1. Define the problem.
2. Identify the decision criteria.
3. Allocate weights to the criteria.
4. Develop the alternatives.
5. Evaluate the alternatives.
6. Select the best alternative.

This model relies on the assumption that the decision maker has all the information they need to make the best choice possible. But we know that the real world is not like that. Another way to make decisions is based on intuition. Intuitive decision making is an unconscious process which draw upon an individual’s past experience. It occurs outside of our awareness and relies on the unconscious links and associations we make between various experiences and pieces of information we have tucked away in our unconscious mind from the past.

But while intuition is not necessarily rational—it is not necessarily wrong. Nor does it always operate in opposition to rational analysis; rather, the two can complement each other. Intuition is not superstition, or the product of some magical or paranormal sixth sense—it is a highly complex and highly developed form of reasoning that is based on your experience and learning.

So her is today’s Daily HR Tip: Be aware that you may overemphasize analysis and rationality in certain instances and recognize that using your intuition may improve your decision making, don’t rely on it too much, however, it is so unquantifiable that it’s hard to know when our hunches are right or wrong. The key is neither to abandon nor rely solely on intuition but to supplement it with evidence and good judgment.

1. Extraversion—describes the degree that someone is sociable, gregarious, and assertive.
2. Agreeableness—describes the degree that someone is good natured, cooperative, and trusting.
3. Conscientiousness—describes the degree that someone is responsible, dependable, persistent, and organized.
4. Emotional stability—describes the degree that someone is calm, self-confident, secure (positive) versus nervous, depressed, and insecure (negative).
5. Openness to experience—describes the degree that someone is imaginative, sensitive and curious.

Traits that form the “dark side” of personality are assessed less frequently, but these can cause managers and executives to “derail”, particularly when they are under stress. A “dark side” personality trait found among some managers and executives is narcissism. Narcissism is the tendency to be arrogant, have a grandiose sense of self-importance, require excessive admiration, and have a sense of entitlement. For example, an executive at the software company Oracle once described the CEO Larry Ellison as follows: “The difference between God and Larry is that God does not believe he is Larry”. A case of narcissism? You decide…

A study found that while narcissists thought they were better leaders than their colleagues, their supervisors actually rated them as worse. Because narcissists often want to gain the admiration of others and receive affirmation of their superiority, they tend to “talk down” to those who threaten them, treating others as if they were inferior. Narcissists also tend to be selfish and exploitive and believe others exist for their benefit. Their bosses rate them as less effective at their jobs than others, particularly when it comes to helping other people.

So here is today’s Daily HR Tip: When screening candidates for key leadership positions within your organization consider using personality assessments that look at both the “bright side” and the “dark side” of personality. Contact an organizational psychologist who is a member of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) who should be able to advise you. The SIOP consultant locator can be found at http://www.siop.org/consultantlocator/search.aspx

Cultural values such as religion and the everyday use of numerous languages are an integral part of the culture; hence different approaches to leadership are required. These differences complicate leadership because organizational leadership is only possible when others willingly adopt the goals of the organization as their own. In an increasingly diverse and competitive world, leaders need to have the skills to lead others, despite their cultural orientation, to be part of a cohesive and goal-oriented team.

In an effort to help leaders determine a preferred leadership style within a country, Project Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) is currently identifying organizational practices and values in 61 countries. The purpose of this study is to describe, understand, and predict the impact of specific cultural variables on leadership and organizational processes, as well as the effectiveness of these processes.

GLOBE is a network of 170 social scientists and management scholars from 61 cultures throughout the world, working in a coordinated long-term effort to examine the interrelationships between societal culture, organizational culture and practices, and organizational leadership. The overall goal of the GLOBE research program is to develop an empirically based theory to describe, understand, and predict the impact of cultural variables on leadership and organizational processes and the effectiveness of these processes.

So here is today’s daily HR Tip: If your organization has to deal with leadership issues internationally don’t assume that the American system of leadership will work everywhere. Be sensitive to the leadership differences cross culturally. A great resource to find out more is to access the GLOBE project at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/paper.cfm

Items that should be considered for inclusion in a social media policy are:

A warning for employees that postings on social media sites that include the following will not be tolerated and will subject the individual to discipline:

1. Proprietary and confidential company information;
2. Discriminatory statements or sexual innuendos regarding co-workers, management, customers, or vendors; and
3. Defamatory statements regarding the company, its employees, customers, competitors, or vendors.

Other provisions in the Social Media policy may include:

1. Managers are prohibited from using any informal review systems on social networking sites
2. The company’s systems may not be used for any illegal activity including downloading or distributing pirated software or data.
3. The company reserves the right to take disciplinary action against an employee if the employee’s electronic communications violate company policy.
4. A statement that the policy is not intended to interfere with rights under the National Labor Relations Act.
5. Designate a management representative within the organization as the point of contact for policy violations or questions concerning the policy to ensure consistent application.
6. Notice that monitoring will occur in order to reduce an employee’s expectation of privacy.
7. A reporting procedure for violations of the policy.

So here is today’s Daily HR Tip: If you don’t have an up-to-date Social Media Policy in your organization then put one in place as soon as possible. Consulting with an internal or external counsel is a good idea when doing this. The policy should be distributed to all employees in the employee handbooks and policy manuals; and paycheck reminders and annual e-mail reminders are also a good idea. Consider requiring employee to acknowledge in writing that they have received the policy.

1. Too Eager To Please: When people become supervisors for the first time, they usually want to prove themselves to everyone around; their superiors, peers as well as subordinates. Hence, they want to show that a wise choice was made. So the new supervisor begins to act without stopping to think of the consequences involved. Perhaps they neglect listening and learning from those who might be more knowledgeable and instead proceed to manage in an almost incompetent manner. Consequently this has to lead to failure. Is there a better way? One is to remember the three Ls: LISTEN, LEARN and LEAD.
2. Promises not kept: Supervisors should never make any promise they will be unable to keep. Recognizing the limits of your authority is extremely important. To say, “I’ll try” is quite different than to say, “I will!” When supervisors promise things, but fail to deliver, their credibility is diminished. For example, promising more money or extra time off from work to a subordinate will get any new supervisor in trouble.
3. Pointing Fingers: When a supervisor fails to make good on a promise to an employee or makes an unpopular decision, it is extremely easy to point fingers towards someone else and say, “They wouldn’t allow me to do what I wanted” or “They made me do it their way.” These are ways of shifting the blame away from you, the supervisor. Don’t do it! New supervisors, who behave in this manner, show a complete lack of commitment towards their profession. So take full responsibility for any promise you’ve failed to deliver or any decision you’ve made.
4. Doing Employees Work: New supervisors sometimes have difficulty keeping their hands off the work. This is especially true for those that were promoted from within their department. Perhaps there is that feeling that no one can do it any better than they can. However, this is not their role anymore. New supervisors should remember they are no longer technical engineers, but human engineers who must work through people to attain departmental goals if they are to be successful. Making it a practice to do non-managerial work will only keep them from performing the work they were really hired to do. A supervisor’s primary responsibilities focus in those areas concerning planning, organizing, directing and controlling. The only times hands-on work should ever be done is during a training period with a new employee, re-training an existing one or any emergency situation.
5. Favoritism: A grave mistake most new supervisors make is showing favoritism. Unnecessary attention towards any employee will always label a supervisor as showing favoritism and hinder their effectiveness. Supervisors are leaving themselves wide open for charges of discrimination.

So here is Today’s Daily HR Tip: Making a successful transition from worker to supervisor is exciting and challenging. Recognizing the pitfalls and working to avoid them will reduce the likelihood of serious trouble or plain failure. HR professionals can help to make the transition for new supervisors as smooth as possible by providing the training and support needed by newly appointed supervisor and their boss.

Howard Gardner made this concept fairly well known using the idea of multiple intelligences. Human beings have a variety of intelligences, such as cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, musical intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, and so on. Most people excel in one or two of those, but do poorly in the others. This is not necessarily or even usually a bad thing; part of integral wisdom is finding where one excels and thus where one can best offer the world one’s deepest gifts.

According to Ken Wilber of the Integral Institute, this means that we need to be aware of our strengths (or the intelligences with which we can shine) as well as our weaknesses (where we do poorly or even pathologically). The various multiple intelligences include: cognitive, interpersonal, moral, emotional, and aesthetic are also “developmental lines”. This is because those intelligences show growth and development. They unfold in progressive stages. Each multiple intelligence grows—or can grow—through the 3 major stages. For example you can have cognitive development to stage 1, to stage 2, and to stage 3.

Likewise with the other intelligences. Emotional development to stage 1 means that you have developed the capacity for emotions centering on “me,” especially the emotions and drives of hunger, survival, and self-protection. If you continue to grow emotionally from stage 1 to stage 2—or from egocentric to ethnocentric—you will expand from “me” to “us,” and begin to develop emotional commitments and attachments to loved ones, members of your family, close friends, perhaps your whole tribe or whole nation. If you grow into stage-3 emotions, you will develop the further capacity for a care and compassion that reaches beyond your own tribe or nation and attempts to include all human beings and even all sentient beings in a world centric care and compassion.

There is a fairly easy way to represent these intelligences or multiple lines. A simple “psychograph” like the one we have included (below) can show the 3 major stages (or levels of development) and 5 of the most important intelligences (or lines of development). This psychograph shows somebody who excels in cognitive development and is good at interpersonal development, but does poorly in moral and, really poorly, in emotional intelligence. Other individuals would, of course, have a different “psychograph.”

The psychograph also helps us spot the ways that virtually all of us are unevenly developed, and thus helps prevent us from thinking that just because we are terrific in one area we must be terrific in all the others. In fact, usually the opposite. More than one leader, spiritual teacher, or politician has spectacularly crashed through lack of an understanding of these simple realities.

So here is today’s Daily HR Tip: If you are involved with personal development or employee development in your organization consider incorporating some of the concepts put forward by the Integral Psychograph. The integral Institute has developed coaching and personal development materials and practices that incorporate the Integral Psychograph and lines and stages of development. More information can be obtained from http://www.integrallife.com

For the past decade or so Google’s leadership philosophy has been what Judy describes as “let’s hire fantastic people, bring them in, and set them free”. Of course that may work best when you’re a small organization but can it work when you get to Google’s size?

Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice-president for people operations at Google and Judy’s boss was hired in 2006 from GE where he was a vice-president for human resources at GE Capital Solutions. Bock did not want to repeat the formal, highly structured GE approach to leadership development. Instead Google, under Bock’s direction, emphasizes peer feedback, two or three-day leadership programs, and self-directed career planning.

Bock thinks Google, is more flexible about managing talent. “To have a monolithic view of leadership sets you up for a lot of problems,” he says. Google’s approach precludes setting up what he calls a “big, corporate, top-down, university model of training” because it’s “too static.” It also precludes identifying too many common traits. When his team at Google tried to put some together, they quickly amassed more than 40. “Having the right balance of generalists and specialists is important,” Bock argues. “Some leaders excel technically, and some stand out because they’re innovative, creative thinkers. What you need is a portfolio of people with widely varying skill sets.”

John Lynch, GE’s senior vice-president for corporate human resources agrees. “Is there anything general anymore?” he asks. He believes the beauty of GE’s system is that it can be adapted to a rapidly shifting environment. GE measures people on five “growth traits”—external focus, clear thinking, imagination, inclusiveness, and expertise—that are broad enough to allow for wide interpretation. The current push is meant to enhance those traits with more contemporary thinking. “Everything we do drives change,” he says. “The focus is relentless, and it’s a constant evolution.”

Under Jack Welch, for example, the prized skills were cost-cutting, efficiency, and deal-making. Then Jeff Immelt came in, calling for risk-taking, customer focus, and innovation. Now, Immelt says he’s leaning toward “more networking, more managing in volatility…more orientation toward not just the person, but how the person works within a team.”

So here is today’s Daily HR Tip: Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking that leadership development in your organization has to be a formalized, curriculum driven process. There is a spectrum of approaches you can take to developing your organization’s leaders and right now the pendulum seem to be swinging away from traditional, formal leadership development programs towards flexibility, hiring the right people, and understanding that leadership comes in many forms. The realization seems to be that true leadership is not a single set of well defined competencies described in a corporate competency model, but rather a rich and complex set of skills and attributes that comes in many forms and which add value in different ways.

In an exhaustive study he conducted of over 24,000 managers there appears to be a consensus, however, about the most important leadership competencies for the 21st century. The research was conducted in 2007 in 30 industries (e.g., aerospace and defense, banking, government, pharmaceutical, telecommunications). 101 organizations and managers were asked to choose the most critical leadership competencies from a list of 100 possible competencies. The following were the top ten leadership competencies identified by the research:

1. Leading Employees – Definition: Delegates to employees effectively, broadens employee opportunities, acts with fairness toward direct reports, and hires talented people for his/her team.
2. Building and Mending Relationships – Definition: Knows how to build and maintain working relationships with co-workers and external parties; can negotiate and handle work problems
   without alienating people; understands others and is able to get their cooperation in non-authority relationships.
3. Risk-taking, Innovation Visionary – Definition: Seizes new opportunities and consistently generates new ideas; introduces and creates needed change even in the face of opposition.
4. Change Management – Definition: Uses effective strategies to facilitate organizational change initiatives and overcome resistance to change.
5. Influence, Leadership, Power – Definition: Good at inspiring and promoting a vision; able to persuade and motivate others; skilled at influencing.
6. Communicating Information, Ideas – Definition: Effectively communicates organization goals and is able to inspire through presentation of information (articulate, good speaker, good writing skills).
7. Brings Out the Best in People – Definition: Has a special talent with people that is evident in his/her ability to pull people together into highly effective teams.
8. Taking Action, Making Decisions, Following Through – Definition: Action-oriented and decisive; follows through.
9. Listening – Definition: Is a willing and patient listener and is open to feedback.
10. Openness to Influence – Definition: Flexibility. Takes ideas different from own seriously; shares responsibility and collaborates with others; accepts criticism well; does not assume a single best way.

So here is today’s Daily HR Tip: This research provides a useful starting point for HR professionals who are reviewing their leadership development and training needs. HR professionals should be careful, however, to identify and develop the leadership competencies that really are important to their specific organization or work setting.

Here are eight questions that can be used to evaluate candidates to ensure they have the “right stuff” for your leadership program:

1. Do they have the motivation/desire to lead and have an impact?
2. Do they have a sense of purpose (personal vision / goals) ?
3. Do they have the confidence that they can make a difference (not arrogance)?
4. Are they assertive and have the willingness to assert themselves to compete?
5. Are they psychologically fit and do they have insight about themselves and empathy towards others?
6. Are they centered and are they able to control their emotional impulses (emotional intelligence) ?
7. Do they have energy and the stamina to work long hours?
8. Do they have average or slightly above average intelligence that meets the cognitive/problem solving requirements for positions above their current level?

Other things to consider in candidate selection are the strategic direction of the organization, the organization’s demographic / diversity goals, and the candidate’s technical skills.

So here is today’s Daily HR Tip: When designing your Leadership Development Program be sure to select candidate with the potential to succeed and possesses the “right stuff”. This involves creating clear criteria to assess potential candidates for the program. Remember, some candidates may be “diamonds in the rough” right now, but with a little polishing even the roughest diamonds will sparkle!

So we can and should expect leaders to have weaknesses; “derailers” are another matter. What is a derailer? Simply put: a derailer is a weakness that requires improvement if a leader is to avoid failure.

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) identified the following list of derailers that, if not addressed, may cause a leader to fail:

Inability to Change or Adapt During a Transition:

1. Failure to adapt to a new boss
2. Over-dependence on a single skill and/or failure to acquire new skills
3. Inability to adapt to the demands of a new job, a new culture, or changes in the market

Problems with Interpersonal Relationships: Personality characteristics seen as:

1. Insensitive
2. Manipulative
3. Demanding
4. Authoritarian (lacked a teamwork orientation)
5. Self-isolating
6. Aloof
7. Critical

Failure to Build and Lead a Team:

1. Failing to staff effectively
2. Can’t manage subordinates
3. Poor leadership skills

Failure to Meet Business Objectives:

1. Lack of follow-through
2. Too ambitious
3. Poor performance

CCL also found that certain events in a leader’s career often triggered these fatal flaws to surface:

1. A change in boss
2. A radically different job
3. A reorganization/culture change
4. A performance problem handled ineptly
5. A clash with a boss
6. A trail of little problems/bruised people
7. An expatriate assignment
8. Failure to learn from mistakes
9. Overusing strengths
10. Going it alone

Most leadership derailers will not cause the fall of an entire organization. But they can certainly lead to a failed career for an otherwise talented employee.

So here is today’s Daily HR Tip: Think about key leaders in your organization and ask yourself two questions:

1. What type of derailers would cause them to fail?
2. How can we position them or develop them so that derailment is avoided?