Cincinnati’s business school. She recommends using the rejection to​ review career goals and decide whether you still yearn to fill the position.

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​Ms. Vough​ co-authored a recent paper about finding success after denied promotions. One tip for explaining a rejection to others: come up with a “growth-based” narrative that attributes the setback to internal and controllable causes, such as inexperience, organizational politics or budgetary issues.

Employers are often willing to help. Amid a stronger economy, more companies are giving frank feedback to runners-up because they “realize they need to do a better job of retaining their top performers,’’ says John Beeson, author of “The Unwritten Rules: The Six Skills You Need to Get Promoted to the Executive Level.”

In turn, those denied a promotion should “show a mature desire to learn from the experience,’’ advises Mr. Beeson, who has an executive-development consultancy. Don’t ask why you didn’t get the job. Instead, ask what specific things you could do to be a strong candidate for a similar job in the future, he says.

TO RECOVER FROM A DENIED PROMOTION

Do:

  • 1. Review your career goals.
  • 2. Ask your boss how to become a stronger candidate in the future.
  • 3. Expand your leadership skills and critical work experiences.
  • 4. Find ways to showcase your talents inside and outside the workplace.

Don’t:

  • 1. Lose your cool and act angry
  • 2. Ask why you didn’t get the desired job.
  • 3. Hesitate to put your hand up again for a promotion.
  • 4. Stay with your current employer if you’ve been passed over several times.

Kenneth Miller, a vice president of the diabetes-care unit at Becton, Dickinson & Co., told his boss that he felt honored to have been a contender for world-wide president of his unit after the Franklin Lakes, N.J., medical-technology company picked another executive for that post in the fall of 2013.

The winner had stronger operational capabilities than Mr. Miller, the unit’s exiting president told him, adding that if he continued to develop, he would someday land the role. Becton arranged leadership training for Mr. Miller and retained Mr. Beeson as his executive coach.

During the yearlong training program, Mr. Miller says he discovered that “I could be tough on standards and tenderhearted with people.” Mr. Beeson taught the Becton executive how to delegate responsibility better.

Mr. Miller enhanced his operational acumen by managing his unit’s financial forecasting and budget-setting process. He soon became a vice president of a larger unit. In February 2015, he rejoined the diabetes-care business as president.

“I had grown a lot over the past year and a half,” Mr. Miller recalls. “I was much better prepared than in 2013.”

Other executives flourish after the denial of a promotion because they conceal their bruised ego and find smart ways to showcase their talents. “Make yourself mandatory for your company,’’ suggests Alexandre Wentzo, a French-born executive.

Several years ago, Mr. Wentzo was running operations in France for Casewise Ltd., a small British software vendor. When the CEO departed in late 2009, the executive chairman of the firm took command temporarily.

Mr. Wentzo expected the chairman would choose a global chief operating officer. Instead, he named Mr. Wentzo and an American new hire as regional COOs, launching a horse race for the top job. “The best guy will win,” the chairman told the two.

Mr. Wentzo says he felt somewhat offended that he wasn’t selected for a global role. “I was thinking, ‘Why? Am I not good enough?’ ” He nevertheless pretended to support his boss’s decision, while aiming to prove “I was better than the other guy.”

Mr. Wentzo thrived in his new job. Financial results for Europe, one of his regions, beat internal growth targets and overtook those for the U.S. within six months, he says. Casewise fired his American counterpart and in 2012 elevated Mr. Wentzo to chief executive, Mr. Wentzo says.

At General Electric Co., an ambitious executive used a different strategy after a promotion turndown, involving associates at a variety of levels to help improve her leadership abilities.

‘Show a mature desire to learn from the experience.’ —John Beeson, author of “The Unwritten Rules: The Six Skills You Need to Get Promoted to the Executive Level.”

The GE vice president had pursued a senior vice presidency within her unit during summer 2011. “One of her identified strengths was her aggressiveness,’’ recalls Adam Holton, who then was human-resources manager for the unit. (He now is chief human resources officer at CHS Inc., the biggest U.S. farmer cooperative.)

“She drove her people too hard,’’ Mr. Holton says​ of the executive, who did not want her name used in this article. The promotion went to a male peer whom managers viewed as a more inclusive leader. The woman immediately asked Mr. Holton how she should change. He advised her to build more trust among her subordinates. In response, she prepared a detailed developmental plan that she regularly reviewed with Mr. Holton and her boss.

She also solicited—and acted on—feedback from colleagues above and below her about her relationship-building skills. For instance, she began to give her lieutenants “the freedom and latitude to fail on things,’’ according to Mr. Holton.

The GE executive finally became a senior vice president in July 2012. And in October 2014, she landed a fresh senior spot with even bigger responsibilities.

Write to Joann S. Lublin at joann.lublin@wsj.com

 

WSJ.com | April 19, 2016 | Joann S. Lublin

 

Your #Career : How Do You Survive Office Competition?…Hypercompetitors Spark Strong Reactions in Colleagues, from Fighting Back to Shutting Down; Warriors vs. Worriers

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Every office has at least one—the hypercompetitive employee who’s out to win at all costs. These adversarial types go beyond striving for success. They turn every endeavor into a competition, whether it is intended to be or not, psychologists say. And they spark strong reactions in colleagues, from fighting back to just shutting down.

Free- Man at Desktop

 

Competition is often healthy and encouraged at work, of course. People who compete in a healthy way see it as a route to developing their skills, reaching shared goals, staying motivated and thriving on the job.

Research on hypercompetitors sets them apart. Intense rivalry is linked with a win-at-any-cost mind-set and a tendency to ignore the perspectives and decisions of others, according to a 2010 study at Harvard University. Other research shows highly competitive people focus on attaining status over getting work done, and readily put their own interests above others’.

HEALTHY OR HYPER?

How competitive are you? To find out, answer ‘true’ or ‘false’ to the following questions.

  • 1. Winning in competition makes me feel more powerful as a person.
  • 2. I do not see my opponents in competition as my enemies.
  • 3. I like competition because it teaches me a lot about myself.
  • 4. I can’t stand to lose an argument.
  • 5. Competition can lead to forming new friendships with others.
  • 6. Failure or loss in competition makes me feel less worthy as a person.
  • 7. It doesn’t bother me to be passed by someone while I am driving on the roads.
  • 8. Competition does not help me develop my abilities.
  • 9. Success in athletic competition does not make me feel superior to others.
  • 10. If I can disturb my opponent in some way to get the edge, I will do so.

Scoring: Answering ‘true’ to questions 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9 and 10 reveals a tendency toward hypercompetitiveness. Those who answer ‘true’ only to 3, 5 and 8 tend to have a healthy attitude toward competition.

Source: Richard Ryckman et al., Journal of Personality Assessment.

 

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Hypercompetitive people tend to ignore their impact on others, so getting them to change often requires pointing out that they’re hurting themselves.

How we react to competition varies widely. People may be conditioned by childhood experiences to see a hypercompetitive colleague as a challenge—and to respond by trying harder—or as a threat, triggering a retreat into fear and anxiety.

It is rooted partly in genetics: Scientists have identified a “warrior” variant of a gene linked to performance under pressure, which confers an advantage in threatening situations, and a “worrier” variant linked to poor performance, according to a 2015 study by researchers at Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest.

These tendencies shape early decision-making. College students who are competitive by nature tend to aim toward competitive jobs, such as coaching, according to a 2015 study led by John M. Houston, a psychology professor at Rollins College, Winter Park, Fla. Those who are less competitive train for more collaborative jobs, such as school counseling.

People who become anxious and shy away from hypercompetitors in the workplace often hurt their own performance, says Shelley Reciniello, a New York psychologist and author of “The Conscious Leader.” After a rival confronted one executive with a harsh critique of her speaking skills, “she lost her footing. It started to get to her,” and the executive began stumbling during presentations, Dr. Reciniello says.

Such confrontations can stir a visceral response so powerful that it blindsides people, she says. “They know they feel angry, they feel sick, they feel sad. They find themselves having revenge fantasies,” Dr. Reciniello says.

Equally at risk on the job are those who prefer to sit out any competition. “Some people don’t even want to compete,” says Steve Sims, chief product officer for Badgeville, a Redwood City, Calif., maker of gamelike motivational tools for the workplace. If you show such a person a leaderboard of the top 10 performers in the office, “that person will drop out.”

Patti Johnson first noticed a colleague’s hypercompetitive behavior when she was vying with the woman for a promotion years ago. She withheld information Ms. Johnson needed to do her job, and took credit with the boss for work they had done together, says Ms. Johnson, chief executive officer of PeopleResults, a Dallas human-resources and change-management consulting firm.

“I realized it was part of my job, to manage her,” Ms. Johnson says. She insisted the boss include her in meetings on joint projects and kept her boss well-informed about her contributions, she says. “I made it more and more difficult for her to throw tacks on the road.”

At times, the presence of super-competitive people can spur others to achieve more. Jay Bower says feeling overmatched early in his career by warrior types with Ivy League M.B.A.s drove him to study nights for 4½ years to get his M.B.A. too. Knowing he lacked skills his co-workers had “was kind of a searing experience for me,” says Mr. Bower, president of Crossbow Group, a Westport, Conn., marketing-services firm.

Deciding whether to confront an ultracompetitive colleague can be tricky. “It depends on the situation. You have to look at what you stand to lose,” says Susan Packard, author of “New Rules of the Game,” a book about how women can compete in the workplace. A little political maneuvering by a rival might not hurt much. But if a hypercompetitor starts interfering with your career goals, or with the funding or resources you need to do your job, you have to act, she says.

The first step is to be aware of your own reactions. Then, practice confronting co-workers, if necessary, to insist that they stop undercutting teammates or shared goals.

Gather specific examples of the hypercompetitor’s bad behavior and the reactions it caused. A hypercompetitor won’t understand what you’re asking unless you explain the behaviors that need to end, saysJessica Bigazzi Foster, a senior partner with RHR International, a Chicago leadership and business-psychology consulting firm. Prepare to explain how the behavior is hurting the business or the team.

​Consider practicing what you plan to say with a friend, to help control your emotions, and write a script if necessary to keep the conversation on track, Dr. Reciniello says. Super-competitive people “will do everything to get you off point.”

Start on a positive note, says Elaine Varelas, managing partner of Keystone Partners, such as, “You’re very successful and I appreciate that. What I find very difficult in working with you is that you don’t share information.” Then give examples and describe the behavior you’d like in the future, she says.

Employees who are stuck with a hypercompetitive colleague may not get much help from the boss, at least at first. The dark side of a hypercompetitor often goes unnoticed because the boss “is seeing this aggressive, results-oriented person,” says Ralph Roberto, president of Keystone Partners, a Boston career-management consultant.

It can be tough for a boss to crack down on a hypercompetitive employee. Bill Fish sees competition as a motivator. When an aggressive sales agent at his company, ReputationManagement.com, accumulated an oversized roster of clients, he initially hesitated to take clients away from him, thinking the competition was fueling sales, says Mr. Fish, president of the Cincinnati provider of reputation-management services. “He wasn’t thinking about anybody else. At first, I really didn’t see it as a bad thing,” he says. After customers began to complain that the agent wasn’t responding quickly to their requests, however, he realized that the agent’s uber-competitiveness was hurting the business and made him share the load.

Hypercompetitive people tend to ignore their impact on others, so getting them to change often requires pointing out that they’re hurting themselves. David Hoffeld once managed a top-performing salesman who needled co-workers, saying, “Maybe you should work harder, because I’ve noticed I’m always higher than you on the leaderboard,” says Mr. Hoffeld, chief executive officer of a Minneapolis sales-training firm. “It didn’t spur his co-workers to work harder. It just made them angry.”

Mr. Hoffeld took the salesman aside and pointed out that he was alienating his co-workers, making them less willing to help him out on big projects in the future. The salesman changed his behavior.

Write to Sue Shellenbarger at sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com

 

WSJ.com | April 20, 2016 |  Sue Shellenbarger

Your #Career : Best Money Moves When You Get Laid Off…The First Quarter of 2016 saw 76% More Job Cuts than the Last Quarter of 2015

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If you’ve ever been laid off, you know how it stings. I’ve been there, too, and, sadly, growing numbers of workers have lost their jobs lately. The first quarter of 2016 saw 76% more job cuts than the last quarter of 2015, according to global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

fired-layoffs-let-go-box-leaving-work-3

If you become an unfortunate victim, you’ll have a myriad of financial decisions to deal with pronto. And they’ll demand clear thinking. So, just in case a job loss happens to you — or if it recently did — here are nine money moves you need to make:

1. Ask the nitty-gritty questions. Find out whether “any severance is being offered, whether the company has a written severance policy, when your insurance will be cut off, and — possibly most importantly — why you are being fired,” says Donna Ballman, author of Stand Up for Yourself Without Getting Fired. “You’ll need this information when you apply for unemployment, if you want to talk to an attorney about potential legal claims, when you apply for a new job and when you have your next doctor’s visit,” counsels Ballman.

(More: 5 Ways to Prepare for a Possible Job Loss)

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2. Get your employment-related financial stuff. If it’s not a quick shuffle out of the building with Security or HR, tap into your computer and make copies of: documentation of anything your employer owes you (say, commissions and bonuses); any employment agreements, confidentiality agreements and non-compete agreements you signed; your performance reviews, commendations, awards, disciplines, recommendation letters and anything else about your work that might be useful to a lawyer or to your state unemployment compensation agency, advises Ballman.

3. Scrutinize any severance agreement. It could contain a non-compete clause blocking you from working at certain places, for example. “Be clear on the restrictions you’re agreeing to in exchange for a severance payout. Be certain you aren’t giving up vested benefits. The agreement should clearly state the status and amounts of your 401(k), stock options or pensions,” says Ballman.

(More: Don’t Let a Job Loss Harm Your Retirement)

Your best move is to tell HR or your boss that you need some time to evaluate any severance agreement. If you’re being asked to sign something you don’t fully understand, don’t. First, talk to an employment lawyer; you can find one near you at the National Employment Lawyers Association website.

4. Examine your final paycheck. “You may be entitled to payout of all your accrued paid time off or vacation pay if the company doesn’t have a use-it-or-lose-it policy or if your state requires it,” says Ballman. If you’re paid by the hour, check to be sure you’ve been compensated for all the hours and overtime you worked.

5. Line up health insurance. Many employers cut off your health insurance the day you lose your job; some continue it to the end of the month. Initially, if you don’t have a spouse or partner’s health plan to fall back on, you might opt for landing coverage through COBRA (The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act), which lets you to buy it under your ex-employer’s group plan, generally for 18 to 36 months.

Some employers subsidize or pay the entire cost of health coverage, including COBRA coverage, for terminating employees and their families as part of a severance agreement. You’ll have 60 days to decide whether to sign up for COBRA; the insurance is retroactive to your loss of coverage date.

Your other option: buy an individual health plan from your state insurance marketplace or directly from an insurer.

Losing job-based coverage is a “qualifying life event,” allowing you to enroll anytime, not just during the normal Open Enrollment period.

If you’ll need health insurance between the time you lose your job-based coverage and when a Marketplace policy starts (for example, you or a family member needs medical care), you may want to sign up for COBRA, since it’ll continue providing benefits until your Marketplace plan kicks in.

6. Consider replacing any employer-sponsored life or disability insurance you had. If you purchased either type of coverage this way, you may want to buy your own policy now. If so, compare prices by using online insurance brokers such as Accuquote.com, FindMyInsurance.com, andLifeInsure.com.

7. File for unemployment insurance. “Some people hesitate to apply,” says Ballman. “Why? It’s your money. What do you think they’ve been paying in from your paycheck all this time? It may not be a lot of money, but it will help tide you over.” Apply by contacting your state’s unemployment agency as soon as you are fired or laid off.

Whether you’ll qualify for unemployment benefits depends on your state. To check your local law, visit the “Find Local Help” area of the U.S. Department of Labor’s CareerOneStop site. Before taking any freelance assignments or a part-time job, read your state’s unemployment insurance rules; some work may reduce your benefit.

8. Be sure you get all your vested retirement funds. Any of your 401(k) contributions belong to you, of course, but your employer’s contributions (or matches) typically must be vested before they’re yours. You’ll vest, or own, a certain percentage of your employer’s contributions each year once you qualify for them.

9. Manage your retirement account. Chances are, when you leave your employer, you’ll want to transfer your accumulated retirement savings to aself-directed IRA that offers you more investment choices.

After you receive the funds from your employer plan, you have 60 days to complete the rollover to an IRA or other tax-deferred plan. Wait too long and the amount will be taxed as ordinary income; if you were younger than 59½ when the distribution occurred, you’ll face a 10% penalty, too. A direct rollover straight to an IRA or a plan at your next employer is best, so the money never comes into your hands. Ask your plan administrator to make the payment directly to another retirement plan or to an IRA.

You can, alternatively, leave the money in your ex-employer’s plan, and sometimes that’s more cost effective. Large corporations often negotiate with financial service firms for lower fees than you can get on your own in an IRA account.

My advice: Meet with a financial adviser to figure out what’s best for you. As a rule, I think an adviser should have the Certified Financial Planner designation, awarded by the nonprofit Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards.

Just don’t cash out your 401(k) balance. If you do, you’ll owe income tax on any withdrawals and possibly that 10% penalty. As I wrote in this Next Avenue post, extracting retirement money before retirement is a weighty problem; nearly 45% of workers cash out their retirement accounts when changing jobs, according to the Women’s Institute for Secure Retirement (WISER).

The last thing you need after losing your job is a wallop from the Internal Revenue Service.

Forbes.com | May 1, 2016 | Kerry Hannon, Contributor

#Leadership : How To Deliver Bad News To Your Boss…It May Seem Like there’s No Good Way to Deliver Bad News To the Boss. But When you Deliver Bad News in a Way that Increases the Boss’s Feeling of Confidence in Your Competence

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Sometimes the boss might say, “What happened?” But there are plenty times when it doesn’t matter what went wrong.

Free- Pull Tab on Can

 

It may seem like there’s no good way to deliver bad news to the boss. But when you deliver bad news in a way that increases the boss’s feeling of confidence in your competence to handle the bad news and that gives the boss a sense of control, you can actually deepen your working relationship with the boss.

How do we do this?

Number one is offering a little bit of control. This is as easy as walking into the boss’s office and saying, “Is now a good time to talk?” Let the boss decide. It may not be the right moment; maybe the boss is in the midst of prepping for the big board meeting.

Step two is sharing that there’s some bad news. All you want to say is, “I have some bad news about the Johnson account.” Don’t downplay the situation by saying, “I have some news that you may not love.” Soft-pedaling bad news is likely to backfire and drive the boss to say, “What do you mean? This is the most horrible thing ever and you’re sitting there like this is not that bad. What are you, nuts?” Downplaying bad news undermines the boss’s confidence in your competence.

And downplaying a troublesome situation is going to be extremely bad if your boss is among the 25% of people who are Analytical Communicators. These folks like hard data, real numbers, and tend to be suspicious of people who aren’t in command of the facts and data, or try to sugarcoat, cover-up, etc. (You can take this free communication styles assessment to assess your particular style and then use that insight to diagnose your boss as well).

 

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Step three is to make sure the boss understands what the heck you’re talking about. So again, we say, “Boss, do you have a few minutes to talk? I’ve got some bad news about the Johnson account. Are you familiar with the work we’re doing on the Johnson account?”

Don’t take it for granted that the Johnson account is forefront in the boss’s mind. Sometimes the organization is too big and the boss doesn’t automatically know every single thing that’s going on. The boss may say, “Yes, I’m familiar with the Johnson account,” or the boss may say, “I don’t know the Johnson account; catch me up?” If it’s the latter, be prepared to give a concise response such as: “We’ve been working on the Johnson proposal for the past six months.” Provide only the necessary context for the bad news you’re about to share.

Approximately 19% of people are Functional Communicators. They like process, detail, timelines and well-thought-out plans. They like to communicate things in a step-by-step fashion so nothing gets missed. And if your boss is one of these folks, they will really appreciate having some background and context so that they feel totally up to speed. (You can dig deeper into these communication styles in my Forbes article “Which Of These 4 Communication Styles Are You?”)

The fourth step is to factually deliver the evidence. About 26% of people are Intuitive Communicators, and they want you to cut right to the chase. They don’t need every single piece of history or emotional musings; they really want to skip right to the end point. So you might say “After working with the Johnson account for a year and a half in what we thought was a very stable relationship, they’ve just called in three other firms to bid on the work that we’re doing with them.”

What you don’t want to say is, “I don’t want you to worry. I think this is going to be okay, but the Johnson account called in three other firms.” What the boss wants is a) the necessary information but also b) enough information to know that you grasp the seriousness of the situation. You don’t want to go in and say the sky is falling, “Oh my, gosh. This is the worst. It’s awful. We’re all going to die because they called in three other firms and just shoot me now!” That’s not fact-based communication. That’s histrionic. We don’t want that, but we also don’t want, “Don’t you worry. It’s going to be fine.” Neither of these approaches will increase the boss’s confidence in your abilities.

Now, once we’ve presented the evidence, we’re going to offer the boss a bit more control. We’re going to ask them, “That’s the situation. I have a few thoughts on some possible solutions. Is that something you would like to hear about right now?” The boss won’t always be looking for your solutions right away. You’ve had time to think this over, but the boss is just hearing about it now and may need some additional time to catch up. If the boss says “yes,” offer your solutions.

Notice that I say “solutions.” One of the single best things you can do is to bring the boss multiple solutions. This provides the boss with some options. The boss may want to wrestle with a couple of different ideas; and giving only one solution pretty much guarantees that they’re going to take your idea, discard it, and go look for their own ideas. This will make you feel irritated and it’s not serving the boss the best either.

Once we present some solutions and a resolution is decided upon, confirm the resolution with the boss. “So we’ve decided that we’re going to do ____ and you want me to handle X, Y and Z parts of this. You’re going to handle A, B and C parts of this. Is that correct?” Just like when you get an assignment, state back with crystal clear accuracy exactly what it is you’re going to be doing to eliminate any chance of misunderstanding. This also helps to build the boss’s confidence.

One final piece to this; you may have noticed that up to now we haven’t given the boss the root cause of what went wrong. There’s a reason for that. You can offer the root cause if you are asked for it. But oftentimes, when you bring bad news, the root cause doesn’t really matter; it doesn’t help solve the problem in the here and now.

Sometimes the boss might say, “What happened?” But there are plenty times when it doesn’t matter what went wrong. If your computer crashed ten minutes before an important presentation, all that matters in those precious moments is finding a way to make that presentation. You can deal with the computer later. There will likely be a time down the road when the boss will ask for the root cause, after the crisis has been averted.

Mark Murphy is a NY Times bestseller, author of Hiring For Attitude, and founder of Leadership IQ.

 

Forbes.com | May 1, 2016 | Mark Murphy

#Leadership : How former Google & Apple Exec Kim Scott is Curing the World of Horrible Bosses…The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss? Letting Employees Give Performance Feedback to Bosses, Not Just the Other Way Around. Kim Scott is on a Mission to Rid the World of Terrible Bosses, Particularly the “Nice” Ones.

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Scott, a former Google and Apple exec, has cofounded a new startup with beta software launching next week called Radical Candor, and she’ll soon have a book out of the same name. Radical Candor puts the power in the hands of employees, helping them convert bad bosses to good ones.

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Have you ever seen the movie Office Space? Don't be that guy.

The surprising secret to being a good boss? Letting employees give performance feedback to bosses, not just the other way around.

And the startup is likely to be a big success because Scott is known to Valley insiders as a secret weapon: a CEO coach.

She launched her coaching career about three years ago when Twitter’s then-CEO Dick Costolo, having looked for a coach among “the usual suspects” turned to her, his friend, and said, “I like talking to you about this management stuff more than these people, why don’t you become my coach?” Scott tells Business Insider.

Surprised by the offer, she took him up on it.

Soon she was coaching CEOs like Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith (who just also asked her to be on Qualtrics board), Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, Shyp CEO Kevin Gibbon, and a number of other startup founders.

Radical Candor is her way of spreading her CEO coaching tricks to every manager.

But Scott’s career has been a wild and crazy ride that no one, least of all Scott, could have predicted would end up here.

 

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Russian investors and a deadly coup

She studied Russian literature in college, moving to Moscow after the Berlin Wall fell, where she got a job turning military factories into commercial ones, from making tanks to making tractors. (We asked her if the work was tied to the CIA, but Scott says it wasn’t.)

The job paid $6 a month, which let her buy one thing: a bag of potatoes. “So I ate potatoes for the first couple of months.”

Fortunately it soon led to a job with a venture investment firm trying to convince investors to join its new Soviet fund. The job paid a real wage but didn’t last long.

“We brought all these pension fund managers over to Russia and we’re driving to our first meeting and there’s this column of tanks coming,” Scott remembers. They had stumbled into the start of the 10-day coup, the failed attempt to oust president Boris Yeltsin.

Her guests remained safe and “they had a great time,” she laughs now.

But the Soviet Union was ultimately dissolved, ending the fund.. The VCs moved on to China.

She wound up working for one of the VC’s brothers at American diamond-cutting company Lazare Kaplan.

“So I wounded up starting up a diamond cutting factory in Moscow,” she says. This was her first management job.

But it was tough to get Russians to quit their safe government jobs to come work for an American at a commercial factory, even though it paid far more than $6 month.

Finally, a few agreed to consider the job if she had a picnic with them.

She learned the first lesson of “radical candor.” They wanted to get to know her better before they left their secure jobs.

“They wanted to know that if all hell broke lose, I could help get them and their families get out of there. They wanted somebody who could help them learn English. They wanted somebody who cared. I was like, ‘Oh! If that’s all it takes to be a boss, I can do that.’”

By the time she left Russia about two years later, “the factory was on a $200 million a year run rate.”

Being a boss “who cares” is a central part of her CEO coaching philosophy.

9/11 and Sheryl Sandberg

She left Russia to get an MBA at Harvard, where Sheryl Sandberg was a classmate. Her professor Richard Tedlow helped her land a job working for the FCC and that led to a job offer at her first startup, called DeltaThree, which did “voice over IP,” sending phone calls over the Internet.

She loved the tech industry but not the job, so she took a year off and wrote a novel instead.

The novel was a love triangle story with an underlying message about how capitalism is good at “rewarding what it can measure but bad at rewarding what people most value,” she says.

No one would publish it. (She self-published on Amazon where you can still buy it. It didn’t sell well.)

So she went to work at a friend’s startup making software for the mortgage industry and soon convinced them to back her idea for a spin-out company, Juice Software, online spreadsheet software for the financial industry.

Juice launched on September 10, 2001.

The very next day came the 9/11 terrorist attacks. New York was in ruins.

“We limped along for a couple of years and then sold, ‘sold’ being a very generous term for what happened,” she says. She was unemployed again.

“All the headhunters in New York saw my resume and scratched their head. You’ve got a failed startup and an unpublished novel, we don’t know what to do with you,” she remembers.

So she called her acquaintance, Sheryl Sandberg, for advice. Sandberg, who was at Google, showed Scott’s resume to then-CEO Eric Schmidt. He told Sandberg that it was “the perfect Google resume,” Scott tells us. “I was like, how could I be a loser in New York and perfect for Google?”

Even though she loved Manhattan, she moved to Silicon Valley to take the job at Google, right before Google went public.

“I knew I was lucky. I didn’t know how lucky,” she says. Most of the employees of that era earned a lot of money on their stock options.

Scott was hired to run AdSense, working for Sandberg. Scott brought to Google some of her favorite employees from Juice, including Jared Smith (who is today cofounder of $1 billion startup Qualtrics).

Together they “increased AdSense North America revenue 10-fold and we decreased headcount by 10%. That was really scaling. We had fun doing it. We built a great culture. They were magical Google years,” she says.

And she realized that her favorite part of the job was the part that most others disliked: the hiring, the managing, cultivating employees, and building a fun working environment.

Apple University comes calling

She wanted to do that for a living and soon she was talking to Professor Tedlow again. He had left Harvard and was working at Apple University training Apple managers.

The goal was to keep Apple’s exceptional culture even as it grew into a huge company and to “defy the gravitational pull of mediocrity” that usually happened as companies grew large.

“So I left Google, went to Apple and designed this class called Managing at Apple, which was ironic because I didn’t really know anything about managing at Apple, I had managed at Google. I did it for about two and a half years and taught it to thousands of managers,” she says.

That class became her testing ground for her “Radical Candor” theories  and one of the cornerstones of Apple’s management style.

She left Apple University to write a book about it, “And this book is getting published.” she says with a nod. “I’ve sold it to St. Martin’s Press.”

She also stumbled into the coaching gig, largely thanks to Twitter’s Costolo.

This all led her to give a 20-minute talk about Radical Candor to a group of startup CEOs at First Round Capital last winter. To her shock, it went viral.

“A huge number of companies contacted me and said, ‘make this our culture,’ and like the early days of AdSense there were too many fish wanting to jump into the boat and I didn’t even have boat.”

So in January, she launched a startup, funded by hot angel investor Micheal Dearling of Harrison Metal, with cofounder Joe Ternasky, former director of engineering at Google “who was my husband’s boss at Google,” Scott says.

The startup will take the ideas in the book and create software so any manager can learn them and easily use them.

Lose the aggression and the repression, please

Radical candor divides managing into two intersecting qualities  “care personally” about your employees (what the Russians wanted) and “Challenge directly” (honest, truthful communication styles made famous by Google and Apple).

screenshot/The Office

When you care personally, and you challenge directly, you are in the sweet zone of “radical candor.” Employees are well supported and the team runs smoothly.

When you don’t care personally, but you are honestly barking out orders, that’s “obnoxious aggression.”

When you don’t care personally and you don’t challenge directly, you are engaged in “manipulative insincerity” the worst boss style of them all “and that’s where politics comes in.”

But there’s another problem that’s far too common: being too nice, or “ruinous empathy.”

This is “responsible for 85% of management mistakes that get made,” Scott says. “That’s the boss who’s afraid of being called a jerk.”

With that boss, employees aren’t getting honest support and can fail right in front of you.

The chart winds up looking like this:

Radical CandorKim Malone Scottmanagement by Radical Candor

 

Scott and Ternasky are building software tools that will allow bosses to ask their employees for anonymous feedback on them with just a few clicks of a mouse. (“How did I do on our last 1:1 meeting? How did I do in the last team meeting?”)

If a boss earns feedback in boxes other than “radical candor,” the manager will then be offered advice from Scott and/or a network of other Radical Candor managers.

The software tools will not be sold to human resources departments — “over my dead body” Scott says — but will remain personal, confidential accounts that bosses can take with them as they move to new jobs, so they can continue to improve as their career progresses.

“People treat each other worse at work than they do in other environments,” Scott says because “feedback is a highly unnatural act.”

With Radical Candor Scott has a plan to make it natural, and painless.

 

Businessinsider.com | May 1, 2016 | 

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Your #Career : 5 Essential Tips To Reinvent Your Career…Create an Action Plan to Reach your Job-Change Goal. The Plan Should be Tailored to your Particular Situation

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At 50+, you’re less likely to make an extreme career change — from doctor to chef, for example — than to build on your existing skill set. Most career moves are subtle, Jansen says, and can be as simple as transferring from one department of your company to another.

Jansen, who started off as a radio and TV broadcaster, says she’s been fired, had her job eliminated and dealt with her share of “nasty bosses” and corporate cultures that were a “bad fit.” She tried recruiting and sales management before finding her niche as a career coach, author and speaker. “I was navigating to roles that were a great fit for my personality,” Jansen says.

Free- Lock on Fence

The lessons Jansen gleaned from her own career steps helped shape the new, third edition of her book, which reflects the tectonic shift of the job hunt to digital and social platforms.

(More: The Big Financial Asset You’re Ignoring: Your Career)

Here, Jansen shares five tips to reinvent your career after 50 and findgratifying work:

1. Assess Yourself and Make a Plan

For anyone over 50 eager to change careers, either for full-time work or part-time work in retirement, Jansen suggests following this three-step process:

First, assess yourself. In her book, Jansen offers a series of quizzes and exercises to determine the source of your job dissatisfaction; identify your core values, personality preferences and skills and determine your ability to change.

To understand your values and apply them to your career search, Jansen offers a list of some 40 values from “Achievement/Accomplishment,” “Advancement” and “Autonomy” through “Status,” “Teamwork” and “Wealth,” urging readers to check off the ones that apply and rank their Top 10. The most important ones will help you decide whether to stay in your position or field or look for something new.

Next, she says, identify “opportunities” and “obstacles” towards making a job change. “People either get hung up unrealistically on an obstacle — ‘I’m too old to change, I don’t have a degree, I won’t make enough money,’ or they get hung up on an opportunity that’s not realistic,” Jansen says.

Finally, create an action plan to reach your job-change goal. The plan should be tailored to your particular situation, whether have, what she calls, “One Toe in the Retirement Pool,” are “Yearning to Be on Your Own” or you’re “Bored and Plateaued” with your career.,

For someone in the latter category, Jansen offers an 11-step plan that calls for asking yourself a series of questions, including why you’re bored, how you can re-activate interest in your job and whether you want to stay in your industry.

(More: Career Advice for the Freelance Economy)

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2. Decide Between Making a Big or Small Change

At 50+, you’re less likely to make an extreme career change — from doctor to chef, for example — than to build on your existing skill set. Most career moves are subtle, Jansen says, and can be as simple as transferring from one department of your company to another.

“If you’re in a bad marriage, the whole marriage isn’t necessarily bad. You have to focus on the things that are good,” Jansen notes. “Maybe you love your company, but want to move to a different area. I had a client who worked in finance at ESPN. He wanted to move into talent management. It took him a few years, but he was able to do it.”

3. Network for an Employers’ Job Market

If you’ve worked at the same employer for quite awhile and want out, networking with people who don’t work there is key, says Jansen. And the sooner the better.

“People are very disposable at companies,” Jansen says. “It’s an employers’ market right now. It means most employers can treat people however they want. Companies don’t have as much of a moral compass when it comes to laying people off.”

That harsh reality underscores the importance of networking, whether in the real or virtual worlds.

Jansen says: Start by creating a list of everyone you know who could possibly be of use (even your dentist). Prepare a “script” for your email or telephone networking pitches. View any event — from a baseball game to a block party — as a networking opportunity. And, whether your networking meeting is online or at an event, always ask the person if there’s anything you can do to helpthem, Jansen writes.

4. Prepare for Today’s Interview Process

The job interview process has become an even higher hurdle towards getting an offer these days, says Jansen. If you clear the initial online screening, expect to have multiple phone interviews and in-person interviews, take personality and psychological tests and possibly be tasked with an on-site drill, such as being given a 15-minute deadline to assemble a PowerPoint presentation.

Prepare for this reality with friends or family by having them ask you the kinds of questions that often stump interviewees, Jansen advises. Examples: “Tell me about yourself,” “What are your weaknesses or areas of development” and “Tell me about a time when you failed at something.”

Whether you wind up speaking with one interviewer or eight, Jansen says, always write individual thank-you notes. “Be sure to customize each note based on your specific conversation,” Jansen writes.

5. Make Social Media Work for You

Whether you’re a LinkedIn dynamo with 500-plus connections, a 24/7 Twitter presence and your own blog or someone who maintains a minimal digital profile, Jansen says, ensure that your virtual self reflects and promotes your real-world accomplishments.

For anyone with little or no social media profile on places like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, Jansen recommends starting out by responding to other people’s blog posts; posting and answering questions on LinkedIn and tweeting “meaningful” comments on Twitter.

“You have to carefully monitor what you’re posting — visually or otherwise — because the first thing prospective employers are doing is Googling you,” Jansen says. “If you have any controversial or inappropriate information anywhere, that’s not a good thing. Or if you have no presence at all, that’s not a good thing, either.”

 

By Robert DiGiacomo, Next Avenue Contributor

Career coach Julie Jansen, who’s all about reinventing your career for the better, walks the walk with her advice. The author of the newly revised I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This: A Step by Step Guide to Finding Gratifying Work,  has herself made several fulfilling career changes over the past few decades.

 

Forbes.com | April 25, 2016

#Leadership : Leadership is a Role, & the Best Managers are Brilliant Actors…You were Selected to the Role of Leader for a Reason, to Perform. That Performance goes Beyond Delivering Results. It Includes Portraying That you Know What you’re Doing, even Though you Sometimes Don’t.

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Imagine having your team go from five people to 80 in an instant.  That’s what happened to Mike Calihan, a senior executive with Aldridge Electric Inc., a national infrastructure construction company based in Chicago.

Free- Man on Skateboard with Sign on Ground

He had been a project manager, managing relatively small electrical projects. He had been involved in crafting a response to a bid put out by the Illinois Department of Transportation.

As he tells it, “It was a longshot, because we hadn’t managed a project for this type of work at the scale specified in the bid.”

Calihan had a big-gulp moment when the bid was opened and he saw that Aldridge had won the contract. He was tapped to lead the behemoth project, which meant leading a team that was 16 times larger than he had ever led before.

As he explains it, “At first, I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I was in way over my head, and scared as hell.” When asked how he went from being a manager of five people to a leader of eighty, he replied, “Sometimes you have to fake it till you make it. You don’t start with the skills; you develop them along the way.”

A lot of leadership and organizational development books have started to underscore the importance of authenticity. When you’re a leader, the people you’re leading want to know that the power that accompanies your leadership hasn’t gone to your head.

They want to know that you “get” that leadership is a privilege, not an entitlement, and that you still pull up your own britches, just like they do. People want to know that you remember your roots and that you haven’t forgotten where you came from. In short, they want to know that you’re real.

 

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It’s important to remember, though, that leadership is not just a way of being and behaving, it’s a role. And when you’re in the role of leader, you have to perform that role. What you display to others sometimes has to be based on what the role calls for, and what others’ need, versus what you may actually be feeling.

For example, if people are freaking out about a large new acquisition the organization is making, you’ll only get them more upset if you freak out, too, even if you quietly are. What you portray and what you’re actually feeling may sometimes be at odds. But you don’t lead people according to where they are, you lead them according to where they need to go.

Often that means that your leadership demeanor needs to be compensatory to your followers’ demeanor. When people are freaking out, you need to portray confidence and resolve. When people are complacent and apathetic, you need to portray worry and concern. This may not exactly be authentic, but it’s what people need and what the role of leader calls for you to portray.

You, authentically inauthentic

The trick is not to be so caught up in your leadership role that you look like a histrionic Shakespearean thespian. You’ve still got to be real and unpretentious.

When you don’t know something, you still have to be honest about it. It’s just that you also have to cloak your true feelings every now and then. When you do, you’ll often start out with one set of feelings and end with another anyway.

At the start of a big hairy project, you may be full of knee-knocking fear — and keeping your anxiety under wraps will serve the project better than if you inject it into everyone else.

The more you get into the project, the more the fear will start to lift and confidence will start to grow. Yes, as Calihan suggested, after faking it you start to make it.

By the way, feeling like you’re faking it will be a predominant feeling throughout your career.

It’s normal and natural for leaders to have a nagging feeling that this is the day they’ll be found out.

No leader has all the answers to every problem, so it takes a lot of improvisation. You’ll be making up a lot of stuff as you go along.

As you do, people still need to see you as competent. They don’t expect you to have all the answers, they just expect you to not shrink from the questions. Here are some tips for being a Genuine Faker:

  • Let ’em see you: People need to know that you have a life outside of work, just like them. They need to see your non-work identity. Occasionally share stories from your family life. Let people know what you like to do for fun outside of work. Include pictures from your outside-of-work life in your workspace. Show people who you really are when you step outside of the role of leader.
  • Plumb your unconfident past: Think about moments in your career when you felt in over your head. What was the situation/opportunity, and how did it come about? How did you deal with your lack of confidence? How did your confidence evolve as the situation/opportunity progressed? How transparent was what you were experiencing to others around you? How might the lessons from that situation/opportunity be used as a reference point when you feel over your head in future situations?
  • Clarify Point B: Leadership often involves moving people from Point A to Point B. The behaviors required to be successful at Point B are usually different than those at Point A. As a leader, you have to practice the behaviors that the future requires before others will catch on. People take cues from you. Draw a line down a piece of paper and create two headers: Point A and Point B. Differentiate between the behaviors that make a person successful today (Point A) versus the behaviors that will make a person successful after they’ve moved to Point B. Acting as the leader means adopting the Point B behaviors before others do.

Bill Treasurer is the chief encouragement officer of Giant Leap Consulting, Inc. He is the author of four books, including “Leaders Open Doors: A Radically Simple Leadership Approach to Lift People, Profits, and Performance” (TD Press, 2014). Learn more atGiantLeapConsulting.com.

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Read the original article on SmartBrief. If you enjoyed this article, join SmartBrief’s email listfor our daily newsletter on being a better leader and communicator. Copyright 2016. Follow SmartBrief on Twitter.

Businessinsider.com | April 28, 2016 | Bill Treasurer, SmartBrief

Your #Career : 3 Signs That You’re Burnt Out…Take some Time to Honestly Assess the Amount of Stress in your Life & Find Ways to Reduce It Before it’s Too Late. Burnout isn’t Like the Flu; it Doesn’t Go Away After a Few Weeks Unless you Make some Changes in your Life

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We often hear about how workers are disengaged. A Gallup poll found that only around one out of every eight employees worldwide are actually fully engaged in their work, and the remaining seven are disengaged, at least to some degree.

Free- Bubble on the Bubble

Sometimes, this lack of engagement results from a lack of interest in what you’re doing. “I dreamed of being a photographer my whole life, but I took this job as a secretary because it pays well,” or “I always wanted to be an artist, but I work at this dentist’s office to pay the bills” — those stories are all too common. It’s not often that we hear about people who dreamed their entire lives about becoming astronauts, doctors, or musicians, and how they are actually successful in those particular career paths.

 Pace yourself. If you value your job, care for it like you would anything else that you care about — work evenly and at the appropriate pace. It’s unwise to give it an abundance of attention for several months, get burnt out, and have to neglect portions of your work, and then start the cycle all over again.

Even if you have your dream career, you can only give so much of yourself to your job before it starts to take a toll. Sure, give 100% while you are at work, but when it’s time to go home, work should be done until the next work day. There are some really great companies out there these days, ones that know attracting and keeping talent means giving a little to get a lot. Some companies have onsite daycare, some allow their employees to telecommute, and others have recreational facilities onsite so that employees can get some time away from their desks to stretch their legs and have a little fun.

No matter how many perks are offered, how much an employer tries to set you up for success, or how much you like what you’re doing, at the end of the day, it’s partly up to you to manage your own work-life balance. Work can be addictive. Checking emails during off-work hours, reviewing reports at night, and logging into systems because you just want to check “one thing real quick” can be unhealthy.

After a while, the line blurs, and work life and home life are really no different. This can be so unhealthy that Germany was actually considering passing a law prohibiting people from sending work-related emails after 6 p.m. “There is an undeniable relationship between constant availability and the increase of mental illness,” Labor Minister Andrea Nahles told the Rheinische Post.

What do you think about Germany’s potential future decision to make emailing after 6 p.m. illegal? Do you think you’re working too hard? Here are a few signs you may be so stressed out that you’re becoming burnt out.

1. Coffee does nothing

More than half of American adults drink coffee on a daily basis. You may be thinking, “I’ve become kind of immune to coffee because I drink a few cups every day.” But coffee should still affect you to some degree, no matter who you are. So if you can drink a cup or two of Joe and then easily nap afterwords, you may be so stressed out that you just want to zonk out.

“The EEG machines that show increased brain activity post-coffee don’t lie — but some people swear that caffeine doesn’t affect them. What’s probably happening with these caffeine denialists, says [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][study author Michael Breus], is that they’re so exhausted that their levels of calm-inducing neurotransmitters are very high. Theseneurotransmitters help override caffeine’s effects, or they set to work on a different area of the brain to kick-start the sleep process — so the caffeine is working, but the coffee drinkers aren’t reacting to it. In other words, they’re not superhuman; they’re just super-tired,” according to data published in a Huffington Post report.

 

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2. You’re experiencing physical symptoms

According to WebMD, the physical symptoms of stress include the following:

  • Low energy
  • Headaches
  • Upset stomach, including diarrhea, constipation, and nausea
  • Aches, pains, and tense muscles
  • Chest pain and rapid heartbeat
  • Insomnia
  • Frequent colds and infections
  • Loss of sexual desire and/or ability
  • Nervousness and shaking, ringing in the ear
  • Cold or sweaty hands and feet
  • Excess sweating
  • Dry mouth and difficulty swallowing
  • Clenched jaw and grinding teeth.

Burnout can effect more than just your ability to put your best face forward — it can actually make you physically sick. That’s not to mention all of the emotional and mental health-related problems you can experience as a result of too much work stress, as well. These emotional symptoms range from feeling frustrated and overwhelmed to avoiding your loved ones.

 

3. Success doesn’t feel like success

When you do well at your job — when you receive accolades from your superiors, clients, or coworkers — does that rejuvenate you, or does it feel like you don’t deserve the praise (or that the praise doesn’t really matter)?

If you are a high achiever, you may be particularly susceptible to this symptom. At first, you give 200 percent of yourself — you over perform and everything is going really well. Except, there’s one big problem: You’re overdoing it, putting way too much into your job and seeing it as a sprint instead of a marathon. This sets you up for short-term success that cannot be maintained over the long run.

Because you excelled so much in the beginning, you place more and more pressure on yourself. And, according to Psychology Today: “Irritability often stems from feeling ineffective, unimportant, useless, and an increasing sense that you’re not able to do things as efficiently or effectively as you once did. In the early stages, this can interfere in personal and professional relationships. At its worst, it can destroy relationships and careers. … Despite long hours, chronic stress prevents you from being as productive as you once were, which often results in incomplete projects and an ever-growing to-do list. At times, it seems that as hard as you try, you can’t climb out from under the pile.”

If any of these signs or symptoms sound like you, it’s time to take action. “Take some time to honestly assess the amount of stress in your life and find ways to reduce it before it’s too late. Burnout isn’t like the flu; it doesn’t go away after a few weeks unless you make some changes in your life,” says Psychology Today.

Pace yourself. If you value your job, care for it like you would anything else that you care about — work evenly and at the appropriate pace. It’s unwise to give it an abundance of attention for several months, get burnt out, and have to neglect portions of your work, and then start the cycle all over again.

CheatSheet.com | April 28, 2016 | 

 

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