Survival in an Unhappy Work Environment

When someone doesn't like his or her job, going to work every day can be a real challenge I suppose. The problem might be with poor office management, staff politics, not meeting what you expect to achieve, that you constantly feel stretched to the breaking point, or that you are resentful about some actions the senior management had just announced. Or, the whole environment may just feel unpleasant for him or her. He or she might need to stay in the present job because it provides health benefits, or maybe they're only staying while looking for another position. Whatever the reasons for being unhappy, they need to maintain their professionalism and prevent a bad attitude from sabotaging themselves.


What the Professionals Say

Some of you need to turn towards that feeling of unhappiness, experience it more thorough and find out deeper into the issues, and not try to solve things too quickly. It is suggest to observe the feelings and not expecting anything. You may just find yourself at a frontier, considering what you're going to do next.

Similarly, an associate professor who specializes in human resources management and organizational behavior, agrees that looking within is the first step. That may be hard for some people to hear, because while it's true that sometimes people just don't match well with their jobs, employees tend to rationalize their job dissatisfaction rather than consider that they may be part of the problem. But if you are part of the problem, you may be part of the solution, too.

A workplace expert advises that if you're unhappy, see if you can upgrade your contribution to the company, or find a way to be more creative about your job. She once performed very dull work in a book bindery but avoided becoming negative about the job by finding a way to make it less boring. No work is uninteresting if you can think how to do it differently.

That's not to say unhappy workers don't have valid complaints. One thing you don't want to do, however, is let your feelings boil over at work.

Signs That You Need to Take Action

Perhaps you've heard of someone who was so unhappy he quit on the spot or blew up at a boss. Losing control at work helps no one and may have repercussions in both your current job and in the future — you never know when you'll work with one of your current colleagues again.

Indications that you need to address your emotions may be physical or behavioral. The signs include feeling distracted, sluggish, angry or irritable, not sleeping well or sleeping excessively, relying on alcohol or food to comfort yourself, and withdrawing from friends and activities. All may indicate underlying depression or anxiety, which you shouldn't ignore.

If you feel you have nowhere to turn, are about to burst, or are depressed, one option is to seek out your company's counselor, if it has one.

There are also things you can try to change in your approach to your job. Consider these solutions for surviving and even thriving in a job that's less than optimal:

-Face the situation. During a recession or slow recovery, people at all levels experience the pain and depression. Such an economic climate makes it more difficult to leave a job, but it doesn't mean you should feel stuck. Accept that this job is not where you want to be, even if you can't make a change today. But begin taking steps to change things. Practice radical acceptance, you have more control over how you think than you realize. Understand what you're feeling, and that if you show up to work reluctantly, it will affect your performance.

-Choose a plan. Be proactive, work with trusted friends and office members about your ideas. If there's something you'd like to change, decide whether your management is approachable and if so, the best tactics to use. If you have suggestions, discuss how they will improve your performance as well as others.

You could also try learning a new skill. At the very least, it may help you prepare for another job should you decided later to progress further elsewhere. It can also lift your spirits and lead to new possibilities at your current job. Finally, consider looking outside your job for fulfillment. Having an outside interest or two gives you another outlet and an activity to look forward to, if that is finally what you choose to be.

-Find the "positives". Make a list of the good points about your job, you may be thankful to have healthcare and other benefits, you may like your coworkers. Or you enjoy the opportunity for travel or the mentoring you do. Listing what you do like about your job will help shift your perception and keep you from feeling so unhappy and felt trapped. If you don't take responsibility, it will hurt your performance, erode your satisfaction further, and make your time at the job worse.

Remember the Dos’ and Don’ts

Do: Differentiate between what you can change and what you can't. Take responsibility for making a change. Focus on making the best of a bad situation.
Don't: Assume nothing will ever change. Allow negative thoughts to rule you. Go it alone.
Find Satisfaction in Some Part of Your Job, Find Satisfaction Outside of Work. Whatever you do, be happy and positive and do not whine like a baby !

Management to learn from Toyota's Fallout

Toyota fast move of establishing factories in five U.S. states in the late 1980s, about few years ago it began ramping up production and making big expansion plans as a way to meet soaring demand and, ultimately gotten the title of world’s largest automaker pushing GM from it’s title holder. Was this hasty ambition led Toyota to have some problem coordinating just-in-time arrivals from its suppliers and maintaining deep technical ties with those suppliers??


This could only be part of the story and there could be more to it’s flaw in it's manufacturing management and control. Let's look at some areas :

Bureaucracy

The lines of control of Toyota’s U.S. operations were murky. During most of Toyota’s expansion into America, the company’s California-based sales division and its Kentucky-based manufacturing division reported back to Japan, independent of each other. For a few years, the company’s top-ranking U.S. exec, James E. Press, was able to establish Toyota Motor North America in New York as the de facto headquarters in charge of all U.S. operations. He even rose to become the only American on Toyota’s board of directors in Japan. But Press quit in 2007 to join Chrysler and he was replaced by a series of Japanese executives with less clout. With Press’ departure, Toyota lost its key bridge between management in Japan and various U.S. constituencies — and its ability to respond rapidly when crises hit.

Too Confident

Another underlying problem is cultural. Toyota is a secretive and non-communicative organization. American insiders joke that working for the company is like working for the Central Intelligence Agency, where information is shared only on a “need to know” basis, confides one American employee. And long a scrappy underdog to General Motors and Ford Motor, Toyota developed a sense of cockiness in the past two or three years as it began to surpass its American rivals in global sales. The company did not need rebates to sell its vehicles. Consumer Reports gave the brand high praise. Toyota did not believe it needed a strong public relations effort. The company thus failed to recognize that the pressures on the No. 1 player in any market are far more intense than the pressures on No. 2 and No. 3.

Poor Management

For years, the company has been led by a series of world-class professional managers. Then last summer, Akio Toyoda, 53, grandson of the company’s founder, took charge as chief executive and some insiders did not think he was ready, say some auto industry watchers in Japan. They were right. When he took the job, Toyoda told the world that he would practice “genchi genbutsu,” which translates roughly as “management by walking around” or “going to where the problem is.” But when the safety flap came to light, he remained silent and even attended the annual gathering of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland. American crisis response experts were flabbergasted. “What is he doing in Davos anyway?” Paul A. Argenti, a professor of corporate communications at Dartmouth’s business school was quoted as saying in The New York Times. “If you’ve got a crisis of this magnitude, you get on a plane and you go to the scene of the problem.” Instead, day-to-day management of the controversy was delegated to James E. Lenz III, head of Toyota Motor Sales.

Fallout

Toyota’s problem-solving mechanism clearly broke down. The company revealed as much in the series of explanations it released. Initially, Toyota announced the floor mats were the problem. Then it was the gas pedals, which were made by an Indiana-based supplier and thus limited the problem only to U.S.-made cars. But that story didn’t hold up because of a well-publicized case involving a Lexus in California in which four people died — and that vehicle was made in Japan. Now it seems the underlying problem involves the software and the computerized controls governing acceleration and braking in many Toyota vehicles. No one knows for sure but this series of problems could take months to reformulate.

Toyota used to have a reputation for quickly correcting mistakes. It first introduced a vehicle nicknamed the Toyopet in the U.S. in 1957. It was laughed out of the market because of its ungainly design and small size. But by 1959, Toyota was back and it executed flawlessly in the United States for 50 years, even introducing the luxury Lexus brand, which beat Mercedes, BMW and Cadillac in total sales.

Now it faces class-action lawsuits and intense scrutiny from Congress and officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The tone is reminiscent of the Big Tobacco hearings more than a decade ago: What did Toyota know and when did it know it? There’s no question that Toyota’s reputation has been badly damaged. The only question now is how long it will take to recover.

I think some of these management fall-out could happen to any big organization in any kind of manufacturing businesses, be it Rig building, Tall architectural building design and construction, medical industries, filming industry, etc… The lesson to all high ranking staffs, is to be on their toe and corporate governance is one key to maintaining the integrity and well-being of the business and let it be a wake-up call to all ( as Jack, the director, recently mentioned on his own fall-out, though it was not manufacturing related but "woman" was the cause ). Let’s not be cocky no matter how successful your trade or business is ! !

CEOs are better-off with MBA ?

Remember Jeff Skilling of Enron? He had an MBA, while Bill Gates and Steve Jobs didn't even finish college. Probably with the recent financial crisis on banks,etc, there was also side-impact on MBA programs and few of these programs have received criticism and whether the graduates know what to look out for or just follow by the book. According to critics, they are guilty of many overlooked lapses: teaching the wrong financial models, riding roughshod over risk management, sidestepping business ethics, overheating the managerial job market, hiding from the real world. As a result, so the script goes, we have a generation of business leaders tainted by greed and short-term thinking.


What impact has an MBA on a CEO's overall position in the ranking. Findings are :

While information about educational credentials wasn't in the public domain for all countries, CEOs' academic records were widely available in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. Fewer than one-third of the CEOs of four countries had an MBA. So let's be clear certainly we do not say it's a necessity for getting the top job. But it could still be sufficient to improve performance.

As it turns out, seems there is a definite correlation between holding an MBA and achieving high performance as a CEO over the long term. CEOs with an MBA ranked on average a full 40 places higher than those without.

Those who had become CEO before the age of 50. The effect of an MBA was even more significant for this group. The advantage went up from 40 places to 100. Time and again, the MBA advantage persisted.

The Potent MBA Ingredient

The big question is, why? The simple answer is that something in the MBA curriculum or experience helps a CEO add value, particularly if that executive has comparatively few years of business experience. But what exactly is this magic MBA ingredient? For some graduates, an MBA simply gives them better skills. It can add right-brain creativity and warmth to left-brain logic and financial acumen. Or vice versa. It can even help get the hard and soft skills working together. For others, an MBA is a badge of excellence. After all, top schools only accept a chosen few. And most top companies look among the elite for their leaders.

An MBA may also provide a network of other rising stars. This network offers business contacts, opportunities, and priceless advice. And it lasts for an entire career.

Those who choose to do an MBA, are opting to improve themselves. Their openness to ideas and willingness to learn is going to benefit them all the way to the top—and long after they arrive in the executive suite.

An MBA program, or at least a good one, gives just such a perspective, especially if it recruits a globally diverse student body. And here the speculation is backed up by research. An INSEAD colleague, Professor Will Maddux, has carried out experiments demonstrating conclusively that the simple fact of having lived abroad makes people more creative.

The most successful MBA graduates are probably those who manage to mix all of the above ingredients into a potent cocktail of excellence. Perhaps they're the ones who made it into the top 200. Today's MBA students should take note.

*Some of above quoted from Herminia Ibarra, professor of organizational behavior and the Cora Chaired Professor of Leadership and Learning at INSEAD

Innovation - Key to survival of an Organization

Innovation in an organization can succeed and even thrive in an efficiently run company.

Being aware of and addressing the different external / internal environments, competition, support, skills, and drivers allow an organization to be on top compare to the others lacking the foresight. The challenge is to understand the differences, and create a system that is working against odds. Innovations challenge the norms and assumptions by thinking out- of-the-box and creating new ideas with risks. They can affect current resources, disrupt supply chains, manufacturing processes, product strategies, and even be unsettling for existing customers. Innovations can also affect structures within the company, creating a startling bump in an otherwise orderly progression in an already established and focused business. We always wonder why innovation is so difficult to initiate and maintain especially within a matured organization. The more so we have reasons to effectively manage innovation and it may be one of the best ways of differentiating a company with its strong competitors.

We may approach and manage innovation in an established organization - firstly is to protect opportunities by isolation as the innovations are identified and developed. Secondly is to integrate innovation practices and management systems to become an everyday part of the organization.

Isolating is an attractive approach since it is relatively straightforward and could include establishing separate new business ventures and isolating new opportunities. Isolating a new opportunity has the advantage of freeing the innovative enterprise from the controls of the established organization. While this approach works in some situations, it has several difficulties, including managing conflicting business models (the innovation could likely become a competitor to other operations in the company), the fact that the innovation often needs resources controlled by the established organization.

Splitting innovations from the established organisation certainly makes sense in some situations, such as those that can create an entirely new business. In most cases though, innovations would do better if they could co-exist with established businesses.

Innovations come in all sizes, and an integrated approach allows an organisation to adjust the balance in the approach between ordinary operations and systems designed for those ideas that are highly innovative.

Integrating innovation with normal business operations is done by combining top-down innovation leadership and bottom-up creation and drive of new opportunities and solutions.

Top-down innovation -

The management role in these businesses is to envision a potential new area, increase R&D, or to consolidate otherwise disparate activities within a company in a way that would be very difficult to do otherwise. Possible success initiatives could be those where the management is dependent on often newly established bottom-up ideas to further develop them into new businesses.

Bottom-up innovation -

Bottom-up innovation drives everything from day-to-day improvements to multi billion dollar new-to-the-world products and platforms.

Management systems are designed to allow bottom-up entrepreneurialism co-existing with normal businesses. These management systems recognize the unique needs for internal entrepreneurial activities. They may be :-

Allocation of some time: Spending 5-10% time with employees to work on programmes that they believe are important to the company. The time can either be to work on a programme or innovative quality circle that they initiate, or to support other's activities. Managers are expected to support employees' use of this time, and the employee can stay with the programme as the champion or team member.

Funding: Peer group allocated, self-managed funds to support feasibility work.

Design Forum: A networking program fostering peer to peer exchange and interaction, or could be strategic alliance or brainstorming amongst SBUs.

Use of company capabilities: The company's process and material capabilities are managed by groups that can provide access. Technologies are owned by the company, not by any one group.

Access to the company's markets: While the focus for an employee is to their direct business, they are encouraged through their allocated time to apply ideas anywhere where they think there may be an application. The reward system is designed to recognise both contributions to their business, as well as creating new businesses elsewhere in the company.

There are potential and the innovation determines the degree of one system or the other used. Small, sustaining innovations can be usually assessed and incorporated through normal processes. Moderate innovations often challenge assumptions, and by giving a champion of the idea resources, access, and support, they can lead testing those assumptions.

Large innovations, especially those involving new technologies and opening new markets for the company need the full support of senior management or the board or committee. The champion needs resources, access, and support to protect the innovation. Senior management gives enough independence to the new innovative group to make the right decisions, while at the same time encouraging collaboration and interdependence between the new and established groups.

Integrating innovation opens the organization to improve their style of working with customers, employees, partners, and suppliers in new ways. With this, it could possibly lead to many new opportunities and the experience staff in the organization with the vast experience will eventually drive to grow it’s company to a higher standard and compete in the global arena with stronger product and service.

The need to assess how effective your staff manage Emails ?

Everyday your inbox is being flooded with emails that tire your eyes while raising your blood pressure and killing more of your brain cells. Email exchanges that cc or bcc to you occasionally makes you wonder what your direct reports, and their clients, actually do for a living? We will irk those "FWD" mails linking you to long spools of detailed correspondence that you have zero desire, or need, to review or read. You are only just peeking into the abyss of digital dysfunction and human self mis-management. The bigger office communication picture may be even more disheartening or threatening.

It will soon be seen that the art of effective email exchange is going to lead to a critical success factor in business performance, therefore mismanagement of email may in fact be a symptom of weakness or poor operation of your organization.

Executive has no time (or obsessive-compulsive disorder) to review and edit their people's correspondence — it's not possible and it wouldn't be healthy in working organization. So how can management or HR department quickly and cheaply create the shock of self-consciousness to push their people to take the style and substance of their correspondence more seriously? And how can you find out the interoffice spam actually reflects a deeper issue of employee performance?

A possible approach is to make email an intrinsic part of performance reviews. Insist that colleagues and subordinates better evaluate their email so that you may better evaluate their performance. There are few better proxies for assessing how well individuals are communicating, on task and on target, than the digital transmittal they send in order to get their work done.

The key is to politely demand self-assessment and review. Ask people to present correspondence that demonstrate how well they've used the medium to manage successful outcomes. In other words, have them select examples illustrating their own email "best practices" for results. From here, we may find such assessment and prioritization procedure a lot to reveal and understand. Culling their email correspondence is a wonderful way for individuals to remember and reconnect with what they think works and what doesn't. Your ability to weigh their self-assessed success with your own experiences gives this simple technique particular power.

At one project review, every single example selected by one manager featured brief emails with large reports or presentations attached. Email is not a medium of communication; it is a tool for referral. The larger issue was that this person was so intent on being "comprehensive" that they avoided getting to the essence of what their colleagues asked for and needed in the moment. At another, the employee literally annotated and expanded upon the emails received; all the "best practice" emails were "responses" to others rather than ideas and solutions he initiated. These email styles raised larger and more important issues around performance and personal effectiveness. They likely would not have surfaced without the email self-assessment demand.

It's remarkable what can be discovered when people are asked to show examples of what they think they're doing well.

Some of us may not be so tech-naive to constrain this performance review technique to email alone. Firms using wikis, blogs, and other digital media for coordination and collaboration should similarly broaden the purview of their performance reviews. But it may be surprising that only a small handful of the managers and executives make this tactic a part of their assessment process.

Some have the opinion that many managers think that they already have adequate insight into the communications styles of colleagues and subordinates because of their own interactions with them. Or because they are cc:ed on correspondence that matters. We must not be shortsighted and misleading as the truth is that it is always important and relevant to learn how one's people rate and rank their own effectiveness. Of course, getting people to submit the "worst practices" and stupid emails they sent would truly be a fool's errand for a performance review. But gaining insight into your staff perceptions — quickly and cheaply — from the examples they themselves choose might strike you as an ideal way to improve one's own effectiveness as a communicator and leader.