ARROGANT EXECUTIVES!

If you ask Japanese: What do you do? They will most probably answer: I am a 'Sony man' or I am a 'Toshiba Man'! They usually do not name their position or title. If you ask a Korean: For whom do you work?, you will hear: 'For Samsung or Hyundai', for instance. Naturally you won’t hear them saying, 'for Mr Kun-hee of Samsung'.

Lee Kun-hee, Chairman of Samsung and Chung Mong-koo, Chairman of Hyundai Motor Group, the two most influential individuals in the world, Asia in particular, address their staff as 'Associates'. This is also the case with other giants like GE and Nestle in the US and Europe.

Promoting a sense of belonging to the organisation rather than the position and title has been seriously practiced in Europe and the US especially since mid 90s, and Executives of both sides of the Atlantic have understood that where 'Shared Vision' is the key for an organisation to succeed, they cannot afford an 'Arrogant Manner' to look at staff from top to down; they rather need to turn their organisations into a community centre. This is not achievable with an 'Arrogant Management / Attitude'.

What are the features of an Arrogant Executive?

Many employers do not know the difference between 'supervising' and 'controlling'; therefore, basically problems escalate from there. Arrogance is defined as conceit, self-loving and egocentric.

• Arrogant Executives are not team players; therefore, suspicious of everything and everyone.
• They usually give voice rather than making points.
• They tend to see their main responsibility to find faults in employees' tasks and assignments.
• They are shifty, unstable and they see themselves as priority number one.
• They often use self-centred and to some extend offensive terminologies to enforce their views. They constantly emphasise on: "I", "MY Experience", "MY Time", "MY Resources", "Let me Teach you", "I AM the Chairman / CEO", and even sometimes they use discriminative tones by saying "You work FOR ME" ,"EVERYTHING in this company SHOULD go around ME & MY Time", etc!
• They usually expect to be fully respected without earning it.
• They make policy and a day after they don't remember it.
• They constantly change office rules.
• They view a job search as a betrayal.
• They are often not very good at Communication, Motivation, Decision - making, System-thinking, Process and Time management.

Regretfully, Arrogant Bosses never gain employees' respect. They are sadly viewed as dictators and insensitive rulers. They lack empathy for others and usually do not have enough consideration for people around them.

Working with this type of boss can have negative effects on the quantity and quality of work generated by staff. The smallest problem will be blown into something colossal and they usually cause complications.

How to handle them?

Contact the human resources department and avoid unproductive conflicts. Do your best at work, always be in time, meet deadlines and don't give any excuses.

! Working in an unhealthy and stressful environment will cause mental and physical disorders.

PUBLIC RELATIONS

An environment, where the challenge is: to understand and being understood!

Public Relations – PR has been quite often misunderstood with other similarly important components to a successful organisation such as 'Advertising', 'Marketing', or even 'Sales'/ 'Branding'. In Middle East, it is normally confused with having 'People Skills', one of the several elements of an effective communication.

PR addresses organisational functions such as media, communities, consumers, industries, governmental relations; political campaigns; interest-group representations; conflicts mediation; employee & investor relations and many more.

However PR, Marketing, Advertising and Sales have one common and delicate case to constantly study, which is 'Human Psychology'; PR has most of its emphasis on understanding the attitudes and concerns of communities, consumers, employees, and public interest groups as well as establishing and maintaining cooperative relationships with them and with representatives from press and media.

Those who choose Public Relations as a career need to have an enthusiasm for motivating people. It is a very challenging job but yet rewarding.

Why I call it challenging? Going back and viewing the history of mankind, tasks such as tool making, hunting, and building shelters have never been a big challenge for the mankind.

In fact, the biggest challenge for human being was and still is human being!

How to understand and being understood; how to accept and being accepted; how to love and being loved. Therefore, for those interested in PR, having rhetorical presentation skills and skilful communication are crucial.

INNOVATE OR DIE!

Is innovation about a new product? Or is it about change?

Well, I would say it is about reinventing organisational processes and going for a total new marketplace.

What in fact is dragging a business is lack of creativity. There are many ways that creativity is being actively supported and encouraged in companies today. They are all valuable but without one underlying requirement being fulfilled it is unlikely that will have more than a localized effect. It is generally agreed that without a culture of creativity, a company is unlikely to be able to encourage effective innovation.

Bear in mind that cultural change is the prime mover. Training both in management innovation and being creative is essential and DO NOT POSTPONE MAKING A START.

You as a manager or manager–to–be, need to know it is possible to hire for creativity, but it is not enough. You have got choices and one of them is to create and be copied and followed by others and always stay ahead by your constant creativity or be a sheep and follow others.

Creativity or rather innovative idea is absolutely critical to any organisation, and any manager should be able to have and carry out a sense of it.

In this advanced business world, it is not possible to survive without creativity in managing an organisation.

   So, Innovate or Die!

TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH!

In MANAGING PEOPLE, there are some truths that however not that pleasant, you should face them:

• Behaviour counts: The best predictor of a person's future behaviour is his/her past behaviour.
• What you see is what you get: Managers by being too much positive about employees are setting themselves up for the disappointment of a sudden and surprising resignation of the employees.
• Brains matter: A slow brain is expensive! Hire SMART people. Those people who fit your culture.
• Happy workers aren't necessarily productive workers: Productivity leads to satisfaction!
• 2 + 2 doesn't necessarily equal 4: Sometimes teams create negative synergy. Individuals expect less effort when working collectively than when working individually.
• The best surprise is no surprise: Annual reviews can have surprising results. Performance feedback should be given continuously and daily.
• People aren't completely rational: Don't ignore EMOTIONS.

SETTING GOALS, SMART GOALS!

When it is time for setting goals, we often don't know what we don't know. And what we don't know will most probably hurt us by limiting our abilities to succeed.

Let ‘s here addressing this issue by answering this question. What is a GOAL?

A goal is a desired end towards which you direct your specific effort. And “end” is a tangible and exact result that you want to achieve.

The amount of the effort that you will put on to achieve the end always depend on how much you and/or your organisation see the goal important.

Here, the three important elements of a goal are:

• An end to be reached;
• A measurable outcome to be considered;
• A date and time by which the goal must be attained.

Therefore with view to the mentioned elements a goal should be:

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-constrained. That is, it needs to be: SMART!

A goal is created in three stages:

   1. As a picture in your mind / mentality;

   2. When it is written down by you in order to add clarity and dimensions;

   3. When you take action towards its achievement.

So, the structure of a goal within these three stages will be:

WHAT, WHY, and HOW

• WHAT, is the goal itself, which provides purpose;
• WHY, is the benefits to be gained which provides fuel to reach the end;
• HOW, is the strategy or the map that gives the direction and shows the destination.